The guiding idea of German idealism is the autonomy of reason in the strong sense given to it by Kant in the Critique of Practical Reason: reason, and reason alone, is (under certain conditions) capable of producing its objects itself and thereby of foregoing all passivity (“receptivity”) and becoming pure activity (“spontaneity”). Hegel thinks that this idea “must from now on be regarded as a universal principle of philosophy” but that it has also become “one of the prejudices of our time.”1 If there is a divergence between the two philosophers, it has to do with how widely the principle of rational autonomy can apply. In Kant’s eyes, the meaning and scope of this principle is exclusively moral. Although pure reason is one and the same in its theoretical and practical usages,2 the principle of autonomy is only foundational when it comes to its practical-normative usage, not its theoretical-cognitive usage; moreover, the fundamental interests of reason are ultimately practical.3 Fichte considerably expanded the principle of rational autonomy by extending it to the entirety of the subject’s field of activity, which he understands as practical in a renewed sense of the term. Reason is practical because it is pure self-activity and because “determining its activity and being practical, are one and the same.”4 He is fully aware of the revision of the Kantian concept of practice this implies:
It is a familiar proposition: reason is practical; and I promised to show the equivalence of this Kantian assertion with my own. [For Kant] this means first: that reason is, among other things, practical and yet sometimes, in certain circumstances, not. I affirm the opposite: reason is only practical, and there is only one purely practical reason.5
As for Hegel, he gives maximal scope to the self-determination of reason by striving to reconcile theoretical interest and practical interest in the unity of speculative reason. The very meaning of what he calls the absolute idea is that reason is inseparably knowing and willing, oriented toward both the true and the good: the “speculative or absolute” idea is in fact “the unity of the theoretical and practical idea”6 not in the sense that it is their retrospective synthesis but rather in the sense that the subjective-objective unity of the “objective world” and the “subjectivity of the concept”7 is secretly presupposed by acts of knowing and willing finis (bound up with the duality of the subject and object).
Ultimately, it is in the practical field, understood in the narrow (say, Kantian) sense that the consistency of the idealist principle of rational autonomy is determined. We must be careful to specify the vocabulary we use here, for between Kant and Hegel (to limit ourselves to these two philosophers) there are differences that can lead to serious confusion. Hegel underscores the innovation contained in his distinction between Moralität and Sittlichkeit:
Morality and ethicality, which are usually regarded as roughly synonymous, are taken here in essentially distinct senses. Yet even representational thought [Vorstellung] seems to distinguish them; Kantian usage prefers the expression morality, as indeed the practical principles of Kant’s philosophy are confined throughout to this concept, even rendering the point of view of ethicality impossible and in fact expressly infringing and destroying it. But even if morality and ethicality were etymologically synonymous, this would not prevent them, since they are now different words, from being used for different concepts.8
I will return to Hegel’s claim that Kant’s moral philosophy makes “the point of view of ethicality impossible”; I believe that at bottom it is less one sided and misguided than is often claimed. But first we must note that Kant himself does not confuse Moral and Ethik, at least in his late practical philosophy. The treatise on Perpetual Peace formally distinguishes “moral as doctrine of law” from “moral as ethics.”9 In The Metaphysics of Morals, Kant reinterprets the distinction made in the Critique of Practical Reason between legality and morality in the sense that legality is the distinctive trait of “rightful lawgiving,” while morality is the specific mark of ethical lawgiving.10 Thus, we may schematically state the following: whereas in Hegel, ethicality (Sittlichkeit) is the concrete totality within which the two abstract moments of law and morality (Moralität) can be distinguished, in Kant, ethics (Sittenlehre) and law (Rechtslehre) are both species of the genus morality (Moral). Clearly, in comparing their positions we must keep this terminological difference in mind (while also admitting that it may turn out to be more than just a difference in vocabulary).
In terms of their conceptualizations of the moral or ethical domain (i.e., the practical field), I will start from the following paradoxical observation: it is in this domain that Hegel turns out, sometime unwittingly, to be closest to Kant, but it is here that he fights against him most strenuously. I will quickly review the two sides of the issue.
German idealism refuses to construct a “material ethics” that would try to determine the ends that the moral subject should set for him- or herself. Thus, it completes the modern break with the traditional conception of a teleological order that just needs to be discovered so that the subject can conform to it by adding the idea of rational self-determination that foregoes any material element. Kant’s discovery lies here: pure reason and it alone is practical on its own,11 which means that the moral problem has less to do with the objects or ends that reason pursues and more with the form it adopts in order to do so—in this case, the form of self-determination. Any instrumental or prudential determination is proscribed or at least relegated to second place with regard to the principle of autonomy, which is illustrated by the “fundamental law of pure practical reason: so act that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle in a giving of universal law”12 and other (derivative) formulations of the categorical imperative. In any event, the advice of prudence and instrumental rationality are practical determinations only in a weak sense: they are actually theoretical propositions applied to the domain to free actions (thus, they belong to the “knowledge of nature [theory]”13) and not the rational promulgation of norms intended to frame these actions themselves. Thus, the determination of the ends of action, that is to say the objects of practical reason, is if not secondary then at least second with respect to the foundational act of practical normativity as it is experienced in awareness of obligation in respect for the very idea of normativity. This explains the reversal of the structure of the Analytic in the second Critique: principles first, then concepts.14 The real practical question, the only one relevant from the normative point of view, is thus the question of what ultimately determines the will to will (pure reason or various pathological interests) and not the ends or goals of action. This results in a rejection of all forms of eudemonism, that is, of any material definition of morality. It also explains Kant’s tendency, palpable in his later texts, to simply identify the will with practical reason and to accentuate the difference between the rational will and mere free choice:
The will is therefore the faculty of desire considered not so much in relation to action (as choice is) but rather in relation to the ground determining choice to action. The will itself, strictly speaking, has no determining ground; insofar as it can determine choice, it is instead practical reason itself.15
Hegel’s insistent critique of the formalism of practical reason has sometimes led readers to believe that he strays from the Kantian path; according to some, the distinction between Moralität and Sittlichkeit implies a return to the principle of happiness and a conception of ethics based on teleological ends or substance. This is not at all the case, at least at the level of morality properly speaking, insofar is it concerns the relationship between an acting subjectivity, a norm (the good), and the actual world, which also has rights to be asserted. Hegel’s critique of the classical (external) conception of finality and his concomitant valorization of the Kantian theme of internal finality16 indicates that he is most certainly not reintroducing into practical philosophy what the Logic rejects even more radically than Kant does: finalism understood according to the traditional technical paradigm and the naively ontologizing perspective, denounced in the appendix to the first part of the Ethics. Thus, in the moral domain, Hegel takes up for his own the Kantian refutation of the principle of happiness or well-being (das Wohl), adding that there can be no question of sacrificing law to the quest for personal happiness (which is not illegitimate in itself).17 There is indeed a place for this quest, but at a subordinate level where neither morality nor ethicality are fully developed. If civil society is dedicated to the (partly illusory and partly contradictory) quest for particular well-being, it is precisely because particularity and abstraction are its principle; and while particular happiness must be recognized as a moment in the development of ethicality,18 it cannot provide it with a principle. As in Kant, rational autonomy, “the free will which wills the free will,”19 is the only foundation for legal, moral, or ethical norms.
