Building
the duties from the inside is a whole pseudo-problem that Kant invents in order to have something to do; he wanted to start from the abstract imperative, but that is not a true imperative; it is only the abstraction of the imperative.
Hegel Was Right_nodrm
It concerns the very core of morality itself.
Hegel accused the Kantian, eudemonist postulate of a future harmony for being immoral and nothing else.
The eudemonist transforms the neighbor into a means, and that is immorality without adjectives or subtleties of any kind.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 284 Hegel was right 3. ethicity
Now we can address the message contained in the structure itself of the Philosophy of Right, whose understanding depends entirely on the meaning of the word ethicity (Sittlichkeit) --a term that was deliberately chosen by Hegel in order to get over the Kantian inmoral morality (Mo- ralita? t) once and for all. It is indeed true that eudemonism is not the only thing that Hegel disapproves of about Kant's position; however, the criticism that we have seen shows that Hegel assumes in its integrity, and even with more exigency, the Kantian distinction be- tween categorical and conditional imperatives; the categorical impera- tive is an end in itself, not a means for something else.
Previously, I have employed the terms 'ethical' and 'moral' indif- ferently. In what follows I will not do that anymore. I beg the reader to have this into account. "Morality and ethicity, words that are or- dinarily taken as synonyms, are taken here with essentially different meanings" (Rph 33). The etymology of both words is the same; the root of both is: custom. But "since both different words do exist, this does not prevent that one uses them for distinct concepts" (ibid. ).
After what has been said about happiness, one cannot assume that the distinction introduced by Hegel is a subtlety of nomenclature. The reader can be sure of this: it is the most important content in moral, po- litical and juridical philosophy. In this case, in order to understand the terms, we have to do without the etymology, since they mean in that regard exactly the same thing. As we shall see, what ethicity means is: the only true morality. Hegel shows that the morality of the treatise writers, not only of Kant, is sheer immorality: when they distinguish between morals and right, neither morals nor right ascribe legitimately those terms to themselves, since by its own concept "right is not something sacred at all" (Rph 30). Hegel refutes not only the moralists but also the jurists, more particularly, juridical positivism, which by no means is an invention that Hans Kelsen made in our century.
Hegel makes clear that the first part of his work --which is devoted to right without ethicity-- has as its object of study abstract right, the false right. Bourgeois commentators have not wanted to take charge of that insisting warning, because there, in false right, is where the right of property finds its place. And with the same stubbornness Hegel, warns that the second part of his work, which is devoted to morality without ethicity, has as its subject abstract morality, the false morality.
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Only the third part, the ethicity, in which morals and right identify themselves, is true right and true morals. It is the same structure that we already saw in the Science of Logic. Just as the concept ( = spirit) is the truth of being and essence, so the ethicity is the truth of right and morality.
One could ask oneself, why don't we start with the highest, that is to say, with what is concretely true? The answer is: because we want to see what is true in a way of a result, and for that one needs essentially to understand fist the abstract concept. Therefore, what is real, the figure of the concept, is for us what comes next, what will arrive afterwards, although in reality it- self it exists beforehand. Our procedure is to demonstrate the abstract forms not as subsistent but as false (Rph 32 Z).
"When we speak about right in contrast with morality and ethicity, we understand by right only the first one, the formal one, the one with the abstract personality" (Rph 30 A).
"The morality, just as the previous element, formal right, both are abstractions; only ethicity is the truth of both of them. " (Rph 33 Z).
As an interpretative question it is convenient to notice that in 1806, while writing the Phenomenology, Hegel did not take yet the termino- logical decision that we have seen he has made in the Philosophy of Right. In the Phenomenology morality is still superior to ethicity. The latter was not a technical term yet. It starts to be so from 1817 onwards, in the Hegelian review of a work of Jacobi (cf. NH 451). That is to say, four years before the publication of his Philosophy of Right.
Any serious researcher, as the excellent Lauer, must agree with this: "Sittlichkeit simply does not have the same meaning in the two contexts" (1983, 6 n. 4). "Sittlichkeit on a higher level, treated in the Phi- losophie des Rechts but not in the Phenomenology" (1982, 180).
In addition, Hegel himself not only announces the change of mean- ing, but he addresses it thematically, with which our interpretative question gives way to the question of content:
Consequently, what we contemplated before with the Greeks as a form of ethicity can no longer have a place in the Christian world. Because that ethicity is custom without reflection; on the contrary, the Christian princi- ple is the interiority that subsists by itself, the soil where the truth grows. Against the principle of the subject freedom an ethicity without reflection cannot be carried out anymore (WG 746).
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 286 Hegel was right
About the ethicity of the Greeks Hegel says insistently: "It is the ingenuous ethicity, not morality yet; the individual will of the subject is located in the not-mediated custom of rightness and laws" (VG 249) (The italics are mine).
"But besieged by immediacy, the freedom of the subject is only custom, without the infinite reflection in itself, without the subjective interiority of conscience" (EPW 557).
The following text is particularly explicit:
"For the beautiful ethicity is not true ethicity, it has not been born out of the struggle of the subject's freedom" (VG 250).
It is perfectly clear that the spontaneous ethicity, the one consisting in custom, is not true ethicity for Hegel. True ethicity, which is superior to morality, is the one that the Philosophy of Right studies.
"Consequently the form of ethicity is completely modified. The beautiful ethicity is no longer present. What is now ethical, might be also custom or habit, as long as it comes from interiority; but precisely what has plain right is the interior, the subject" (WG 746s).
As can be see, Hegel expressly warns that the meaning of ethicity changes completely. To think, as some Marxist interpreters have wanted, that Hegel's ethicity means custom and habit, would not be an analysis of the texts but a willful introjection of the interpreter's thinking, a re- course of those who, on the one hand, deny the imperative and true obligation as such, and on the other, want to have Hegel on their side.
