Love and Law:

Hegel's Critique
of Morality / j. M.

J. HE Spirit of Christianity and its Fate" (hereafter "Spirit") pro-

vides the most direct and eloquent presentation of the logical
structure and moral content of Hegel's ethical vision. This is a
vision of ethical life itself, of how Hegel conceives ofthe meaning
of ethics, what it is about and its internal dynamic logic, and of
ethicality so understood as constitutive of our relation to our-
selves, others, and the natural world. In worldng out the sub-
stance of ethical living, above all in opposition to Kant's morality
of universal law, Hegel is simultaneously elaborating the struc-
tural contours of human experience. Hegelian idealism is consti-
tuted by this identification of the normative logic of ethical life
with the structure of experience in general. Hegel's ethical vision
is hence the vision of the demands and fatalities of ethical life
becoming the pivot and underlying logic for the philosophical
comprehension of human experience iiberhaupt It is only slightly
hj'perbolic to say that in the "Spirit" essay Hegel is interrogating
and proposing the possibility of ethics as first philosophy, where
the idea of ethics as. first philosophy provides the governing
impulse and ultimate meaning of Hegelian objective (absolute)
idealism. If this is right, what Hegel has to say about subjects such
as knowledge, reason, and objectivity must be keyed to the
dynamics of ethical life.-^
The great advantage of beginning with this essay is that it
presents Hegel's vision in an undiluted form: its expresses most
fally what Hegel will want to say about ethicality and the con-
sdtutive structures of experience consequent upon that ethical-

SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Summer 2003)

394 SOGIAL RESEARCH

ity. There is about the vision, or so I shall argue, something eth-

ically deep and compelling; the compellingness of this original
vision, the thought that it captures something about why ethi-
cal life matters, about how and why we have ethical concerns at
all, about how the achievements and fatalities of ethical experi-
ence can appear as what matters most in a life, provides the
motivation for Hegel's attempts, above all in the Phenomenology
of Spirit, to secure it against the inadequacies of its articulation
in the "Spirit" essay. At the center of Hegel's ethical vision in
the "Spirit" essay is the idea of a causality of fate, an ethical
logic of action and reaction: to act against another person is to
destroy my own life, to call down upon myself revenging fates;
I cannot (ethically) harm another without (ethically) harming
m^yself. In this way the flourishing and foundering of each is
intimately bound up with the flourishing and foundering of all.
Social space is always constituted ethically, as a space in which
subjects are necessarily formed or deformed, freed or
oppressed through the structures of interaction governing
everyday life. It is this that is Hegel's great idea since it reveals
how ethical life matters independent of any particular moral
norms, laws, ideals, principles, or ends. Ethical life is not, in the
first instance, about moral principles, but about the ways in
which both particular actions and whole forms of action injure,
wound, and deform recipient and actor alike; it is about the
secret bonds connecting our weal and woe to the lives of all
those around us.
In the essay, ethical life as constituted by a causality of fate is
logically and historically unfolded in relation to an inadequate
holistic metaphysics of love and life. In putting the matter this
way, I have two thoughts in mind. Eirst, the metaphysics of the
"Spirit" essay is emphatically a metaphysics of life and love—life
and love are Hegel's first idea about the nature of the secret
bonds connecting us together-—and hence anti-theological.
Christian God-talk in the essay is Hegel's means for expressing
the metaphysics of life and love, and so of revealing that such
 HEGEL'S CRITIQUE OF MORALITY 395

God-talk has its ultimate substance solely in ethical life. Hegel's

model here is, of course, Kant's R£ligion within the Limits of Rea-
son Alone. Hegel thinks there is an ethical content embedded in
the emergence of Christianity, above all in the Jesus narrative,
that Kant misses and misrepresents altogether; so fully does
Kant mistake the fundamental ethical logic of Christianity that
his doctrine is not Christian at all, but rather a rationalized ver-
sion, ofthe very Judaism biblical Christianity aimed to supplant.
Hegel's method is nonetheless akin to Ka.nt's, with a twist: his
ambition is not to interpret Christianity in the light of an
already secured moral theory, as Kant did, but rather to make
manifest the ethical logic, the ethical content of the logic of
experience, implicit in early Christianity. Hegel's hermeneutical
practice can be baffling and misleading because he perceives
Jesus as doing practically the same activj.ty of attempting to
unlock the ethical content of theological discourse that he is
doing theoretically.^ for Hegel, Jesus too is engaged in an anti-the-
ological enterprise of ethical decoding, and thus Jesus too is
using God-talk as a fumbling, indeterminate linguistic way of
expressing what is a holistic ethical vision, The hubris of Hegel's
identification of his endeavor with Jesus' has not gone unno-
ticed (see Hamaclier, 1998); however, once one recognizes that
Hegel takes Jesus to be an liermeneutician and performative
decoder, a kind of philosopher, then that hubris can be some-
what softened. Still, the model for Hegel's essay is Eant's reli-
gion book; in this light we might retitle Hegel's essay: "Religion
within the Limits of Life Alone." So suggesting requires one fur-
ther acknowledgement: while Kant's philosophy contains a
moment of religious or theological excess, Hegel's does not.^
Because he thinks the ethical content is, however indetermi-
nately, available from the outset, then for him there is no excess
or remainder. This too can lead to confusion since Hegel does
not construe his interpretive effort as reducing religion to ethi-
cality or reinterpreting religious thought in terms of secular
Actions and ideals; rather, his aim, like that of Jesus, is to expli-
396 SOCIAL RESEARCH

cate what God is, to make manifest the implicit content of the
concept of God.
Second, the holistic metaphysics of life espoused in the
"Spirit" essay is inadequate, but not completely false. Taking his
cue from Aristotle (and Holderlin and Schelling), Hegel wants
to construe practical, ethical life as somehow continuous with
organic, biological life, with the living world; having a life—as in
the expression "get a life!"—is a formation of living, of being
alive. This account of ethical experience thence requires both
the holistic assumptions operative in speaking about organic liv-
ing things, above all the normative exigencies that follow upon
an organic conception of the logic of part and whole, and, the
vitalistic conceptuality of life and death, of injury, hurt, and
wounding that life discourse so understood carries with it. The
depth of Hegel's ethical vision depends on the appropriation of
life discourse in these two registers for ethical experience—
practical life as a form of living. The inadequacy of his account
derives from the immediacy of the appropriation; organism/life
discourse is adopted but not philosophically earned. Nonethe-
less, as we shall see, Hegel's deployment of life in "Spirit" has
profound consonances with Nietzsche's critique of morality.
More important, the ethical depth the metaphysics of life pro-
vides to Hegel's account of ethical experience sets the agenda
for what he means to resource through the notions of recogni-
tion and spirit in the Phenomenology. The fundamental task of the
Phenomenology on this interpretation is to make good the inade-
quacies in the original holistic metaphysics of life in the "Spirit"
essay while sustaining the same fundamental ethical logic. The
Phenomenology conceptually actualizes, through the notions of
recognition and spirit, the ethical vision first displayed in "The
Spirit of Christianity and its Fate,"^ Hence, the logic of ethical
life displayed in the "Spirit" essay remains, the metaphysics sup-
porting it changes.
 HEGEL'S CRITIQUE OE MORALITY 397

I. The Spirit of Judaism:

Notes for a Genealogy of Transcendental Idealism

Hegel interprets biblical Judaism as the coming-to-be of tran-

scendental idealism as a form of life, or, what is the same, he inter-
prets Judaism as the genealogical origin of Western reason in its
fundamental Platonic and Kantian dispensation.* Hence,
although Hegel regards Abraham as the "true progenitor of the
Jews" (182),^ it matters to the overaii ambition of his project that
he begins with story of the flood, and with a contrast between
Noah and Nimrod, and between them and Deucalion and
Pyrrha.^ The state of nature, that time when man and nature still
lived in a state of harmony, comes to end with the flood; its
"destructive, invincible, irresistible hostilit)',. . . [and] manslaugh-
ter" reveal the indifference of physical nature to human ends,
leading to the necessity for control and mastery. Western ratio-
nality emerges in response to tJie need to master threatening
nature; it is the contours of this nature-mastering reason that will
come to structure Judaic life. But this is equally to say tliat the
deforming and perverse quality ofJewish life, and hence of Kant-
ian reason, derives from the fact that it appropriates a form of
rationality designed to master hostile nature, and applies it to the
human subject, its self-relation, and its relations wth its human,
as well as nonhuman, others.'^ The logic of mastery over nature,
die logic of first separation and then domination that Hegel per-
ceives as the debilitating and self-destructive feature of Kantian
rationalism has its intelligible source in the flsrst human responses
to the appearance of nature as itself coldly indifferent and bru-
tally antagonistic to human life. Judaic reason is an instrumental
rationality generated as a means to human survival turned into an
integral form of life.^
Hegel proposes that are just two basic ways one can :master
nature: through "something real" (183)—that is, through col-
lective practical activity like the building of a city or a tower
(Nimrod's solution)—or through "something thought." Noah's
398 SOCIAL RESEARCH

