Bernstein Hegel love law

Love and Law:Hegel's Critiqueof Morality / j. M.

J. HE Spirit of Christianity and its Fate" (hereafter "Spirit") pro-vides the most direct and eloquent presentation of the logicalstructure and moral content of Hegel's ethical vision. This is avision of ethical life itself, of how Hegel conceives ofthe meaningof ethics, what it is about and its internal dynamic logic, and ofethicality so understood as constitutive of our relation to our-selves, others, and the natural world. In worldng out the sub-stance of ethical living, above all in opposition to Kant's moralityof universal law, Hegel is simultaneously elaborating the struc-tural contours of human experience. Hegelian idealism is consti-tuted by this identification of the normative logic of ethical lifewith the structure of experience in general. Hegel's ethical visionis hence the vision of the demands and fatalities of ethical lifebecoming the pivot and underlying logic for the philosophicalcomprehension of human experience iiberhaupt It is only slightlyhj'perbolic to say that in the "Spirit" essay Hegel is interrogatingand proposing the possibility of ethics as first philosophy, wherethe idea of ethics as. first philosophy provides the governingimpulse and ultimate meaning of Hegelian objective (absolute)idealism. If this is right, what Hegel has to say about subjects suchas knowledge, reason, and objectivity must be keyed to thedynamics of ethical life.-

The great advantage of beginning with this essay is that itpresents Hegel's vision in an undiluted form: its expresses mostfally what Hegel will want to say about ethicality and the con-sdtutive structures of experience consequent upon that ethical-

SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Summer 2003)

394 SOGIAL RESEARCH

ity. There is about the vision, or so I shall argue, something eth-ically deep and compelling; the compellingness of this originalvision, the thought that it captures something about why ethi-cal life matters, about how and why we have ethical concerns atall, about how the achievements and fatalities of ethical experi-ence can appear as what matters most in a life, provides themotivation for Hegel's attempts, above all in the Phenomenologyof Spirit, to secure it against the inadequacies of its articulationin the "Spirit" essay. At the center of Hegel's ethical vision inthe "Spirit" essay is the idea of a causality of fate, an ethicallogic of action and reaction: to act against another person is todestroy my own life, to call down upon myself revenging fates;I cannot (ethically) harm another without (ethically) harmingm yself. In this way the flourishing and foundering of each isintimately bound up with the flourishing and foundering of all.Social space is always constituted ethically, as a space in whichsubjects are necessarily formed or deformed, freed oroppressed through the structures of interaction governingeveryday life. It is this that is Hegel's great idea since it revealshow ethical life matters independent of any particular moralnorms, laws, ideals, principles, or ends. Ethical life is not, in thefirst instance, about moral principles, but about the ways inwhich both particular actions and whole forms of action injure,wound, and deform recipient and actor alike; it is about thesecret bonds connecting our weal and woe to the lives of allthose around us.

In the essay, ethical life as constituted by a causality of fate islogically and historically unfolded in relation to an inadequateholistic metaphysics of love and life. In putting the matter thisway, I have two thoughts in mind. Eirst, the metaphysics of the"Spirit" essay is emphatically a metaphysics of life and love—lifeand love are Hegel's first idea about the nature of the secretbonds connecting us together-—and hence anti-theological.Christian God-talk in the essay is Hegel's means for expressingthe metaphysics of life and love, and so of revealing that such

HEGEL'S CRITIQUE OF MORALITY 395

God-talk has its ultimate substance solely in ethical life. Hegel'smodel here is, of course, Kant's R£ligion within the Limits of Rea-son Alone. Hegel thinks there is an ethical content embedded inthe emergence of Christianity, above all in the Jesus narrative,that Kant misses and misrepresents altogether; so fully doesKant mistake the fundamental ethical logic of Christianity thathis doctrine is not Christian at all, but rather a rationalized ver-sion, ofthe very Judaism biblical Christianity aimed to supplant.Hegel's method is nonetheless akin to Ka.nt's, with a twist: hisambition is not to interpret Christianity in the light of analready secured moral theory, as Kant did, but rather to makemanifest the ethical logic, the ethical content of the logic ofexperience, implicit in early Christianity. Hegel's hermeneuticalpractice can be baffling and misleading because he perceivesJesus as doing practically the same activj.ty of attempting tounlock the ethical content of theological discourse that he isdoing theoretically.^ for Hegel, Jesus too is engaged in an anti-the-ological enterprise of ethical decoding, and thus Jesus too isusing God-talk as a fumbling, indeterminate linguistic way ofexpressing what is a holistic ethical vision, The hubris of Hegel'sidentification of his endeavor with Jesus' has not gone unno-ticed (see Hamaclier, 1998); however, once one recognizes thatHegel takes Jesus to be an liermeneutician and performativedecoder, a kind of philosopher, then that hubris can be some-what softened. Still, the model for Hegel's essay is Eant's reli-gion book; in this light we might retitle Hegel's essay: "Religionwithin the Limits of Life Alone." So suggesting requires one fur-ther acknowledgement: while Kant's philosophy contains amoment of religious or theological excess, Hegel's does not.^Because he thinks the ethical content is, however indetermi-nately, available from the outset, then for him there is no excessor remainder. This too can lead to confusion since Hegel doesnot construe his interpretive effort as reducing religion to ethi-cality or reinterpreting religious thought in terms of secularActions and ideals; rather, his aim, like that of Jesus, is to expli-

396 SOCIAL RESEARCH

cate what God is, to make manifest the implicit content of theconcept of God.

Second, the holistic metaphysics of life espoused in the"Spirit" essay is inadequate, but not completely false. Taking hiscue from Aristotle (and Holderlin and Schelling), Hegel wantsto construe practical, ethical life as somehow continuous withorganic, biological life, with the living world; having a life—as inthe expression "get a life!"—is a formation of living, of beingalive. This account of ethical experience thence requires boththe holistic assumptions operative in speaking about organic liv-ing things, above all the normative exigencies that follow uponan organic conception of the logic of part and whole, and, thevitalistic conceptuality of life and death, of injury, hurt, andwounding that life discourse so understood carries with it. Thedepth of Hegel's ethical vision depends on the appropriation oflife discourse in these two registers for ethical experience—practical life as a form of living. The inadequacy of his accountderives from the immediacy of the appropriation; organism/lifediscourse is adopted but not philosophically earned. Nonethe-less, as we shall see, Hegel's deployment of life in "Spirit" hasprofound consonances with Nietzsche's critique of morality.More important, the ethical depth the metaphysics of life pro-vides to Hegel's account of ethical experience sets the agendafor what he means to resource through the notions of recogni-tion and spirit in the Phenomenology. The fundamental task of thePhenomenology on this interpretation is to make good the inade-quacies in the original holistic metaphysics of life in the "Spirit"essay while sustaining the same fundamental ethical logic. ThePhenomenology conceptually actualizes, through the notions ofrecognition and spirit, the ethical vision first displayed in "TheSpirit of Christianity and its Fate,"^ Hence, the logic of ethicallife displayed in the "Spirit" essay remains, the metaphysics sup-porting it changes.

HEGEL'S CRITIQUE OE MORALITY 397

I. The Spirit of Judaism:Notes for a Genealogy of Transcendental Idealism

Hegel interprets biblical Judaism as the coming-to-be of tran-scendental idealism as a form of life, or, what is the same, he inter-prets Judaism as the genealogical origin of Western reason in itsfundamental Platonic and Kantian dispensation.* Hence,although Hegel regards Abraham as the "true progenitor of theJews" (182),^ it matters to the overaii ambition of his project thathe begins with story of the flood, and with a contrast betweenNoah and Nimrod, and between them and Deucalion andPyrrha.^ The state of nature, that time when man and nature stilllived in a state of harmony, comes to end with the flood; its"destructive, invincible, irresistible hostilit)',. . . [and] manslaugh-ter" reveal the indifference of physical nature to human ends,leading to the necessity for control and mastery. Western ratio-nality emerges in response to tJie need to master threateningnature; it is the contours of this nature-mastering reason that willcome to structure Judaic life. But this is equally to say tliat thedeforming and perverse quality of Jewish life, and hence of Kant-ian reason, derives from the fact that it appropriates a form ofrationality designed to master hostile nature, and applies it to thehuman subject, its self-relation, and its relations wth its human,as well as nonhuman, others.'^ The logic of mastery over nature,die logic of first separation and then domination that Hegel per-ceives as the debilitating and self-destructive feature of Kantianrationalism has its intelligible source in the flsrst human responsesto the appearance of nature as itself coldly indifferent and bru-tally antagonistic to human life. Judaic reason is an instrumentalrationality generated as a means to human survival turned into anintegral form of life.