"But ethicity is duty" (VG 115).
And by contrast, "in the ancient form, the ethicity is custom, habit" (WG 115).
In the entire Hegelian philosophy, in his philosophy of right and of the State, in his philosophy of history, as in his philosophy or art, as in his philosophy of religion, the imperative character of ethicity is of primal importance, because that imperative is God, the only true God. Without that, Hegel could not sustain that the State is the Kingdom of God, or that God is the one who has been conducting the human his- tory and continues to do so.
In the classic arts, the oracles have essentially their place, because in them the human individuality has not climbed up yet the hill of interiority in which the subject takes out from himself the decision of action. What we call conscience in our sense of the word does not find a place in the classic arts. (Asth I 489)
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Let us have in mind that our translation distinguishes between conscience (Bewusstsein) and consciousness (Gewissen). This last one is the faculty with which we perceive the moral and ethical imperative.
No matter how beautiful, attractive and interesting the Greek ethicity looks, it is not, however, the culminating point of the self-consciousness of the spirit; it lacks the infinite form, precisely the reflection of thinking in itself, to free oneself from the natural element, of the sensitive that is inherent to the character of the beautiful Greek gods, to free oneself from the immedi- acy in which this ethicity is located; it lacks self-understanding of thought, the infiniteness of self-consciousness; it lacks that everything which must have validity as right and ethicity finds a confirmation in myself, in the testimony of my spirit (WG 639).
"Men can behave themselves instinctively according to their cus- toms and traditions" (PR II, II 198).
The Greeks did not have conscience. What is right and duty was the law of the State , with regard to which no one reflected whether it was in fact right and duty. But one is not a free man if one does not see that what the State demands is good. And if he does see, then the individual becomes sepa- rated from what is custom; the interiority and the formal separation from the existent harmony begins (VG 263).
In contrast with the instinctive ethicity that exists as a general rule in the masses, the true ethicity that matters to Hegel, essentially in- cludes self-conscience and self-responsibility; for this true ethicity the customs and positive laws are not obligatory just because of the fact that they are customs and laws in force; the free spirit demands to understand the purpose of those laws and judge them; one only decides to observe them when one's conscience of good and evil testi- fies that they are obligatory. This is why the ethicity, far from being a custom, is a 'Doctrine of Duties', as the Philosophy of Right calls it when it speaks about the ethicity (142-157). "An immanent and consequent doctrine of duties cannot be anything else than the development of re- lations that are by the idea itself of freedom necessary and hence real within the State in its whole extension" (Rph 148A).
Hegel is terribly explicit when he affirms that true ethicity is duty. There can be no doubt about that:
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 288 Hegel was right
The difference between the actual exposition and the form of a Doctrine of Duties is only that, in what follows, the ethical determinations are deduced as relations that are necessary; apodosis is not yet added to each one of them; therefore, this determination is a duty for man (Rph 148 A).
So, what is the difference between ethicity and morality?
We sustain that a morality, whose criterion and goal is the subject's self-perfection, is rigorously immoral; we sustain that the unique duties are the duties towards the neighbor; we sustain that only the authentic imperative can only emerge from intersubjectivity, and that inventing other kind of obligations that distract us from this one is an immorality, not morality.
The attack is not directed against Kant only, but against all the tra- ditional moralists that have placed the Kingdom of God in another world, with which not only my neighbors and the State become mere means, but also morals itself become subjectivism, since the only thing that matters is the soul that will go to the other world and whose fate will depend entirely on its self-perfection: "My intention of the good of my action, and my conviction that is good, makes it good" (Rph 140 A). One has abandoned the objective morality that commands to build here a world of justice, freedom and human dignity; and since morality does not become objectively real in the world but is only a soul's gar- ment that only God himself knows, it depends exclusively on my in- tention; my actions are good insofar my intentions are sincerely good, regardless of any objectivity. "Sheer chitchat: it is good because I am convinced" (Rph Notiz zu 140).
Ethicity means objective morality. Therefore, as we said, the only true morality.
We have just seen that ethicity is the doctrine of duties. These are grouped in three areas: family, society and State --a State that is es- sentially bonded with universal history --. That is in itself objective. The rights of our neighbor in each of these spheres constitute duties for me; this is why ethicity is the identification of morality with right. But not by means of an 'also', not by juxtaposition, "not by a mixture of both principles, but by suppressing them and constituting the absolute ethical identity" (JS 509), because as we will see, right without ethics is not true right.
According to Hegel, Kant's contribution not only is irrevocable, but constitutes the true point of reference in the history of moral thought.
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Before Kant, no theoretician knew what morals were. The difference between categorical imperative and conditioned imperatives is a par- adigmatic achievement: who acts by self-interest, regardless if that means a beatific vision or eternal torments, is not acting morally but only in terms of losses and gains. That conditioned imperative is not really imperative, but only technical information about efficient means. 'If you want this, do that'. On the contrary, 'thou shall not kill' is a categorical imperative and its validity does not depend on one's inter- est in that commandment; it does not care about whether it is conve- nient or not for you; it does not care about prizes or punishments. That, and only that, it is moral.
Kant understood that morality begins exactly there where the pur- suit of self-interest ends. That is certainly impressive. What he missed to realize was that only the pursuit of the good of the others brings to an end the pursuit of self-interest. I cease to be the most important thing in the world only when my neighbor is as important as myself. That is what Christ's teaching tells us: "So everything you want man make for you do it to them (Mathew 7, 12). This inclination to self profit cannot be thought to come to an end otherwise. By the way, the im- perative obtains in that very moment its content and becomes perfectly determined. The Kantian formalism, its incapacity of generating real and concrete obligations, comes from not realizing that the imperative comes from the other, not from the same subject; e. g. it comes from intersubjectivity. When it comes it comes with content.