solution, here presented as the invention of the Jewish God,

involves two steps: the posing of an ideal to set against hostile
nature, and then the ascription to that ideal of reality, being. On
this account, the transcendent God of the tradition is a reified
and personified ideality. By ascribing reality to the ideal, Noah
gives it power over mundane reality, now conceived as the object
of God's thought. In this way, all reality is sublimed into a
thought-reality—God as the original transcendental ego. Still,
the thought of such a God cannot, in fact, provide for an actual
mastery over nature; hence, a certain type of conceptual defer-
ral must be built into the experience of such a God's mastery
over nature. The deferral is the mediation of God's relation to
nature through his relation to man via the establishment of what
we might call the "Theological Contract": God promises to
restrain the forces of nature on the condition that human
beings master their nature, nature within, our murderous
hearts, by obeying his laws of conduct. Because God's relation to
hostile nature is always conditional upon human obedience,
then the ebb and flow of nature in relation to man is only ever
a register of human obedience and disobedience. Nature, from
this perspective, becomes nothing but a sign of man's relation to
God, a thought Hegel states unequivocally in the account of
Abraham: "it was through God alone that Abraham came into a
mediate relation with the world, the only kind of link with the
world possible for him" (187).
Against the hostile power of nature, Hegel states, "Noah saved
himself by subjecting both it and himself to something more pow-
erful; Nimrod, by taming it himself (184). Noah and Nimrod
together are thus meant to represent the two standpoints of criti-
cal reason: Nimrod stands for the strategy of the understanding
(Verstand) in which nature is conceived of as a causal system that
is to be engaged with through causal manipulation, while Noah
stands for the strategy of moral reason (Vernunfi) in which the
relation to the external world is mediated through individuals'
self-relation, their self-subjection or self-manipulation to an exter-
 HEGEL'S CRITIQUE OF MORALITY 399

nal authority.^ Noah and Nimrod represent two aspects of a uni-

vocal, self-defeating strateg)': "Both made a peace of necessity with
the foe and thus perpetuated the hostility." This sentence encap-
sulates in miniature Hegel's intuition about why nature-dominat-
ing reason is necessarily self-defeating: the logic of causal
manipulation and self-subjection to external authority both inter-
nalize the conception of other as antagonist. Mastery knows only
one solution: domination and control. Because no other relation
to the natural other is possible, then even the state of peace per-
petuates the relation of hostility; peace and successful domination
are one; or rather, peace can only be envisaged as the coimplete
vanquishing of the other: peace and death are one.
For Hegel, the Abrahamic narrative is the embodiment and
fulfillment of the Noah portion of the logiic of mastery. What is
involved in subjecting oneself to a transcendent external author-
ity? Or, asking the same question from the opposing angle, what
in Abraham's actions reveals that they are the manifestation of a
•^vork of self-subjection to transcendent autliority? What, in Abra-
ham's actions, allows us to perceive in them, the perpetuation of
hostility? Hegel's answer to these questions depends on ^vindicat-
ing an ethical geometry of horizontal and vertical, in which the
horizontal and so immanent relations of love and life are dis-
placed, by a vertical relation to a projected externality. Horizon-
tal relations are internal; the vertical relation is (purportedly)
external. Because, again, there is no actual external authority but
only the self-subjecting stance of taking oneself to be so subject,
then the meaning of the vertical relation is realized through
what the attempt to secure it does to the horizontal relations of
love and life.
Hegel's initial gesture is to describe Abraham's project in the
neutral, wholly modern terms of seeking to becoming an
autonomious subject; he wanted to become "a wholly self-subsis-
tent, independent man, to be an overlord himself' (185). Since
autonomy is a worthwhile, indeed indispensable goal, Hegel can-
not condemn Abraham for adopting it. Rather, what is con-
400 SOCIAL RESEARCH

demned is not the goal, but the manner gmd form it takes in Abra-
ham. Eor Hegel, Abraham's action of tearing himself free of his
family, which may look like the normal mechanism necessary for
becoming autonomous, is carried out with an intolerable cold-
ness, and it is that coldness or indifference in the action that qual-
ifies its violence. ^^ Abraham tore himself free "without having
been injured or disowned, without the grief which after a wrong
or an outrage signifies love's enduring need, when love, injured
indeed but not lost, goes in quest of a new fatherland in order to
flourish and enjoy itself there." Abrahamic autonomy is to be dis-
tinguished from other emancipatory projects by its utter discon-
nection from the routine natural motives for such undertakings:
hurt, injury, loss, wound. Injury, so understood, occurs when
human intersubjective relations, what Hegel here calls love, go
wrong. Suffering wrong, where suffering is the base criterion for
wrongness, is the intelligible reason for wanting to free oneself
and set up new relations. Moral injury is an injury to the consti-
tutive relations with others; legitimate emancipation, then,
involves the realization of noninjurious relations. Hegel conceives
of the bonds of love as providing the baseline or modei for our
constitutive relation to others; crudely, in love we realize our-
selves, and so our standing for ourselves, through our relation to
the other. But this is to say that in love our relation to an other
mediates our relation to ourselves, and thus is a component of an
extended self-relation. Hegel's thought is that love is the condi-
tion for anything like moral injury, because I am dependent upon
the other, their loving regard, for my standing for myself, then
any interruption in that loving regard is an interruption in my
self-regard. Moral injury is injury to the internal constitutive rela-
tions between the self and its others. Because Hegel construes
love as the miodel for relations to others (otherwise, again, there
would be nothing that logically could, humanly, be injured), he
construes injury, the quest for emancipation, and the realization
of new noninjurious relations, as components of an internal logic
of love. The monstrous, self-defeating character of Abrahzim's act
 HEGEL'S CRITIQUE OF MORALITY 401

is that it renders empty all the good reasons one might have for
seeking to free oneself: "Abraham wanted not to love, wanted to
be free by not loving." This is the fundamental act of disidentifi-
cation^ with the intimate other that allows a logic of mastery to
intrude.
The fulfillment of the Noah strategy requires self-subjection to
ideal, external, authoritative norms of conduct. To found a nation
on this basis is to displace the internal norms of communal senti-
mentTOthmoral principle. To make moral principle constitutive
of one's relations to self and others requires the dissolution of
familial bonds and their extension to the tribe. So the story of
Abraham is a version of the story of the transformation from a
family-based social system to an independent political mode of
organization—the transformation that also lies behind a good
deal of Greek tragedy. In the Jewish case, on. Hegel's reading, it is
the radical discontinuity between the two forms of social organiza-
tion, familial and political, that is the source of the problem.
Abraham seeks to found a new nation at the behest of a purely
abstract ideal or norm, where it is presumed that what that means
is the utter rejection of the previous form of social bonding. The
issue, again, is not a matter of content, but its form. "The first act
which, made Abraham the progenitor of a nation is a disseverance
which snaps the bonds of comm.unal life and love." Abraham's
nation-founding act is the wholesale displacement of sentimental
attachment by law; or rather, since family cannot really disappear,
the mediation of what once were sentimental relations by the
demands of positive law. If the bonds of communal life and love
are now construed as the horizontal conditions that pro'vide for
the intelligibility in principle of human activity, of what counts as
injury and what not, of what grounds the quest for freedom and
what needs to be realized in such a quest, then in severing those
bonds as such Abraham has placed himself and t;he nation he
means to found in a position whereby each further act can only
make its agents ever more abject (199). This statement should be
construed literally: Abrahamic, and by extension Jewish agency.
402 SOCIAL RESEARCH

by pursuing a project premised on the repudiation of the condi-

tions that make human agency intelligible in principle, "love's
enduring need," incrementally destroy the physiognomy of their
practices as human, rendering the lives lived in terms of those
practices borderline, neither fully inside nor outside the human.
It is this notion of radical abjectness that Hegel has in mind when,
at the end of § i, he says that

the great tragedy of the Jewish people is no Greek tragedy;

it can rouse neither terror nor pity, for both of these arise
only out of the fate which follows from the inevitable slip of
a beautiful character; it can arouse horror alone. The fate
of the Jewish people is the fate of Macbeth who stepped out
of nature itself, clung to alien Beings, and so in their service
had to trample and slay everything holy in human nature,
had at last to be forsaken by his gods (since these were
objects and he their slave) and be dashed to pieces on his
faith itself (204-5).