Hegel proposes that are just two basic ways one can :masternature: through "something real" (183)—that is, through col-lective practical activity like the building of a city or a tower(Nimrod's solution)—or through "something thought." Noah's

398 SOCIAL RESEARCH

solution, here presented as the invention of the Jewish God,involves two steps: the posing of an ideal to set against hostilenature, and then the ascription to that ideal of reality, being. Onthis account, the transcendent God of the tradition is a reifiedand personified ideality. By ascribing reality to the ideal, Noahgives it power over mundane reality, now conceived as the objectof God's thought. In this way, all reality is sublimed into athought-reality—God as the original transcendental ego. Still,the thought of such a God cannot, in fact, provide for an actualmastery over nature; hence, a certain type of conceptual defer-ral must be built into the experience of such a God's masteryover nature. The deferral is the mediation of God's relation tonature through his relation to man via the establishment of whatwe might call the "Theological Contract": God promises torestrain the forces of nature on the condition that humanbeings master their nature, nature within, our murderoushearts, by obeying his laws of conduct. Because God's relation tohostile nature is always conditional upon human obedience,then the ebb and flow of nature in relation to man is only evera register of human obedience and disobedience. Nature, fromthis perspective, becomes nothing but a sign of man's relation toGod, a thought Hegel states unequivocally in the account ofAbraham: "it was through God alone that Abraham came into amediate relation with the world, the only kind of link with theworld possible for him" (187).

Against the hostile power of nature, Hegel states, "Noah savedhimself by subjecting both it and himself to something more pow-erful; Nimrod, by taming it himself (184). Noah and Nimrodtogether are thus meant to represent the two standpoints of criti-cal reason: Nimrod stands for the strategy of the understanding(Verstand) in which nature is conceived of as a causal system thatis to be engaged with through causal manipulation, while Noahstands for the strategy of moral reason (Vernunfi) in which therelation to the external world is mediated through individuals'self-relation, their self-subjection or self-manipulation to an exter-


nal authority.^ Noah and Nimrod represent two aspects of a uni-vocal, self-defeating strateg)': "Both made a peace of necessity withthe foe and thus perpetuated the hostility." This sentence encap-sulates in miniature Hegel's intuition about why nature-dominat-ing reason is necessarily self-defeating: the logic of causalmanipulation and self-subjection to external authority both inter-nalize the conception of other as antagonist. Mastery knows onlyone solution: domination and control. Because no other relationto the natural other is possible, then even the state of peace per-petuates the relation of hostility; peace and successful dominationare one; or rather, peace can only be envisaged as the coimpletevanquishing of the other: peace and death are one.

For Hegel, the Abrahamic narrative is the embodiment andfulfillment of the Noah portion of the logiic of mastery. What isinvolved in subjecting oneself to a transcendent external author-ity? Or, asking the same question from the opposing angle, whatin Abraham's actions reveals that they are the manifestation of a• vork of self-subjection to transcendent autliority? What, in Abra-ham's actions, allows us to perceive in them, the perpetuation ofhostility? Hegel's answer to these questions depends on ^vindicat-ing an ethical geometry of horizontal and vertical, in which thehorizontal and so immanent relations of love and life are dis-placed, by a vertical relation to a projected externality. Horizon-tal relations are internal; the vertical relation is (purportedly)external. Because, again, there is no actual external authority butonly the self-subjecting stance of taking oneself to be so subject,then the meaning of the vertical relation is realized throughwhat the attempt to secure it does to the horizontal relations oflove and life.

Hegel's initial gesture is to describe Abraham's project in theneutral, wholly modern terms of seeking to becoming anautonomious subject; he wanted to become "a wholly self-subsis-tent, independent man, to be an overlord himself' (185). Sinceautonomy is a worthwhile, indeed indispensable goal, Hegel can-not condemn Abraham for adopting it. Rather, what is con-

400 SOCIAL RESEARCH

demned is not the goal, but the manner gmd form it takes in Abra-ham. Eor Hegel, Abraham's action of tearing himself free of hisfamily, which may look like the normal mechanism necessary forbecoming autonomous, is carried out with an intolerable cold-ness, and it is that coldness or indifference in the action that qual-ifies its violence. ^ Abraham tore himself free "without havingbeen injured or disowned, without the grief which after a wrongor an outrage signifies love's enduring need, when love, injuredindeed but not lost, goes in quest of a new fatherland in order toflourish and enjoy itself there." Abrahamic autonomy is to be dis-tinguished from other emancipatory projects by its utter discon-nection from the routine natural motives for such undertakings:hurt, injury, loss, wound. Injury, so understood, occurs whenhuman intersubjective relations, what Hegel here calls love, gowrong. Suffering wrong, where suffering is the base criterion forwrongness, is the intelligible reason for wanting to free oneselfand set up new relations. Moral injury is an injury to the consti-tutive relations with others; legitimate emancipation, then,involves the realization of noninjurious relations. Hegel conceivesof the bonds of love as providing the baseline or modei for ourconstitutive relation to others; crudely, in love we realize our-selves, and so our standing for ourselves, through our relation tothe other. But this is to say that in love our relation to an othermediates our relation to ourselves, and thus is a component of anextended self-relation. Hegel's thought is that love is the condi-tion for anything like moral injury, because I am dependent uponthe other, their loving regard, for my standing for myself, thenany interruption in that loving regard is an interruption in myself-regard. Moral injury is injury to the internal constitutive rela-tions between the self and its others. Because Hegel construeslove as the miodel for relations to others (otherwise, again, therewould be nothing that logically could, humanly, be injured), heconstrues injury, the quest for emancipation, and the realizationof new noninjurious relations, as components of an internal logicof love. The monstrous, self-defeating character of Abrahzim's act


is that it renders empty all the good reasons one might have forseeking to free oneself: "Abraham wanted not to love, wanted tobe free by not loving." This is the fundamental act of disidentifi-cation^ with the intimate other that allows a logic of mastery tointrude.

The fulfillment of the Noah strategy requires self-subjection toideal, external, authoritative norms of conduct. To found a nationon this basis is to displace the internal norms of communal senti-ment TOth moral principle. To make moral principle constitutiveof one's relations to self and others requires the dissolution offamilial bonds and their extension to the tribe. So the story ofAbraham is a version of the story of the transformation from afamily-based social system to an independent political mode oforganization—the transformation that also lies behind a gooddeal of Greek tragedy. In the Jewish case, on. Hegel's reading, it isthe radical discontinuity between the two forms of social organiza-tion, familial and political, that is the source of the problem.Abraham seeks to found a new nation at the behest of a purelyabstract ideal or norm, where it is presumed that what that meansis the utter rejection of the previous form of social bonding. Theissue, again, is not a matter of content, but its form. "The first actwhich, made Abraham the progenitor of a nation is a disseverancewhich snaps the bonds of comm.unal life and love." Abraham'snation-founding act is the wholesale displacement of sentimentalattachment by law; or rather, since family cannot really disappear,the mediation of what once were sentimental relations by thedemands of positive law. If the bonds of communal life and loveare now construed as the horizontal conditions that pro'vide forthe intelligibility in principle of human activity, of what counts asinjury and what not, of what grounds the quest for freedom andwhat needs to be realized in such a quest, then in severing thosebonds as such Abraham has placed himself and t;he nation hemeans to found in a position whereby each further act can onlymake its agents ever more abject (199). This statement should beconstrued literally: Abrahamic, and by extension Jewish agency.

402 SOCIAL RESEARCH

by pursuing a project premised on the repudiation of the condi-tions that make human agency intelligible in principle, "love'senduring need," incrementally destroy the physiognomy of theirpractices as human, rendering the lives lived in terms of thosepractices borderline, neither fully inside nor outside the human.It is this notion of radical abjectness that Hegel has in mind when,at the end of § i, he says that

the great tragedy of the Jewish people is no Greek tragedy;it can rouse neither terror nor pity, for both of these ariseonly out of the fate which follows from the inevitable slip ofa beautiful character; it can arouse horror alone. The fateof the Jewish people is the fate of Macbeth who stepped outof nature itself, clung to alien Beings, and so in their servicehad to trample and slay everything holy in human nature,had at last to be forsaken by his gods (since these wereobjects and he their slave) and be dashed to pieces on hisfaith itself (204-5).

Horror is a response to what appears as abject; the humanbecomes abject when it steps "out of nature itself; in so doing, ahuman sheds his or her human shape and appears as inhuman.Such an appearance can arouse neither terror nor pity because itis not an intelligible human fate, and hence not a fate with whichwe can in principle identify. So when Hegel says of Abrahami thathe became a "stranger on earth, a stranger to the soil and to menalike" (186), the being a stranger is more than a descriptive qual-ity; its signifies Abraham becoming so unlike in kind to soil andmen that he is no longer one of them. Abraham, I am tempted tosay, is, for Hegel, ontologically a stranger, a stranger to what con-stitutes the human.

The horror of Abrahamic agency is that it is not an internalmodification of human relations, a playing out of one of thedarker fates of what remains nonetheless a fully human life—how-ever violent, however tragic, however self-defeating—^but rather arepudiation of what makes relations between the self and others

HEGEL'S CRITIQUE OE MORALITY 403

human relations. This is the burden of Hegel's interpretive track-ing of the Abraham narrative: he must show, by redescription,how, in severing the bonds of communal life and love as the real-ization of the Noah strategy of mastery over nature, Abrahamcomes to constitute himself and the nation he founds as ontolog-icail strangers, as objects to whom our only response can be one ofhorror. To say that tbe only response possible is horror is to claimthat it is a form of life that is not further transformable (187-8),where the fact that it is not internally trans,formable provides thepremise to Jesus' intervention (205-6).