Building the duties from the inside is a whole pseudo-problem that Kant invents in order to have something to do; he wanted to start from the abstract imperative, but that is not a true imperative; it is only the abstraction of the imperative. We will come back to the question of the autonomy of reason in short.
The best commentators already made clear that the acceptance of the superb Kantian contribution by Hegel is total and without reserva- tions. Joachim Ritter says: "In Hegel the adoption of Kantian morality in the Philosophy of Right has a fundamental importance" (in Riedel ed. II 1975, 218). Likewise, W. T. Stace says: "Thus the Hegelian ethic con- tains all that is true, good, and noble in Kant's ethical system without its defects. " (1955, 379)
Hegel himself expresses it unmistakably: "The merit and the elevated point of view of the Kantian practical philosophy consist in having highlighted the significance of duty" (Rph 133Z).
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 290 Hegel was right
"This discovery of the absoluteness of reason in itself, which has produced the turn of the philosophy in our times, this absolute point of beginning, must be recognized and it is irrefutable, in spite of the fact that one must call insufficient the Kantian philosophy" (A? sth I 109s).
The absoluteness of conscience is an indubitable fact: the sharpness of the imperative is only perceived in the moment when I convince myself that the content is obligatory.
Despite that the Kantian contribution is, like Hegel says, an absolute starting point, the insufficiency of the Kantian system must still be af- firmed: "incomplete morality [. . . ] is immorality" (PG 440).
No matter how essential it is to highlight the unconditioned self-determi- nation of will as the root of duty --in fact our knowledge of the human will only has its firm fundament and beginning point due to the Kantian philoso- phy through the idea of its infinite autonomy --this acquisition still turns out to be a formalism if one holds it only from the very moralist point of view, without arriving to the concept of ethicity; the moral science becomes mere rhetoric about the duty by the duty itself. On the basis of this principle a Doctrine of the Duties is impossible; [. . . ] from the notion of duty as ab- sence of contradiction, as formal coherence with itself, which is nothing but the attachment of the abstract indetermination, it is impossible to arrive to the determination of concrete duties (Rph135 A).
"Although we stressed above the point of view of the Kantian phi- losophy --which is excellent insofar it affirms the conformity of duty with reason--, one must still denounce its mistake, namely, that this point of view still lacks a whole structurization. For the sentence 'May you live your life as if the maxim of your actions were to become univer- sal law' would be very good if we had already determined principles about what had to be done. Indeed, when we demand from a principle to be the content of a universal legislation, it must have beforehand content; and if the content was there, the application would be very easy. But here the principle itself is not present yet; and the criterion about non-existence of contradiction produces nothing; where there is only nothingness we do not find contradiction" (Cfr. Rph 135 Z).
Kant has to employ certain artificial resources in order to have con- tent --at the end of the day these resources leave him in a bad situation. As Hegel sharply criticizes, to examine if something can be erected as universal maxim, presupposes that this 'something' has content, and therefore the existence of a content is not originated in such inquisition.
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In the same way to know if something can be held without contradic- tion, first we need that something to have a content. So the existence of the content is not originated in that research. The notorious artificiality of these resources allows one to see clearly what we were saying: Kant seeks that lack of content because he wants to. It is false that Kant has in front of him the imperative and its lack of content. 'An imperative on the quest of content' it is something artificially fabricated by abstracting the real and concrete imperatives to the pure notion of the imperative, which, in fact, results to be the abstraction of the imperative, and this has not the exigency and is not anymore an imperative.
Now, this entire Kantian detour has the objective of saving the au- tonomy of reason. But we have already seen (V,1 fine) that the autono- my consists in the decision of the subject itself , and not in the natural impulses that where already there. The ethical demand that addresses the neighbor is what makes this autonomy exist; the imperative that stems from intersubjectivity is what frees man from the natural im- pulses. There is no autonomy of the will without the moral demand that the others address to me. Autonomy as the starting point with no concrete duty is an abstraction, the abstraction of autonomy, and there- fore the entire problem of conciliating the autonomy with the existence of particular obligations is a pseudo-problem.
Hegel refutes, therefore, the Kantian system from the inside, that means to say, by adopting the complete univocity of the absolute im- perative without mixture of conveniences and self-interest, but showing that the formalism contradicts the origin itself and the existence of this imperative is the same as immorality. What Hegel does is to "establish the true principles of morality or rather of ethicity against false mo- rality" (VG 171). Referring to Kant and Fichte he affirms: "Everything stays in this gossip about morality. But what things are moral and how will the spirit realize itself systematically is something no one thinks of" (GP III 369). It is in the rights of the neighbor where one establishes what things are moral and what things are not. A system that pretends to establish duties, distracting us from our duty towards the neighbor, is an immoral system.
It is obvious that Hegel does not refute only Kant and Fichte. It is a widespread weakness both in moral and juridical treatises to distin- guish between morals and right, by saying that the former only per- tains to the interior and the intentions, while the former does not care about such things.
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Just as we have seen in the previous chapters, that physics, chem- ists and biologists live, by common agreement, in the fiction that their disciplines are empirical, so jurists live by common agreement be- lieving that right does not care about intentions or the interior but only about the exterior.
This is a negative universal thesis. Consequently, one needs only one particular case in order to demonstrate that it is false. Now, in the branch of law called criminal law, the interiority of the accused is a decisive factor for the code itself, the judge, the accusing instance and the lawyer. If the murderer is insane, there is no crime. But insanity or sanity pertains to interiority.