Horror is a response to what appears as abject; the human

becomes abject when it steps "out of nature itself; in so doing, a
human sheds his or her human shape and appears as inhuman.
Such an appearance can arouse neither terror nor pity because it
is not an intelligible human fate, and hence not a fate with which
we can in principle identify. So when Hegel says of Abrahami that
he became a "stranger on earth, a stranger to the soil and to men
alike" (186), the being a stranger is more than a descriptive qual-
ity; its signifies Abraham becoming so unlike in kind to soil and
men that he is no longer one of them. Abraham, I am tempted to
say, is, for Hegel, ontologically a stranger, a stranger to what con-
stitutes the human.
The horror of Abrahamic agency is that it is not an internal
modification of human relations, a playing out of one of the
darker fates of what remains nonetheless a fully human life—how-
ever violent, however tragic, however self-defeating—^but rather a
repudiation of what makes relations between the self and others
 HEGEL'S CRITIQUE OE MORALITY 403

human relations. This is the burden of Hegel's interpretive track-

ing of the Abraham narrative: he must show, by redescription,
how, in severing the bonds of communal life and love as the real-
ization of the Noah strategy of mastery over nature, Abraham
comes to constitute himself and the nation he founds as ontolog-
icail strangers, as objects to whom our only response can be one of
horror. To say that tbe only response possible is horror is to claim
that it is a form of life that is not further transformable (187-8),
where the fact that it is not internally trans,formable provides the
premise to Jesus' intervention (205-6).
Because the bulk of Hegel's case turns on a comparison
between the Jewish and Christian understanding of transgression,
only two moments B,eed be mentioned as this juncture. The first
is Hegel's analysis of Judaic autonomy. On this account, one
becom.es autonomous by litei"ally making oneself independent in
principle from the worldly conditions of human action. To pursue
tills strategy a rigid duality must be set in place between the unity
of the idea! and all else; one must regulate one's actions by ideal
norms rather than by the demands of the things themselves.
Judaic autonomy, then, turns on the distinction ,between ithe intel-
ligible and the sensible:,no sensible thing, no love nor pain, no
pla,ce or person, no feeling or act, can be held of independent
worth or lodge a claim that would infringe on the authority of
principle. What is independent of the natural world gives mean-
ing to it. This requires that ideality be utterly non-natural, non-
sensible; hence, the idea ofa wholly invisible God (191), whose
name cannot be spoken,, with respect to who'm every image of him
counts as a rejection of his untouchable authority (192), and
because unseen, then necessarily "unfelt" (193). This is the ulti-
mate source of Hegel's claim that Judaic idealit)? involves a whole-
sale stepping out of nature. It is equally why, conversely, Hegel
appears to make truth a mode of beauty-—"truth is beauty intel-
lectually apprehended" ,(196)—and to consider "the spirit of
:beaTity" (200) the Moving force of reconciliation (206). Beauty
plays the pivotal role it does in this essay,because it stands for the
404 SOCIAL RESEARCH

normative element in and hence the normative authority of

nature-bound sensible experience not subject to the logic of mas-
tery. Beauty hence stands for the claim of the sensible as an inde-
pendent source of authority, as how the entwinement of fact and
norm is experienced.^'^
The radicalness of the distinction between sensible and intelli-
gible is what finally secures the authority of the vertical axis. It is
this duality of sensible and intelligible that is the source of both
the coldness of the law, and the perpetuation of hostility between
self and other in carrying it out: "The whole world Abraham
regarded as simply his opposite: if he did not take it to be a nul-
lity, he looked on it as sustained by the God who was alien to it.
Nothing in nature was supposed to have any part in God; every-
thing was simply under God's mastery" (187). From this perspec-
tive. Mosaic law giving simply sets in place, in stone, the
independence of the Jewish people from the life-world (191).
The transcendence of the Jewish God and the unconditionality of
Jewish law are two sides ofthe same coin.
Second, because nothing can count against the authority of
God, then the fact of God, his being, his being one, his being
the source of meaning, is not a truth apprehended but "a com-
mand" (196), a categorical imperative, an infinite demiand. In
making command prior to truth, one places it beyond the realm
of evidence and so rational criticism. It is the combination of
the radical separation of nature and ideality, on the one hand,
and the command structure of self-subjection on the other that
turns sentimental life into pathology. For Hegel the emblematic
episode in which this structure is realized is the near sacrifice of
Isaac. In this episode we find the paradigmatic playing out ofthe
contest between love and law; it is, of course, equally, the source
of Hegel's contention that the structure of Judaic lawfulness
involves, essentially, the severing ofthe bonds of love. For Hegel
it matters terribly that this is the one moment in the Abrahamic
narrative in which he is troubled, anxious, doubtful, in which
his "all-exclusive heart" (187) could be caused disquiet and
 HEGEL'S CRITIQUE OF MORALITY 405

depression. Abraham's hesitation is the marker that "love alone

was beyond his power"; Abraham naturally perceived in the per-
son of Isaac all his hopes for the future, his hopes for posterity
and the one kind of immortality he might have. But this is as
much to say that love is the counterclaim to the authority of
God. For that authority, however, nothing mundane can
count—the very thought Kierkegaard states as the "teleological
suspension of the ethical." For Hegel, the teieological suspen-
sion of tbe ethical is the truth of the positing of God; so Abra-
haBi can truly accept the authority of God only once he is willing
to make the sacrifice of his love. This makes sacrifice the type of
relation between the claims of mundane particulars against
God; practically, subsumption of the material world to the
authority of God is, precisely, the sacrifice of the particular to
the uaiversal; sacrifice is how the bonds of love and life are sev-
ered. Abraham achieves peace in accepting the necessit;!'' of sac-
rifice: "and his heart was quieted only through the certainty of
the feeling that this love was not so strong as to render him
unable to slay his beloved son with his own hand." The surest
evidence of faith is a quiet self-assurance in the act of murder—
and the more one loves the person to be murdered, the more
certain is the faith. Of course, God stays Abraham's hand; Isaac
lives. So Abraham and Isaac are still father and son, only now
their relation is mediated through God's command. Since the
meaning .of that mediation is nothing but the sacrifice Abraham
was willing to make, then, logically and motivationally the sacri-
fice was committed: from henceforth the father is always the law
of death and the son forever dead, (188).
If this all sounds like implausible 'materials for nation building,
one should recall their origin with Noah. This entire elaborate
mediation of relations between selves, and between the Jewish
nation and all other nations ("the horrible claim that He alone
was God and that this nation was the only one to have a god"
(188)), is motivated by fear of threatening nature, and the need
to master it. The desire for mastery becomes the desire for radi-
406 SOCIAL RESEARCH

cal autonomy, where the desire for autonomy is potentially satis-

fied by the subsumption and sacrifice of the claim of each and
every natural thing to the authority of transcendent being. It is
the complex of those fears and desires that are embodied in the
continual work of self-subjection, and it is hence further those
same passions that keep the work of self-subjection actual. Radi-
cal fear and the corresponding desire for mastery, and the chan-
neling of those into the desire for freedom and independence,
make plausible the attraction of such a form of life, even its
inevitability.

//. Modifications of Life: Ethics without Duty

By shading the meaning of the command structtire of Judaic

law in terms of its genealogical origin, Hegel intends that the very
idea of positive law should lose its natural appearance, that it
should come to appear as, precisely, a solution to the problem of
hostile nature, and hence as a historically conditioned and thus
particular strategy. It is an intelligible butfinallynot rational strat-
egy because the logic of mastery that is embedded in the concep-
tion of positive lawfulness reproduces the antagonism it was
meant to resolve. Not only does lawfulness reproduce the hostil-
ity, it exacerbates it by depriving all the particulars composing the
natural world of any intrinsic worth; it renders them all abject.
Abjection is the ultimate fate of the spirit of Judaism. In § ii and
§ iii Hegel seeks to deepen the account of the self-defeating char-
acter of positive law, which he is now going to claim is fully equiv-
alent to Kant's conception of the moral law—the law of reason as
constitutive of morality—by contrasting it with Jesus' immanent
ethic of reconciliation.
Hegel's initial gesture, and what he takes to be Jesus' initial ges-
ture, is simply to set the claims of human needs and wants against
religious commands in order to reveal, minimally, that no com-
mand can be absolute or unconditional, that circumstance must
 HEGEL'S CRITIQUE OF MORALITY 407

make a dijfference to the authority and validity of a command;

more radically, since the claim.s of need and want must be able to
condition the appropriateness and applicability of the law, then
they must be antecedent to the law, hence must pose a counter-
claim to it. So even for tiie Jews the "animal which falls into the
pit demands instant aid" (208) whether or not it is the Sabbath;
but this shows that "need cancels guilt." But if need can trump
law, then although a particular urgency can make the claim of
need vivid, the claim does not depend on the urgency but on the
need. Jesus and his disciples show general contempt for the Sab-
bath, plucking the ears of corn to satisfy their hunger even
though that hunger might have been satisfied ottierwise. Tbeir
contempt for 'the law is meanl to reveal its arbitrariness and
absurdity in the face of even the most simple natural need: "The
satisfaction of the commonest human want rises superior to
actions like these [religious ones], because there lies directly in such a
want the sensing or the preserving of a human being, no matter how
empty his being may be" (207; emphasis added). Natural need
and want in themselves, spontaneously and automatically,
"directly" raise an. ethical claim deserving of being satisfied inde-
pendently of the moral worth of the individual whose need it is,
thus raising a counterclaim to Eant's idea that happiness (the sat-
isfaction of natural desires) ought to be distributed in proportion
to virtue (as if only the truly virtuous deserve feeding when hun-
gry). If one fails, to recognize her hunger as the sort of state of
affairs one responds to by satisfying it, giving food, one has not
recogni2ed her. Hegel begins here because the caise of natural
need and want answers directly to the Judaic emptying of nature
of any intrinsic worth. Jesus' generai drift is to "lift nature" (208),
to shoW; that nature is "holier than the temple."
To urge that natural needs and wants directly raise an ethical
claim is to say that recognizing a state as one of need or want is
to recognize it as a state demanding of satisfaction; satisfying the
need is the internal correlative of perceiving it as a need. Needs just
are things for which the appropriate response is to satisfy them;
408 SOGIAL RESEARCH