Because the bulk of Hegel's case turns on a comparisonbetween the Jewish and Christian understanding of transgression,only two moments B,eed be mentioned as this juncture. The firstis Hegel's analysis of Judaic autonomy. On this account, onebecom.es autonomous by litei"ally making oneself independent inprinciple from the worldly conditions of human action. To pursuetills strategy a rigid duality must be set in place between the unityof the idea! and all else; one must regulate one's actions by idealnorms rather than by the demands of the things themselves.Judaic autonomy, then, turns on the distinction ,between ithe intel-ligible and the sensible:,no sensible thing, no love nor pain, nopla,ce or person, no feeling or act, can be held of independentworth or lodge a claim that would infringe on the authority ofprinciple. What is independent of the natural world gives mean-ing to it. This requires that ideality be utterly non-natural, non-sensible; hence, the idea ofa wholly invisible God (191), whosename cannot be spoken,, with respect to who'm every image of himcounts as a rejection of his untouchable authority (192), andbecause unseen, then necessarily "unfelt" (193). This is the ulti-mate source of Hegel's claim that Judaic idealit)? involves a whole-sale stepping out of nature. It is equally why, conversely, Hegelappears to make truth a mode of beauty-—"truth is beauty intel-lectually apprehended" ,(196)—and to consider "the spirit of:beaTity" (200) the Moving force of reconciliation (206). Beautyplays the pivotal role it does in this essay,because it stands for the

404 SOCIAL RESEARCH

normative element in and hence the normative authority ofnature-bound sensible experience not subject to the logic of mas-tery. Beauty hence stands for the claim of the sensible as an inde-pendent source of authority, as how the entwinement of fact andnorm is experienced.^'^

The radicalness of the distinction between sensible and intelli-gible is what finally secures the authority of the vertical axis. It isthis duality of sensible and intelligible that is the source of boththe coldness of the law, and the perpetuation of hostility betweenself and other in carrying it out: "The whole world Abrahamregarded as simply his opposite: if he did not take it to be a nul-lity, he looked on it as sustained by the God who was alien to it.Nothing in nature was supposed to have any part in God; every-thing was simply under God's mastery" (187). From this perspec-tive. Mosaic law giving simply sets in place, in stone, theindependence of the Jewish people from the life-world (191).The transcendence of the Jewish God and the unconditionality ofJewish law are two sides ofthe same coin.

Second, because nothing can count against the authority ofGod, then the fact of God, his being, his being one, his beingthe source of meaning, is not a truth apprehended but "a com-mand" (196), a categorical imperative, an infinite demiand. Inmaking command prior to truth, one places it beyond the realmof evidence and so rational criticism. It is the combination ofthe radical separation of nature and ideality, on the one hand,and the command structure of self-subjection on the other thatturns sentimental life into pathology. For Hegel the emblematicepisode in which this structure is realized is the near sacrifice ofIsaac. In this episode we find the paradigmatic playing out ofthecontest between love and law; it is, of course, equally, the sourceof Hegel's contention that the structure of Judaic lawfulnessinvolves, essentially, the severing ofthe bonds of love. For Hegelit matters terribly that this is the one moment in the Abrahamicnarrative in which he is troubled, anxious, doubtful, in whichhis "all-exclusive heart" (187) could be caused disquiet and


depression. Abraham's hesitation is the marker that "love alonewas beyond his power"; Abraham naturally perceived in the per-son of Isaac all his hopes for the future, his hopes for posterityand the one kind of immortality he might have. But this is asmuch to say that love is the counterclaim to the authority ofGod. For that authority, however, nothing mundane cancount—the very thought Kierkegaard states as the "teleologicalsuspension of the ethical." For Hegel, the teieological suspen-sion of tbe ethical is the truth of the positing of God; so Abra-haBi can truly accept the authority of God only once he is willingto make the sacrifice of his love. This makes sacrifice the type ofrelation between the claims of mundane particulars againstGod; practically, subsumption of the material world to theauthority of God is, precisely, the sacrifice of the particular tothe uaiversal; sacrifice is how the bonds of love and life are sev-ered. Abraham achieves peace in accepting the necessit;!'' of sac-rifice: "and his heart was quieted only through the certainty ofthe feeling that this love was not so strong as to render himunable to slay his beloved son with his own hand." The surestevidence of faith is a quiet self-assurance in the act of murder—and the more one loves the person to be murdered, the morecertain is the faith. Of course, God stays Abraham's hand; Isaaclives. So Abraham and Isaac are still father and son, only nowtheir relation is mediated through God's command. Since themeaning .of that mediation is nothing but the sacrifice Abrahamwas willing to make, then, logically and motivationally the sacri-fice was committed: from henceforth the father is always the lawof death and the son forever dead, (188).

If this all sounds like implausible 'materials for nation building,one should recall their origin with Noah. This entire elaboratemediation of relations between selves, and between the Jewishnation and all other nations ("the horrible claim that He alonewas God and that this nation was the only one to have a god"(188)), is motivated by fear of threatening nature, and the needto master it. The desire for mastery becomes the desire for radi-

406 SOCIAL RESEARCH

cal autonomy, where the desire for autonomy is potentially satis-fied by the subsumption and sacrifice of the claim of each andevery natural thing to the authority of transcendent being. It isthe complex of those fears and desires that are embodied in thecontinual work of self-subjection, and it is hence further thosesame passions that keep the work of self-subjection actual. Radi-cal fear and the corresponding desire for mastery, and the chan-neling of those into the desire for freedom and independence,make plausible the attraction of such a form of life, even itsinevitability.

//. Modifications of Life: Ethics without Duty

By shading the meaning of the command structtire of Judaiclaw in terms of its genealogical origin, Hegel intends that the veryidea of positive law should lose its natural appearance, that itshould come to appear as, precisely, a solution to the problem ofhostile nature, and hence as a historically conditioned and thusparticular strategy. It is an intelligible but finally not rational strat-egy because the logic of mastery that is embedded in the concep-tion of positive lawfulness reproduces the antagonism it wasmeant to resolve. Not only does lawfulness reproduce the hostil-ity, it exacerbates it by depriving all the particulars composing thenatural world of any intrinsic worth; it renders them all abject.Abjection is the ultimate fate of the spirit of Judaism. In § ii and§ iii Hegel seeks to deepen the account of the self-defeating char-acter of positive law, which he is now going to claim is fully equiv-alent to Kant's conception of the moral law—the law of reason asconstitutive of morality—by contrasting it with Jesus' immanentethic of reconciliation.

Hegel's initial gesture, and what he takes to be Jesus' initial ges-ture, is simply to set the claims of human needs and wants againstreligious commands in order to reveal, minimally, that no com-mand can be absolute or unconditional, that circumstance must


make a dijfference to the authority and validity of a command;more radically, since the claim.s of need and want must be able tocondition the appropriateness and applicability of the law, thenthey must be antecedent to the law, hence must pose a counter-claim to it. So even for tiie Jews the "animal which falls into thepit demands instant aid" (208) whether or not it is the Sabbath;but this shows that "need cancels guilt." But if need can trumplaw, then although a particular urgency can make the claim ofneed vivid, the claim does not depend on the urgency but on theneed. Jesus and his disciples show general contempt for the Sab-bath, plucking the ears of corn to satisfy their hunger eventhough that hunger might have been satisfied ottierwise. Tbeircontempt for 'the law is meanl to reveal its arbitrariness andabsurdity in the face of even the most simple natural need: "Thesatisfaction of the commonest human want rises superior toactions like these [religious ones], because there lies directly in such awant the sensing or the preserving of a human being, no matter howempty his being may be" (207; emphasis added). Natural needand want in themselves, spontaneously and automatically,"directly" raise an. ethical claim deserving of being satisfied inde-pendently of the moral worth of the individual whose need it is,thus raising a counterclaim to Eant's idea that happiness (the sat-isfaction of natural desires) ought to be distributed in proportionto virtue (as if only the truly virtuous deserve feeding when hun-gry). If one fails, to recognize her hunger as the sort of state ofaffairs one responds to by satisfying it, giving food, one has notrecogni2ed her. Hegel begins here because the caise of naturalneed and want answers directly to the Judaic emptying of natureof any intrinsic worth. Jesus' generai drift is to "lift nature" (208),to shoW; that nature is "holier than the temple."

