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Spirit That Is Certain Of Itself: Morality
At the heart of Hegel's analysis of the French Revolution, as we have seen, is a critique of the one-sidedness of the conception of freedom it embodied, which required the subject to 'extinguish all particularity' (all determinate desires, traits, and social roles) in order to achieve 'universality'; this 'universal freedom', Hegel argued, 'can produce neither a positive work nor a deed'. Hegel now tries to show how a similar one-sidedness lies behind the ethical systems of Kant and Fichte, where on their account of freedom, the autonomous moral subject who acts out of duty is set apart from the natural subject who acts out of desires and inclinations; he argues once again that this sets up an antithesis between the individual and concrete actions, such that the subject is left feeling that it might be best from a moral perspective if he gave up trying to do anything, as there is nothing he can do to actualize pure duty. (Hegel famously saw a close relation here between philosophy in Germany and political events in France, observing of the idea of the pure will that 'With the Germans, it remained tranquil theory; but the French wished to put it into practice'.) Hegel aims to show how this conception of freedom and moral goodness commits the Kantian to a dualistic picture, which distinguishes sharply between the natural and the moral order, inclination and duty, and happiness and morality, in a way that ultimately leads to incoherence.
The postulates of Kantian morality
In order to bring out this incoherence, Hegel focuses on the series of postulates to be found in the Kantian conception of practical reason, where Kant tried to show that the moral agent must have certain hopes about the efficacy of his endeavours, and that to make these hopes rational, he must commit himself to the following propositions: 'There is a God, there is in the nature of the world an original although incomprehensible disposition for agreement with moral purposiveness, and there is finally in the human soul a disposition that makes it capable of a never ending progress to this moral purposiveness'. Kant sees a need for these postulates because without them we would have no grounds for thinking that our moral actions will succeed, as nothing in the natural world taken on its own gives us any reason to think that virtuous behaviour will bring about happiness, while the achievement of moral goodness seems impossible in this life, but becomes conceivable if the soul is thought of as immortal. Kant treats these postulates as theoretically unprovable, but as propositions that we must endorse if our moral undertakings are to make any practical sense. (For further discussion, see Wood.)
Now, Kant's doctrine of the postulates has drawn fire from many quarters. In general, critics have seen the postulates as inconsistent with the rest of the Kantian framework, and thus as compromising the integrity of his fundamental position. To some, the main inconsistency is with what they see as the anti-metaphysical position of the First Critique, claiming that Kant now tries to give some kind of rational support for belief in the existence of God and the soul, where he had previously succeeded in showing such beliefs to be unsupportable (Heine, 'As the result of this argument, Kant distinguishes between the theoretical reason and the practical reason, and by means of the latter, as with a magician's wand, he revivifies deism, which theoretical reason had killed'; also Nietzsche). To others, the inconsistency introduced by the postulates is with Kant's ethical theory, and in particular with his anti-eudaemonism: for, having sharply distinguished virtue from happiness, Kant is nonetheless said to compromise his position with the idea of the Highest Good, where virtuous actions bring about happiness in a way that will only seem attainable (according to Kant) if we introduce the postulate of a supreme and benevolent God who can govern nature to bring this about (Schopenhauer, 'Kant had the great merit of having purged ethics of all eudaemonism . . . [But] Of course, strictly speaking, even Kant has banished eudaemonism from ethics more in appearance than in reality, for he still leaves a mysterious connection between virtue and supreme happiness in his doctrine of the highest good, where they come together in an abstruse and obscure chapter; whereas virtue is obviously quite foreign to happiness.'). Though they have a certain rhetorical force, these criticisms of Kant's position can be met by the Kantian. Given Kant's distinction between theoretical and practical reason, it is not clear that there is any inconsistency in rejecting theoretical arguments for God and the soul, but defending practical arguments; and there is no reason to accuse Kant of bad faith on this score. And it also seems incorrect to hold that the doctrine of the Highest Good is in tension with Kant's anti-eudaemonism: for although Kant here makes happiness a goal of the moral agent, it is not his happiness that motivates him, so Kant does not in any way treat happiness as the agent's reward for virtue (Guyer).
