“Faust: Who are you then?
Mephistopheles: Part of that force which would
Do ever evil, and does ever good.
Faust: And that conundrum of a phrase implies?
Mephistopheles: The spirit which eternally denies!
And justly so; for all that which is wrought
Deserves that it should come to naught.”
· Faust, ‘Study,’ Lines 1334-1338
“It is a great service of Hegel to have assigned to modern morality its true position.”
· Karl Marx, ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’
While the entire body of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right has much to say to the contemporary world, and while, as a totality, it remains largely unexplored, the present focus is rather narrow. The concern here is exclusively on the transition from morality to Ethical Life, specifically the subsection ‘Good and Conscience,’ paragraphs 129 to 141.
Hegel defines ethical life as “the concept of freedom developed into the existing world.” (Par. 142) The ethical is the realization of “the good” as well as “the end” of self-consciousness, and what actuates its efforts. But this ethical life is more than the subjective form and the self-determination of the will. The Ethical Life is the “absolute good,” when both the objective and the subjective moments are present. (Addition, Par. 144) By contrast, “morality” is the form of the will in general on its subjective side. The moral point of view is “defective” because it is purely abstract (Addition, Par. 138) with the End reduced to an “empty good.”
At the level of morality, subjectivity is still distinct from freedom, the concept of subjectivity. (Remark, Par. 152) Here the good is without subjectivity and a determinate character, and the determining principle, subjectivity, is without what is implicit within it, i.e. the good. Both have built themselves into “independent totalities.” (Remark, par. 141) The subjective will, however, has value and dignity in so far as its insight and intention accord with the good. (Par. 131)
The moral ground is precisely that of the modern world, where Man, no longer shackled by particular aims and the external and the given nature of earlier epochs, has reached the moment of “I Think.” This is the standpoint of Cartesian metaphysics where thought discovers the world as its own property. We have here arrived at an unresolved duality. Now, “everything depends on the character of the content which it [self-consciousness] gives itself.” (Remark, Par. 138) Self-consciousness has become the potentiality of either making the absolutely universal its principle, or equally well of elevating above the universal, the self-will of the particularity.
“It is only in times when the world of actuality is hollow, spiritless, and unstable, that an individual may be allowed to take refuge from actuality in his own inner life.” (Add. Par. 138) This “sinking into oneself” is the abstract self-certainty of a subjectivity which regards itself as independent. It appears in ages when what is recognized as right and good in the existing world no longer satisfies Man and, therefore, Man decides to change it. But as Hegel argues, this only puts you “on the verge of slipping into evil,” because it is precisely in the moment of the Subject’s separation and isolation from the actual and the substantial that resides the “common root” of both the good and the evil.
In general, remarks Hegel, the origin of evil is to be found in “the mystery of freedom,” in the “speculative aspect of freedom,” at a point when the subject as “infinite self-reflection,” clings to the particular in opposition to the universal. Thus at the turning point of the activity of mind, we are confronted with two kinds of subjectivity; either of willing the “universality of the concept,” or alternately, taking “a particular content as a principle” and realizing that. The second alternative, writes Hegel, is “Evil.” (Add. Par. 139)
In our epoch, concludes Hegel, Morality is the form into which evil has blossomed. (Remark, Par.140) When this morality is imposed on others, it is “hypocrisy.” But it can just as well be imposed on one’s own self in which case it goes “beyond hypocrisy.” Here, we have a still higher peak of subjectivism. This, says Hegel, is the position of “the absolute sophistry.” Here subjectivity evaporates every content to itself. “The chief hypocrites are pious ones who are punctilious in every ritual observance, while yet they do just as they please.” (Add. Par. 140)
This type of mind feels at ease to pass itself off, at its own discretion, as anything it likes. In fact, it has no regard for the real, for it is now ready to shape reality out of itself. If and when this Subject seizes the office of the lawgiver, then the distinction between good and evil vanishes. To be sure, says Hegel, law is no agent; it is the actual human being who acts. But based on this “principle,” the only question is how far has this Ego taken the law into its own conviction. Then it would be impossible to see what the law is for and what end it is to serve. In this sense, exclaims Hegel, Antigone proclaims that “no one knows whence the law come; they are everlasting,” i.e. their determinate character is absolute and has its source “in the nature of things.” (Add. Par. 144)
Once the subject reaches this penultimate stage of “abstract negativity” and subordinates all determinations to itself, then having a good or a bad conscience looses its relevance. Thus, “willing the good,” taken as the sole requisite, does not make its action good. Good in the abstract, even if it is as noble an intention as “to do good to the poor,” is bereft of any concrete determination so long as it devolves on the authority of the Ego. Whether such ego claims its authority from “God or the state” or both [religious or secular], matters for naught, because here the law itself is degraded to an empty word, to a mere instrument of the acting agent’s conviction. Here, it is not the content of action, which is to be judged but the empty good. “To this context also belongs the notorious maxim: ‘The end justifies the means’.”
Finally, this type of subjectivism knows itself as the final court of appeal and the arbiter and judge of truth. Thus, it doesn’t just substitute “a void” for the whole content of Ethics, but its very “form” is a subjective void, i.e. it knows itself as this content-less void and its knowledge knows itself as the Absolute. “Our advancing culture,” argues Hegel, may yet compel this “noble illogicality” to assume subtler forms by attempting to represent every transgression with “a show of goodness.” And yet, this “I,” this Lord of the Good cannot enjoy substance as a purely self-enclosed and unmixed subjectivity, and is, therefore, compelled to acquire a mass base, or followers: “This self-complacency fails to rest in a solitary worship of itself but builds up a sort of community.” (Remark, Par. 140)
Hegel concludes the subsection of “Good and Conscience” with a transition that allows both moments of the Ethical Idea to experience self-negation in order to become concrete. The “I” and the “Thing,” the subjective and the objective, have hereby shed their one-sidedness and achieved “identity.” We have now entered the Ethical Life. But this, warns Hegel at the end, “must be proved, not pre-supposed.” “Those who hope to be able to dispense with proof and demonstration in philosophy show thereby that they are still far from knowing the first thing about what philosophy is.” (Remark, Par. 141)
For Hegel, the proof in philosophic science is the development of the concept of the ethical from its immediate phase through civil society to the state and world-history. Hegel repeatedly reminds readers that what constitutes philosophic science is expounded in his earlier works and is here “presupposed.” Specifically, he keeps referring to his Phenomenology of Mind. Thus at the threshold of the transition to the Ethical, Hegel singles out section C, ‘Conscience,’ of Phenomenology’s ‘beautiful soul’ – “that still nobler type of subjectivity which empties the objective of all content and so fades away until it looses all actuality.”
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