All the criminal codes of the world distinguish today between willful harm and negligent harm, that is to say, between a prejudice caused with the intention to harm and a prejudice caused by impru- dence. The felony is completely different, and the penalty, conse- quently, is also different. The intention of the people is something fundamental for the law.
The criminal code of Mexico City, in its article 225, fraction VI, im- poses suspension, dismissal or a fine to the civil servant that dictates or omits a resolution that violates any categorical precept of the law, "whenever one acts by immoral motives and not by simple mistake of opinion".
This applies not only to criminal law: this is also valid for civil right and commercial law, since one looks there for intentions as well. For example, a testament is invalid if the testator did not have the intention of making a will. Also, civil right codes invalidate a contract when any of the parties suffered a 'mistake over the determinant motive of will', as jurists frequently claim. That is what the Napoleonic Code called a mistake over 'the cause of the contract'. And the invalidating mistake could have also been related with the nature of the contract.
When a judge has to decide which member of a broken marriage will take care of the children's education, what matters the most to him is the interior personality. The father's lawyer intends to show the psy- chic instability of the mother or her internal viciousness. The exterior facts function only as indicators, symptoms or proving means, and the truly decisive for the judge is the interior. It is completely false that in these cases the right is mostly concerned with the exterior and acci- dentally the interior. The thing is actually the other way around. What matters is the internal personality of husband or the spouse. And the
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same is to be said about the testament and the contract: the decisive fac- tor is the intention or the interior experience of mistake or ignorance. The exterior data are equivocal: in the case of a person certain external data can be an indicator of ignorance, and in the case of a different person the same external data can be irrelevant. In the examples I have mentioned, right does not care about the exterior in itself, but only as a means to hit the mark with the interior.
Let us think now in the felony called fraud: only the interior has importance. As far as the victim goes, the decisive thing is to find out if he was effectively deceived by the fraudulent maneuver and not by his own imprudence. As for the felon goes, the decisive thing to examine is the intention of making the other fall into the trap. No exterior data has univocal significance, since the same fact can deceive certain indi- viduals under certain circumstances, but that may not always be the case. This demonstrates that it is not the exterior fact what orientates the right in those cases, but only the interior, because sometimes it can be accompanied with certain exterior facts and sometimes with others very diverse. The criminal lawyer Mariano Jime? nez Huerta recognizes with honesty: "The deceits cannot be measured objectively, because, projecting themselves over the intelligence of victim, they will neces- sarily influence in its efficiency the subjective psychological peculiari- ties of the deceived person" (1 968ss IV 140).
The examples we have seen solve the question without any doubt. The ideology that prevails nowadays among the jurists --which 'justi- fies' judicial, legislative or governmental decisions that are flagrantly unjust by saying that right has to relay on the exterior and the moral character of the facts does not belong to legal right-- is completely out- rageous. Insofar one is a lawyer or a judge, one feels exempted from the universal moral imperative, but the pretext they come up with destroys itself: how do they justify the decision they have taken, namely, that the exterior is in some cases relevant and in others not? The few examples we have mentioned demonstrate that it is utterly false that the interior is irrelevant to right. That being proved, how can they justify to do without morals whenever they want to?
Hegel refers to this in his Philosophy of Right when he says that the positive right, that is to say, the abstract right, is not true right, and that true right is only the ethicity in which the morality and right identify themselves. Already in his youth Hegel condemns this: "It may also happen that a conduct of right is not bound to the mentality
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of right, and even that there is an immoral mentality instead" (NH 253). Here we read a criticism against the hypocritical cynicism that has found today a 'scientific' rationalization in the juridical positivism of those who wield the law to commit, knowingly, atrocious injustices.
"An action like the affirmation of my property can be perfectly ju- ridical and yet there can be intention of evil, regardless of right and having the purpose of harming the other" (NH 228).
"When in politics, the only thing that prevails is law as such, the dominant thing is violence and the arbitrariness of the individual" (PR II, II 82s).
"The highest thing, if conceived finitely, is the worst" (PR II, II 238) [. . . ] "an animal kingdom of men" (ibid).
"Thus in right the particularity is not yet that of the concept, but only that of the natural want" (Rph 151 Z).
In order to do without the obligations of the moral imperative when it comes to the law, jurists have relied on a huge epistemological mis- take: the mistake of believing that the application of a law is a mechani- cal process that may be performed without judgments of value, without appreciations that are empirically unjustifiable. As a matter of fact, it is very unusual to find jurists that take the task of reflecting about the epistemological status of their own acts.
As we have seen, physicists and the biologists fall in that ingenuity as well, and they figure that if 'the whole world' thinks in a certain way, that is enough to say that what we have in our hands is an empirical judgment. Only that in the case of the jurists that lack of reflection has ominous consequences, for it has lead them to believe that the action of subsuming certain empirical fact under a law does not imply valua- tion and decision, because the 'whole world' would subsume the fact in question under that law. But the valuations do not stop being valua- tions because they are common or very frequent. To be sure, not even the sentences that allegedly describe a fact, that is to say, the so called 'fundamental propositions', are justifiable only by empirical data, since they decide precisely which is the content of the supposed empirical data. The empirical data does not consist in words; the descriptive sentence, on the contrary, consists in words. To judge if the sentence reflects 'sufficiently well' the sensorial data is always an appreciation, an evaluative estimation, not a mechanical process at all. The vocabu- lary with which one supposedly describes the fact in question decides beforehand under what law it will be subsumed. I am not reproaching
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this way to proceed; on the contrary, I am saying that it is the only one possible and that is the way one always follows. But the point is this: if the judge, the ruler or the jurist in general carries out judgments of val- ue even with the actions which are apparently more mechanical, if they are always carrying out moral judgments, how could one do without the moral imperative by saying right does not consider it? With what logic or justification can someone base himself on right in order to commit acts and deeds which his conscience unmistakably calls injustices and immoralities?