To urge that natural needs and wants directly raise an ethicalclaim is to say that recognizing a state as one of need or want isto recognize it as a state demanding of satisfaction; satisfying theneed is the internal correlative of perceiving it as a need. Needs justare things for which the appropriate response is to satisfy them;

408 SOGIAL RESEARCH

failing to do so, assuming one is in a position to help and thereare no competing claims, is to fail to recognize them as needs.The demandingness of needs is of kind that does not requireanything "oughtish" in order to justify acting on the demand.Perhaps one could say that it is part of logical grammar of needstatements that the appropriate response to the perception of aneed is satisfying it. ^ This slightly torturous way of expressingHegel's thesis is intended to open on to his critique of moralityas general laws that ought to be obeyed. He thinks there is some-thing fundamentally corrupt about the very idea that there arethings we ought to do, that the ought structure of morality ("Oneought to keep one's promises"; "Thou shalt not kill"; etc.) isinseparable from the Judaic idea of God and law, and hence thatthe ought structure of morality is a perpetuation of hostilityagainst the other. But those critical theses will only carry weightif Hegel can at least make plausible the idea that there is hori-zontal ethical logic, a logic of love and its renunciation, the logicof a causality of fate, that can operate independent of the verti-cal demands of morality.

"Since laws," Hegel states, "are unifications of opposites in aconcept, which thus leaves them as opposite while it exists itself inopposition to reality, it follows that the concept expresses anought" (209). By saying a law involves a unification of opposites,he means that it brings together an action and its prohibition (orthe negation of its prohibition): of the act of killing, do not doit; of making a promise, do not break it. Since a law just is thisunifying of opposites, the killing and the not doing it, then itmust leave its elements as opposites. A unification of oppositescan occur only in a concept, not in reality; hence a law necessar-ily stands outside, in opposition to, reality. It is because the logi-cal form of law involves this double structure of opposition thatlaws stand as oughts.

Hegel contends that there are a variety of ways in which theopposition of law to life, the oughtishness of laws, can be sus-tained; for example, by becoming a civil law decreed by the state


(and therefore having the coercive power of the state behind it)or as God's fiat. However, the deepest and most seductive versionof positivity occurs when the opposition is secured through theform of law; that is, through obligatoriness being the corollary orconsequent of a law being universal, or universalizable in theKantian sense. For Kant the only unconditionally good thing inthe world is a good will. What makes a good will good uncondi-tionally, absolutely, is not what it wills, which is always somethingparticular and therefore empirical and contingent, but how itwills—where the how, if it does not refer to an explicit content,must refer to form.. The form is that of universality. For themaxim of my action to be moral (either fulfilling what I ought todo or, minimally, not contrary to what I ought to do), it must beuniversalizable, one that could in principle be a maxim of actionfor everyone. So, familiarly enough, the maxim of breakingpromises as convenient cannot be universalized because if every-one acted on it then soon enough no one would trust others andthe practice of promising would break down altogether. The con-tradiction Kant is concerned with lies not in this consequence,but in tlie fact that ray maxim, of promise breaking as convenientpresupposes the continuing viability of the institution of promis-ing; hence, I am committed to universalizing at the same timeboththa.t. eveiyone keep their promises and that everyone breaktheir promises as convenient. Logically, this just is a co^ntradic-tioB; morally what it shows is that in acting on a nonuniversaliz-abie maxim I am making an exception in my own case, or, whatis the same, free riding on the good will of everyone else. To beKandanly immoral is to be a moral parasite.

Regel concedes that universality does overcom^e the abstractpositmty of civil law (at its worst) and divine fiat because com-mand here is "something subjective, and, as subjective, as a prod-uct of a human power (i.e., of reason as the capacity foruiiiversalit)O, it loses its objectivity, its positivity, its heteronomy,and the thing commanded is revealed as grounded in an auton-omy of the human vnll" (210-11). Hegel's notion of positivity in

410 SOCIAL RESEARCH

the "Spirit" essay can now be recognized as a version of Kant'snotion of heteronomy. Having conceded that Kant's conceptionof universality as a product and form of rational self-determina-tion is an advance on the sheer positivity of civil and divine law,Hegel nonetheless wants to urge that it contains an intrinsicmoment of heteronomy itself. The issue here is complex since thevery thing Kant believes is the great achievement of the morallaw—namely, the way in which it secures the wholesale indepen-dence of reason from the dictates of nature—is equally whatHegel regards as its indelible positivity, its ultimate heteronomy.At this juncture, the force of Hegel's claim depends on itsgenealogical setting: we comprehend the meaning and characterof the universality of moral reason by comprehending it as aninternalization of the command structure of lawfulnessbequeathed by Judaic law into Western reason generally and, inparticular, into its conception of political rule. This is the sourceof Hegel's contention that the difference between the Europeanprelate who rules church and state and the man who listens to thecommand of duty is not that "the former make themselves slaves,while the latter is free, but that the former have their lord outsidethemselves, while the latter carries his lord in himself, yet as thesame time is his own slave" (211). Hegel can see nothing in Kant-ian universality other than a punishing superego whose appear-ance as an ego ideal is the ultimate source of its power to punish.It is punishing because rational universality secures the ultimateseparation of particular and universal, the separation which,genealogically, is to be understood in terms of the logic of mas-tery: "For the particular—impulses, inclinations, pathologicallove, sensuous experience, or whatever else it is called [byKant]—the universal is necessarily and always something alienand objective." Since, again, on one level, this is exactly what Kantis claiming to be the authority' of the moral law, namely, that itconfers rational meaning on the naturally given, then the objec-tion must lie, in the first instance, in coming to see the moral lawas a progeny of the history of mastery: the moral law continues


the history of mastering nature, making the realization of moral-ity simultaneously a formation of self-renunciation. Exactly likeNietzsche later, Hegel perceives the moral la.w as a slave moralitythat opposes to life an abstract ideal that is in realitj ^ a product oflife, where the opposition between law and life is logically equiva-lent to the duality between (rational) universality and (sensuous)particularity. Even when a desire is compatible with the moral lawthe separation or duality between universality and particularremains: when I am disposed to act benevolently, it is not my dis-position that is the ground of my action but the fact that said(pathological) disposition satisfies the general obligation to aidthose in distress. The law confers reason-giving force on the dispo-sition that, on its own,,is (rationally) empty.

III. A Logical Grammar ofLcwe

While Hegel's genealogical account might be sufficient todemonstrate the remnant positivity of moral rationality, and evensufficient to reveal how that positivity is, as a form of mastery, self-destructive, its contention that moral reason is irrational is notyet complete; to make that charge stick requires that there be a\iable alternative to moral reason. The alternative offered by thespirit of Jesus involves a further internalization, an internalizationthat through realizing or fulfilling, the law annuls its remnantpositivity; this idea of a radical internalization is meant to wedthe work of Luthe,ran inwardness, inwardization, to Aristotelianvirtu,e. What would fulfill the law of benevolence, love of thyneighbor, would not be a command but an "is," "a modificationof life, a modification which is exclusive and therefore restrictedonly if looked at in reference to its object" (212). If in the Eant-ian scheme the relation between law and case is that of universalto particular that leaves both nonetheless separate, in the ,Chris-tiae scheme the relation of the virtuous disposition to love thyneighbor to loving this neighbor is one of potentiality to actual-

412 SOCIAL RESEARCH

ity—or to use Hegel's own language here, borrowed from Baum-garten, fulfillment is the '"complement of possibility,' since pos-sibility is the object of something thought, as a universal, while'is' is the synthesis of subject and object, in which the subject andobject have lost their opposition" (214). For the virtuous dispo-sition, the particular is all occasion and opportunity for satisfac-tion. As Knox correctly claims in a footnote (212), Hegelperceives love as modification of life (that is, of the whole self),and hence not a portion of the self taking command overanother portion. Hegel's consistent language here is that of"modification": love is a modification of life; reconciliation is amodification of love; the virtues are, collectively, modificationslove. Although Hegel does not elaborate his notion of modifica-tion, the intuitive idea, which almost certainly is based on theSpinozist conception of modes, is that a living individualexpresses his or her self in a variety of attitudes, dispositions, andactions. Each such disposition is an expression, an articulationand formation, of the whole self, in which the self both expressesand realizes itself. As simply expression and realization, a state ofthe self just "is" the self in one of its formations. The commandform becomes superfluous because there is nothing of the selfthere for it to be opposed to, no source of resistance or recalci-trance; but once the form of command becomes superfluous inthis way, then it is destroyed since as form it presupposes anopposition between itself and inclination.

Anger and hate and hurt and revulsion and despair andresentment can also be modifications of life and love. Negativeemotions have a role in life, and can indeed provide the motiva-tion for worthwhile ends, such as the emancipatory project ofseeking a new life and the founding of a new state (the "endur-ing need of love" Abraham lacked); from the standpoint of rec-onciliation, a negative emotion can also be a crime (216). Whatdistinguishes all these cases for Hegel is that in them my life isalready internally bound to the life of the other, that there is pre-supposed an equality between me and the other, and that my


reaction is a further working out, unfolding, or elaboration, afurther determination of our indefinitely determinable lifetogether. What Hegel is thus opposing is the idea that our rela-tions with others, all others, be conceived of as relations withobjeets whose weal and woe are extrinsic to our internal self-rela-tion. Hegel is not denying that the very point of Kant's morallaw—-Ms idea that we ought to treat others as ends-in-them-selves—is to make our moral worthiness contingent upon ourtreatment of others. His objection is not to the intention, but theform it talc.es: when the authority of the rooral depends upon aimiversal forever logically and ontologically independent of allconcrete particulars, then others as concrete particulars becomeancillar)' to my relation to the law itself; others are m^re occasionsfor an individual to further enact her obedience to the transcen-dent authority of the moral law; her worthiness or unworthinessis, finally, a private matter between her will and the authority ofthe ia,w. Formally, Abraham's God-mediated sacrificial relation toIsaac genealogically becomes the relation between the Kantiangood will and its other.

