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12 - Ethical subjectivity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Allen W. Wood
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Summary

The ethical disposition

The objective side of ethical life is the ethical order, a rationally articulated system of social institutions. The subjective side is the ethical disposition or attitude (Gesinnung).

The ethical attitude is the truest actualization of freedom because in it individuals are completely “with themselves.” Human individuals are products of their social order. The ethical laws they obey are self-given because the ethical order is fundamentally identical with the essence of the individual:

[Ethical laws are] not something alien to the subject, rather the subject bears a witness of spirit to them as to its own essence, in which it has its feeling of self and it lives in them as in an element not distinguished from itself – a relation more of identity than of faith or trust.

(PR § 147)

The original experience of this identity is more fundamental than rational reflection, even more fundamental than any “faith” or any affective state. It is “the identity of living nature, which does not admit of grounds or reasons, yet also doesn't appeal only to feelings, but rather to a whole experience, the whole feeling of life, unity of the laws and the individual's nature. This is simple, natural ethical life” (VPR:3: 487–488).

The ethical disposition is Hegel's response to the Kantian duality of duty and inclination. In ethical life, the “universal” aspect of the self (the aspect represented by law and duty) is in perfect harmony with the “particular” side (the individual's drives and desires).

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Hegel's Ethical Thought , pp. 209 - 218
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1990

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