It is only when he gathers, so to speak, his entire humanity together, and his ethical way of thinking becomes the result of the united effect of both principles [e.g., Reason and Sensibility], when it has become his nature, it is then only that it is secure…(GD, 284/150)10
The human being has been set the task of promoting a sincere accord between his two natures, of always being a harmonious whole, and of acting with his whole harmonious humanity. (GD, 289/154)
Schiller calls the harmonious individual the beautiful soul. Like the monarchic agent, her actions have dignity or moral worth. Unlike the monarchic agent, though, her actions exhibit grace (Anmut): she experiences no internal division, discord, or constraint.
Thus Schiller holds that an agent is unified when the two aspects of the soul—rational nature and affective nature—are harmonious, directing the agent toward the same ends. Disunity arises when there is a conflict between the rational and the affective, which takes the form of reason being out of accordance with the affects. In short: unity obtains when the agent’s reflective judgments and affects incline her in the same direction.
An adequate moral philosophy would have to teach us how to achieve this state. And it is just this task that Schiller pursues in Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, 1794). The arguments of this work are dense and resist any quick summary, but the core claim is easily conveyed: it is through an aesthetic education that we become unified selves or beautiful souls. Moreover, this ideal is not something that we can attain alone: we must relate not just to ourselves, but also to others and to our society, in an unconstrained and undivided manner. This requires a specific form of culture: in its ideal form, culture preserves individuality and variety while fostering community, and thereby leads individuals to participate in social life not from duty but from inclination (Letter XVII). That, then, is Schiller’s vision: a community of undivided agents interacting in a way that preserves their individuality and accords with and gives expression to their whole natures.
24.4 HEGEL’S SOCIALLY AND HISTORICALLY SITUATED SELF
Hegel, too, begins with freedom. In Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Philosophy of Right, 1821), Hegel claims that the concept of freedom, when properly understood, is the ground of ethics.11 He argues that ethical agency is the capacity to act on norms that arise not from some external source, but from the agent’s will. Thus, “the will that wills itself,” or “the free will which wills the free will” (PR, 27), is the ultimate source of normativity.
Thus far, Hegel sounds like Kant. However, he famously criticizes Kant for operating with an excessively “formal” or “abstract” conception of autonomy, which renders the Kantian theory an “empty formalism” (PR, 135). Briefly, Hegel’s point is that the Categorical Imperative does not yield any determinate results. For example, Kant claims that the Categorical Imperative rules out theft as follows: if the maxim of stealing personal property were universalized, the institution of property would die out, and theft would be rendered impossible. Hegel’s objection is simple:
The absence of property contains in itself just as little contradiction as the non-existence of this or that nation, family, etc., or the death of the whole human race. But if it is already established on other grounds and presupposed that property and human life are to exist and be respected, then indeed it is a contradiction to commit theft or murder; a contradiction must be a contradiction of something, i.e. of some content presupposed from the start as a fixed principle. (qPR, 135R)
Hegel agrees with Kant that if the maxim of stealing in order to enrich oneself were universalized, the institution of property would disappear. However, Hegel claims that unless we presuppose, as a fixed principle, that property should exist, this generates no contradiction at all.
Hegel takes this to be a perfectly general point: a merely formal principle cannot yield any determinate results unless we incorporate some substantive content (such as, in the above case, a commitment to property). For this reason, Hegel concludes that an adequate account of normativity must take existing cultural and social institutions and values as its “support and foundation” (PR, 141A). He terms these institutions and values Sittlichkeit, or “ethical life” (PR, 142–360).
Hegel distinguishes between Moralität and Sittlichkeit. According to Moralität,
ethical and moral principles shall not merely lay their claim on him as external laws and precepts of authority to be obeyed, but have their assent, recognition, or even justification in his heart, sentiment, conscience, intelligence, etc.12
In other words, Moralität attempts to justify ethical norms by appealing to the acts of individuals. Kant’s theory is a paradigm case: a norm is justified insofar as the agent can will it in accordance with the Categorical Imperative. Sittlichkeit, by contrast, claims that duties can be understood and justified only by the agent’s participation in and identification with concrete forms of social life. For example, consider the modern family. In an ideal case, the family is produced by the rational free choice of two individuals; the individuals seek a good, namely love; and this relationship gives rise to determinate obligations (for example, mutual respect, obligations of care, and so on). It is by participating in and identifying with such institutions that agents realize their freedom and determine their duties.