L,ove as a modification of life, the notion of our life together,that which gets indefinitely worked and reworked, fotmed,deformed and reformed, is itself modeled upon the love relationthat is one of its modes. At this juncture, life is conceived on anal-ogy 'wth love, of love in its unconscious form, while the relationof lovers to one another is conceived in organic terms ("each sep-arate iover is one organ in a living whole") (308). That Hegel pre-supposes a discourse of love here can seem as both fateful andembarrassing. The embarrassment can be curtailed, at least some,ifwe focus on the logical form of love rather than its precise affec-tive character. FuUBllment, I suggested earlier, should be con-ceived along the lines of intemalization; hence, the general ideaof the universal being absorbed into the self and inclination law-fully articulated yields life as a thoroughgoing synthesis of law andinclination, where synthesis is understood not as an external artic-iilati,oii ,of subject (universal) to object (particular), but a condi-

414 SOCIAL RESEARCH

tion in which their opposition is lost (214). Hence, we haveHegel's formula that "the correspondence of law and inclinationis life and, as the relation of differents to one another, love" (215).In acts of love, "inclination (desire, what I desire most), and law(say the demand that I regard the other as an end in him-or-her-seU", and thus take her ends to be my ends)," are synthesized. Butthis is equivalent to claiming that in love the other is my end; sheis the unconditioned object of my desire, hence is the worth of mylife as such. In loving the worth of my life, so to speak, is realizedin the worth of the other who is separate from me.

As Jean-Luc Nancy eloquently states the idea, love, in all itsforms, always poses itself as that which is not self-love (Nancy, 1991:94).^^ Love is always experienced as the immediate abrogation ofself-love, of what, spontaneously and all unannounced and unin-tended, ruptures the egoism of desire. ^ Love dispossesses the selffrom itself, sends the self outside itself till the point where it findsitself lodged in the beloved; being so separated from itself, beingso bound to the other, is phenomenologically manifested in theexperience of finding one's own weal and woe, one's own capac-ity for flourishing and vulnerability to hurt, as bound to the other,both with respect to the other's capacity for flourishing and vul-nerability to hurt (when the other flourishes, I flourish; when myother hurts, I hurt), and with respect to the other's regard for me.If Kant supposes that the deepest and most significant aspect ofthe experience of the moral law is that it ruptures my self-love,then Hegel's counter is that such rupturing is naturally experi-enced in love, and thus that the moral law can only be a reified,denaturalized form of what properly belongs my loving relationwith (all) others.

The second logical aspect of love, according to Nancy, is that"love is the extreme movement, beyond the self, of a being reach-ing completion. . . . Philosophy always thinks love as an accom-plishment, arriving at a final and definitive completion" (Nancy,1991: 86). If the idea of love posing itself as not self-love repre-sents the moral aspect of love, the idea of love as completing or


satisfying or fulfilling oneself in and through the other, of theother as the moment of one's subsistence, is the logical/philo-sophical claim of love: love as the figure of philosophical truth. Inthe fragment "Love," Hegel parses this thought by comparing thelimitations of the understanding, which is always a unit)? of oppo-sites left as opposites (that is, nothing more than the joining of asubject and predicate: S is P), and reason, which claims all deter-mining power for itself, to love. "Love," he contends, "neitherrestricts nor is restricted; it is not finite at a l l . . . in love, life is pre-sent as a duplicate of itself and a single and unified self. Here lifehas run through the circle of development from an immature toa completely mature unity" (304-5). This is the first glimmer ofthe Hegelian idea of an immanent infinite, together with the ideathat such an infinite is the result of a development sequence. Thecrux of this conception of the infinite, and so of completion, isthat it is the dissolution of the opposition between self and other,so a finding of oneself in the other. From one perspective, thelogic of completion looks thoroughly teleological: the other is myend; however, there is a different angle of vision possible. .Aissumethat the other stands for the absolute limit of my powers, that thefreedom or autonomy or separateness of the other from mestands for what is ultimately separate from me (because her free-dom is logically independent from my freedom: it can be domi-nated, coerced, manipulated, but as freedom it always escapesme); and, simultaneously, the other's independence from meentails that her desires are intrinsically different from rny owneven when, coincidentally, the two overlap. The other's freedomis the absolute limit of my freedom, and the other's desires aswhat restrict and deny the authority of my desires. This is, ofcourse, just the Hobbesian version of the relation between, myselfand others that Kant inherits. Seen in this way, the claim that loverehearses a logic of compietion is an extended and radicalizedversion of Kant's founding insight, the insight that firet enables awholly immanent conception of se'lf and world, that the Emits ofexperience are its condition of possibility; the logic of love trans-

416 SOGIAL RESEARCH

forms Kantian subjective idealism into an objective or infiniteidealism. Once the self's relation to the world is bound to its rela-tion to others, and those others become both limits (as separatefrom the self) and its conditions of possibility (as what providesfor the very possibility of self-relation), then there remains noabsolute limit, no restriction, no perspective outside the ongoingexchange between self and others that could be relevant to it. Butthis is all that is meant by objective, infinite idealism; idealism isthe logic of love actualized as the logic of experience in general.

According to Nancy, there is a third aspect to the logical fonnof love, namely, that its rupturing of self-love is a fracturing oftheself that is never quite surmounted or sublated.

Love re-presents the I to itself broken (and this is not a rep-resentation). It presents this to it: he, this subject, wastouched, broken into, in his subjectivity, and he is fromthen, for the time of love, opened by this slice, broken orfractured, even if only slightly. He is, which is to say that thebreak or wound is not an accident, and neither is it a prop-erty that the subject could relate to himself. For the breakis a break in his self-possession as subject; it is, essentially, aninterruption of the process of relation of oneself to oneselfoutside of oneself. From then on, / is constituted broken(Nancy, 1991:9).

Nancy's whole way of setting up and articulating this thesis isintended as a critique of both Hegel's early conception of com-pletion through love as well as his later conception of sublation,canceling and preserving at a higher level, which is his phenome-nological re-inscription of the logic of love. To say that the I isconstituted as broken is to urge that there is a wound or rupturethat does heal, that remains exposed and vulnerable. If loveinvolves our indefinite exposure to the other, and hence a limit-less vulnerability, if love constitutes our moral irijurability, ourinjurability as human, then there is in love something that cannotbe conceived of as completion and satisfaction. The condition of

HEGEL'S CRITIQUE OF MOF^LITY 417

satisfaction through the other is always, simultaneously, a satisfac-tion forever ruined; my completion in and through the other isalways also my incompletion, my brokenness. And, to be sure, inthe fragment "Love" Hegel desperately, which is to say, romanti-cally, attempts to conceive of all limitation as external, so thateven death is inconsequential, m ereiy external, to the immortal-ity of love represented by the child (305-8). The "Spirit" essay,however, implicitly contains a darker moment, one that is pivotalfor the formation of the project of the Phenomenology.

TV. The Causality of Fate:Transgression and the Critique of Punishment

When Hegel says that over "against the positivit)^ of the Jews,Jesus set man" (224), I take it he means by this curious claim thatmorality does not concern what we ought to do or what deter-mines or provides some ultimate justification for our actions, butrather elaborates who we are, hence what we are willing to takeresponsibility for, what we are answerable for, hence where westand with respect to our others and what we construe their posi-tion with respect to us to come to (what claims they have upon usand hence, again, what we are answerable for). To say tooi muchtoo quickly, by putting man in place of law, Hegel means that inthose places where questions of morality seem most urgent, whenwe are called upon to justify an action or nonaction, what is atstate is not the validity of morality as such or the ultimate sourceof its authority or, what is the same, the extent of its authoritjr overour doings but, just and only, "the nature or quality of our rela-tionship to one another" (Cavell, 1979: 268). This is not to desub-liniate morality into the human, to reduce a transcendentmorality to a merely human one, but rather to change the topic,tO' suggest that the very idea of morality as a set of ultimatelyauthoritative norms governing hum.an action is mistaken about itsmeaning and scope; morality as law displaces responsibility for

418 SOCIAL RESEARCH

the quality of human relationships from the web of commitmentsand undertakings through which we elaborate how we stand withrespect to one another into subject-transcendent norms and laws.Changing the topic is not meant to make morality weaker or lessauthoritative than it is in the morality system, but rather to give itanother aspect altogether—to expose the actuality of its mun-dane, albeit every bit as demanding, content: the nature and qual-ity of our relationship to one another. Ethical discourse,including moral argument, is the means of making explicit forourselves and for the other what this comes to and what is to doneabout it, so who I am and must be in my relations to others if I amto sustain what I take to be my fundamental commitments andideals. Norms, commitments, responsibilities, values and thedesires and emotions that accompany or reveal these are all inter-nal ingredients through which we articulate where we are in theunfolding story of our life together—a story of selves lost orfound, dejected or elated, sustained or spurned, imprisoned orfree, foiling or flourishing, needy or needed, indifferent or car-ing. Everything turns on where we are with respect to oneanother, how we respond or fail to do so, and there is nothing elsefor either self or other that ethically matters.