Hegel opposes Kant most strongly and consistently in the domain of practical philosophy. This is expressed in the terminological change I have already mentioned: the elevation of ethicality (Sittlichkeit) to the level of the concrete truth of the abstract norms of law and morality. But this shift goes along with a transformation of the very meaning of these concepts. In Kant, the distinction between law and ethics has meaning only on the basis of the sole formal principle of morality: we must distinguish an action’s external conformity to a norm (legality) from the fact that the obligation attached to a norm is the motive for the action (morality). Consequently, ethics, the doctrine of obligatory ends, the legislation of which can only be internal to the subject, must be distinguished from law, the doctrine of external obligations. But both are founded on the self-determination of practical reason, which means that ethical norms and legal norms are both, as norms, “laws of freedom,” categorical imperatives.20 Hegel profoundly alters a terminology that in his eyes reveals a conceptual defect. For him, ethicality (Sittlichkeit) is the “unity and truth of these two abstract moments,”21 that is, law and morality; it reconciles the objective abstraction of law and the subjective abstraction of morality within a concrete totality, itself divided into strata that correspond to various institutional shapes. Thus, ethicality becomes foundational in the sense that it gives rational actuality to the two spheres, the moral and the legal, where the formalism of abstract normativity reigns. But this clearly corresponds to a radical transformation of the meaning of the term, one that fits the general problematic of objective spirit. Ethicality in Hegel no longer refers to a domain or type of normativity but rather to the institutional field within which (legal and moral) normativity becomes actual for subjects who only access concrete subjectivity insofar as they inscribe their actions (or their plans to act) within this requisite institutional framework that is like second nature to them.22 The terminological shifts are thus both an indication and an effect of reshaping the field of practical philosophy. They also imply a judgment of the Kantian project to base ethics on the principle of the self-determination of pure practical reason.
Hegel makes three reproaches to the Kantian theory of moral normativity: the definition of practical philosophy is tainted by formalism; it is condemned to inactuality because of the opposition it establishes between ought and is; and it reveals the dualism characteristic of philosophies of the understanding. This triple failure dooms Kant’s moral philosophy to be no more than a finite thought of finitude.
1. The imputation of formalism in Kant’s moral philosophy is based on the letter of his texts. The Analytic of pure practical reason establishes that
since material principles are quite unfit to be the supreme moral law . . . the formal practical principle of pure reason (in accordance with which the mere form of a possible giving of universal law through our maxims must constitute the supreme and immediate determining ground of the will) is the sole principle that can possibly be fit for categorical imperatives, that is, practical laws (which make actions duties), and in general for the principle of morality.23
Within the deontological perspective, which Kant considers the only perspective that can allow for the constitution of a rational morality, this open formalism is based on the demonstration that it is impossible to found apodictic ethical norms on any material principle whatsoever.24 Because any definition of obligation based on its content—that is, on the ends it prescribes—implies a heteronomy of choice, the rational foundation of normativity, in keeping with the principle of autonomy, requires that the form of universality (the “form of the law) be the ultimate (if not sole) foundation of the determination of the will. From Kant’s point of view, the formalism of practical reason is simultaneously the result of the critique of the eudemonism that any material ethics ultimately amounts to and the consequence of defining reason as the power to actualize the universal in the particular, as the “faculty of principles.”25
Hegel shares Kant’s conviction that moral normativity must have a purely rational basis too much to invoke the common version of the antiformalist argument, which Péguy’s wisecrack sums up neatly: the Kantian subject’s hands are clean, but he/she has no hands. This is why Hegel takes seriously the requirements to which the deontological formalism of practical reason corresponds:
What Kant had denied theoretical reason, namely free self-determination, he explicitly vindicated for practical reason. It is principally this side of the Kantian philosophy that has won it great favour, and rightly so. In order to recognize the value of our debt to Kant in this respect, we need first to call to mind that shape of the practical philosophy and specifically the moral philosophy that he encountered as the dominant one. This was generally speaking the system of eudaemonism . . . in opposition to this eudaemonism that dispenses with any firm hold within itself and opens the door to every whim and passing mood, and he enunciated in this way the requirement of a universal determination of the will that was equally binding on everybody.26
Hegel recognizes the advance implied by the formalism of the Kantian understanding of moral normativity when it is properly understood: it simply expresses the founding principle of idealism, rational autonomy—the fact that “for the will . . . there is no other aim than that derived from itself, the aim of its freedom.”27 Hegel expresses this by saying that “the absolute determination or, if one prefers, the absolute drive, of the free spirit is to make its freedom into its object [Gegenstand].”28
Hegel contests Kantian formalism for a reason other than the formalism of (moral) normativity, a reason directly connected to his own concept of speculative reason. “Bad” formalism is in reality a legacy of theoretical philosophy. The rejection, within Kant’s idealism, of the constitutive use of rational ideas in favor of merely regulative usage makes the function of theoretical reason simply to order the knowledge that the understanding produces; reason “does not create any concepts (of objects) but only orders them.”29 This restriction condemns speculative reason to engender abstract universals (transcendental ideas) that are separate from the particular material and tools of true knowledge (the concepts—possibly pure—of objects, produced by the understanding); Kant himself describes the rational idea as focus imaginarius.30 For Hegel, on the other hand, true, concrete, speculative universality is the universality constituted in the process of its own self-differentiation. True reason works within the finite acts of the understanding, and it is to emphasize the imbrication between the two that Hegel evokes “what reason and its understanding have labored to produce over several thousand years”31 and attributes to the latter an “absolute power” that lies in the analytic work that its “activity of dissolution” practices on “familiar” representations.32 Because Kant’s practical reason ignores this and does not call into question the separation between understanding and reason established in the first Critique, it “does not advance beyond the formalism that is supposed to be the ultimate standpoint of theoretical reason.” At the same time, it keeps the understanding in isolation and therefore does not manage to actually go beyond “abstract identity of the understanding.”33
Making use of Hegel’s distinction between two aspects of moral subjectivity’s formalism, which stems from the two senses (passive and active) that the notion of form can have,34 we may say for simplicity’s sake that the formalism of Kantian reason has both positive and negative meaning. The problem is that there is a break between the positive meaning of this formalism—it illustrates the power of reason’s self-determination, the fact that it is pure spontaneity—and the negative meaning, the reduction of the universal to abstract noncontradiction, to the principle of identity that the Logic shows implies precisely what it intends to proscribe—contradiction. However, we may also say that the first meaning leads to the second. For it is the very requirement of reason’s unconditioned autonomy that, due to the lack of tools that would be speculatively suited to its fulfillment, leads to the formalist distortion of rationality. This ambiguity of Kantian formalism is emphasized in a Remark in the “Morality” section of the Philosophy of Right:
However essential it may be to emphasize the pure and unconditional self-determination of the will as the root of duty—for knowledge [Erkenntnis] of the will first gained a firm foundation and point of departure in the philosophy of Kant, through the thought of its infinite autonomy—to cling on to a merely moral point of view without making the transition to the concept of ethicality reduces this gain to an empty formalism, and moral science to an empty rhetoric of duty for duty’s sake. From this point of view, no immanent theory of duties is possible. One may indeed bring in material from outside and thereby arrive at particular duties, but it is impossible to make the transition to the determination of particular duties from the above determination of duty as absence of contradiction, as formal correspondence with itself, which is no different from the specification of abstract indeterminacy; and even if such a particular content for action is taken into consideration, there is no criterion within that principle for deciding whether or not this content is a duty. On the contrary, it is possible to justify any wrong or immoral mode of action by this means.35
The analysis may seem curt. Nonetheless it is true that the formal law, as a principle for discriminating between subjective maxims, aims to proscribe what cannot be willed, and beyond that, what cannot be thought without contradiction.