It is not the case that the unjust jurist does without morals.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 284 Hegel was right 3. ethicity
Now we can address the message contained in the structure itself of the Philosophy of Right, whose understanding depends entirely on the meaning of the word ethicity (Sittlichkeit) --a term that was deliberately chosen by Hegel in order to get over the Kantian inmoral morality (Mo- ralita? t) once and for all. It is indeed true that eudemonism is not the only thing that Hegel disapproves of about Kant's position; however, the criticism that we have seen shows that Hegel assumes in its integrity, and even with more exigency, the Kantian distinction be- tween categorical and conditional imperatives; the categorical impera- tive is an end in itself, not a means for something else.
Previously, I have employed the terms 'ethical' and 'moral' indif- ferently. In what follows I will not do that anymore. I beg the reader to have this into account. "Morality and ethicity, words that are or- dinarily taken as synonyms, are taken here with essentially different meanings" (Rph 33). The etymology of both words is the same; the root of both is: custom. But "since both different words do exist, this does not prevent that one uses them for distinct concepts" (ibid. ).
After what has been said about happiness, one cannot assume that the distinction introduced by Hegel is a subtlety of nomenclature. The reader can be sure of this: it is the most important content in moral, po- litical and juridical philosophy. In this case, in order to understand the terms, we have to do without the etymology, since they mean in that regard exactly the same thing. As we shall see, what ethicity means is: the only true morality. Hegel shows that the morality of the treatise writers, not only of Kant, is sheer immorality: when they distinguish between morals and right, neither morals nor right ascribe legitimately those terms to themselves, since by its own concept "right is not something sacred at all" (Rph 30). Hegel refutes not only the moralists but also the jurists, more particularly, juridical positivism, which by no means is an invention that Hans Kelsen made in our century.
Hegel makes clear that the first part of his work --which is devoted to right without ethicity-- has as its object of study abstract right, the false right. Bourgeois commentators have not wanted to take charge of that insisting warning, because there, in false right, is where the right of property finds its place. And with the same stubbornness Hegel, warns that the second part of his work, which is devoted to morality without ethicity, has as its subject abstract morality, the false morality.
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Only the third part, the ethicity, in which morals and right identify themselves, is true right and true morals. It is the same structure that we already saw in the Science of Logic. Just as the concept ( = spirit) is the truth of being and essence, so the ethicity is the truth of right and morality.
One could ask oneself, why don't we start with the highest, that is to say, with what is concretely true? The answer is: because we want to see what is true in a way of a result, and for that one needs essentially to understand fist the abstract concept. Therefore, what is real, the figure of the concept, is for us what comes next, what will arrive afterwards, although in reality it- self it exists beforehand. Our procedure is to demonstrate the abstract forms not as subsistent but as false (Rph 32 Z).
"When we speak about right in contrast with morality and ethicity, we understand by right only the first one, the formal one, the one with the abstract personality" (Rph 30 A).
"The morality, just as the previous element, formal right, both are abstractions; only ethicity is the truth of both of them. " (Rph 33 Z).
As an interpretative question it is convenient to notice that in 1806, while writing the Phenomenology, Hegel did not take yet the termino- logical decision that we have seen he has made in the Philosophy of Right. In the Phenomenology morality is still superior to ethicity. The latter was not a technical term yet. It starts to be so from 1817 onwards, in the Hegelian review of a work of Jacobi (cf. NH 451). That is to say, four years before the publication of his Philosophy of Right.
Any serious researcher, as the excellent Lauer, must agree with this: "Sittlichkeit simply does not have the same meaning in the two contexts" (1983, 6 n. 4). "Sittlichkeit on a higher level, treated in the Phi- losophie des Rechts but not in the Phenomenology" (1982, 180).
In addition, Hegel himself not only announces the change of mean- ing, but he addresses it thematically, with which our interpretative question gives way to the question of content:
Consequently, what we contemplated before with the Greeks as a form of ethicity can no longer have a place in the Christian world. Because that ethicity is custom without reflection; on the contrary, the Christian princi- ple is the interiority that subsists by itself, the soil where the truth grows. Against the principle of the subject freedom an ethicity without reflection cannot be carried out anymore (WG 746).
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 286 Hegel was right
About the ethicity of the Greeks Hegel says insistently: "It is the ingenuous ethicity, not morality yet; the individual will of the subject is located in the not-mediated custom of rightness and laws" (VG 249) (The italics are mine).
"But besieged by immediacy, the freedom of the subject is only custom, without the infinite reflection in itself, without the subjective interiority of conscience" (EPW 557).
The following text is particularly explicit:
"For the beautiful ethicity is not true ethicity, it has not been born out of the struggle of the subject's freedom" (VG 250).
It is perfectly clear that the spontaneous ethicity, the one consisting in custom, is not true ethicity for Hegel. True ethicity, which is superior to morality, is the one that the Philosophy of Right studies.
"Consequently the form of ethicity is completely modified. The beautiful ethicity is no longer present. What is now ethical, might be also custom or habit, as long as it comes from interiority; but precisely what has plain right is the interior, the subject" (WG 746s).
As can be see, Hegel expressly warns that the meaning of ethicity changes completely. To think, as some Marxist interpreters have wanted, that Hegel's ethicity means custom and habit, would not be an analysis of the texts but a willful introjection of the interpreter's thinking, a re- course of those who, on the one hand, deny the imperative and true obligation as such, and on the other, want to have Hegel on their side.
"But ethicity is duty" (VG 115).