failing to do so, assuming one is in a position to help and there

are no competing claims, is to fail to recognize them as needs.
The demandingness of needs is of kind that does not require
anything "oughtish" in order to justify acting on the demand.
Perhaps one could say that it is part of logical grammar of need
statements that the appropriate response to the perception of a
need is satisfying it.^^ This slightly torturous way of expressing
Hegel's thesis is intended to open on to his critique of morality
as general laws that ought to be obeyed. He thinks there is some-
thing fundamentally corrupt about the very idea that there are
things we ought to do, that the ought structure of morality ("One
ought to keep one's promises"; "Thou shalt not kill"; etc.) is
inseparable from the Judaic idea of God and law, and hence that
the ought structure of morality is a perpetuation of hostility
against the other. But those critical theses will only carry weight
if Hegel can at least make plausible the idea that there is hori-
zontal ethical logic, a logic of love and its renunciation, the logic
of a causality of fate, that can operate independent of the verti-
cal demands of morality.
"Since laws," Hegel states, "are unifications of opposites in a
concept, which thus leaves them as opposite while it exists itself in
opposition to reality, it follows that the concept expresses an
ought" (209). By saying a law involves a unification of opposites,
he means that it brings together an action and its prohibition (or
the negation of its prohibition): of the act of killing, do not do
it; of making a promise, do not break it. Since a law just is this
unifying of opposites, the killing and the not doing it, then it
must leave its elements as opposites. A unification of opposites
can occur only in a concept, not in reality; hence a law necessar-
ily stands outside, in opposition to, reality. It is because the logi-
cal form of law involves this double structure of opposition that
laws stand as oughts.
Hegel contends that there are a variety of ways in which the
opposition of law to life, the oughtishness of laws, can be sus-
tained; for example, by becoming a civil law decreed by the state
 HEGEL'S CRITIQUE OF MORALITY 409

(and therefore having the coercive power of the state behind it)
or as God's fiat. However, the deepest and most seductive version
of positivity occurs when the opposition is secured through the
form of law; that is, through obligatoriness being the corollary or
consequent of a law being universal, or universalizable in the
Kantian sense. For Kant the only unconditionally good thing in
the world is a good will. What makes a good will good uncondi-
tionally, absolutely, is not what it wills, which is always something
particular and therefore empirical and contingent, but how it
wills—where the how, if it does not refer to an explicit content,
must refer to form.. The form is that of universality. For the
maxim of my action to be moral (either fulfilling what I ought to
do or, minimally, not contrary to what I ought to do), it must be
universalizable, one that could in principle be a maxim of action
for everyone. So, familiarly enough, the maxim of breaking
promises as convenient cannot be universalized because if every-
one acted on it then soon enough no one would trust others and
the practice of promising would break down altogether. The con-
tradiction Kant is concerned with lies not in this consequence,
but in tlie fact that ray maxim, of promise breaking as convenient
presupposes the continuing viability of the institution of promis-
ing; hence, I am committed to universalizing at the same time
boththa.t. eveiyone keep their promises and that everyone break
their promises as convenient. Logically, this just is a co^ntradic-
tioB; morally what it shows is that in acting on a nonuniversaliz-
abie maxim I am making an exception in my own case, or, what
is the same, free riding on the good will of everyone else. To be
Kandanly immoral is to be a moral parasite.
Regel concedes that universality does overcom^e the abstract
positmty of civil law (at its worst) and divine fiat because com-
mand here is "something subjective, and, as subjective, as a prod-
uct of a human power (i.e., of reason as the capacity for
uiiiversalit)O, it loses its objectivity, its positivity, its heteronomy,
and the thing commanded is revealed as grounded in an auton-
omy of the human vnll" (210-11). Hegel's notion of positivity in
410 SOCIAL RESEARCH

the "Spirit" essay can now be recognized as a version of Kant's

notion of heteronomy. Having conceded that Kant's conception
of universality as a product and form of rational self-determina-
tion is an advance on the sheer positivity of civil and divine law,
Hegel nonetheless wants to urge that it contains an intrinsic
moment of heteronomy itself. The issue here is complex since the
very thing Kant believes is the great achievement of the moral
law—namely, the way in which it secures the wholesale indepen-
dence of reason from the dictates of nature—is equally what
Hegel regards as its indelible positivity, its ultimate heteronomy.
At this juncture, the force of Hegel's claim depends on its
genealogical setting: we comprehend the meaning and character
of the universality of moral reason by comprehending it as an
internalization of the command structure of lawfulness
bequeathed by Judaic law into Western reason generally and, in
particular, into its conception of political rule. This is the source
of Hegel's contention that the difference between the European
prelate who rules church and state and the man who listens to the
command of duty is not that "the former make themselves slaves,
while the latter is free, but that the former have their lord outside
themselves, while the latter carries his lord in himself, yet as the
same time is his own slave" (211). Hegel can see nothing in Kant-
ian universality other than a punishing superego whose appear-
ance as an ego ideal is the ultimate source of its power to punish.
It is punishing because rational universality secures the ultimate
separation of particular and universal, the separation which,
genealogically, is to be understood in terms of the logic of mas-
tery: "For the particular—impulses, inclinations, pathological
love, sensuous experience, or whatever else it is called [by
Kant]—the universal is necessarily and always something alien
and objective." Since, again, on one level, this is exactly what Kant
is claiming to be the authority' of the moral law, namely, that it
confers rational meaning on the naturally given, then the objec-
tion must lie, in the first instance, in coming to see the moral law
as a progeny of the history of mastery: the moral law continues
 HEGEL'S CRITIQUE OF MORALITY 411

the history of mastering nature, making the realization of moral-

ity simultaneously a formation of self-renunciation. Exactly like
Nietzsche later, Hegel perceives the moral la.w as a slave morality
that opposes to life an abstract ideal that is in realitj^^ a product of
life, where the opposition between law and life is logically equiva-
lent to the duality between (rational) universality and (sensuous)
particularity. Even when a desire is compatible with the moral law
the separation or duality between universality and particular
remains: when I am disposed to act benevolently, it is not my dis-
position that is the ground of my action but the fact that said
(pathological) disposition satisfies the general obligation to aid
those in distress. The law confers reason-giving force on the dispo-
sition that, on its own,,is (rationally) empty.

III. A Logical Grammar ofLcwe

While Hegel's genealogical account might be sufficient to

demonstrate the remnant positivity of moral rationality, and even
sufficient to reveal how that positivity is, as a form of mastery, self-
destructive, its contention that moral reason is irrational is not
yet complete; to make that charge stick requires that there be a
\iable alternative to moral reason. The alternative offered by the
spirit of Jesus involves a further internalization, an internalization
that through realizing or fulfilling, the law annuls its remnant
positivity; this idea of a radical internalization is meant to wed
the work of Luthe,ran inwardness, inwardization, to Aristotelian
virtu,e. What would fulfill the law of benevolence, love of thy
neighbor, would not be a command but an "is," "a modification
of life, a modification which is exclusive and therefore restricted
only if looked at in reference to its object" (212). If in the Eant-
ian scheme the relation between law and case is that of universal
to particular that leaves both nonetheless separate, in the ,Chris-
tiae scheme the relation of the virtuous disposition to love thy
neighbor to loving this neighbor is one of potentiality to actual-
412 SOCIAL RESEARCH

ity—or to use Hegel's own language here, borrowed from Baum-

garten, fulfillment is the '"complement of possibility,' since pos-
sibility is the object of something thought, as a universal, while
'is' is the synthesis of subject and object, in which the subject and
object have lost their opposition" (214). For the virtuous dispo-
sition, the particular is all occasion and opportunity for satisfac-
tion. As Knox correctly claims in a footnote (212), Hegel
perceives love as modification of life (that is, of the whole self),
and hence not a portion of the self taking command over
another portion. Hegel's consistent language here is that of
"modification": love is a modification of life; reconciliation is a
modification of love; the virtues are, collectively, modifications
love. Although Hegel does not elaborate his notion of modifica-
tion, the intuitive idea, which almost certainly is based on the
Spinozist conception of modes, is that a living individual
expresses his or her self in a variety of attitudes, dispositions, and
actions. Each such disposition is an expression, an articulation
and formation, of the whole self, in which the self both expresses
and realizes itself. As simply expression and realization, a state of
the self just "is" the self in one of its formations. The command
form becomes superfluous because there is nothing of the self
there for it to be opposed to, no source of resistance or recalci-
trance; but once the form of command becomes superfluous in
this way, then it is destroyed since as form it presupposes an
opposition between itself and inclination.
Anger and hate and hurt and revulsion and despair and
resentment can also be modifications of life and love. Negative
emotions have a role in life, and can indeed provide the motiva-
tion for worthwhile ends, such as the emancipatory project of
seeking a new life and the founding of a new state (the "endur-
ing need of love" Abraham lacked); from the standpoint of rec-
onciliation, a negative emotion can also be a crime (216). What
distinguishes all these cases for Hegel is that in them my life is
already internally bound to the life of the other, that there is pre-
supposed an equality between me and the other, and that my
 HEGEL'S CRITIQUE OF MORALITY 413