However, the critique of formalism only takes on its full meaning in light of Hegel’s reading of the Critique of Judgment, a text that in his eyes includes Kantianism’s most fertile speculative potential. According to Hegel, the doctrine of internal finality that Kant develops in that work would have made it possible to reconstruct practical philosophy on other bases. Through it, Kant could have renounced the formal concept of the good upheld in his moral philosophy and thus would have avoided the trap of the ought and (bad) formalism:
Through the concept of inner purposiveness Kant has resuscitated the idea in general and in particular the idea of life. He liberated practical reason from external purposiveness only insofar as he recognized the formal element of the will, self-determination in the form of generality, as absolute. The content, however, is indeterminate. Purposive action is conditioned by material and accomplishes only formal goodness, or, what amounts to the same thing, realizes only the means.36
The hypothesis of an intuitive understanding—which Kant merely affirms is not contradictory37—makes it possible to reconstruct what Kantian ethics could have been if not for the limitations it set on itself. Such an intuitive understanding (the equivalent of what Hegel calls speculative reason) would be able to actually and “synthetically” produce the particular from the universal and thus to deduce concrete ethical obligations from the formal principle of autonomy. This is not the case in Kantian morality, where normative content is given by “common reason” or “the most ordinary understanding” and is tested by practical reason only for its universalizability. Thus, had Kant taken this hypothesis seriously, he would have had the means to go beyond “bad” formalism in his practical philosophy without thereby returning to ethical principles that entail heteronomy.
2. Hegel’s second criticism concerns the inactuality of the moral principle: the only perspective for the realization of the highest good, the object and end of pure practical reason, offered by the postulates is that of an indefinite ought. His analysis in the Phenomenology of Spirit of the displacements or distortions (Verstellungen) of the moral vision of the world and the (unsuspected) contradictions practical reason runs into in determining the ultimate end (Endzweck) of moral action is well known.38 According to Kant, the doctrine of the postulates of practical reason responds to the requirement of accomplishment that drives practical action, and they are intended to overcome, asymptotically, the discordance between the end that the will is obliged to prescribe for itself (the realization of the highest good in the world) and the “external relations within which alone an object as end in itself (as moral final end)” would be “produced in conformity with these incentives.”39 Though the doctrine of the highest good and of the postulates must be dissociated from the determination of the principle of morality (the “fundamental law of pure practical reason”), it illustrates the contrast between the practically constitutive value of rational ideas and their merely regulatory theoretical usage; thus, it expresses the necessity that results from the critique of the powers of reason to “deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.”40 In this sense, the theme of the ought, the Sollen, is not the mark of an insurmountable gap between what is and what should be according to the requirement of abstract reason (Hegel’s interpretation); to the contrary, it is the principle of a tendency to actuality that, resulting from the rational necessity of action, guarantees it an indefinitely open perspective. Kant is clearly quite aware of the objections that this problematic of the Sollen as an indefinitely open perspective on action can raise. But in his eyes, it alone can reconcile the autonomy of rational willing with the achievements of the critique of speculative reason. A passage from the third Critique illustrates this conviction:
Moral laws must be represented as commands (and the actions that are in accord with them as duties), and that reason expresses this necessity not through a be (happening) but through a should-be, which would not be the case if reason without sensibility (as the subjective condition of its application to objects of nature) were considered, as far as its causality is concerned, as a cause in an intelligible world corresponding completely with the moral law, where there would be no distinction between what should be done and what is done, between a practical law concerning that which is possible through us and the theoretical law concerning that which is actual through us.41
In Hegel’s eyes there are two flaws in this determination of the practical field and of the horizon—considered necessary—of moral action. First, from a logical point of view, it ignores the speculative determination of infinity as a process that works immanently within the finite itself. As the Logic establishes, the theme of the ought implies a finitization of true infinity, an operation analogous to that of a mathematician who, ignoring the truth in effect in his own practice, represents infinity as the beyond of the finite:
In the ought the concept of finitude and then the transcendence of the finitude, infinity, begins. The ought is that which, in the subsequent development, in accordance with the said impossibility, will display itself as a progress to infinity.42
Second, from a practical point of view, the doctrine of the postulates, which refers the concordance between happiness and morality to an indefinite horizon, inaugurates an insurmountable gap between universal-rational volition, the apodictic power of self-determination of which is expressed by the moral law, and the particular-empirical volition of the pathologically determined subject; for the latter, the conditions of effectiveness of action necessarily lie beyond his or her action. Practical reason requires the realization of the highest good, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of a divine administrator of the world, but at the same time it also requires the nonrealization of these conditions, for their realization would deprive the moral purpose of the meaning it holds for empirical human subjects.43 There is thus a contradiction between the objective content of morally determined behavior and the meaning it has for the subject of this behavior, between universality and particularity, and between freedom and nature. Kant’s point of view plunges the moral subject into an inextricable contradiction, for the subject’s action both presupposes the aporia and, unknown to the subject, is its practical resolution:
Actin therefore in fact immediately brings to fruition what had been put forward as not taking place at all, that is, what was only supposed to be a postulate, merely an other-worldly beyond. Consciousness therefore expresses through its deed that it is not serious about its own act of postulating, since what the action means is that it brings into the present what was not supposed to be in the present.44
In the Philosophy of Right, the doctrine of morality presents the positive lesson to be drawn from the equivocations of the moral view. If moral consciousness is not to succumb to its contradictions, it must be understood in such a way that it ceases to always be within or beyond itself: it must include an immanent principle of actuality. But to define this rule of actualization it is necessary to go beyond the space of moral subjectivity properly speaking. The true actuality of practical reason is located in the sphere of the concrete objectivization of action for which Hegel reserves the name Sittlichkeit, thus breaking with the Kantian usage of the term. At bottom, the problems with Kantian practical philosophy illustrate the fact that moral subjectivity cannot be thought of as self-sufficient, for it is not able to actualize by itself what it must necessarily strive for. If practical reason is doomed to contradiction, it is ultimately because of a structural deficiency, “not only the one-sidedness of this subjectivity but subjectivity in general.”45 The solution to the aporia of the ought is not to abandon the expectations of moral subjectivity, let alone of rationality itself; rather, it lies in the objectivization of subjective reason, the true “reason of understanding,” and in the promotion of morality to ethicality (in the Hegelian sense!).