The test case Hegel employs to demonstrate this thesis is howwe understand and what we do with trespass (crime, vice, offense,transgression). For the purposes of this argument, Hegel is goingto construe criminal justice as moral justice writ large: criminaljustice makes explicit and formal, gives institutional shape to,what transpires informally in routine occurrences of (deontic)immorality since, formally, both are structures of law. Hegel's neg-ative thesis is that criminal justice has only one response to tres-pass: punishment. To comprehend the meaning of punishmentfor criminal justice encapsulates, while rendering vivid, the mLean-ing of law itself since punishment completes the claim of law byrevealing its jurisdiction over those actions that most emphaticallydeny it. Punishment represents the authority of the law in justthose cases where its authority has been defied, its claims to being


authoritative abrogated. Punishment, Hegel is going to claim, isthe fullest revelation of both the fact that moral lawfulness is alogic of mastery and domination whose fulfillment is death, and,consequently, that law is dependent upon the very life-world, thelives of living agents, that it necessarily seeks to separate itselffrom (all the better to rule).

In a sense, Hegel considers th,e punishments rendered by penaljustice are a tortured concession by law that there is nothing it canhumanly do to respond to trespass; that punishment is not somuch a human response to transgression, but what we do whenBO further human response is possible. Punishment is the form ofrespoBse to trespass that is the severing of response. Why? At thecenter of the puzzle is the absolute separation between ttie uni-versality of the law, its eternal authority, and the action that defiesit. Formally, 'ihese two belong to ontologically distinct domains:law belongs forever to the intelligible, oughtish world of reason,while the crim inal act belongs to the sense world of particularitythat is. Act and law are connected to one another—the act breaksthe law, denies it—and yet sepairate. Hegel's contenti,on is that allthat punishment accomplishes is the solidification of the separa-ti.oii of the criminal from the law: his imprisonment or deathmakes factual ("linked with life and clothed with might" [226])the separation that the criminal act itself announced: "The lawhas been broken by the trespasser; its content no longer exists forhim, he has canceled it. But the form of the law, universality, pur-sues him and clings to his trespass; his deed becomes universal,and the right which he has canceled is also canceled for him.Thus the law remains, and a punishment, Ms desert, remains."Following Kant, Hegel construes each human action as legislative:to do X is, at the same time, to implicitly claim that I am entitledto do X, that X is right, hence doing X is la,wfuL To commit acriminal act is to pose a law that cancels the existing law. If obe-dience is a condition for right, then in breaking the law one putsoneself outside right; the lawbreaker must lose his rights, must bepunished, otherwise his action would replace the authority of

420 SOCIAL RESEARCH

given law with the law announced in his action. This is what Hegelmeans when he says that "punishment lies directly in theoffended law" (225).

It is the fact that "punishment is inevitably deserved . . .inescapable" (226) that raises the problem. While punishment isalways both necessary and deseired, its execution is not since it isalways something contingent and particular. ^ On the face of it, itlooks plausible to say that we can resist prosecuting the offense,or even pardon the criminal. But from the perspective of law andjustice itself, these options are not consistently and truly availablesince they "do not satisfy justice, for justice is unbending; and solong as laws are supreme, so long as there is no escape from them,so long must the individual be sacrificed to the universal, i.e., beput to death." Because the criminal action is particular and yetlegislative, it represents a standing denial of the authority of thelaw. Because the criminal has negated the rights of all others,then until his claim to right (the legislative character of his act) iscanceled, the affront remains. Hegel's bald thesis here is thatnothing less than canceling the criminal's position as active-legislator will,in actuality, restore the authority of the law itself Every act thatemphatically breaks the law necessarily undermines lawfulness assuch by canceling its authority. Hence, "if there is no way of mak-ing the action undone, if its reality is eternal [in supplanting thelaw], then no reconciliation is possible, not even through suffer-ing punishment" (227). Suffering pumshment does nothing withrespect to the cancellation of the law involved in the offense. Onlythe removal of the legislative authority of the criminal, theauthority rightfully possessed only through obedience, canrestore the authority of the law. The death penalty is not oneoption among others; it belongs to the very being of law. WhatHegel claimed was paradigmatic in the relation of Abraham andIsaac, comes to realization in penal justice: the sacrifice of theindividual to the universal, his death, is the truth of law. ^

It is worth lingering on this thought for just a moment. Hegel'scomplaint is that at the heart of morality there is a terrible moral-


ism. The only thing morality can do with transgression is to judgeit, or rather, judgment is the internal corollary of the fact &at formorality transgression is the negation of the law, and as such putsthe violator of the law outside the binding terms of humanengagement. So we might say the very act of transgression callsdo^vn upon itself a judgment, where every judgment is the per-ception of the violator of law as excluding herself from the con-ditions that regulate interaction in general. Judgment is thecommunal recapitulation of the seUnexclusion originally accom-plished by the transgressive-legislative deed. This is the viLolenceand moralism of judgment, what makes moral judgment a moral-ism; every moral judgment says "Guiltj'I" and in so sayingannounces the penalty of death. Which is why it is appropriate tothink of what is transpiring here as Hegel's critique of traditionalmorality rather than, merely, Eant's moral philosophy. Hegel'sperceives in Kant's theory only the exacerbation of 'the moralismthat all morality—as a system of binding laws or principles ornorms or commandments—has been. Morality so understood isnothing other than judgment and death, making each of ustransgressive beings for it, only dead men walking.

Punishment as fate, Hegel contends, is quite different in kindto the operation of penal law. I have been claiming that Hegel'sethical project involves a generai shift of orientation, a changingof the topic of morality from the question of law and obedience,vertical morality, to the quality an.d nature of our relationshipwith one another, horizontal morality. Within horizontal ethicallife there is no fundamental cleavage between universal and par-ticular; trespass here cannot be described in terms of the particu-lar slave defying the authority of his uniA ei al master (229); withinunited life nothing original appears as intrinsically other or alien.The following sddkes me as among the most powerful and movingpassages in Hegel's corpus:

Only through a departure from united life which is neitherregulated by law nor at variance with law, only through the

422 SOCIAL RESEARCH

killing of life, is something alien produced. Destruction oflife is not the nullification of life but its diremption, and thedestruction consists in its transformation into an enemy. . . .The illusion of trespass, its belief that it destroys the other'slife and thinks itself enlarged thereby, is dissipated by thefact that the disembodied spirit of the injured life comes onthe scene against the trespass, just as Banquo who came asa friend to Macbeth was not blotted out when he was mur-dered but immediately thereafter took his seat, not as aguest at the feast, but as an evil spirit. The trespasserintended to have to do [away] with another's life, but he hasonly destroyed his own, for life is not different from life,since life dwells in a single Godhead. In his arrogance hehas destroyed indeed, but only the friendliness of life; hehas perverted life into an enemy (229).

Entangled in this passage are both the depth of Hegel's vision andthe fragility of its metaphysical presuppositions. If, horizontally, inethical life we are dynamically bound together, sharing a life, thenin destroying the other I am doing more than simply destroyinganother, although I am certainly doing that; I am at the same timedisrupting the very conditions that sustain the life of each. Theproper description of my destruction is that it undermines thethick web of life-world conditions that make my own life possible;there is in my act, not a nullification of life as such, since life isalways shared and joined, but its diremption, the ruining of thefriendliness of life (what makes united life an enabling conditionof possibility), and the making of it into an enemy. Diremption,ruining the friendliness of life, making life an enemy, are theterms Hegel opts for in place of law breaking or disobedience.Trespass transforms the quality and nature of our life together.Since united life is the baseline, then this destruction of it neednot even assurae evil intention: innocent trespass (Oedipus [232-3])^' and evil trespass (Macbeth) can equally disrupt united life,unleashing the avenging fates.