And by contrast, "in the ancient form, the ethicity is custom, habit" (WG 115).
In the entire Hegelian philosophy, in his philosophy of right and of the State, in his philosophy of history, as in his philosophy or art, as in his philosophy of religion, the imperative character of ethicity is of primal importance, because that imperative is God, the only true God. Without that, Hegel could not sustain that the State is the Kingdom of God, or that God is the one who has been conducting the human his- tory and continues to do so.
In the classic arts, the oracles have essentially their place, because in them the human individuality has not climbed up yet the hill of interiority in which the subject takes out from himself the decision of action. What we call conscience in our sense of the word does not find a place in the classic arts. (Asth I 489)
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Let us have in mind that our translation distinguishes between conscience (Bewusstsein) and consciousness (Gewissen). This last one is the faculty with which we perceive the moral and ethical imperative.
No matter how beautiful, attractive and interesting the Greek ethicity looks, it is not, however, the culminating point of the self-consciousness of the spirit; it lacks the infinite form, precisely the reflection of thinking in itself, to free oneself from the natural element, of the sensitive that is inherent to the character of the beautiful Greek gods, to free oneself from the immedi- acy in which this ethicity is located; it lacks self-understanding of thought, the infiniteness of self-consciousness; it lacks that everything which must have validity as right and ethicity finds a confirmation in myself, in the testimony of my spirit (WG 639).
"Men can behave themselves instinctively according to their cus- toms and traditions" (PR II, II 198).
The Greeks did not have conscience. What is right and duty was the law of the State , with regard to which no one reflected whether it was in fact right and duty. But one is not a free man if one does not see that what the State demands is good. And if he does see, then the individual becomes sepa- rated from what is custom; the interiority and the formal separation from the existent harmony begins (VG 263).
In contrast with the instinctive ethicity that exists as a general rule in the masses, the true ethicity that matters to Hegel, essentially in- cludes self-conscience and self-responsibility; for this true ethicity the customs and positive laws are not obligatory just because of the fact that they are customs and laws in force; the free spirit demands to understand the purpose of those laws and judge them; one only decides to observe them when one's conscience of good and evil testi- fies that they are obligatory. This is why the ethicity, far from being a custom, is a 'Doctrine of Duties', as the Philosophy of Right calls it when it speaks about the ethicity (142-157). "An immanent and consequent doctrine of duties cannot be anything else than the development of re- lations that are by the idea itself of freedom necessary and hence real within the State in its whole extension" (Rph 148A).
Hegel is terribly explicit when he affirms that true ethicity is duty. There can be no doubt about that:
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The difference between the actual exposition and the form of a Doctrine of Duties is only that, in what follows, the ethical determinations are deduced as relations that are necessary; apodosis is not yet added to each one of them; therefore, this determination is a duty for man (Rph 148 A).
So, what is the difference between ethicity and morality?
We sustain that a morality, whose criterion and goal is the subject's self-perfection, is rigorously immoral; we sustain that the unique duties are the duties towards the neighbor; we sustain that only the authentic imperative can only emerge from intersubjectivity, and that inventing other kind of obligations that distract us from this one is an immorality, not morality.
The attack is not directed against Kant only, but against all the tra- ditional moralists that have placed the Kingdom of God in another world, with which not only my neighbors and the State become mere means, but also morals itself become subjectivism, since the only thing that matters is the soul that will go to the other world and whose fate will depend entirely on its self-perfection: "My intention of the good of my action, and my conviction that is good, makes it good" (Rph 140 A). One has abandoned the objective morality that commands to build here a world of justice, freedom and human dignity; and since morality does not become objectively real in the world but is only a soul's gar- ment that only God himself knows, it depends exclusively on my in- tention; my actions are good insofar my intentions are sincerely good, regardless of any objectivity. "Sheer chitchat: it is good because I am convinced" (Rph Notiz zu 140).
Ethicity means objective morality. Therefore, as we said, the only true morality.
We have just seen that ethicity is the doctrine of duties. These are grouped in three areas: family, society and State --a State that is es- sentially bonded with universal history --. That is in itself objective. The rights of our neighbor in each of these spheres constitute duties for me; this is why ethicity is the identification of morality with right. But not by means of an 'also', not by juxtaposition, "not by a mixture of both principles, but by suppressing them and constituting the absolute ethical identity" (JS 509), because as we will see, right without ethics is not true right.
According to Hegel, Kant's contribution not only is irrevocable, but constitutes the true point of reference in the history of moral thought.
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Before Kant, no theoretician knew what morals were. The difference between categorical imperative and conditioned imperatives is a par- adigmatic achievement: who acts by self-interest, regardless if that means a beatific vision or eternal torments, is not acting morally but only in terms of losses and gains. That conditioned imperative is not really imperative, but only technical information about efficient means. 'If you want this, do that'. On the contrary, 'thou shall not kill' is a categorical imperative and its validity does not depend on one's inter- est in that commandment; it does not care about whether it is conve- nient or not for you; it does not care about prizes or punishments. That, and only that, it is moral.
Kant understood that morality begins exactly there where the pur- suit of self-interest ends. That is certainly impressive. What he missed to realize was that only the pursuit of the good of the others brings to an end the pursuit of self-interest. I cease to be the most important thing in the world only when my neighbor is as important as myself. That is what Christ's teaching tells us: "So everything you want man make for you do it to them (Mathew 7, 12). This inclination to self profit cannot be thought to come to an end otherwise. By the way, the im- perative obtains in that very moment its content and becomes perfectly determined. The Kantian formalism, its incapacity of generating real and concrete obligations, comes from not realizing that the imperative comes from the other, not from the same subject; e. g. it comes from intersubjectivity. When it comes it comes with content.