3. The third criticism of practical philosophy actually goes beyond the moral-practical problem and leads to a general judgment on the Kantian system; this critique has to do with the dualism of Kant’s philosophy. This dualism brings with it the contradictions contained in the moral view of the world:
In every dualistic system, and especially in the Kantian system, its basic flaw reveals itself through the inconsistency of combining [vereinen] what a moment ago has been declared to be independent and thus incompatible [unvereinbar].46
Dualism—between the thing-in-itself and the phenomenon, the infinite and the finite, the understanding and reason, freedom and necessity, subjective practical reason and its objective horizon—condemns Kant’s project to constantly betray its own fundamental requirement of the radical self-determination of reason freed of any given condition. The duality of Sein and Sollen (which Kant attributes to the anthropological constitution of the subject, to the combination of spontaneity and receptivity within the subject) is the effect of a structure of thought that of itself calls for its own surpassing. Kantian dualism, precisely because it results in “nothing but the contradiction itself posited as perennially recurring,”47 works unknown to itself toward speculative rationality, toward true autonomy. If it is true that the understanding, by the judgment it makes of abstract difference, is the site of this always-re-created contradiction, then Kant’s philosophy is indeed the “completed philosophy of the understanding.”48 But as we know, Hegel’s judgment of the understanding is far from unilaterally negative: doesn’t it have “the most astonishing and mightiest of powers, or rather the absolute power”?49 In a sense, the understanding is extremely close to speculative reason, of which it is the abstract, though decisive, moment. This sheds light on the nature of Hegel’s overall assessment of Kantian morality: to satisfy the requirement it rightfully expresses (the self-determination of reason), Kant’s subjective reason must be replaced with a simultaneously subjective and objective rationality, which develops the truth contained in the former by revealing the objective conditions of its actuality.
The analysis of Moralität describes the complex relations between moral subjects and their actions (and thus, with the world to which subjects belong) and with the norms to which these actions must conform. For Hegel, it is not a matter of denying all value to “subjective morality” and replacing it with Sittlichkeit alone. It is true that his analysis is full of criticism: the Remark to section 140—the longest one in the Philosophy of Right—contains a scathing denunciation of the ambiguous or perverse figures of a subjectivity that “declares itself absolute”50 under the cover of subtle moral casuistry. It is also true that a famous passage in the Phenomenology of Spirit develops a vigorous critique of the “moral view of the world.”51 But we must not forget that after the wanderings of the “beautiful soul” and its “solitary divine service”52 have been denounced, the critique culminates in the eminently positive figure of the pardon of Evil,53 in which the entire odyssey of spirit is recapitulated, for this is what allows spirit in its history or world (the phenomenological equivalent to objective spirit) to transition to religion and absolute knowing, which in the completed Hegelian system are part of absolute spirit. This is why Hegel’s denunciation of moral subjectivism, consistent since the earliest Jena writings, must not lead us to misunderstand the positivity that morality has for him when it is understood within its limits and brought back to the requirements of objectivity (the “right of the world”). Everything suggests that within the economy of objective spirit, the task of morality is to guarantee the connection between the abstract outline of objective spirit (law) and its concrete figures (political-ethical institutions). Why does this task of mediating between objective spirit and itself fall to moral subjectivity?
For Hegel as for Kant, the principle of morality is the rational self-determination of the subjective will:
The will’s self-determination is at the same time a moment of its concept, and subjectivity is not just the aspect of its existence [Dasein], but its own determination (see § 104). The will which is determined as subjective and free for itself, though initially only concept, itself has existence in order to become Idea. The moral point of view therefore takes the shape of the right of the subjective will. In accordance with this right, the will can recognize something or be something only in so far as that thing is its own, and in so far as the will is present to itself in it as subjectivity.54
This definition raises a preliminary question: why is the study of the “right of the subjective will” framed by the theory of objective spirit? The question is all the more pressing because within subjective sprit, practical spirit has characteristics that clearly make it akin to moral subjectivity: like moral subjectivity, it is initially bound by the characteristic structure of the ought of the norm it gives itself, but at the same time it is thereby involved in an indefinite process of objectivization by which its intrinsic limitation is surpassed. So then why separate the examination of practical spirit (the will) from that of its “right,” morality? Precisely because morality, which connects the subjectivity of willing to norms that must be realized through actions, expresses the right—that is, the objective manifestation—of the internal principle that is free subjectivity. The necessary distinction between the principle of willing and the manifestation of this principle as right explains the inclusion of morality in the sphere of objective spirit or of law in the broad sense of the concrete existence, the objectivization of freedom.
However, we must not think that Hegel cuts morality off from principle, that is, in Kantian terms, the obligations of virtue (Tugendpflichten) from the rational autonomy of the practical subject. For practical spirit, which experiences itself as spirit through acts of volition, impulses, desires, and choices, is in reality merely the abstract support (in Kelsenian terms, the point of imputation) for the objectivized system of moral norms; thus, the doctrine of objective spirit constitutes the “rational system” of that which, for the subjective spirit as such, remains an “indeterminate demand.”55 In short, the principle of subjective autonomy is an objective principle, a “right” in the Hegelian sense:
So the question of which are the good, rational inclinations and how they are to be subordinated to each other, turns into a presentation of the relationships that the spirit produces when it develops an objective spirit—a development in which the content of self-determination loses its contingency or willfulness. The treatment of urges, inclinations, and passions in their genuine content is thus essentially the theory of legal, moral, and ethical duties.56
Conversely, the inclusion of morality in the doctrine of objective spirit gives the weight of actuality to abstractly objective determinations, in particular those of law in the narrow sense, for the formal universality of these determinations means that they need a concrete principle of actualization, which subjective consciousness guided by moral norms offers them. Whence the surprising affirmation (if we keep in mind Hegel’s reproach that the moral view of the world is abstract and formal) that morality is the “real aspect of the concept of freedom” and that the subjectivity of willing is the only “aspect of existence” by which “freedom, or the will which has being in itself, [can] be actual.”57 What does this mean?
Within the structure of objective spirit, moral subjectivity has a function that corresponds to that of objectivity within the logic of the concept: it supplies a mediation through which the initially formal and abstract concept finds itself in the actual world of common representation, which appears foreign to it. There is nothing arbitrary about this seemingly paradoxical similarity. Just as in the doctrine of objective spirit the concept of law must be actualized as idea, so in the Logic the “formal concept” is transposed into objectivity, leaves its “inwardness,” and moves to “determinate existence”58 so that the identity in process in each one, that is, its idea, can become manifest in its speculative truth. From this parallel structure (which in fact is a chiasmus since in it subjectivity plays the role that had fallen to objectivity, and vice versa) we must retain the fact that the presence of morality within objective spirit and its function there stem from the fact that subjectivity, whose natural language is morality, is an operator of actuality for objective spirit. Without the mediation that moral normativity, which is abstract in itself, provides for objective spirit, the gap between law and ethicality and between law and morality itself would be conceptually and practically insurmountable.
But in reality, subjectivity as such is not what drives the analysis of morality; action is, understood through the lens of its imputability to a subject and in relation to the norms that structure action and the human world to which it belongs. In this way, Hegel’s analysis of morality acquires positive content and turns out to be closer to Kant’s than is often thought. The point of view of the moral subject, finite and abstract, perpetually renews the distance between what is and what should be. But it turns the subject into a being of action, for he or she must act in order to try to fill the gap between the norm prescribed by reason and the state of the world. Thus, action (Handlung), defined as “the expression of the will as subjective or moral,”59 is the center of gravity of the Hegelian theory of morality. This, however, does not apply to just any act or “deed” (Tat) an individual may perform; it refers to a plan made by a subjectivity guided by a norm or normative configuration. Action lies at the intersection of a concrete individual’s subjectivity, the (abstract) objectivity of a universal norm recognized by the subject as the supreme end of his or her action, and the (concrete) objectivity of a world present in the mode of factuality and immediacy and which involves other subjective individualities in the structure of action. Action, the vehicle of the subject’s moral aim, is the contact point between the various components that the moral view of the world incorporates.