In speaking of punishm^ent as fate, Hegel contends that trans-gressive actions are consequential for our ongoing experience ofourselves in relation to others. Fate stands for a logic of actionand reaction, the coming-to-be of the experience of life as hostileand an enemy. Fate signals the return of repressed life. In classi-cal tragedy, the avenging fates return in the form of an extendedlogic of unintended actions having the consequence of, literally,bringing down the life of their perpetrator; in modem tragedy, itis the experience of guilt and suffering by the evildoer that rep-resents the return of dirempted life—my guilty conscience justthe ghost of the other haunting me. For the purpose of exempli-fication, assume that the notion of united life is represented bytbe notioK of a general condition of trust between me and rny oth-ers. Assume further, pace Hobbes, that the condition of generaltrust cannot intelligibly be a consequence of the knowledge ofeach that every other knows that the consequence of trespass willbe punishment; this is implausible because, first, such knowledgeis not trust but merely a calculation by each of every other's cal-culation of the likelihood of detection; and second, externalthreat of detection and punishment does not reach far enoughinto the fine-grained detail of everyday life in which the necessityof trust is operative. General trust by each of all its others is oneaspect of united life, its friendliness. Transgressive actions cometo matter to the continuing experience of my relation to others:if I have destroyed the grounds of trust between me and my oth-ers because I know that / cannot be trusted, how might I trustthem? If trusting them is impossible, then my every action will beriddled with anxiety since there is nothing I can count on. Anxi-ety here is just guilt deferred. On this account, the experience ofguilt is not a consequence of law breaking, but rather of disrupt-ing the conditions of my active life with others. Hegel, then, mustbe assuming that guilt and conscience are not, or at least not onlyor not best understood as artifacts of a repressive psycholog)^ of aninternalized, punishing superego, but rather the actual coming toawareness of how my life of action is internally bouB.d to tlie life

424 SOCIAL RESEARCH

of others, and how my transgressive action has severed those con-ditions of possible action.

Anxiety and guilt are my experience of being caught within thetoils of fate. While fate appears as simply a direct consequence ofanother's deed, this is not quite so. Trespass is an occasion of fate,not its hydraulic cause; what really produces fate, Hegel claims, "isthe manner of receiving and reacting against the other's deed"(233). Fate is not a mechanical consequence of trespass; that ismerely the external perception of it, the one bequeathed byGreek tragedy; rather fate is my awareness and response to whathas been done, it is a form of reaction and response in which Icome to awareness of my answerability for my doings, and thus afurther elaboration of the deed itself. Putting the matter this wayis equally to say that guilt as fate is both a component in and myawareness of the quality and nature of my relationship with oth-ers. Hegel continues: "The fate in which the man senses what hehas lost creates a longing for lost life. This longing . . . recognizeswhat has been lost as life, as what was once its friend, and thisrecognition is already an enjoyment of life" (231). Suffering guiltis my acknowledgement of my answerability for what I have done;because with guilt I locate myself within life, as lost and desired,my acknowledgement of answerability is simultaneously my accep-tance of life as the condition of my action, hence "an enjoymentof life." In brief, each moment in this unfolding of my trespassreveals itself to be but a modification of life and nothing more.

Finally, because trespass is here a modification of life, then theway is opened to further modifications: on the part of the trans-gressor: confession, apology, repentance, reparation; on the partof his others: forgiveness (236).^* In place ofthe restoration ofthe law that requires the death of the trespasser, fate announcesthe sensing of life by life; reconciliation, which here represents allthose modes of activity in which the friendliness of life is soughtand accomplished, thus tokens the general possibility that the factof transgression is not final, and hence that the restoration of thefriendliness of life is possible: "And life can heal its wounds again;

HEGEL'S CRITIQUE OF MOEALITY 425

the severed, hostile life can return into itself again and annul thebungling achievement of a trespass, can annul the law and thepunishment" (230). The toils of fate involve an agent becomingsensitive to what he has done, so coming to feel differently aboutit, and as a consequence necessarily coming to redescribe thenexus of self and context differently. Feeling differendy andappreciating differently are thus intertwined. The movement ofthis intertwining, as the work of love, may be described as conver-sion or transformation. What underwrites this notion is Hegel'sgesture of distinguishing between action and agent. Within themorality system, an action is a permanent cancellation of the law;there is no space available to consider the agent apart from theobedience or disobedience of what is done. In fate, an action isboth a doing, something done, and an expression of the standingof the agent wth respect to others. Ethical life conceives ofactions always along a double register, as doings with consequences,and as expressions of ethical subjectivity. Actions are events andexpressions; they are both these things, however, only throughthe transformation tiiat poses acdon as a moment within unitedlife in which affective response and cognitive appreciation arefully and irrevocably entangled. This is how, finally, horizontalethicality comes to be the leading edge for the comprehension ofobjectivity?; no adequate appreciation of what is the case, objectiv-ity, is possible outside consideration: of how an individual is affec-tively attuned to it. Objectivity without affective salience is empty,while salience without objectivity is blind.

V. Transgression: Concluding Unscientific Postscript

Soon after writing the "Spirit" essay, Hegel becam,e aware thatits account of united life illegitimately depended on a concep-tion of society as having the qualities of small-scale religiouscommunities: a romantic envisionment of Gemeinschaftlich com-munal life. Adam Smith taught Hegel that societies could be

426 SOCIAL RESEARCH

bound together in relationships of mutual dependency in waysquite other than communal sharing; and that further, suchmodern societies acknowledged a place for the independenceof individuals from one another that communal life could nottolerate. Without question, it was these thoughts that led Hegelto seek to reconstruct his first account of ethical life in themore complex and robust terms of recognition and spirit. Yet,I think there is a hint of something else occurring even in the"Spirit" essay.

At the conclusion of section III in response to Nancy's argu-ment that the logical form of love contains an element of unsur-passable brokenness, I claimed that there was implicit a darkermoment in the account of the causality of fate that was responsiveto that claim. What I had in mind were sentences such as, on theone hand, "finally, love completely destroys objectivity andthereby annuls and transcends reflection, deprives man's oppo-site of all foreign character" (305); and, on the other, "Onlythrough the departure from that united life . . . is something alienproduced" (229); or "The trespass which issues from life revealsthe whole, but as divided, and the hostile parts can coalesce againinto the whole" (232). The first sentence fragment states that lovecancels objectivity, reflection, foreignness; but this images ourrelations with others as one that is all but unconscious, as lackingall the ingredients of judgment, discernment, reflective consider-ation that are routine elements of everyday interactions. At thisjuncture, it is almost as if Hegel is unable to consider even thesimplest reflective articulations of experience as other than formsof alienation and defect. And while he does not truly believe thisto be the case or intend us to so construe him, he seems forced toit by conceiving of love as compietion, or, to make his borrowingfrom Holderlin here clear, "Pure life is being' (254).^^

If we take the two opposing statements at face value, they con-tain a disturbing message: they suggest that only in the light of atransgressive action can an aspect of united life be revealed as adistinct and separate element of it; and further, only in the lightof a transgressive action can the whole of united life appear as a


whole having a claim upon its component parts. In brief, trans-gressive action appears to be a necessary condition for ethical self-con-

sciousness. Since in Hegel ethical self-consciousness is a result of adevelopment sequence, then we could equally say that he is herebeginning his insistence that all consciousness formation occursthrough transgressive action, that criminalit)' is indeed the modelfor consciousness formation in general, and, since consciousnessforraation is just what he thinks spiritual history to be, tlien his-tory is the work of transgressive deeds. * From this perspective,transgressive action is not a locai interruption within an otherwiseharmonious, organic, functioning whole; what makes the organicmodel inadequate—and Nancy's vision of shattered love true butsentimental, and Smith's invisible hand a subject-transcendentbut nonetheless fortuitously happy mechanism—is not that it pic-tures society as simple and small rather than large and complex,but the discovery that all significant human action is necessarilytransgressive (no matter how innocent or well intended), thattransgressiveness belongs to the routine grammar of humanaction and ethical self-consciousness, and hence 'that indepen-dence or what has come to be called subjectivity arises onlythrough actions that sever (upset, transform, deform and reform)the bonds of everyday sociality; that without the ongoing possibil-ity of transgression all subjectivity withers and dissipates. None ofthis is meant to challenge the credentials of the causality of fatedoctrine, how it elaborates a conception of ethical life quite otherthan the one imagined by the morality system bequeattted byJudaic law. On the contrary, my point is rather that we miss thedepth of the claim of the doctrine if we fail to acknowledge thatits claim against the morality system only becomes evident andoperative once the simple whole of united life is shattered.

In the beginning is the criminal deed.

Notes

TMs is slighdy hyperbolic, since a more accurate statement would bethat what Hegel is seeking a thoroughgoing synthesis or unification oftheoretical and practical reason in which practical reason takes the lead.

428 SOCIAL RESEARCH

Kant, the existence of a transcendent God is a "postulate"required by moral reason in order to secure belief in the possibility ofour realizing the "highest good."

^Hegel's early Jena writings are, of course, conceptually closer to thePhenomenology than the "Spirit" essay. On my reading, those works arethemselves attempts to work out conceptually the ethical logic of theoriginal vision. For this very reason, I prefer the vividness, immediacy,and beauty of the "Spirit" essay; we will not understand what requiresconceptual articulation undl we have first glimpsed the vision itself.

^Conversely, Hegel must equally think that the fundamental impulseof biblical Christianity is anti-Platonic. The Christianity that takes itselfto be in relation to a transcendent, creator God is for the young Hegela Judaic misinterpretation of it.

^All page references in the text are to Hegel, Early Theoh^cal Writings(1975). All unspecified quotations refer to the last page number given.