Building the duties from the inside is a whole pseudo-problem that Kant invents in order to have something to do; he wanted to start from the abstract imperative, but that is not a true imperative; it is only the abstraction of the imperative. We will come back to the question of the autonomy of reason in short.
The best commentators already made clear that the acceptance of the superb Kantian contribution by Hegel is total and without reserva- tions. Joachim Ritter says: "In Hegel the adoption of Kantian morality in the Philosophy of Right has a fundamental importance" (in Riedel ed. II 1975, 218). Likewise, W. T. Stace says: "Thus the Hegelian ethic con- tains all that is true, good, and noble in Kant's ethical system without its defects. " (1955, 379)
Hegel himself expresses it unmistakably: "The merit and the elevated point of view of the Kantian practical philosophy consist in having highlighted the significance of duty" (Rph 133Z).
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"This discovery of the absoluteness of reason in itself, which has produced the turn of the philosophy in our times, this absolute point of beginning, must be recognized and it is irrefutable, in spite of the fact that one must call insufficient the Kantian philosophy" (A? sth I 109s).
The absoluteness of conscience is an indubitable fact: the sharpness of the imperative is only perceived in the moment when I convince myself that the content is obligatory.
Despite that the Kantian contribution is, like Hegel says, an absolute starting point, the insufficiency of the Kantian system must still be af- firmed: "incomplete morality [. . . ] is immorality" (PG 440).
No matter how essential it is to highlight the unconditioned self-determi- nation of will as the root of duty --in fact our knowledge of the human will only has its firm fundament and beginning point due to the Kantian philoso- phy through the idea of its infinite autonomy --this acquisition still turns out to be a formalism if one holds it only from the very moralist point of view, without arriving to the concept of ethicity; the moral science becomes mere rhetoric about the duty by the duty itself. On the basis of this principle a Doctrine of the Duties is impossible; [. . . ] from the notion of duty as ab- sence of contradiction, as formal coherence with itself, which is nothing but the attachment of the abstract indetermination, it is impossible to arrive to the determination of concrete duties (Rph135 A).
"Although we stressed above the point of view of the Kantian phi- losophy --which is excellent insofar it affirms the conformity of duty with reason--, one must still denounce its mistake, namely, that this point of view still lacks a whole structurization. For the sentence 'May you live your life as if the maxim of your actions were to become univer- sal law' would be very good if we had already determined principles about what had to be done. Indeed, when we demand from a principle to be the content of a universal legislation, it must have beforehand content; and if the content was there, the application would be very easy. But here the principle itself is not present yet; and the criterion about non-existence of contradiction produces nothing; where there is only nothingness we do not find contradiction" (Cfr. Rph 135 Z).
Kant has to employ certain artificial resources in order to have con- tent --at the end of the day these resources leave him in a bad situation. As Hegel sharply criticizes, to examine if something can be erected as universal maxim, presupposes that this 'something' has content, and therefore the existence of a content is not originated in such inquisition.
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In the same way to know if something can be held without contradic- tion, first we need that something to have a content. So the existence of the content is not originated in that research. The notorious artificiality of these resources allows one to see clearly what we were saying: Kant seeks that lack of content because he wants to. It is false that Kant has in front of him the imperative and its lack of content. 'An imperative on the quest of content' it is something artificially fabricated by abstracting the real and concrete imperatives to the pure notion of the imperative, which, in fact, results to be the abstraction of the imperative, and this has not the exigency and is not anymore an imperative.
Now, this entire Kantian detour has the objective of saving the au- tonomy of reason. But we have already seen (V,1 fine) that the autono- my consists in the decision of the subject itself , and not in the natural impulses that where already there. The ethical demand that addresses the neighbor is what makes this autonomy exist; the imperative that stems from intersubjectivity is what frees man from the natural im- pulses. There is no autonomy of the will without the moral demand that the others address to me. Autonomy as the starting point with no concrete duty is an abstraction, the abstraction of autonomy, and there- fore the entire problem of conciliating the autonomy with the existence of particular obligations is a pseudo-problem.
Hegel refutes, therefore, the Kantian system from the inside, that means to say, by adopting the complete univocity of the absolute im- perative without mixture of conveniences and self-interest, but showing that the formalism contradicts the origin itself and the existence of this imperative is the same as immorality. What Hegel does is to "establish the true principles of morality or rather of ethicity against false mo- rality" (VG 171). Referring to Kant and Fichte he affirms: "Everything stays in this gossip about morality. But what things are moral and how will the spirit realize itself systematically is something no one thinks of" (GP III 369). It is in the rights of the neighbor where one establishes what things are moral and what things are not. A system that pretends to establish duties, distracting us from our duty towards the neighbor, is an immoral system.
It is obvious that Hegel does not refute only Kant and Fichte. It is a widespread weakness both in moral and juridical treatises to distin- guish between morals and right, by saying that the former only per- tains to the interior and the intentions, while the former does not care about such things.
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Just as we have seen in the previous chapters, that physics, chem- ists and biologists live, by common agreement, in the fiction that their disciplines are empirical, so jurists live by common agreement be- lieving that right does not care about intentions or the interior but only about the exterior.
This is a negative universal thesis. Consequently, one needs only one particular case in order to demonstrate that it is false. Now, in the branch of law called criminal law, the interiority of the accused is a decisive factor for the code itself, the judge, the accusing instance and the lawyer. If the murderer is insane, there is no crime. But insanity or sanity pertains to interiority.
All the criminal codes of the world distinguish today between willful harm and negligent harm, that is to say, between a prejudice caused with the intention to harm and a prejudice caused by impru- dence. The felony is completely different, and the penalty, conse- quently, is also different. The intention of the people is something fundamental for the law.