reaction is a further working out, unfolding, or elaboration, a

further determination of our indefinitely determinable life
together. What Hegel is thus opposing is the idea that our rela-
tions with others, all others, be conceived of as relations with
objeets whose weal and woe are extrinsic to our internal self-rela-
tion. Hegel is not denying that the very point of Kant's moral
law—-Ms idea that we ought to treat others as ends-in-them-
selves—is to make our moral worthiness contingent upon our
treatment of others. His objection is not to the intention, but the
form it talc.es: when the authority of the rooral depends upon a
imiversal forever logically and ontologically independent of all
concrete particulars, then others as concrete particulars become
ancillar)' to my relation to the law itself; others are m^re occasions
for an individual to further enact her obedience to the transcen-
dent authority of the moral law; her worthiness or unworthiness
is, finally, a private matter between her will and the authority of
the ia,w. Formally, Abraham's God-mediated sacrificial relation to
Isaac genealogically becomes the relation between the Kantian
good will and its other.
L,ove as a modification of life, the notion of our life together,
that which gets indefinitely worked and reworked, fotmed,
deformed and reformed, is itself modeled upon the love relation
that is one of its modes. At this juncture, life is conceived on anal-
ogy 'wth love, of love in its unconscious form, while the relation
of lovers to one another is conceived in organic terms ("each sep-
arate iover is one organ in a living whole") (308). That Hegel pre-
supposes a discourse of love here can seem as both fateful and
embarrassing. The embarrassment can be curtailed, at least some,
ifwe focus on the logical form of love rather than its precise affec-
tive character. FuUBllment, I suggested earlier, should be con-
ceived along the lines of intemalization; hence, the general idea
of the universal being absorbed into the self and inclination law-
fully articulated yields life as a thoroughgoing synthesis of law and
inclination, where synthesis is understood not as an external artic-
iilati,oii ,of subject (universal) to object (particular), but a condi-
414 SOCIAL RESEARCH

tion in which their opposition is lost (214). Hence, we have

Hegel's formula that "the correspondence of law and inclination
is life and, as the relation of differents to one another, love" (215).
In acts of love, "inclination (desire, what I desire most), and law
(say the demand that I regard the other as an end in him-or-her-
seU", and thus take her ends to be my ends)," are synthesized. But
this is equivalent to claiming that in love the other is my end; she
is the unconditioned object of my desire, hence is the worth of my
life as such. In loving the worth of my life, so to speak, is realized
in the worth of the other who is separate from me.
As Jean-Luc Nancy eloquently states the idea, love, in all its
forms, always poses itself as that which is not self-love (Nancy, 1991:
94).^^ Love is always experienced as the immediate abrogation of
self-love, of what, spontaneously and all unannounced and unin-
tended, ruptures the egoism of desire. ^^ Love dispossesses the self
from itself, sends the self outside itself till the point where it finds
itself lodged in the beloved; being so separated from itself, being
so bound to the other, is phenomenologically manifested in the
experience of finding one's own weal and woe, one's own capac-
ity for flourishing and vulnerability to hurt, as bound to the other,
both with respect to the other's capacity for flourishing and vul-
nerability to hurt (when the other flourishes, I flourish; when my
other hurts, I hurt), and with respect to the other's regard for me.
If Kant supposes that the deepest and most significant aspect of
the experience of the moral law is that it ruptures my self-love,
then Hegel's counter is that such rupturing is naturally experi-
enced in love, and thus that the moral law can only be a reified,
denaturalized form of what properly belongs my loving relation
with (all) others.
The second logical aspect of love, according to Nancy, is that
"love is the extreme movement, beyond the self, of a being reach-
ing completion. . . . Philosophy always thinks love as an accom-
plishment, arriving at a final and definitive completion" (Nancy,
1991: 86). If the idea of love posing itself as not self-love repre-
sents the moral aspect of love, the idea of love as completing or
 HEGEL'S CRITIQUE OF MORALITY 415

satisfying or fulfilling oneself in and through the other, of the

other as the moment of one's subsistence, is the logical/philo-
sophical claim of love: love as the figure of philosophical truth. In
the fragment "Love," Hegel parses this thought by comparing the
limitations of the understanding, which is always a unit)? of oppo-
sites left as opposites (that is, nothing more than the joining of a
subject and predicate: S is P), and reason, which claims all deter-
mining power for itself, to love. "Love," he contends, "neither
restricts nor is restricted; it is not finite at a l l . . . in love, life is pre-
sent as a duplicate of itself and a single and unified self. Here life
has run through the circle of development from an immature to
a completely mature unity" (304-5). This is the first glimmer of
the Hegelian idea of an immanent infinite, together with the idea
that such an infinite is the result of a development sequence. The
crux of this conception of the infinite, and so of completion, is
that it is the dissolution of the opposition between self and other,
so a finding of oneself in the other. From one perspective, the
logic of completion looks thoroughly teleological: the other is my
end; however, there is a different angle of vision possible. .Aissume
that the other stands for the absolute limit of my powers, that the
freedom or autonomy or separateness of the other from me
stands for what is ultimately separate from me (because her free-
dom is logically independent from my freedom: it can be domi-
nated, coerced, manipulated, but as freedom it always escapes
me); and, simultaneously, the other's independence from me
entails that her desires are intrinsically different from rny own
even when, coincidentally, the two overlap. The other's freedom
is the absolute limit of my freedom, and the other's desires as
what restrict and deny the authority of my desires. This is, of
course, just the Hobbesian version of the relation between, myself
and others that Kant inherits. Seen in this way, the claim that love
rehearses a logic of compietion is an extended and radicalized
version of Kant's founding insight, the insight that firet enables a
wholly immanent conception of se'lf and world, that the Emits of
experience are its condition of possibility; the logic of love trans-
416 SOGIAL RESEARCH

forms Kantian subjective idealism into an objective or infinite

idealism. Once the self's relation to the world is bound to its rela-
tion to others, and those others become both limits (as separate
from the self) and its conditions of possibility (as what provides
for the very possibility of self-relation), then there remains no
absolute limit, no restriction, no perspective outside the ongoing
exchange between self and others that could be relevant to it. But
this is all that is meant by objective, infinite idealism; idealism is
the logic of love actualized as the logic of experience in general.
According to Nancy, there is a third aspect to the logical fonn
of love, namely, that its rupturing of self-love is a fracturing ofthe
self that is never quite surmounted or sublated.

Love re-presents the I to itself broken (and this is not a rep-

resentation). It presents this to it: he, this subject, was
touched, broken into, in his subjectivity, and he is from
then, for the time of love, opened by this slice, broken or
fractured, even if only slightly. He is, which is to say that the
break or wound is not an accident, and neither is it a prop-
erty that the subject could relate to himself. For the break
is a break in his self-possession as subject; it is, essentially, an
interruption of the process of relation of oneself to oneself
outside of oneself. From then on, / is constituted broken
(Nancy, 1991:9).

Nancy's whole way of setting up and articulating this thesis is

intended as a critique of both Hegel's early conception of com-
pletion through love as well as his later conception of sublation,
canceling and preserving at a higher level, which is his phenome-
nological re-inscription of the logic of love. To say that the I is
constituted as broken is to urge that there is a wound or rupture
that does heal, that remains exposed and vulnerable. If love
involves our indefinite exposure to the other, and hence a limit-
less vulnerability, if love constitutes our moral irijurability, our
injurability as human, then there is in love something that cannot
be conceived of as completion and satisfaction. The condition of
 HEGEL'S CRITIQUE OF MOF^LITY 417

satisfaction through the other is always, simultaneously, a satisfac-

tion forever ruined; my completion in and through the other is
always also my incompletion, my brokenness. And, to be sure, in
the fragment "Love" Hegel desperately, which is to say, romanti-
cally, attempts to conceive of all limitation as external, so that
even death is inconsequential, m^ereiy external, to the immortal-
ity of love represented by the child (305-8). The "Spirit" essay,
however, implicitly contains a darker moment, one that is pivotal
for the formation of the project of the Phenomenology.

