No More Learning

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The postulate of a 'vision' that we criticized suffers from another evident superficiality: it believes that the best way to know a person is looking at it as if it were an object. As a matter of fact, to know a per- son means to be addressed by another: the essence itself of a person is dialogical and intersubjective. The character and depth of his appeal is what matters; his unconformities and his conformities, his ambi- tions and his plans, his wishes and his preferences, his patience and his impatience, his historical burden, his lucidity about reality, his de- gree of consciousness in respect to the world and other people, his tolerance, his trajectory, his dialogical intensity, his capacity or inca- pacity to sacrifice, and above all, his degree of true morality, his affec- tivity, his intelligence, his keeping his word, his honesty, his delicacy, his tenderness. The spirit is act, it consists in its acts, especially God, who the Scholastic philosophers called 'pure act'. To imagine a 'divine essence' which does not consist in acts is tantamount to imagine God as a material being.
And let us now address the central point. Who said that knowing God deeply has to be 'delightful' and 'beatific'? We need to say with Hegel: "it is a reality that becomes deformed if one calls it happiness" (GP II 289). Pleasure and pleasant are words completely inadequate and even childish, when they mean to describe an overwhelming as- tonishment; an amazement that cannot decrease or increase, whose nature inspires piercing veneration. It is a boundless wonder which never ceases to be disturbing and powerful. T he predominance of the eudemonist terminology confused theologians.
As we have seen, Hegel defends eagerly and coherently the im- mortality of the individual soul. However, that does not mean at all 'another world'. For a long time, theologians were deceived by the expression 'the Kingdom of Heaven', which, as the parallel passages of Mark and Luke can bear witness, was an expression introduced by Mathew instead of the original expression of Christ, the 'Kingdom of God'. All the exegetists --whether liberals or conservatives-- know that Mathew uses there the circumlocution employed in later Judaism in order to avoid pronouncing the name of God, which was a poorly respect towards the divinity and a merely legalist interpretation of the prohibition of using the name of God in vain. Mathew himself teaches us explicitly in the parable of the tares that the place where the King- dom is reestablished is no other "the world" (13, 38), and that Christ will return to such Kindgom to expel from it all the people who perform
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inequity (13, 41). And in the teaching that our Savior taught us, we do not read "take us to thy Kingdom" but rather "thy Kingdom come" (6, 10). The resurrection of the bodies is not only an argument against what we have been saying. It reinforces our entire point. The bodies need a physical ground; they have to be in this world. There is no single Bibli- cal text that says that the Kingdom of God belongs to another world. Now, the Kindgom which Christ started to conform was a State. As Hegel says: "the reality of the Kingdom of Heavens is the State" (FR 231). We will see later on how little they understand the Philosophy of Right those who do not see that the reality called State is a part of universal history (Rph. 341, 360) and that the universal history is directed to the
realization of the Kingdom of God.
One cannot put into question that the Kingdom that Christ wanted to
gather and form --and of which he always said 'it has come' (Mathew 12, 28; Luke 11, 20), the verb phtha? no does not mean 'to approach' but 'to come' -- consists in the set of persons bounded by duties and rights. And in the parable of the grain of mustard seed (Mark 4, 30-32) the thesis is that this Kingdom, although it may now be of small propor- tions, will grow one day more than any other.
This kingdom is the only end of man. Only in this kingdom, true ethicity among mankind is reached and God becomes truly conceivable. It is intolerable the immorality that says that my neighbors and my interrelation with them are a means to the consecution of my heavenly happiness or to the consecution of any other thing. Man must find his own realization and plenitude in responding positively and creatively to this continuous ethical appeal, to this intersubjectivity in which the kingdom of God consists. As Hegel says, the subject 'must find his sat- isfaction in his ethical situation' (VG 264).
This is the point where Kant failed in a lamentable way, and this is the reason why Hegel criticizes the Kantian morals, in spite of the fact that its distinction of categorical and hypothetical imperatives is an undisputable merit of Kant and the key to overcome definitively eudemonism. The Kantian postulate of a future harmony between the moral good and the physical good (= happiness) hinders that the end of man is morality and the neighbor. "The harmony is not present, it is not real; it only must be. The postulate itself is perennizing" (GP III 370s). "The immorality expresses here precisely what it is: that moral- ity itself is not what matters, but happiness as such, with any relation to the former" (PG 440).
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With regard to Kant, Jacobi and Fichte, Hegel says: "It is false that these philosophies abandon eudemonism; they rather perfect it to its maximum extent" (JS 294).
As I have said, Hegel, makes this objectively irrefutable criticism, in spite of the fact that he recognizes that the key to overcome eudemonism is in Kant: "before the Kantian philosophy, morals, as eudemonism, was grounded on the notion of happiness" (GP I 186).
Intersubjectivity --i. e. the vinculation and unification among men-- is not a means for something else, but rather an end in itself. This is the key to Hegel's Philosophy of Right, the most misunderstood work within his oeuvre: "The unification as such is in itself the true content and end, and the destiny of individuals is to realize a universal life" (Rph 258A).