This is how we are to understand the astonishing expression from the Philosophy of Right that “what the subject is, is the series of its actions.”60 When the moral subject is engaged in the process of objective spirit, it is not through his or her subjectivity or interiority—which give free reign to the very moralizing absolutization Hegel denounces—but rather insofar as he or she is fully invested and present in the action. We can then understand why moral subjectivity is described as “the aspect of concrete existence [Existenz]” or the “real moment” of objective freedom;61 only this dimension of subjectivity gives actual, lived density to freedom. In other words, objective freedom (realized as Sittlichkeit) requires real self-determination of moral subjectivity in action. The form of the ought, which affects subjectivity’s relation to its actions and the norms that guide it, is thus not to be understood as a mere mark of incompleteness, for it also expresses the subject’s need to act and thus to face other subjects and a world that resists.62 This real and concrete aspect of subjective plans for action is fully expressed in the dialectic of conscience (Gewissen) and the good, the third moment in the analysis of morality. Indeed, unlike aim (Vorsatz) or intention (Absicht), conscience is directly and explicitly measured against the universal and constitutes for subjectivity the decisive test of its capacity to go beyond its constitutive limits—its finitude, its interiority, its inactuality—practically, in action. This is why
Conscience expresses the absolute entitlement of subjective self-consciousness to know in itself and from itself what right and duty are, and to recognize only what it thus knows as the good; it also consists in the assertions that what it thus knows and wills is truly right and duty.63
If action is the core of Hegel’s analysis of morality it is because he is concerned with showing the conditions of actuality of the moral aim and in thus showing its role in the process of objectivizing and concretizing freedom. The completed expression of this objectivization—ethicality—requires subjectivity to take on the requirements of the universal, that is, legal norms and the conditions of social and political life. The individual lives and thinks his or her practical relationship to the objective institutional conditions of his or her freedom in the subjective language of morality. This language undoubtedly contributes some confusion as to the true rationality of ethicality, but through it the abstract commands of law and the social and political requirements of rational freedom are actualized. For regardless of its value, “the law [itself] does not act; only an actual human being acts.”64 When the subject acts in conformity with the ends he or she must prescribe him- or herself, objective spirit takes on practical actuality, and its structures acquire lived value. Thus, subjectivity is the “infinite form”65 through which alone the ethical substance appears concrete. In this way, the objective organization of ethicality does not make the principle expressed in moral action outmoded—to the contrary, it conceptually presupposes it. But conversely, the objectivity of ethical-political institutions orients moral subjectivity’s formal aim toward the actual conditions of its fulfillment.66
The moral point of view constitutes objectively effective subjectivity through actions that subjectivity recognizes as its own and the ends it prescribes to itself; this is what justifies its inclusion in objective spirit. It even belongs to it inevitably, at least in the modern world, which, thanks to Christianity, recognizes the value of the “right of subjective freedom.”67 Of course, taking the “right of objectivity” into account at the various strata of Sittlichkeit leads to relativizing this point of view or rather to preventing its illegitimate absolutization. But it still has its right, and in this sense, morality, like abstract law, is unsurpassable: all rational action presupposes the noncoerced adhesion of subjectivity to the norms of reason and the real human world. But if subjectivity restricts itself to the moral requirement alone, it does not reach fulfillment and remains exposed to the fantasies of subjectivism, which are illustrated by the romantic exaltation of the self. This is why moral subjectivity, “formal conscience,” is only completed by going beyond itself and becoming ethical subjectivity, or “true conscience”:
True conscience is the disposition to will what is good in and for itself; it therefore has fixed principles. . . . But the objective system of these principles and duties and the union of subjective knowledge with this system are present only when the point of view of ethics has been reached.68
No doubt it is here that Hegel truly takes leave of Kant: the moral point of view, analyzed through the lens of action, includes a limitation and even an “all-around contradiction.”69 Action presupposes a discordance between what is (the world as it is) and what ought to be (the world as it should be, which is none other than the concept of what it actually is); it strives to reduce this discordance through a normatively oriented act. The paradox of this “syllogism of action”70 (which has three terms: the agent, the norm, and the world) is that the agent aspires (this is his or her “will”) to realize an end (making the world conform to the norm or concept) and at the same time supposes that this end (the good) has not been reached, otherwise this will, which constitutes the subject’s entire being as a practical agent, would itself disappear: if the world were as it should be, there would be no more will to transform it. But the solution to this paradox, and along with it the normative structure of action, lies in the very actualization of willing. Action is the practical solution to this contradiction from which moral conscience cannot extricate itself. It thereby implies the Aufhebung of morality and the passage to ethicality. Let us examine how.
The moral point of view emerges from the relation between three elements that at first are incongruent, each demanding their “right”: the subject, the norm of action (the good), and the world as it is, in which the action takes place:
Reflected from its external existence into itself, determined as subjective individuality [Einzelheit] in opposition to the universal—the universal partly as something internal, the good, and partly as something external, an existent world, with these two aspects of the Idea mediated only through each other; the Idea in its division or particular concrete existence, the right of the subjective will in relation to the right of the world and the right of the Idea—which, however, has being only in itself.71
The contradictions of morality stem from the fact that action must simultaneously honor these three rights. The subject must suppose his or her end realized, that is, a world in conformity with the good, in order to work to achieve this end in a world that must not be all that it should be but that is all that it must be. Thus, a mediation must be established between the autonomous subject and the two universals facing it, the norm of the good and the real. Action, as Kant says, must tend toward achieving the harmony of nature and morality; but it can only want to realize it if it supposes that it has not been realized—otherwise the action would be useless—and even that it cannot be realized. For the same reason, the subject cannot will the union between his or her particular end and the ultimate end that is the good; in that case as well, action and, consequently, morality itself would become obsolete. In order to act, the subject (who must act to actualize his or her freedom so that this freedom is not a pure ought) must postulate both the validity of the universal norm that guides him or her (i.e., the actuality of the good as an ultimate end to accomplish) and the incomplete nature of this achievement, which would deprive the action of meaning. In other words, the subject must affirm that he or she is free while at the same time subjecting itself both to the real and to the moral norm, both of which are independent of his or her volition and possibly incompatible with it.
In reality, the aporias of the syllogism of action are the same as those the Logic describes in its analysis of external finality. Unlike internal finality, external finality presupposes the reciprocal externality of ends and means. This externality implies the finite nature of the content of the end in such a way that its accomplishment only produces a means in view of another end, and so on: it “only goes so far as to be a means, not to be an objective purpose.”72 Because this finality is external, it is caught in bad infinity. The same is true of the practical syllogism. The moral subject’s inadequate representation of the ultimate end of action (the good) condemns this end, despite its “internal universality,” to the “fate of” finitude:73 it must be realized so that action has a moral nature, but it must also not be realized, so that this ultimate end will preserve its absolute nature. Thus, the imbalance between the ultimate end of action and the always-particular content of the subjective will makes the former spectral and the latter contradictory, and action itself becomes useless and uncertain. It is thus not without reason that the long remark concluding the Philosophy of Right’s study of morality is dedicated to the various perversions of moral conscience: hypocrisy, probabilism, bad conscience, and so forth. Indeed, because of moral conscience’s presupposition of a finite aim for the finite, it is tempted to give up on all action in order to escape the contradictions it would be exposed to.