TV. The Causality of Fate:

Transgression and the Critique of Punishment

When Hegel says that over "against the positivit)^ of the Jews,
Jesus set man" (224), I take it he means by this curious claim that
morality does not concern what we ought to do or what deter-
mines or provides some ultimate justification for our actions, but
rather elaborates who we are, hence what we are willing to take
responsibility for, what we are answerable for, hence where we
stand with respect to our others and what we construe their posi-
tion with respect to us to come to (what claims they have upon us
and hence, again, what we are answerable for). To say tooi much
too quickly, by putting man in place of law, Hegel means that in
those places where questions of morality seem most urgent, when
we are called upon to justify an action or nonaction, what is at
state is not the validity of morality as such or the ultimate source
of its authority or, what is the same, the extent of its authoritjr over
our doings but, just and only, "the nature or quality of our rela-
tionship to one another" (Cavell, 1979: 268). This is not to desub-
liniate morality into the human, to reduce a transcendent
morality to a merely human one, but rather to change the topic,
tO' suggest that the very idea of morality as a set of ultimately
authoritative norms governing hum.an action is mistaken about its
meaning and scope; morality as law displaces responsibility for
418 SOCIAL RESEARCH

the quality of human relationships from the web of commitments

and undertakings through which we elaborate how we stand with
respect to one another into subject-transcendent norms and laws.
Changing the topic is not meant to make morality weaker or less
authoritative than it is in the morality system, but rather to give it
another aspect altogether—to expose the actuality of its mun-
dane, albeit every bit as demanding, content: the nature and qual-
ity of our relationship to one another. Ethical discourse,
including moral argument, is the means of making explicit for
ourselves and for the other what this comes to and what is to done
about it, so who I am and must be in my relations to others if I am
to sustain what I take to be my fundamental commitments and
ideals. Norms, commitments, responsibilities, values and the
desires and emotions that accompany or reveal these are all inter-
nal ingredients through which we articulate where we are in the
unfolding story of our life together—a story of selves lost or
found, dejected or elated, sustained or spurned, imprisoned or
free, foiling or flourishing, needy or needed, indifferent or car-
ing. Everything turns on where we are with respect to one
another, how we respond or fail to do so, and there is nothing else
for either self or other that ethically matters.
The test case Hegel employs to demonstrate this thesis is how
we understand and what we do with trespass (crime, vice, offense,
transgression). For the purposes of this argument, Hegel is going
to construe criminal justice as moral justice writ large: criminal
justice makes explicit and formal, gives institutional shape to,
what transpires informally in routine occurrences of (deontic)
immorality since, formally, both are structures of law. Hegel's neg-
ative thesis is that criminal justice has only one response to tres-
pass: punishment. To comprehend the meaning of punishment
for criminal justice encapsulates, while rendering vivid, the mLean-
ing of law itself since punishment completes the claim of law by
revealing its jurisdiction over those actions that most emphatically
deny it. Punishment represents the authority of the law in just
those cases where its authority has been defied, its claims to being
 HEGEL'S CRITIQUE OF MORALITY 419

authoritative abrogated. Punishment, Hegel is going to claim, is

the fullest revelation of both the fact that moral lawfulness is a
logic of mastery and domination whose fulfillment is death, and,
consequently, that law is dependent upon the very life-world, the
lives of living agents, that it necessarily seeks to separate itself
from (all the better to rule).
In a sense, Hegel considers th,e punishments rendered by penal
justice are a tortured concession by law that there is nothing it can
humanly do to respond to trespass; that punishment is not so
much a human response to transgression, but what we do when
BO further human response is possible. Punishment is the form of
respoBse to trespass that is the severing of response. Why? At the
center of the puzzle is the absolute separation between ttie uni-
versality of the law, its eternal authority, and the action that defies
it. Formally, 'ihese two belong to ontologically distinct domains:
law belongs forever to the intelligible, oughtish world of reason,
while the crim^inal act belongs to the sense world of particularity
that is. Act and law are connected to one another—the act breaks
the law, denies it—and yet sepairate. Hegel's contenti,on is that all
that punishment accomplishes is the solidification of the separa-
ti.oii of the criminal from the law: his imprisonment or death
makes factual ("linked with life and clothed with might" [226])
the separation that the criminal act itself announced: "The law
has been broken by the trespasser; its content no longer exists for
him, he has canceled it. But the form of the law, universality, pur-
sues him and clings to his trespass; his deed becomes universal,
and the right which he has canceled is also canceled for him.
Thus the law remains, and a punishment, Ms desert, remains."
Following Kant, Hegel construes each human action as legislative:
to do X is, at the same time, to implicitly claim that I am entitled
to do X, that X is right, hence doing X is la,wfuL To commit a
criminal act is to pose a law that cancels the existing law. If obe-
dience is a condition for right, then in breaking the law one puts
oneself outside right; the lawbreaker must lose his rights, must be
punished, otherwise his action would replace the authority of
420 SOCIAL RESEARCH

given law with the law announced in his action. This is what Hegel
means when he says that "punishment lies directly in the
offended law" (225).
It is the fact that "punishment is inevitably deserved . . .
inescapable" (226) that raises the problem. While punishment is
always both necessary and deseired, its execution is not since it is
always something contingent and particular. ^^ On the face of it, it
looks plausible to say that we can resist prosecuting the offense,
or even pardon the criminal. But from the perspective of law and
justice itself, these options are not consistently and truly available
since they "do not satisfy justice, for justice is unbending; and so
long as laws are supreme, so long as there is no escape from them,
so long must the individual be sacrificed to the universal, i.e., be
put to death." Because the criminal action is particular and yet
legislative, it represents a standing denial of the authority of the
law. Because the criminal has negated the rights of all others,
then until his claim to right (the legislative character of his act) is
canceled, the affront remains. Hegel's bald thesis here is that
nothing less than canceling the criminal's position as active-legislator will,
in actuality, restore the authority of the law itself Every act that
emphatically breaks the law necessarily undermines lawfulness as
such by canceling its authority. Hence, "if there is no way of mak-
ing the action undone, if its reality is eternal [in supplanting the
law], then no reconciliation is possible, not even through suffer-
ing punishment" (227). Suffering pumshment does nothing with
respect to the cancellation of the law involved in the offense. Only
the removal of the legislative authority of the criminal, the
authority rightfully possessed only through obedience, can
restore the authority of the law. The death penalty is not one
option among others; it belongs to the very being of law. What
Hegel claimed was paradigmatic in the relation of Abraham and
Isaac, comes to realization in penal justice: the sacrifice of the
individual to the universal, his death, is the truth of law. ^^
It is worth lingering on this thought for just a moment. Hegel's
complaint is that at the heart of morality there is a terrible moral-
 HEGEL'S CRITIQUE OF MORALITY 421

ism. The only thing morality can do with transgression is to judge

it, or rather, judgment is the internal corollary of the fact &at for
morality transgression is the negation of the law, and as such puts
the violator of the law outside the binding terms of human
engagement. So we might say the very act of transgression calls
do^vn upon itself a judgment, where every judgment is the per-
ception of the violator of law as excluding herself from the con-
ditions that regulate interaction in general. Judgment is the
communal recapitulation of the seUnexclusion originally accom-
plished by the transgressive-legislative deed. This is the viLolence
and moralism ofjudgment, what makes moral judgment a moral-
ism; every moral judgment says "Guiltj'I" and in so saying
announces the penalty of death. Which is why it is appropriate to
think of what is transpiring here as Hegel's critique of traditional
morality rather than, merely, Eant's moral philosophy. Hegel's
perceives in Kant's theory only the exacerbation of 'the moralism
that all morality—as a system of binding laws or principles or
norms or commandments—has been. Morality so understood is
nothing other than judgment and death, making each of us
transgressive beings for it, only dead men walking.
Punishment as fate, Hegel contends, is quite different in kind
to the operation of penal law. I have been claiming that Hegel's
ethical project involves a generai shift of orientation, a changing
of the topic of morality from the question of law and obedience,
vertical morality, to the quality an.d nature of our relationship
with one another, horizontal morality. Within horizontal ethical
life there is no fundamental cleavage between universal and par-
ticular; trespass here cannot be described in terms of the particu-
lar slave defying the authority of his uniA^ei^al master (229); within
united life nothing original appears as intrinsically other or alien.
The following sddkes me as among the most powerful and moving
passages in Hegel's corpus:

Only through a departure from united life which is neither

regulated by law nor at variance with law, only through the
422 SOCIAL RESEARCH

killing of life, is something alien produced. Destruction of

life is not the nullification of life but its diremption, and the
destruction consists in its transformation into an enemy. . . .
The illusion of trespass, its belief that it destroys the other's
life and thinks itself enlarged thereby, is dissipated by the
fact that the disembodied spirit of the injured life comes on
the scene against the trespass, just as Banquo who came as
a friend to Macbeth was not blotted out when he was mur-
dered but immediately thereafter took his seat, not as a
guest at the feast, but as an evil spirit. The trespasser
intended to have to do [away] with another's life, but he has
only destroyed his own, for life is not different from life,
since life dwells in a single Godhead. In his arrogance he
has destroyed indeed, but only the friendliness of life; he
has perverted life into an enemy (229).