"We now know that the ethical and the just in the State is also the di- vine and the commandment of God, and that insofar the content there is no other thing which is higher or holier" (WG 888).
"The divine is no longer represented as a beyond" (WG). Those who questioned that man could find his own realization in intersub- jectivity and perfect plenitude understood him wrongly and ignore the most recent physiological and anthropological discoveries. Psy- chologist Abraham Maslow --an impartial witness in this case-- says this very clearly: "At the highest level of life [. . . ] duty is pleasure" (1970, 102).
Those who put this into question commit two mistakes. Fist, they still have the immoral belief that one needs to satisfy his natural and animal impulses, as if we did not possess also killer impulses that enter into conflict with the other impulses. Second, and most important, they have not realized that only the acquired impulses are in fact the only ones that count for experimental psychology nowadays, because they obliterate the natural ones and erase them practically from the list of motivations which demand to be satiated. Psychologist Judson B. Brown says:
. . . the doctrines which hold instinctive sources of motivation to be of sig- nificance for human behavior have all but vanished from the psychological scene. These and other influences have led many to the belief that the im- portant human motives are produced by learning during the processes of socialization and acculturation. (Teevan/Birney, 1964, 80)
If the word happiness had a meaning, it could only consist in the sat- isfaction and fulfillment of the acquired impulses. The Hegelian thesis
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according to which the subject "must find his satisfaction in his ethical situation" (VG 264) not only is it not unreal, but it demonstrates how Philosophy anticipated the discoveries that Psychology and Anthro- pology have only been able to make more recently.
"Delight is undetermined in respect to its content, because we can find it in every object" (NH 256).
"The individual must find somehow, in the fulfillment of his duty, his own interest, his own satisfaction, what matters to him" (Rph 261 A). "In its concept, passion contains the fact of finding itself in a particu- larity of the determination of the will, in which all the subjectivity of man is rooted, despite what the content of such determination may be. Due to this formal reason, passion is neither good or evil; such form only express that the subject has put in its content the whole vital inter- est of his spirit, of his talent, of his character, of his joy" (EPW 474A). All the doubts and skepticisms as whether man can find his own fulfillment and plenitude in his ethical intersubjective relations have their practical origin in a lack of culture, a lack of experience of true culture; and in the theoretical level, their cause is the traditional and false belief in the real distinction of the faculties, that is to say, to be- lieve that the understanding, the will and the emotions are completely
different to each other.
For the abstract intellect the difficulty consists in freeing oneself from the separation which he arbitrarily introduced between the faculties of the soul, between the sentiment and the thinking spirit, and in coming to the idea that there is only one reason in man, in feeling, willing and thinking. God, the Law, ethicity, can be felt. But the feeling is no other thing that the form of the immediate and characteristic individuality of the subject, in which these con- tents can be posited, as well as any other objective content which is granted validity by consciousness (EPW 471A).
But let us repeat what we have said: the fundamental mistake of eudemonism, besides its intrinsic immorality, is to believe that what man wants the most is happiness; that man looks for his own satisfaction and happiness in everything he does. In fact, things are not like that: "delight is something secondary, concomitant to the fact" (NH 255), it is by no means an end.
For marriage, it is time now to denounce the superficiality of all the theories that do not recognize this: for the married couple the other is
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an end in his/herself. Those who ignore this, ignore the true nature of love.
"Precisely, marriage has to be beyond happiness and unhappiness" (Rph, Notiz zu 162).
"Marriage is essentially an ethical relationship" (Rph 161 Z).
The spouse is an end; she is not a means for my happiness. Having the other as an end brings one a depth and a plenitude which are far beyond that thing called happiness.
In the summer of 1811, Hegel wrote this to his future wife: "mar- riage is essentially a religious bond; love needs to be completed with a superior element of what it is for and of itself" (Kaufmann 1966, 333). The other cannot be seen as an end if he or she is not looked upon as identified with God Himself; the agnostic humanism falls short with its own epistemology and the reflection over its own act.
Hegel distinguishes consistently between beseligend and beglu? ckend. In English, it is convenient to distinguish between joy and happiness. Joy is not something one pursuits. Happiness, on the other hand, is pursued: happiness is by definition a goal, something one goes after. Automatically, morality is destroyed with that criterion, for the neigh- bor becomes a means.
In another letter of that summer, Hegel tells her future wife:
I have hurt you by giving the impression that I condemn --as if they were your own principles of thought and behavior-- moral conceptions which I am bound to condemn. I will only tell you two things. On the one hand, I condemn such conceptions because they suppress the difference between what the heart likes and duty, or in other words, they eliminate the latter and destroy morals. On the other hand, and this is what really matters, I beg you not to think of me as somebody that ascribes those conceptions to you with their belonging consequences. I regard them only insofar they are present in your reflection, but not as if you were fully aware of them and their consequences (ibid. ).
One should not believe that the rejection of eudemonism is some- thing that only concerns the subtleties and the wise men. 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.
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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).
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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.