But the analysis goes further. Just as in the case of external finality, Hegel shows that the contradictions of the moral point of view stem not from its principle but rather from the subject’s representations of his or her actions and ends. In the analysis of external finality, the way out of contradiction consists of recognizing that though one only ever achieves the means and not an ultimate end, the activity is nonetheless meaningful. The error would be to believe that means are less worthy of attention than the ends they are meant to serve; but “the means is higher than the finite purposes of external purposiveness.”74 In the same way, unknown to the subject, “actual concrete action”75 contains the speculative resolution to the contradictions to which his or her point of view leads. What makes the moral aim inactualizable is the fallacious representation of the absolute nature of its realization, a representation that makes this realization impossible: the good is always beyond individuals’ plans, which thus have no value or importance. As he shows with regard to teleology, Hegel demonstrates that this representation is the true obstacle: for in order to try to realize the ultimate end—which is always the final goal of moral action—one must presuppose that this end is constantly realized through the actions of subjects. In short, one must renounce the prejudice of a radical dissonance between the existing world and the norm, between what is and what ought to be. By recognizing the actual world as the site of the realization of the good, never achieved but always already undertaken, the subject gives full value to his or her action but thereby gives up thinking of this action as an absolute origin, a pure self-determination, free of any presupposition. The truth of morality thus lies not in its “surpassing”—for, as the subject’s point of view on his or her action, it is unsurpassable—but in the recognition it presupposes of a web of objective relations on which action must be based: “the objective world is thus in and for itself the idea precisely as it [the idea] at the same time eternally posits itself as purpose and through activity produces its actuality.”76 It would be wrong to see in this reminder of the “right of the world” a conservative or resigned reaction to the moral requirement of action expressed in the philosophies of Kant and Fichte. Hegel takes over this requirement, registered in the principle of rational autonomy, but he thinks that it can only be made right on the condition of renouncing the formalist representations that doom the moral project to fail. Morality always already supposes the world of ethicality, the objectivized figure of human action, and it must be based on the obviously partial accomplishments that this action has already given to its project.
For Hegel, Kantianism is the completed form of a practical philosophy that limits itself to the “merely moral point of view without making the transition to the concept of ethicality.”77 Thus, the doctrine of Sittlichkeit appears as a response to the internal limitations of such a point of view. This shift has consequences for the structure of morality itself. A long-dominant interpretation of the Hegelian doctrine of ethicality saw it as a pure and simple rejection of the moral point of view, making Hegel a precursor of Machtstaat theoreticians, a Realpolitiker who rejected all moral requirements in the name of state power—that is, in the name of factual violence. This is basically Heller’s reading as well as Meinecke’s in his book on the doctrine of the Raison d’état.78 Otto Pöggeler has done justice to these imputations by highlighting the fact that they reflect the dominant concerns of a recently defeated Germany in 1918.79 But some texts do seem to support such a view; for example, the Remark to section 337 in the Philosophy of Right. Hegel responds to Kant’s claim that “true politics can therefore not take a step without having already paid homage to morals”80 by saying that
the immediate existence [Dasein] of the state as the ethical substance, i.e. its right, is directly embodied not in abstract but in concrete existence [Existenz], and only this concrete existence, rather than any of those many universal thoughts which are held to be moral commandments, can be the principle of its action and behavior.81
In similar fashion, Hegel refuses to subordinate politics to an abstract representation of justice as implied in the adage fiat justitia, pereat mundus, which Kant praises while also conceding that it is “rather boastful.”82 But Hegel doesn’t reject moral norms; he just contests that they can offer a satisfactory principle for politics. Government is not a matter of “universal providence” but rather of “particular wisdom,”83 for it always strives for the good of a certain community. Thus politics cannot claim the universal-abstract norms of morality without hypocrisy. Politics thus has an ethical status, which does not mean that it cynically ignores all morality. Furthermore, the moral point of view—that is, the requirement of a normative autonomy of subjective reason—would suffer as much as politics (which is a sort of empirical ethical technique) from the confusion expressed in the moralizing politician’s point of view (which is Machiavellian in the banal sense of the word). It is thus moralism, the perversion of political ethics, that Hegel rejects, and not morality as a form of objectivizing the normative expectations of subjectivity; it is moralism, not morality, that is based on “superficial notions [Vorstellungen] of morality, the nature of the state, and the state’s relation to the moral point of view.”84
The distinction between morality and ethicality thus implies a relativization or circumscription of the moral point of view, but certainly not its rejection. Otherwise, there would be no explanation for why the doctrine of objective spirit includes a theory of moral subjectivity or why the latter is the mediation between the abstract objectivity of law and the concrete objectivity of ethicality. The “moral view of the world” specifically contributes to the objectivization of spirit. In becoming objective, spirit loses its limited and futile subjectivity and adopts “the shape of a world.”85 But morality is the moment of the reflection of rational will in itself that makes possible the ethical, and essentially political, actualization of the formal and abstract objectivity of the system of legal norms.
Two points of view must, however, be distinguished. Historically, ethicality—that is, freedom made objective in institutional configurations—is the condition of morality. The exercise of the “right of subjective freedom” that is the “pivotal and focal point in the difference between antiquity and the modern age”86 presupposes an appropriate political and social organization, since morality cannot be achieved in an ethical state of nature, to use Kant’s words in a different sense than the one he gives them. If Christianity put forth the principle of moral autonomy, only the appearance of a “new form of the world” allowed it to become a “universal and actual principle.”87 It is thus thanks to the modern state that morality ceases to be an abstract demand for subjectivity, for the state has enough strength to “allow the principle of subjectivity to attain fulfillment in the self-sufficient extreme of personal particularity, while at the same time bringing it back to substantial unity.”88 Logically, on the other hand, morality is the presupposition of ethicality, for the reflection into subjectivity of objective spirit is the mediation through which what might be alienating within this objectivity is overcome. Subjectivity gives life to the formal structures of objective spirit and thus makes possible its own ethical realization. Certainly ethicality is the Aufhebung of morality, but this dialectical succession means conservation and verification as much as surpassing and negation. Sittlichkeit accomplishes the subjective moral claim by liberating it from its own abstraction, but in this way it conserves it as its conceptual presupposition. In other words, the Hegelian doctrine of ethicality is not a rejection of the problematic of the practical autonomy of reason but rather its completion and extension. For Hegel, as for Kant, the objectivity and rationality of ethical-political configurations are connected to the possibility that individual subjectivity has of producing the norms of its actions or of consenting to them; they presuppose this possibility to the very extent that they condition its actualization.