The criminal code of Mexico City, in its article 225, fraction VI, im- poses suspension, dismissal or a fine to the civil servant that dictates or omits a resolution that violates any categorical precept of the law, "whenever one acts by immoral motives and not by simple mistake of opinion".
This applies not only to criminal law: this is also valid for civil right and commercial law, since one looks there for intentions as well. For example, a testament is invalid if the testator did not have the intention of making a will. Also, civil right codes invalidate a contract when any of the parties suffered a 'mistake over the determinant motive of will', as jurists frequently claim. That is what the Napoleonic Code called a mistake over 'the cause of the contract'. And the invalidating mistake could have also been related with the nature of the contract.
When a judge has to decide which member of a broken marriage will take care of the children's education, what matters the most to him is the interior personality. The father's lawyer intends to show the psy- chic instability of the mother or her internal viciousness. The exterior facts function only as indicators, symptoms or proving means, and the truly decisive for the judge is the interior. It is completely false that in these cases the right is mostly concerned with the exterior and acci- dentally the interior. The thing is actually the other way around. What matters is the internal personality of husband or the spouse. And the
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same is to be said about the testament and the contract: the decisive fac- tor is the intention or the interior experience of mistake or ignorance. The exterior data are equivocal: in the case of a person certain external data can be an indicator of ignorance, and in the case of a different person the same external data can be irrelevant. In the examples I have mentioned, right does not care about the exterior in itself, but only as a means to hit the mark with the interior.
Let us think now in the felony called fraud: only the interior has importance. As far as the victim goes, the decisive thing is to find out if he was effectively deceived by the fraudulent maneuver and not by his own imprudence. As for the felon goes, the decisive thing to examine is the intention of making the other fall into the trap. No exterior data has univocal significance, since the same fact can deceive certain indi- viduals under certain circumstances, but that may not always be the case. This demonstrates that it is not the exterior fact what orientates the right in those cases, but only the interior, because sometimes it can be accompanied with certain exterior facts and sometimes with others very diverse. The criminal lawyer Mariano Jime? nez Huerta recognizes with honesty: "The deceits cannot be measured objectively, because, projecting themselves over the intelligence of victim, they will neces- sarily influence in its efficiency the subjective psychological peculiari- ties of the deceived person" (1 968ss IV 140).
The examples we have seen solve the question without any doubt. The ideology that prevails nowadays among the jurists --which 'justi- fies' judicial, legislative or governmental decisions that are flagrantly unjust by saying that right has to relay on the exterior and the moral character of the facts does not belong to legal right-- is completely out- rageous. Insofar one is a lawyer or a judge, one feels exempted from the universal moral imperative, but the pretext they come up with destroys itself: how do they justify the decision they have taken, namely, that the exterior is in some cases relevant and in others not? The few examples we have mentioned demonstrate that it is utterly false that the interior is irrelevant to right. That being proved, how can they justify to do without morals whenever they want to?
Hegel refers to this in his Philosophy of Right when he says that the positive right, that is to say, the abstract right, is not true right, and that true right is only the ethicity in which the morality and right identify themselves. Already in his youth Hegel condemns this: "It may also happen that a conduct of right is not bound to the mentality
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of right, and even that there is an immoral mentality instead" (NH 253). Here we read a criticism against the hypocritical cynicism that has found today a 'scientific' rationalization in the juridical positivism of those who wield the law to commit, knowingly, atrocious injustices.
"An action like the affirmation of my property can be perfectly ju- ridical and yet there can be intention of evil, regardless of right and having the purpose of harming the other" (NH 228).
"When in politics, the only thing that prevails is law as such, the dominant thing is violence and the arbitrariness of the individual" (PR II, II 82s).
"The highest thing, if conceived finitely, is the worst" (PR II, II 238) [. . . ] "an animal kingdom of men" (ibid).
"Thus in right the particularity is not yet that of the concept, but only that of the natural want" (Rph 151 Z).
In order to do without the obligations of the moral imperative when it comes to the law, jurists have relied on a huge epistemological mis- take: the mistake of believing that the application of a law is a mechani- cal process that may be performed without judgments of value, without appreciations that are empirically unjustifiable. As a matter of fact, it is very unusual to find jurists that take the task of reflecting about the epistemological status of their own acts.
As we have seen, physicists and the biologists fall in that ingenuity as well, and they figure that if 'the whole world' thinks in a certain way, that is enough to say that what we have in our hands is an empirical judgment. Only that in the case of the jurists that lack of reflection has ominous consequences, for it has lead them to believe that the action of subsuming certain empirical fact under a law does not imply valua- tion and decision, because the 'whole world' would subsume the fact in question under that law. But the valuations do not stop being valua- tions because they are common or very frequent. To be sure, not even the sentences that allegedly describe a fact, that is to say, the so called 'fundamental propositions', are justifiable only by empirical data, since they decide precisely which is the content of the supposed empirical data. The empirical data does not consist in words; the descriptive sentence, on the contrary, consists in words. To judge if the sentence reflects 'sufficiently well' the sensorial data is always an appreciation, an evaluative estimation, not a mechanical process at all. The vocabu- lary with which one supposedly describes the fact in question decides beforehand under what law it will be subsumed. I am not reproaching
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this way to proceed; on the contrary, I am saying that it is the only one possible and that is the way one always follows. But the point is this: if the judge, the ruler or the jurist in general carries out judgments of val- ue even with the actions which are apparently more mechanical, if they are always carrying out moral judgments, how could one do without the moral imperative by saying right does not consider it? With what logic or justification can someone base himself on right in order to commit acts and deeds which his conscience unmistakably calls injustices and immoralities?
It is not the case that the unjust jurist does without morals.