Now, although Hegel's critique of the postulates is often assimilated with these standard objections, when looked at more closely this critique is of a rather different kind: put simply, his objection is that the fundamental dualism of Kant's position means that Kant can do no more than postulate the coincidence of nature and morality, inclination and duty, and happiness and morality, but making the connection in this very weak way leaves the dualism unresolved, so that the subject is left feeling that any action it performs is worthless from a moral point of view. According to Hegel, therefore, the difficulty with the Kantian framework is that it is obliged to see the Highest Good and moral perfection as something that we can do no more than hope for, as something that ought to be, because the divisions Kant sets up between the natural sphere and the moral sphere force him to posit this realization in the 'beyond'. Hegel's objection to the postulates therefore takes the form of a so-called Sollen-kritik: that is, he rejects them because they rely on a fundamental distinction between how things are and how things ought to be, in which this 'ought' (Sollen) is introduced to overcome a dualism that is presupposed at the outset, and so cannot be set aside. Hegel summarizes this objection quite clearly in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy:
[For Kant] Will has the whole world, the whole of the sensuous, in opposition to it, and yet Reason insists on the unity of Nature or the moral law, as the Idea of the Good, which is the ultimate end of the world. Since, however, it is formal, and therefore has no content on its own account, it stands opposed to the impulses and inclinations of a subjective and an external independent Nature. Kant reconciles the contradiction of the two . . . in the thought of the highest Good, in which Nature is conformed to rational will, and happiness to virtue . . . [But] The unification spoken of itself therefore remains only a Beyond, a thought, which is not actually in existence, but only ought to be . . . [The postulate of God], like that of the immortality of the soul, allows the contradiction to remain as it is all the time, and expresses only in the abstract that the reconciliation ought to come about. The postulate itself is always there, because the Good is a Beyond with respect to Nature; the law of necessity and the law of liberty are different from one another, and placed in this dualism. Nature would remain Nature no longer, if it were to become conformed to the Notion of the Good; and thus there remains an utter opposition between the two sides, because they cannot unite. It is likewise necessary to establish the unity of the two; but this is never actual, for their separation is exactly what is pre-supposed. Hegel thus has two aims in criticizing Kant's postulates: first, he tries to show that Kant's dualistic picture means he can do no more than treat the Highest Good and moral perfection as goals we can strive for, and second he tries to show that there is something incoherent in this position with respect to moral action, so that the Kantian should abandon the dualism that has led him to it. In the Phenomenology, Hegel sets out Kant's postulates in the subsection entitled 'The Moral View of the World'. Hegel first dis-
though incomprehensible disposition for agreement with moral purposiveness': that is, the assumption that good deeds will succeed, while bad ones will fail. The need for this postulate arises, because the moralist divides nature off from the moral consciousness, by taking the natural order to be governed by causal necessity, while the moral order is governed by the imperatives of duty: 'The object has thus become . . . a Nature whose laws like its actions belong to itself as a being which is indifferent to moral self-consciousness, just as the latter is indifferent to it'. On the other hand, the moral agent must take his duties as something he can actually perform in the world, and so must see nature as hospitable to human happiness as a goal. This need to overcome the initial dualism is what gives rise to the postulate: 'The harmony of morality and Nature - or, since Nature comes into account only in so far as consciousness experiences its unity with it - the harmony of morality and happiness, is thought of as something that necessarily is, i.e. it is postulated'. The moral world-view therefore divorces morality from nature at one level, but tries to moralize it at another. A related dualism underlies the second postulate, of immortality. Here, the problem is that on the one hand the Kantian sees moral subjects as possessing a 'pure will' which directs them to follow the moral law, though on the other hand they are nonetheless also natural beings who are 'affected by wants and sensuous motives', which qua natural beings they cannot overcome; they therefore fall short of the 'pure thought of duty' that has no such affliction. Thus, while the moral world-view requires that as moral agents we should act on this pure will and 'set aside' our natural being, on the other hand as natural subjects it accepts we cannot do so, thereby apparently making moral goodness unachievable. It therefore attempts to overcome this tension by introducing the postulate of immortality, which allows for the possibility of an endless process of self-improvement, so at no point need we accept that we cannot achieve such goodness. So, for the Kantian, 'this unity is likewise a postulated being, it is not actually there; for what is there is consciousness, or the antithesis of sensuousness and pure consciousness'.