^Deucalion, son of Prometheus, is the Greek Noah. When Zeus isabout to flood the earth in response to human impiety, Prometheuswarns Deucalion, giving him time to build an ark for himself and his wifePyrrha. After the flood, they are told to throw over their shoulders thebones of Deucalion's mother, from which spring the men and womenwho repopulate the earth. For Hegel this is a work of love, and hence areturn to friendship with the natural world (185). Hegel does notexplain how this work of love might enduringly be a response to a lessthan friendly natural world. I presume that the point of contrast withNoah and Nimrod is that Deucalion and Pyrrha do not take the flood tobe grounds for setting up a permanent barrier to nature; they presumethat friendship with nature remains possible.

^Taking due account of the opening pages of the "Spirit" essay revealshow proximate its argumentation is to the genealogy of reason that MaxHorkheimer and T. W. Adorno offer in Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002).

If one construes the original impulse of Kant's transcendental ideal-ism—the idea that we know appearances only and not things in them-selves—as the Rousseau-inspired attempt to delimit the a^uthority ofnature-dominating, instrumental reason (what Kant calls the under-standing) in order to preserve the possibility of morality, then Hegel'scritique is, even at this level, a continuation and completion of the Kant-ian project. For the idea that Kant's project was intended as a critique ofinstrumental, scientific reason, see Velkley (1989).

I mean this statement of the theological contract to be a genealogi-cal anticipation of Kant's notion of the highest good in which Godwould, ideally, dispense happiness in proportion to virtue. Virtue is

HEGEL'S CRITIQUE OF MOP^LITi^ 429

TOthin our power, our self-mastery, while happiness is nature "without"and hence beyond our power; ideally God will order nature so thatwhat we cannot control normativeiy harmonizes with what is within ourcontrol.

• On coldness as the mood or affect appropriate to instrumental rea-son, see Bernstein, Adomo: Disenchantment and Ethics (2001: 396-414).

^%or accounts of how the analysis of natural beauty in ELant's Critiqueof Judgment became the wedge for going beyond the restrictions of thecritical system, see Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from KanttoDerrida and Adomo (1992, chap. 1); and Robert Pippin (1997).

^\n the lead essay of Must We Mean What We Say? (1976: 25), SunleyGavell states this idea in terms of moral rules being properly understoodnot as Categorical Imperatives, but as Categorical Declaratives; these tellyou "part of what you in fact do when you are moral." So I am suggestingthat lie rule "When X is hungry, feed X" is a Categorical Declarative.Like Hegel, wrhat Cavell is objecting to in the ought character ofthe Cat-egorical Imperative is that it perceives moral rules from the perspectiveof someone already alienated from the authority of morality (or feelinga distance from God), hence the very citing of such a overriding ruledeepens the alienation, making the appeal to it look "hypocritical (oranyway shaky) and the attempts at . . . establishment or justificationseem tyrannical (or anyway arbitrary)" (Cavell, 1976: 24).

^^The idea of love "posing itself' as not self4ove (Nancy, 1991) ismeant to acknowledge that the phenomenology of love can be illusory:what poses itself as not self-love may nonetheless be or become a formof self-love. Love has innumerable pathologies.

-^Even erotic love, the most possessive form of love, easily topples intoobsession because the object of desire is "lifted" to being of infinite, orat least indefinite, value. It is this lifting that poses erotic love as not self-love; indeed the fierceness of erotic possession is the agony of the recog-nition of this rupture, its intolerableness, hence the need to possessabsolutely and so overcome the fracture of self that its uprising causes.

^ IWiich is why, it should be noted, that from the perspective of thecriminal, punishm.ent inevitably wears the face of vengeance andrevenge, not justice.

^^Hegel is not of course asserting that we do not pardon criminals,but only that moral/legal pardon possesses no logical sense in themorality system. His claim will be, rather, that when such pardon is notitself legalistic—Pauline-like atonement—it comes from anotherspace altogether.

430 SOCIAL RESEARCH

^'In conversation, Henry Harris has suggested that the reference heremay not be Oedipus and Co., as Knox supposes (Hegel, 1975: 233 fn.),but to Jesus.

^^But negative modifications are also possible; we can turn away fromthe violator in exasperation or despair or fear; we can, further, and ofcourse, seek repayment for damages done in acts of cruelty that provideus with the pleasures of the other's suffering (as Nietzsche forcefullyreminds us). What will distinguish these acts now, however, is that theyare forms of response, ways of going on, which can always be ways of notgoing on with the other, of finding no fiarther possibilities of that and soof despairing of the possibility of other, fiiture responses. But in thiscase, were it to transpire, the exclusion of the other would not be theway of cleaning the slate and so restoring the authority of the law, butthe announcement of and bearing with an on-going loss. This too is amodification of life—as for now at least damaged beyond repair. Whichis why the question such a modification raises is not about the violatorbut about the manner and possibility of our going on, how we manageor fail to manage this loss, what bearing such a loss could be and what itmeans for us. Assume now that Hegel's severing the moral into themoralism of the morality system and ethical life is the discovery of nottwo separate regimes but two ideal types, both of which cohabit in theheart and practices of each inhabitant of North Atlantic civilization. Itfollows that, since the morality system is a metaphysical illusion becausethere has never been a law that is independent in the way that the moral-ity system imagines, but only the moralistic stance of presupposing theexistence of such a law, then the scenario of damaged life, of life con-stituted by the failures of the community to find a way of allowing theviolators of law back in, becomes an image of our situation in which thetwo stances cohabit. We cannot lightly step, as Hegel imagines, from therigidity of morality to the respotisiveness of ethical life in a flash; to thedegree that the actuality of morality belongs to our present, we are bur-dened by losses already incurred. Both here and later, Hegel ignores thecohabitation problem and the depth of the losses already incurred as aproblem for the present.

^^The distinction that Hegel is aiming for is worked out appropriatelyby Heidegger in Being and Time (1996), with the distinction betweenready-to-hand (objects naturally appearing in the context of their usage)and present-to-hand (how objects appear when they are abstractedfrom, or fall out of through breakage of their constitutive context ofuse), each possessing it own corresponding form of comprehension,viz., circumspective interpretation and assertion respectively. The rea-

HEGEL'S CRITIQUE OF MO1M.LITY 431

son Hegel runs into a dilemma here is that he has yet to work out a con-ception of individuality or human separateness that is compatible withhis strenuous conception of united life. Separateness is assumed— it iswhat makes love of another different from self-love—but Hegel does notyet know how to sustain such separateness without some thought of for-eignness or defect, or rather, his unease about separateness conies out,precisely, in his overly harmonizing, unreflective conception of loving.It is as if he could not think of love except on tlie model of either thefusion of infant and mother, or sexual ecstasy.

^^Almost all readers of Hegel recognize that what I am here callingiransgressive action appears as the notion of the negative in the Phe-nowienology. Yet the notion of negativity is usually left as simply the powerof mind to negate immediacy, hence as equivalent to the thought thereis no consciousness mthout judgment—Holderlin's original insight intoour permanent separation from being. But this leaves the notion of thenegative too weak, at least as compared with the idea of negative trans-gressive acts. In the first part of his The Stru^le for Recognition: The MoralGrammar of Social Conflicts (1995), Axel Honneth does recognize that theearly Hegel, after the "Spirit" essay but before the Phenomenology, doesespouse the idea that practical conflicts can be "understood as an ethi-cal moment in the movement occurring wthin a collective social life"(17); and further that "Hegel granted criminal acts a constructive rolein the formative process of ethical life because they were able to unleashthe conflicts that, for the first time, would make subjects aware of theunderlying relations of recognition." (26). While the idea of oifering anethically textured conflict model of social progress is indeed part ofHegel's project (the part that Marx latched onto), Honneth does nottake seriously enough the generality of his own thesis, and hence makesthe role of struggle, conflict, and transgression local and interruptive,rather than peivasive and general.

References

Bernstein, Jay. The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida andAdomo. University Park: Pennsylvania State Universit y? Press, 1992.

. Adomo: Disenchantment and Ethics. New York: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 2001.

Gavell, Stanley. Must We Mean What We Sayf New York: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1976.

. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy.New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

432 SOCIAL RESEARCH

Hamacher, Werner. Pkroma—Reading in Hegel. Trans. Nicholas Walkerand Simon Jarvis. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Hegel, G. W. F. Early Theological Writings. Trans. T. M. Knox. Philadel-phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany:State University of New York Press, 1996.

Honneth, Axel. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of SocialConflicts. Trans. Joel Anderson. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995.

Horkheimer, Max and T. W. Adomo. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans.Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. "Shattered Love." The Inoperative Community. Trans.Peter Connor, Lisa Barbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.

Pippin, Robert. "Avoiding German Idealism: Kant, Hegel, and theRefiective Judgment Problem." Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Vari-ations. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Velkley, Richard. Freedom and the End of Reason: On the Moral Foun-dations of Kant's Critical Philosophy. Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1989.

Bernstein Hegel love law

Documents

Transcript of Bernstein Hegel love law