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Metaphysics and Morality in Kant and Hegel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2015

Sally Sedgwick*
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College

Abstract

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Even for those who have struggled with Hegel long enough to discover that he is neither a positivist nor a communitarian, nor (at the other end of the spectrum) a Platonist, the fact that he also insists upon distinguishing his approach to practical philosophy from Kant's may seem deeply puzzling. After all, the two philosophers share in common the same principal opponents. Both set out to undermine the sceptic's doubts about the possibility of objective practical judgments and requirements; both in addition reject positivist derivations of law, exclusively empiricist accounts of human behaviour, and intuitionist forms of justification. The two philosophers furthermore seem to share the same conception of the conditions of human freedom. For Hegel as well as Kant, a theory of morality and political right devoted to advancing the cause of freedom must require more than just the absence of obstacles preventing the satisfaction of our animal passions. For Hegel as well as Kant, freedom requires in addition the respect of the ends we have as rational natures. We achieve this kind of freedom when our actions are motivated by the legislation of reason and when the social norms which constrain us are norms we can rationally endorse.

Despite these similarities, Hegel tells us in the Philosophy of Right that the conception of freedom he associates with Kant and discusses under the heading of “Moralität” must give way to the more adequate conception of “Sittlichkeit” or “ethical life”. It is clear that Hegel finds unacceptable what he calls the “empty formalism” of Kant's practical philosophy; it is also clear that he thinks that Kant's practical philosophy is “formal” because its supreme law or categorical imperative is an a priori law of reason. But this doesn't yet tell us why, for Hegel, these features of the Kantian approach are objectionable. In my view, we do his critique little justice if we say that it is aimed at a consequence which presumably follows from Kant's preoccupation with providing an a priori foundation for law and morality: namely, the failure to give sufficient moral weight to the empirical particulars which individuate persons and situations and need to be taken into account in the practice of moral assessment. As I shall argue below, the suggestion that Kant's formalism requires us to ignore empirical content in this way is neither plausible as a critique of Kant nor accurate as a representation of what troubles Hegel about Kant. We go more to the heart of the matter, I believe, if we say instead that Hegel is out to challenge the very distinction between the “empirical” and the “pure” or “a priori” so fundamental to both Kant's practical and theoretical philosophy. Hegel's critique of Kant's practical philosophy is an instance of his critique of Kant's idealism more generally, and of the assumptions about reason and nature upon which that idealism rests. Or so I shall argue here.

Type
Hegel and Ethics
Copyright
Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 1998

References

1 See Hegel's, 1821 Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts §135Google Scholar.

2 I am therefore in agreement with Robert Pippin who claims that Hegel's critique of Kant's practical philosophy is “unavoidably metaphysical,” or occurs at the level of the “‘metaphysics of the person’.” See Pippin's, Hegel on the Rationality and Priority of Ethical Life,” Neue Hefte für Philosophie 35 (1995), esp. pp. 119 and 122 Google Scholar. For a different approach, see Wood's, Allen W. Hegel's Ethical Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In the first paragraph of his Preface, Wood writes that the effort to discover in Hegel's metaphysics or “dialectical logic” the “hidden key” to his social thought promises to be not only “difficult” but also “unrewarding.” It is not an effort, he says, undertaken by those who are “sensible.”

3 Except where otherwise indicated, translations of this as well as all other German texts treated in this paper are mine. Here I rely on Norman Kemp Smith's translation of “subalternen” as “relative”. See his translation, Critique of Pure Reason (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965)Google Scholar. In my text I provide in parentheses references to the “A” and “B” Akademie editions of the first Kritik.

4 Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten [Ak 389].

5 As Onora O'Neill aptly puts it, what Kant is claiming is that the empirical point of view which can regard human nature only as appearance “lacks closure”. See her Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant's Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 111 Google Scholar.

6 Proponents of the “two standpoint” interpretation claim that for Kant appearances are not mental representations of things in themselves (mental representations, that is, of the unknowable reality which causes them). The distinction between appearances and things in themselves refers, that is, not to two different kinds of objects, but to two ways in which empirical objects may be considered. As Henry Allison puts it, Kant intends by “appearances” objects considered, “in relation to the subjective conditions of human cognition,” and by “things in themselves,” objects as they are “independently of these conditions”. This “two standpoint” or “two aspect” reading of the distinction has the obvious advantage over the “two object” or “ontologized” reading, Allison claims, of preserving Kant's “robust empirical realism,” according to which appearances, although not objects independent of the subjective conditions of our knowing them, are nonetheless real and mind-independent. See Allison's, Kant's Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 3 and 18 Google Scholar.

7 Grundlegung [Ak 458]. Kant is claiming at least this: our questions about how the intelligible and empirical realms are causally related cannot be answered from within the point of view of theoretical knowledge. According to Christine Korsgaard, it is an implication of Kant's commitment to the two standpoint view that he believes that such questions cannot even be “coherently asked”. This is because, on her reading of Kant, “freedom is a concept with a practical employment, used in the choice and justification of action, not in explanation or prediction; while causality is a concept of theory, used to explain and predict actions but not to justify them”. From her 1992 essay “Creating the Kingdom of Ends” reprinted as Chapter 7 of her collection, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 204 Google Scholar. Korsgaard takes up this distinction between explanation and justification again in The Sources of Normativity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 14 Google Scholar.