Finally, Hegel considers the third postulate, of God. Here
Hegel's discussion is more remote from Kant's own derivation of the postulate, and is closer to a 'rational reconstruction' than an interpretation. Central to Hegel's account is a distinction he draws between 'pure duty' and 'specific duty'. He does not explain this terminology very clearly, but one way of understanding it is as follows. As a moral consciousness, the individual finds that he must act in particular circumstances, where what is right for him to do is determined by his specific duties (for example, his obligations to his family dependants, or his friends, or his countrymen). However, though the moral consciousness may accept that these specific duties make a certain course of action right for him in his particular situation, he may feel that this course of action is still not his 'pure duty', where 'pure duty' is understood as what it would be right for him to do if he were free of his specific duties (for example, his specific duties make it right that he should provide for his family, while his pure duty is to give a greater proportion of his income to charity). The moral consciousness may therefore come to feel it has a clash: it may feel that it is 'held back' from doing what is its pure duty by the particularity of its situation, and it may therefore question the validity of the specific duties which apply to it by virtue of being in that situation. At the same time, the moral consciousness sees that that situation is one to which it belongs, and so accepts that it is not free to do its 'pure duty' alone. As Hegel puts it:
The moral consciousness as the simple knowing and willing of pure duty is, in the doing of it, brought into relation with the object which stands in contrast to its simplicity, into relation with the actuality of the complex case, and thereby has a complex moral relationship with it. Here arise, in relation to content, the many laws generally, and in relation to form, the contradictory powers of the knowing consciousness and of the non-conscious. In the first place, as regards the many duties, the moral consciousness in general heeds only the pure duty in them; the many duties qua manifold are specific and therefore as such have nothing sacred about them for the moral consciousness. At the same time, however, being necessary, since the Notion of moral relation to it, these many duties must be regarded as possessing an intrinsic being of their own.
Now, this is obviously an uncomfortable situation for the moral agent to be in: on the one hand, as a particular individual, he sees that he has specific duties (e.g. to his dependants and friends), but on the other hand, from a more universal standpoint, he sees that it would be better if he were free to do his pure duty (e.g. give more money to charity). The problem here is this: how can the moral world-view ground the obligatoriness of specific duties, when they appear to go against the competing demands of pure duty? Here, Hegel claims, the moralist introduces God, who 'sanctifies' these specific duties, by so arranging the world that they are just as effective at bringing about the good as pure duties are:
Thus it is postulated that it is another consciousness which makes them [i.e. the specific duties] sacred, or which knows and wills them as duties. The first holds to pure duty, indifferent to all specific content, and duty is only this indifference towards such content. The other, however, contains the equally essential relation to 'doing', and to the necessity of the specific content: since for this other, duties mean specific duties, the content as such is equally essential as the form which makes the content a duty. This consciousness is consequently one in which universal and particular are simply one, and its Notion is, therefore, the same as the Notion of the harmony of morality and happiness . . . This is then henceforth a master and ruler of the world, who brings about the harmony of morality and happiness, and at the same time sanctifies duties in their multiplicity.
Once it has postulated God in this way, the moral consciousness can feel liberated from the demands of 'pure duty', as its role can be confined to the observance of specific duties: 'Duty in general thus falls outside of it into another being, which is consciousness and the sacred lawgiver of pure duty'. This then leads the Kantian to have an equivocal position on the issue of the relation between happiness and virtue: on the one hand, the moral consciousness knows it has not performed its pure duty, and so feels unworthy and undeserving of happiness; on the other hand, it believes that God will see that this failure is not its fault, as it has done what is right in the circumstances, and so may expect forgiveness and hence some measure of well-being. Thus, without following Kant's own discussion, Hegel has brought out the three central features of Kant's moral argument for God, namely that the moral consciousness treats the moral law as commanded by God (God sanctifies the specific duties); that it sees God as helping us to bring about the existence of a good world (God so arranges things that our specific duties lead to the realization of the Highest Good); and that it relies on God's wisdom to argue for a connection between virtue and happiness (Kant , 'God is thus the holy lawgiver (and creator), the beneficent ruler (and sustainer), and the just judge.').
Hegel then turns to a detailed critique of the moral world-view, in the section entitled 'Dissemblance or Duplicity'; passing judgement on Kant in a way that Kant himself had passed judgement on others, he declares that 'the moral world-view is . . . a “whole nest” of thoughtless contradictions'. In particular, he tries to show that in fact we are in a stronger position than merely possessing the 'hopes' the Kantian puts forward, but that Kant's framework makes it impossible for him to acknowledge this. The result, Hegel suggests, is that the Kantian moralist has a view of morality that is divorced from the need for concrete action, so that (like the one adopted by the French revolutionaries discussed in the previous section) this outlook 'can produce neither a positive work nor a deed'. Thus, as regards the first postulate, the Kantian treats 'the harmony of morality and Nature . . . as an implicit harmony, not explicitly for actual consciousness, not present; on the contrary, what is present is rather only the contradiction of the two'. But, Hegel argues, we can do more than just postulate the harmony of morality and nature: in fact, every time we act morally in the world, we can see nature supposed to be merely a postulate, merely a beyond. Consciousness thus proclaims through its deed that it is not in earnest in making its postulate, because the meaning of the action is really this, to make into a present reality what was not supposed to exist in the present'. Hegel then considers a Kantian response, that though I may find it possible to realize particular moral goods, this does not show that the ultimate moral goal of the Highest Good is realizable in nature. But, Hegel argues, this Kantian response is revealing, for it shows that for the Kantian, what makes the Highest Good unrealizable is not so much nature, as that it takes more than the limited efforts of individuals to bring it about; but if this is so, then it is not clear why we should bother acting morally at all, and just rely instead on the hope that the Highest Good will mysteriously come about by itself:
Consciousness starts from the idea that, for it, morality and reality do not harmonize; but it is not in earnest about this, for in the deed the presence of this harmony becomes explicit for it. But is not in earnest even about the deed, since the deed is something individual; for it has such a high purpose, the highest good. But this again is only a dissemblance of the facts, for such dissemblance would do away with all action and all morality. In other words, consciousness is not, strictly speaking, in earnest with moral action: what it really holds to be most desirable, to be the Absolute, is that the highest good be accomplished, and that moral action be superfluous.