Entangled in this passage are both the depth of Hegel's vision and
the fragility of its metaphysical presuppositions. If, horizontally, in
ethical life we are dynamically bound together, sharing a life, then
in destroying the other I am doing more than simply destroying
another, although I am certainly doing that; I am at the same time
disrupting the very conditions that sustain the life of each. The
proper description of my destruction is that it undermines the
thick web of life-world conditions that make my own life possible;
there is in my act, not a nullification of life as such, since life is
always shared and joined, but its diremption, the ruining of the
friendliness of life (what makes united life an enabling condition
of possibility), and the making of it into an enemy. Diremption,
ruining the friendliness of life, making life an enemy, are the
terms Hegel opts for in place of law breaking or disobedience.
Trespass transforms the quality and nature of our life together.
Since united life is the baseline, then this destruction of it need
not even assurae evil intention: innocent trespass (Oedipus [232-
3])^' and evil trespass (Macbeth) can equally disrupt united life,
unleashing the avenging fates.
 HEGEL'S CRITIQUE OF MORALITY 423

In speaking of punishm^ent as fate, Hegel contends that trans-

gressive actions are consequential for our ongoing experience of
ourselves in relation to others. Fate stands for a logic of action
and reaction, the coming-to-be of the experience of life as hostile
and an enemy. Fate signals the return of repressed life. In classi-
cal tragedy, the avenging fates return in the form of an extended
logic of unintended actions having the consequence of, literally,
bringing down the life of their perpetrator; in modem tragedy, it
is the experience of guilt and suffering by the evildoer that rep-
resents the return of dirempted life—my guilty conscience just
the ghost of the other haunting me. For the purpose of exempli-
fication, assume that the notion of united life is represented by
tbe notioK of a general condition of trust between me and rny oth-
ers. Assume further, pace Hobbes, that the condition of general
trust cannot intelligibly be a consequence of the knowledge of
each that every other knows that the consequence of trespass will
be punishment; this is implausible because, first, such knowledge
is not trust but merely a calculation by each of every other's cal-
culation of the likelihood of detection; and second, external
threat of detection and punishment does not reach far enough
into the fine-grained detail of everyday life in which the necessity
of trust is operative. General trust by each of all its others is one
aspect of united life, its friendliness. Transgressive actions come
to matter to the continuing experience of my relation to others:
if I have destroyed the grounds of trust between me and my oth-
ers because I know that / cannot be trusted, how might I trust
them? If trusting them is impossible, then my every action will be
riddled with anxiety since there is nothing I can count on. Anxi-
ety here is just guilt deferred. On this account, the experience of
guilt is not a consequence of law breaking, but rather of disrupt-
ing the conditions of my active life with others. Hegel, then, must
be assuming that guilt and conscience are not, or at least not only
or not best understood as artifacts of a repressive psycholog)^ of an
internalized, punishing superego, but rather the actual coming to
awareness of how my life of action is internally bouB.d to tlie life
424 SOCIAL RESEARCH

of others, and how my transgressive action has severed those con-

ditions of possible action.
Anxiety and guilt are my experience of being caught within the
toils of fate. While fate appears as simply a direct consequence of
another's deed, this is not quite so. Trespass is an occasion of fate,
not its hydraulic cause; what really produces fate, Hegel claims, "is
the manner of receiving and reacting against the other's deed"
(233). Fate is not a mechanical consequence of trespass; that is
merely the external perception of it, the one bequeathed by
Greek tragedy; rather fate is my awareness and response to what
has been done, it is a form of reaction and response in which I
come to awareness of my answerability for my doings, and thus a
further elaboration of the deed itself. Putting the matter this way
is equally to say that guilt as fate is both a component in and my
awareness of the quality and nature of my relationship with oth-
ers. Hegel continues: "The fate in which the man senses what he
has lost creates a longing for lost life. This longing . . . recognizes
what has been lost as life, as what was once its friend, and this
recognition is already an enjoyment of life" (231). Suffering guilt
is my acknowledgement of my answerability for what I have done;
because with guilt I locate myself within life, as lost and desired,
my acknowledgement of answerability is simultaneously my accep-
tance of life as the condition of my action, hence "an enjoyment
of life." In brief, each moment in this unfolding of my trespass
reveals itself to be but a modification of life and nothing more.
Finally, because trespass is here a modification of life, then the
way is opened to further modifications: on the part of the trans-
gressor: confession, apology, repentance, reparation; on the part
of his others: forgiveness (236).^* In place ofthe restoration of
the law that requires the death of the trespasser, fate announces
the sensing of life by life; reconciliation, which here represents all
those modes of activity in which the friendliness of life is sought
and accomplished, thus tokens the general possibility that the fact
of transgression is not final, and hence that the restoration of the
friendliness of life is possible: "And life can heal its wounds again;
 HEGEL'S CRITIQUE OF MOEALITY 425

the severed, hostile life can return into itself again and annul the
bungling achievement of a trespass, can annul the law and the
punishment" (230). The toils of fate involve an agent becoming
sensitive to what he has done, so coming to feel differently about
it, and as a consequence necessarily coming to redescribe the
nexus of self and context differently. Feeling differendy and
appreciating differently are thus intertwined. The movement of
this intertwining, as the work of love, may be described as conver-
sion or transformation. What underwrites this notion is Hegel's
gesture of distinguishing between action and agent. Within the
morality system, an action is a permanent cancellation of the law;
there is no space available to consider the agent apart from the
obedience or disobedience of what is done. In fate, an action is
both a doing, something done, and an expression of the standing
of the agent wth respect to others. Ethical life conceives of
actions always along a double register, as doings with consequences,
and as expressions of ethical subjectivity. Actions are events and
expressions; they are both these things, however, only through
the transformation tiiat poses acdon as a moment within united
life in which affective response and cognitive appreciation are
fully and irrevocably entangled. This is how, finally, horizontal
ethicality comes to be the leading edge for the comprehension of
objectivity?; no adequate appreciation of what is the case, objectiv-
ity, is possible outside consideration: of how an individual is affec-
tively attuned to it. Objectivity without affective salience is empty,
while salience without objectivity is blind.

V. Transgression: Concluding Unscientific Postscript

Soon after writing the "Spirit" essay, Hegel becam,e aware that
its account of united life illegitimately depended on a concep-
tion of society as having the qualities of small-scale religious
communities: a romantic envisionment of Gemeinschaftlich com-
munal life. Adam Smith taught Hegel that societies could be
426 SOCIAL RESEARCH

bound together in relationships of mutual dependency in ways

quite other than communal sharing; and that further, such
modern societies acknowledged a place for the independence
of individuals from one another that communal life could not
tolerate. Without question, it was these thoughts that led Hegel
to seek to reconstruct his first account of ethical life in the
more complex and robust terms of recognition and spirit. Yet,
I think there is a hint of something else occurring even in the
"Spirit" essay.
At the conclusion of section III in response to Nancy's argu-
ment that the logical form of love contains an element of unsur-
passable brokenness, I claimed that there was implicit a darker
moment in the account of the causality of fate that was responsive
to that claim. What I had in mind were sentences such as, on the
one hand, "finally, love completely destroys objectivity and
thereby annuls and transcends reflection, deprives man's oppo-
site of all foreign character" (305); and, on the other, "Only
through the departure from that united life . . . is something alien
produced" (229); or "The trespass which issues from life reveals
the whole, but as divided, and the hostile parts can coalesce again
into the whole" (232). The first sentence fragment states that love
cancels objectivity, reflection, foreignness; but this images our
relations with others as one that is all but unconscious, as lacking
all the ingredients ofjudgment, discernment, reflective consider-
ation that are routine elements of everyday interactions. At this
juncture, it is almost as if Hegel is unable to consider even the
simplest reflective articulations of experience as other than forms
of alienation and defect. And while he does not truly believe this
to be the case or intend us to so construe him, he seems forced to
it by conceiving of love as compietion, or, to make his borrowing
from Holderlin here clear, "Pure life is being' (254).^^
If we take the two opposing statements at face value, they con-
tain a disturbing message: they suggest that only in the light of a
transgressive action can an aspect of united life be revealed as a
distinct and separate element of it; and further, only in the light
of a transgressive action can the whole of united life appear as a
 HEGEL'S CRITIQUE OF MORALITY 427

whole having a claim upon its component parts. In brief, trans-

gressive action appears to be a necessary condition for ethical self-con-
sciousness. Since in Hegel ethical self-consciousness is a result of a
development sequence, then we could equally say that he is here
beginning his insistence that all consciousness formation occurs
through transgressive action, that criminalit)' is indeed the model
for consciousness formation in general, and, since consciousness
forraation is just what he thinks spiritual history to be, tlien his-
tory is the work of transgressive deeds.^*^ From this perspective,
transgressive action is not a locai interruption within an otherwise
harmonious, organic, functioning whole; what makes the organic
model inadequate—and Nancy's vision of shattered love true but
sentimental, and Smith's invisible hand a subject-transcendent
but nonetheless fortuitously happy mechanism—is not that it pic-
tures society as simple and small rather than large and complex,
but the discovery that all significant human action is necessarily
transgressive (no matter how innocent or well intended), that
transgressiveness belongs to the routine grammar of human
action and ethical self-consciousness, and hence 'that indepen-
dence or what has come to be called subjectivity arises only
through actions that sever (upset, transform, deform and reform)
the bonds of everyday sociality; that without the ongoing possibil-
ity of transgression all subjectivity withers and dissipates. None of
this is meant to challenge the credentials of the causality of fate
doctrine, how it elaborates a conception of ethical life quite other
than the one imagined by the morality system bequeattted by
Judaic law. On the contrary, my point is rather that we miss the
depth of the claim of the doctrine if we fail to acknowledge that
its claim against the morality system only becomes evident and
operative once the simple whole of united life is shattered.
In the beginning is the criminal deed.