8 E.g., the B-Preface of the first Kritik. It is not necessary for morality that “freedom be understood,” Kant tells us there, “only that it may … at least be thought and not be self-contradictory”. Bxxix

9 See again Grundlegung [Ak 458].

10 As Kant puts it at A341/B399, e.g., the ‘I think’ is “purified of the empirical”.

11 This language is already present in Hegel's earliest (“Jenaer”) writings. See, e.g., his discussion of Kant's philosophy in his 1802/03 Glauben und Wissen, and the section “Manchelei Formen, die bei dem jetzigen Philosophieren vorkommen,” in his 1801 Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie.

12 See Hegel's “Jenaer” writings cited directly above.

13 The terms “separable” and “inseparable” may be familiar to us from McDowell's, John recent Mind and World (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1994)Google Scholar. But see § 4 A of the Philosophie des Rechts, where Hegel characterizes thinking and willing as “untrennbar: sie sind eines und dasselbe, und in jeder Tätigkeit, sowohl des Denkens als Wollens, finden sich beide Momente”. (The notion of freedom as our “second nature,” also prominent in Mind and World, appears in this section of the Philosophie des Rechts as well: “das Rechtssystem [ist] das Reich der verwirklichten Freiheit, die Welt des Geistes aus ihm selbst hervorgebracht, als eine zweite Nature. …”) I discuss the influence of Hegel on McDowell, in “McDowell's Hegelianism,” European Journal of Philosophy 5, no. 1 (04 1997): 2138 Google Scholar.

14 See Herman's, The Practice of Moral Judgment,” Journal of Philosophy 82 (1985): 414436 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reprinted as Chapter 4 of her collection of essays The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA/London, Harvard University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

15 I cannot for example properly assess the moral worth of my intention to give money to CARE unless my maxim accurately reflects the facts about how much I am actually able to give. To apply the categorical imperative test, I need in this way to attend to empirical content.

16 See Propositions 2 and 6 for these passages.

17 Grundlegung [Ak 399].

18 See Proposition 4.

19 A prominent spokesperson for this position is Burkhard Tuschling. In, e.g., his essay “The System of Transcendental Idealism: Questions Raised and Left Open in the ‘Kritik der Urteilskraft’,” he writes that “Kantian Transcendental Idealism involves elements of the Hegelian or speculative understanding,” and draws his evidence chiefly from Kant's Introduction to and second part of the Kritik der Urteilskraft as well as from Kant's Opus Postumum. In System and Teleology in Kant's Critique of Teleological Judgment, Spindel Conference 1991, Southern Journal of Philosophy XXX, Supplement, ed. Robinson, Hoke: 109127 Google Scholar.

20 Philosophie des Rechts § 1.

21 This passage appears in Hegel's Zusatz to the Preface. See also Philosophie des Rechts §3.

22 Enzyklopädie der Philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1830), Erster Teil: Die Wissenschaft der Logik, § 38.

23 “Über die wissenschaftlichen Behandlungsarten des Naturrechts, seine Stelle in der praktischen Philosophie und sein Verhältnis zu den positiven Rechtswissenschaften,” Section I.

24 As Hegel writes in the Enzyklopädie Logik, “Man is always thinking, even when he only intuits; when he considers something, he considers it as a universal; he focusses on the singular … in so doing, withdraws his attention from something else, and takes it as something abstract and universal …” §24 A 1.

25 I am drawing heavily on §4 of the Philosophie des Rechts for this discussion. In Hegel's words, “The animal acts by instinct…, but it has no will, because it does not represent to itself what it desires”. For helpful discussions of the relation of desire to agency in Hegel, see in addition to the article by Pippin mentioned above, Terry Pinkard's contribution to that same issue of Neue Hefte für Philosophie, “Historicism, Social Practice, and Sustainability: Themes in Hegelian Ethical Theory,” as well as his book Hegel's Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 274ff.Google Scholar

26 As Hegel argues in the Philosophie des Rechts, it is this outcome which motivates the advance from the stage of “Moralität” to that of “Sittlichkeit”.

27 For Hegel's rejection of the thesis that reason is a mere slave to the passions, see Philosophie des Rechts § 17; for his rejection of the thesis that reason is a mere instrument of social forces, see §§ 146, 148.

28 See § 2 and the Preface to the Philosophie des Rechts for Hegel's remarks on the difficulty of making a new beginning in philosophy. This is a problem which Hegel addresses again and again. See, e.g., the Introduction of his 1807 Phänomenologie des Geistes and the Prefaces of 1812 and 1831 to his Wissenschaft der Logik.

29 I owe thanks to the Hegel Society of Great Britain for the invitation to prepare this paper for their annual meeting in September of 1997. I am grateful to those present at the meeting for their constructive comments. I also wish to thank the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung for the generous grant which made the completion of this paper possible.