In essence, then, Hegel's objection to the first postulate is quite simple: the Kantian starts from a basic dualism of morality and nature, and this blinds him to the fact that enough of our moral goals are achieved to make continued moral action rational; but once this fact is admitted, we are no longer obliged to treat the 'agreement of the world with moral purposiveness' as a mere postulate, in the way that Kant tries to do. The Kantian moralist cannot see this, however, with the result (Hegel claims) that he fails to be 'in earnest' when it comes to the value of moral action. As regards the second postulate, Hegel poses a dilemma for the Kantian. On the one hand, he argues, the Kantian cannot treat the morally pure will as one with no desires and inclinations, because otherwise it would be impossible to explain its capacity for action. On the other hand, the Kantian could see the morally pure will as possessing desires and inclinations, but that these are in conformity with the dictates of morality; but then, if the Kantian is right to take the natural subject as phenomenal and the moral subject as noumenal, why should we think that this conformity should ever arise, as the different realms have different structures? Thus, while the second postulate seems to hold out some hope of overcoming the dualism of duty and inclination in an infinite beyond, Kant's actual position would show such hope to be misguided: 'the harmony [of morality and sensenature] is beyond consciousness in a nebulous remoteness where nothing can any more be accurately distinguished or comprehended; for our attempts just now to comprehend this unity failed'. Now, Hegel argues, this result will not really bother the Kantian, because in fact he sees morality as consisting in just this never-ending struggle between duty and inclination, as without this struggle the virtuous individual could not show that he is capable of resisting the perpetual threat of temptation: 'Morality is both the activity of this pure purpose, and also the consciousness of rising above sense-nature, of being mixed up with sense-nature and struggling against it. That consciousness is not in earnest about the perfection of morality is indicated by the fact that consciousness itself shifts it away into infinity, i.e. asserts that the perfection is never perfected'. Finally, as regards the third postulate, Hegel raises two objections. First, against the idea that God sanctifies our specific duties and so makes them obligatory, Hegel argues that this is incompatible with the commitment to moral autonomy which is fundamental to the Kantian position, and to Kant's insistence that 'we shall not look upon actions as obligatory because they are commands of God, but shall regard them as divine commands because we have an inward obligation to them'. Thus, the Kantian cannot appeal to God to overcome the tension between pure and specific duties:
the many have no truth for it in so far as they are specific duties. They can therefore have their truth only in another being and are made sacred – which they are not for the moral consciousness – by a holy lawgiver. But this again is only a dissemblance of the real position. For the moral self-consciousness is its own Absolute, and duty is absolutely only what it knows as duty. But duty it knows only as pure duty; what is not sacred for it is not sacred in itself, and what is not in itself sacred, cannot be made sacred by the holy being.
Hegel's second objection concerns the possibility of conceiving God as a moral agent, acting under an imperative of pure duty, while we carry out our specific duties. Hegel's claim is that such 'a purely moral being' is an 'unreal abstraction in which the concept of morality, which involves thinking of pure duty, willing, and doing it, would be done away with'. In other words, it is hard to conceive of God, as a being lacking in any specific attachments and as existing outside the world, as having any moral agency within it: God just appears to be altogether beyond the moral situation. Thus, while the Kantian moralist thinks that we are not capable of fully developed moral agency because we are 'affected by sense-nature and Nature opposed to it', it is not clear that God is capable of moral agency either, since 'the reality of pure duty is its realization in Nature and sense'; but God is 'above the struggle of Nature and sense', and so outside the realm in which moral action takes place. Once again, therefore, Hegel claims that the Kantian has a difficulty in relating the reality of moral action with his conception of the moral will.
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