Notes
^TMs is slighdy hyperbolic, since a more accurate statement would be
that what Hegel is seeking a thoroughgoing synthesis or unification of
theoretical and practical reason in which practical reason takes the lead.
428 SOCIAL RESEARCH

Kant, the existence of a transcendent God is a "postulate"

required by moral reason in order to secure belief in the possibility of
our realizing the "highest good."
^Hegel's early Jena writings are, of course, conceptually closer to the
Phenomenology than the "Spirit" essay. On my reading, those works are
themselves attempts to work out conceptually the ethical logic of the
original vision. For this very reason, I prefer the vividness, immediacy,
and beauty of the "Spirit" essay; we will not understand what requires
conceptual articulation undl we have first glimpsed the vision itself.
^Conversely, Hegel must equally think that the fundamental impulse
of biblical Christianity is anti-Platonic. The Christianity that takes itself
to be in relation to a transcendent, creator God is for the young Hegel
a Judaic misinterpretation of it.
^All page references in the text are to Hegel, Early Theoh^cal Writings
(1975). All unspecified quotations refer to the last page number given.
^Deucalion, son of Prometheus, is the Greek Noah. When Zeus is
about to flood the earth in response to human impiety, Prometheus
warns Deucalion, giving him time to build an ark for himself and his wife
Pyrrha. After the flood, they are told to throw over their shoulders the
bones of Deucalion's mother, from which spring the men and women
who repopulate the earth. For Hegel this is a work of love, and hence a
return to friendship with the natural world (185). Hegel does not
explain how this work of love might enduringly be a response to a less
than friendly natural world. I presume that the point of contrast with
Noah and Nimrod is that Deucalion and Pyrrha do not take the flood to
be grounds for setting up a permanent barrier to nature; they presume
that friendship with nature remains possible.
^Taking due account of the opening pages of the "Spirit" essay reveals
how proximate its argumentation is to the genealogy of reason that Max
Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno offer in Dialectic ofEnlightenment (2002).
^If one construes the original impulse of Kant's transcendental ideal-
ism—the idea that we know appearances only and not things in them-
selves—as the Rousseau-inspired attempt to delimit the a^uthority of
nature-dominating, instrumental reason (what Kant calls the under-
standing) in order to preserve the possibility of morality, then Hegel's
critique is, even at this level, a continuation and completion of the Kant-
ian project. For the idea that Kant's project was intended as a critique of
instrumental, scientific reason, see Velkley (1989).
^I mean this statement of the theological contract to be a genealogi-
cal anticipation of Kant's notion of the highest good in which God
would, ideally, dispense happiness in proportion to virtue. Virtue is
 HEGEL'S CRITIQUE OF MOP^LITi^ 429
TOthin our power, our self-mastery, while happiness is nature "without"
and hence beyond our power; ideally God will order nature so that
what we cannot control normativeiy harmonizes with what is within our
control.
•^^On coldness as the mood or affect appropriate to instrumental rea-
son, see Bernstein, Adomo: Disenchantment and Ethics (2001: 396-414).
^%or accounts of how the analysis of natural beauty in ELant's Critique
ofJudgment became the wedge for going beyond the restrictions of the
critical system, see Bernstein, The Fate ofArt: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant
toDerrida and Adomo (1992, chap. 1); and Robert Pippin (1997).
^\n the lead essay of Must We Mean What We Say? (1976: 25), Sunley
Gavell states this idea in terms of moral rules being properly understood
not as Categorical Imperatives, but as Categorical Declaratives; these tell
you "part of what you in fact do when you are moral." So I am suggesting
that lie rule "When X is hungry, feed X" is a Categorical Declarative.
Like Hegel, wrhat Cavell is objecting to in the ought character ofthe Cat-
egorical Imperative is that it perceives moral rules from the perspective
of someone already alienated from the authority of morality (or feeling
a distance from God), hence the very citing of such a overriding rule
deepens the alienation, making the appeal to it look "hypocritical (or
anyway shaky) and the attempts at . . . establishment or justification
seem tyrannical (or anyway arbitrary)" (Cavell, 1976: 24).
^^The idea of love "posing itself' as not self4ove (Nancy, 1991) is
meant to acknowledge that the phenomenology of love can be illusory:
what poses itself as not self-love may nonetheless be or become a form
of self-love. Love has innumerable pathologies.
-^Even erotic love, the most possessive form of love, easily topples into
obsession because the object of desire is "lifted" to being of infinite, or
at least indefinite, value. It is this lifting that poses erotic love as not self-
love; indeed the fierceness of erotic possession is the agony of the recog-
nition of this rupture, its intolerableness, hence the need to possess
absolutely and so overcome the fracture of self that its uprising causes.
^^IWiich is why, it should be noted, that from the perspective of the
criminal, punishm.ent inevitably wears the face of vengeance and
revenge, not justice.
^^Hegel is not of course asserting that we do not pardon criminals,
but only that moral/legal pardon possesses no logical sense in the
morality system. His claim will be, rather, that when such pardon is not
itself legalistic—Pauline-like atonement—it comes from another
space altogether.
430 SOCIAL RESEARCH

^'In conversation, Henry Harris has suggested that the reference here
may not be Oedipus and Co., as Knox supposes (Hegel, 1975: 233 fn.),
but to Jesus.
^^But negative modifications are also possible; we can turn away from
the violator in exasperation or despair or fear; we can, further, and of
course, seek repayment for damages done in acts of cruelty that provide
us with the pleasures of the other's suffering (as Nietzsche forcefully
reminds us). What will distinguish these acts now, however, is that they
are forms of response, ways of going on, which can always be ways of not
going on with the other, of finding no fiarther possibilities of that and so
of despairing of the possibility of other, fiiture responses. But in this
case, were it to transpire, the exclusion of the other would not be the
way of cleaning the slate and so restoring the authority of the law, but
the announcement of and bearing with an on-going loss. This too is a
modification of life—as for now at least damaged beyond repair. Which
is why the question such a modification raises is not about the violator
but about the manner and possibility of our going on, how we manage
or fail to manage this loss, what bearing such a loss could be and what it
means for us. Assume now that Hegel's severing the moral into the
moralism of the morality system and ethical life is the discovery of not
two separate regimes but two ideal types, both of which cohabit in the
heart and practices of each inhabitant of North Atlantic civilization. It
follows that, since the morality system is a metaphysical illusion because
there has never been a law that is independent in the way that the moral-
ity system imagines, but only the moralistic stance of presupposing the
existence of such a law, then the scenario of damaged life, of life con-
stituted by the failures of the community to find a way of allowing the
violators of law back in, becomes an image of our situation in which the
two stances cohabit. We cannot lightly step, as Hegel imagines, from the
rigidity of morality to the respotisiveness of ethical life in a flash; to the
degree that the actuality of morality belongs to our present, we are bur-
dened by losses already incurred. Both here and later, Hegel ignores the
cohabitation problem and the depth of the losses already incurred as a
problem for the present.
^^The distinction that Hegel is aiming for is worked out appropriately
by Heidegger in Being and Time (1996), with the distinction between
ready-to-hand (objects naturally appearing in the context of their usage)
and present-to-hand (how objects appear when they are abstracted
from, or fall out of through breakage of their constitutive context of
use), each possessing it own corresponding form of comprehension,
viz., circumspective interpretation and assertion respectively. The rea-
 HEGEL'S CRITIQUE OF MO1M.LITY 431

son Hegel runs into a dilemma here is that he has yet to work out a con-
ception of individuality or human separateness that is compatible with
his strenuous conception of united life. Separateness is assumed—^it is
what makes love of another different from self-love—but Hegel does not
yet know how to sustain such separateness without some thought of for-
eignness or defect, or rather, his unease about separateness conies out,
precisely, in his overly harmonizing, unreflective conception of loving.
It is as if he could not think of love except on tlie model of either the
fusion of infant and mother, or sexual ecstasy.
^^Almost all readers of Hegel recognize that what I am here calling
iransgressive action appears as the notion of the negative in the Phe-
nowienology. Yet the notion of negativity is usually left as simply the power
of mind to negate immediacy, hence as equivalent to the thought there
is no consciousness mthout judgment—Holderlin's original insight into
our permanent separation from being. But this leaves the notion of the
negative too weak, at least as compared with the idea of negative trans-
gressive acts. In the first part of his The Stru^le for Recognition: The Moral
Grammar of Social Conflicts (1995), Axel Honneth does recognize that the
early Hegel, after the "Spirit" essay but before the Phenomenology, does
espouse the idea that practical conflicts can be "understood as an ethi-
cal moment in the movement occurring wthin a collective social life"
(17); and further that "Hegel granted criminal acts a constructive role
in the formative process of ethical life because they were able to unleash
the conflicts that, for the first time, would make subjects aware of the
underlying relations of recognition." (26). While the idea of oifering an
ethically textured conflict model of social progress is indeed part of
Hegel's project (the part that Marx latched onto), Honneth does not
take seriously enough the generality of his own thesis, and hence makes
the role of struggle, conflict, and transgression local and interruptive,
rather than peivasive and general.

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Gavell, Stanley. Must We Mean What We Sayf New York: Cambridge Uni-
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. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy.
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432 SOCIAL RESEARCH

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