There is a remarkable terminological indication of this complex relation between ethicality and morality: the distinction between two modes of moral conscience that Hegel draws at the end of the analysis of morality. Formal moral conscience, closed in on itself, suffers from a mismatch between the subjective principle of its autonomy and the objective nature of the norm it recognizes, the good—whence the characteristic form of its relation to this norm, the Sollen. Unable to overcome the gap between certainty and truth that affects all the figures of conscience and finite spirit, it is tempted to go beyond the rational formalism defined by Kant and take refuge in a subjectivism of intention or moral sentiment. Thus, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the dialectic of the good and subjective moral conscience culminates in the “beautiful soul” deciding to give the full weight of truth to its certainty because it lacks “the force to empty itself, that is, lacks the force to make itself into a thing and to suffer the burden of being.”89 This is the high point of the subjectivism that in Hegel’s eyes is one of the possible endpoints of Kantian moral philosophy. To the contrary, what Hegel calls true moral conscience is “the disposition to will what is good in and for itself.”90 In other words, moral subjectivity can only satisfy its own requirement by becoming part of a network of objective political and social institutions. If subjectivity does not take into account this ethical-political objectivity, it becomes virtually empty and risks leaving the ground of true morality and succumbing to the dangerous charms of moralism.
But Sittlichkeit cannot be reduced to objective institutions and regulations, to the structures that organize it. It integrates the subjectivity it relativizes at the same time that it guarantees the actualization of its aim, its right: “the ethical is a subjective disposition, but of that law which has being in itself.”91 Sittlichkeit is ethical life because it is both subjective and objective.92 The active presence of subjectivity within ethicality is manifested in what Hegel calls the sittliche Gesinnung (the “ethical disposition”93), or more classically virtue, which here has ethical-political meaning and not merely the moral sense it has in Aristotle: “virtues as the ethical in its particular application.”94 This actualization of the subjective principle within an objective framework is the true accomplishment of moral conscience, “true conscience.” This means that it is only in the institutional context of ethicality that subjectivity can fully enjoy its normative role:
Subjectivity, which is the ground in which the concept of freedom has its concrete existence [Existenz], and which, at the level or morality, is still distinct from this its own concept, is, in the ethical realm, that [mode of] existence of the concept which is adequate to it.95
This disposition of ethical spirit (or true moral conscience) is illustrated in two striking ways. The first is framed by civil society. The second, the political disposition, is the topic of the next chapter. Discussing civil society, Hegel states that
Morality has its proper place in this sphere, where reflection on one’s own actions and the ends of welfare and of particular needs are dominant, and where contingency in the satisfaction of the latter makes even contingent and individual help into a duty.96
At first glance the statement is surprising: isn’t civil society the “field of conflict in which the private interests of each individual come up against those of everyone else”?97 But we know that this society is not exactly the same as the spontaneous order of the market; it also includes an ethical dimension. Consequently, its organization must prevent, or at least limit, the effects of pure market socialization. This is not merely a vague duty to help the poor in order to compensate for the harshness of the system of needs. In reality, the truly social form of the ethical disposition (and consequently of morality) lies in what Hegel calls “the honour of one’s estate,” “rectitude” or “the spirit of the corporation.”98 This is one of the aspects of his institutionalism: Hegel gives institutions with more or less archaic names (like “corporation”) a structuring role in the operation of modern civil society precisely because he thinks it is vital to counteract the disastrous effects that the competition between actors, entirely focused on and driven by the quest for their own personal well-being, can have on the social body. The corporation, the institutionalized form of a social estate (Stand), thus has a role as an ethical regulator. Thanks to it, virtue, initially indeterminate as to its content, receives concrete content: to enjoy the rights and fulfill the obligations that go along with the socioprofessional status guaranteed to each individual. Thus, after the family, the corporation is the “second ethical root of the state”:99 ethical and not only social and economic, for the practices it puts into place and the dispositions it cultivates among its members are the verified echo of the claim of freedom pronounced by subjective conscience in a partially inadequate moral language. Thus, subjectivity in its various forms remains the “moment of the actuality of the ethical.”100
1. Enzykl, § 60 Anmerkung, GW 20, p. 97 (Encyclopedia 108).
2. “It is still only one and the same reason that, whether from a theoretical or a practical perspective, judges according to a priori principles.” (KpV, Ak. 5, p. 121; PP, p. 237).
3. See KpV, Ak. 5, p. 121; PP, p. 238: “all interest is ultimately practical.”
4. Fichte, Sittenlehre, Werke, 4:57.
5. Fichte, System der Sittenlehre (1812), Werke, 11:37.
6. Enzykl, § 235, GW 20, p. 228 (Encyclopedia 299).
7. WdL 3, GW 12, p. 235 (Science of Logic, 734).
8. RPh, § 33, GW 14.1, p. 49 (Elements, 63; see Outlines, 51).
9. Kant, Frieden, Ak. 8, pp. 383–86; PP, p. 349–51 (modified).
10. Kant, MdS, Einleitung, Ak. 6, p. 219; PP, p. 383 ff.
11. Kant, KpV, Ak. 5, p. 31; PP, p. 164.
12. Kant, KpV, Ak. 5, p. 30; PP, p. 164.
13. Kant, Erste Einleitung in die Kritik der Urteilskraft, Ak. 20, pp. 199–200 / 3C, p. 6.
14. See Kant, KpV, Ak. 5, p. 89 ff. (“Critical Elucidation of the Analytic”); PP, p. 211 ff.
15. Kant, MdS, Einleitung, Ak. 6, p. 213; PP, p. 375. See also Religion, Ak. 6, pp. 3–4.
16. “Through the concept of inner purposiveness, Kant re-awakened the idea in general and that of life in particular” (Enzykl, § 204 Anmerkung, GW 20, p. 210 [Encyclopedia 277]). See also WdL 3, GW 12, p. 154 ff. (Science of Logic, 654ff).
17. RPh, § 126 and Anmerkung, GW 14.1, pp. 111–12 (Elements, 153–54; see Outlines, 124–25).
18. On “particular welfare” as the aim of the “external state,” see RPh, §§ 183, 230, GW 14.1, pp. 160, 189 (Elements, 221, 259–60; see Outlines, 181, 215).
19. RPh, § 27, GW 14.1, p. 45 (Elements, 57; see Outlines, 46).
20. Kant, MdS, Einleitung, Ak. 6, pp. 214, 218–21; PP, pp. 375, 383–85. The distinction between legality and morality is, however, not the same as that between law and ethics. See Reflection 6764, Ak. 19, p. 154: “legality is either juridical or ethical.”
21. RPh, § 33, GW 14.1, p. 48 (Elements, 62; see Outlines, 50).
22. See RPh, § 4 and 151, GW 14.1, pp. 31, 151 (Elements, 35, 195; see Outlines, 26, 159).
23. KpV, Ak. 5, p. 41; PP, p. 173. See also MdS, Tugendlehre, Vorrede, Ak. 6, pp. 376–77, as well as Gemeinspruch, Ak. 8, p. 282: “the law with respect to what is formal in choice is indeed all that remains when I have left out of consideration the matter of choice.”
24. See KpV, Ak. 5, pp. 21–22; PP, pp. 154–55.
25. Kant, KrV, Ak. 3, B 356 / 1C, p. 387: “we defined the understanding as the faculty of rules; here we will distinguish reason from the understanding by calling reason the faculty of principles.”
26. Enzykl, § 54 Zusatz, W 8, pp. 138–39 (Encyclopedia 102–3).
27. GdP, W 20, p. 367 (Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 459).
28. RPh, § 27, GW 14.1, p. 44 (Elements, 57; see Outlines, 46).
29. Kant, KrV, Ak. 3, B 671 / 1C, p. 590.
30. Kant, KrV, Ak. 3, B 672 / 1C, p. 591.
31. RPh, Vorrede, GW 14.1, p. 10 (Elements, 16; see Outlines, 9).
32. PhG, GW 9, p. 27 (Phenomenology, ¶ 31). The preface also praises Verständlichkeit, the intelligibility of understanding; see PhG, GW 9, pp. 15–16 (Phenomenology, ¶ 13).
33. Enzykl, § 54, GW 20, p. 93 (Encyclopedia 102). The Phenomenology, at the end of its analysis of the famous example of the “thing entrusted”: “It is not, therefore, because I find something is not self-contradictory that it is right” (PhG, GW 9, p. 237 [Phenomenology, ¶ 437]).
34. See RPh, § 108, GW 14.1, p. 100 (Elements, 137; see Outlines, 110–11).
35. RPh, § 135 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 118 (Elements, 162; see Outlines, 130–131, modified).
36. Enzykl 1817, § 155 Anmerkung, GW 13, p. 95 (Encyclopedia 1817, 124–25, modified).
37. See Kant, KU, § 77, Ak. 5, pp. 405–8.
38. See PhG, GW 9, p. 332 ff. (Phenomenology, ¶ 616 ff.).
39. Kant, Gemeinspruch, Ak. 8, p. 280n; PP, p. 282.
40. Kant, KrV, Ak. 3, B xxx / 1C, p. 117.
41. Kant, KU, § 76, Ak. 5, pp. 403–4 / 3C, p. 273.
42. WdL 12, GW 21, p. 121 (Science of Logic, 105, modified).
43. We may note apropos of this analysis that finality constitutes a link between the problematic of practical reason, centered around rational action, and that of reflective judgment, which has to do with “a lawfulness of the contingent as such” (Erste Einleitung in die Kritik der Urteilskraft, Ak. 20, p. 217 / 3C, p. 20).
44. PhG, GW 9, p. 333 (Phenomenology, ¶ 618). See also Enzykl, § 60.
45. Enzykl, § 234, GW 20, p. 228 (Encyclopedia 298).
46. Enzykl, § 60 Anmerkung, GW 20, p. 97 (Encyclopedia 106).
47. Enzykl, § 60, GW 20, p. 96 (Encyclopedia 106).
48. GdP, W 20, p. 385 (Lectures, 476, translation modified).
49. PhG, GW 9, p. 27 (Phenomenology, ¶ 32).
50. RPh, § 140, GW 14.1, p. 123 (Elements, 170; see Outlines, 138).
51. See PhG, GW 9, p. 324 ff. (Phenomenology, ¶ 599 ff.).
52. See PhG, GW 9, p. 353–4 (Phenomenology, ¶ 632–33).
53. See PhG, GW 9, p. 360 ff. (Phenomenology, ¶ 670).
54. RPh, § 107, GW 14.1, p. 100 (Elements, 136; see Outlines, 110).
55. RPh, § 19, GW 14.1, p. 40 (Elements, 51; see Outlines, 40).
56. Enzykl, § 474 Anmerkung, GW 20, p. 472 (Encyclopedia 212, modified).
57. RPh, § 106 and Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 99 (Elements, 135; see Outlines, 109).
58. WdL 3, GW 12, p. 30 (Science of Logic, 527).
59. RPh, § 113, GW 14.1, p. 102 (Elements, 140; see Outlines, 114).
60. RPh, § 124, GW 14.1, p. 110 (Elements, 151; see Outlines, 122).
61. RPh, § 106, GW 14.1, p. 99 (Elements, 135; see Outlines, 109).
62. On this subject, see Odo Marquard, “Hegel und das Sollen,” in Schwierigkeiten mit der Geschichtsphilosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1964), 37–51.
63. RPh, § 137 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 119 (Elements, 164; see Outlines, 133).
64. RPh, § 140 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 130 (Elements, 178; see Outlines, 146).
65. RPh, § 144, GW 14.1, p. 137 (Elements, 189; see Outlines, 154).
66. See Joachim Ritter’s classic demonstration in Ritter, “Moralität und Sittlichkeit.”
67. RPh, § 124 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 110 (Elements, 151; see Outlines, 122).
68. RPh, § 137, GW 14.1, p. 119 (Elements, 165; see Outlines, 134).
69. Enzykl, § 511, GW 20, p. 493 (Encyclopedia 227).
70. WdL 3, GW 12, p. 233 (Science of Logic, 732).
71. RPh, § 33, GW 14.1, p. 48 (Elements, 62; see Outlines, 50).
72. WdL 3, GW 12, p. 169 (Science of Logic, 666).
73. WdL 3, GW 12, p. 232 (Science of Logic, 731).
74. WdL 3, GW 12, p. 166 (Science of Logic, 663).
75. RPh, § 140, GW 14.1, p. 122 (Elements, 170; see Outlines, 138).
76. Enzykl, § 235, GW 20, p. 228.
77. RPh, § 135 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 118 (Elements, 162; see Outlines, 130–31).
78. See Hermann Heller, Hegel und der nationale Machtstaatsgedanke in Deutschland (Leipzig: Teubner, 1921); Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of the Raison d’État and Its Place in Modern History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1957).
79. Otto Pöggeler, “Hegel et Machiavel: Renaissance italienne et idéalism allemand,” Archives de Philosophie 41, no. 3 (1978): 435–67.
80. Kant, Frieden, Ak. 8, p. 380; PP, p. 347.
81. RPh, § 337 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 272 (Elements, 370; see Outlines, 314). For Kant, this subordination of politics to morality is in reality a subordination to the law, to “morals . . . as doctrine of law” (Frieden, Ak. 8, p. 386; PP, p. 351).
82. Kant, Frieden, Ak. 8, p. 378; PP, p. 345. Cf. Hegel, RPh, § 130, GW 14.1, p. 114 (Elements, 157–58; see Outlines, 126–27).
83. RPh, § 337, GW 14.1, p. 271 (Elements, 370; see Outlines, 314).
84. RPh, § 337 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 272 (Elements, 370; see Outlines, 314).
85. PhG, GW 9, p. 240 (Phenomenology, ¶ 441).
86. RPh, § 124 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 110 (Elements, 151; see Outlines, 122).
87. Ibid.
88. RPh, § 260, GW 14.1, p. 208 (Elements, 282; see Outlines, 235).
89. PhG, GW 9, p. 354 (Phenomenology, ¶ 658).
90. RPh, § 137, GW 14.1, p. 119 (Elements, 164; see Outlines, 132).
91. RPh, § 141 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 135 (Elements, 186; see Outlines, 152).
92. See chapter 12 below.
93. See RPh, § 207, GW 14.1, p. 173 (Elements, 238; see Outlines, 196).
94. RPh, § 150 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 140 (Elements, 194; see Outlines, 158).
95. RPh, § 152 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 142 (Elements, 196 see Outlines, 160).
96. RPh, § 207, GW 14.1, p. 174 (Elements, 238–39; see Outlines, 197).
97. RPh, § 289 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 241 (Elements, 330; see Outlines, 278).
98. RPh, § 150 and Anmerkung, 207, 252, 253 A. and 289 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, pp. 140, 173, 197, 198 (Elements, 193–94, 238, 271, 272; see Outlines, 157–58, 196, 224, 226, 278–79).
99. RPh, § 255, GW 14.1, p. 199 (Elements, 272; see Outlines, 226).
100. RPh, § 141 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 135 (Elements, 185; see Outlines, 152).