Of course, not just any form of social life will be acceptable; not just any set of social institutions and practices will enable the agent to understand and justify her duties. Rather, these institutions and practices must be structured so that they provide the agent with the conditions for realizing her own freedom. Many institutions and practices will fall short on this score. Consider a simple example: if the laws and institutions of my society condemn me to a life of slavery, I will not be able fully to realize my freedom by conforming to those laws and institutions. Thus, Hegel claims that we can ask, of any set of social institutions or practices, whether they enable all individuals to realize their freedom.13
Moreover, the institutions and practices must be such that subjects are not only in fact free, but are also capable of recognizing their own freedom. That is, individuals must be able to view these institutions and practices as expressions of their own wills, so that participation in them is conceived as free activity.14 In The Philosophy of Right, Hegel argues that three modern social institutions—the family, civil society, and the liberal state—jointly fulfill these conditions.15
With this in mind, we can see that there are three important differences between Kantian Moralität and Hegelian Sittlichkeit. First, the objects of normative assessment are distinct: whereas the Kantian agent determines her duty by assessing maxims for particular actions, the Hegelian’s duties are given by the actual social institutions and practices in which she is embedded—though these institutions and practices are themselves assessed in terms of their capacity to enable and make manifest agents’ freedom.
Second, Kantian Moralität attempts to derive or extract norms from a formal procedure. For example, according to Kant I can establish a commitment to the institution of property merely by considering the concept of autonomous willing. The Hegelian is more modest: she begins with a determinate set of principles, embodied in the social institutions of her society, and asks whether these principles are realizations of freedom. So Hegel’s theory uses a formal criterion (the idea of freedom) not to derive, but to assess norms that are embodied in the society. Accordingly, Hegel’s theory has a non-foundationalist structure.
For this reason, the Hegelian ethical theory will always begin with a determinate, historically situated set of norms, principles, and duties. There is no aspiration, here, to produce a foundational normative principle, such as the Categorical Imperative, which generates the selfsame results for all rational agents. Thus, Hegel’s method of justifying normative authority involves scrutinizing the social institutions and practices that we find ourselves with, and showing that they are, or at l
east aspire to be, realizations of freedom: we can affirm them as institutions and practices in which we realize our own freedom. Asking whether the normative claims embodied in these institutions and practices are justified does not involve showing that they can be derived from some formal criterion, such as the Categorical Imperative. These norms need not be derived from anything at all. Rather, justifying the norms requires showing that, although they are historically contingent, they actualize and make manifest our freedom.
This brings us to the third point: Hegel argues that freedom is possible only if one is already standing in certain kinds of social relationships and participating in certain social activities. We can actualize our autonomy only in and through concrete social institutions. We might put the most basic point this way: Hegel thinks that Kant, in focusing on the atomistic individual, has things backwards. Instead, we need to start with the whole and understand the individual in terms of it.16 For, as Hegel nicely summarizes his project:
The right of individuals to their subjective determination to freedom is fulfilled in so far as they belong to ethical actuality [sittlichen Wirklichkeit]; for their certainty of their own freedom has its truth in such objectivity, and it is in the ethical realm [im Sittlichen] that they actually possess their own essence and their inner universality. (PR, 153)
It is this demand for non-alienated freedom achieved through determinate social institutions that most sharply distinguishes Hegel from Kant.
In developing these ideas, Hegel reiterates Schiller’s demand for unity. First, human beings have sensuous inclinations and needs, so an account of morality must not require that agents be alienated from these needs (as in Kant’s demand that we abstract from all of them).17 Second, human beings are situated in social and cultural institutions, such as the family, civil society, and the state; these institutions shape the agent’s identity and enable the agent to recognize and fulfill his duties. This is a form of unity as reconciliation: individuals are at one with themselves and their societies, experiencing nothing as alien or estranged. Individuals realize themselves in an ethical community. Thus, although Hegel’s accounts are richer and more intricate than Schiller’s, these two guiding ideals are analogous.
24.5 GERMAN MATERIALISM AND THE TURN TO NATURAL SCIENCE
Hegel’s aspiration for a unified, non-alienated, free self is dominant into the 1830s. However, by the 1840s the tides begin to turn: the German materialists react against the perceived excesses of Hegel and his followers. These materialists are a diverse lot, but share a common philosophical trajectory: they begin by valorizing the sciences and demanding that philosophy be empirical; they see Hegel and his followers as the paradigms of anti-empirical philosophy; and they suggest that, once the appreciation of science and the love of truth have become widespread, society can clear away religious and metaphysical illusions and enter an age of flourishing.
Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christentums (The Essence of Christianity, 1841) is one of the earliest works in this genre.18 There, Feuerbach argues that Hegel’s idealistic philosophy should be transformed into an “empirical” form; Hegel’s social theory should be replaced by an empirical study of the ways in which human beings can be emancipated; and religious thought should be abandoned once we see that God is merely a fiction that human beings “project.”
This work is enormously influential; it explodes in popularity, and works with similar themes soon follow. Büchner’s Kraft und Stoff (Force and Matter, 1855) went through 12 editions by 1872, and Moleschott’s writings including Lehre der Nahrungsmittel (Theory of Nutrition, 1850) made him famous. Some of the arguments that gripped the imagination now seem rather quaint: for example, Moleschott argued that the character of nations and cultures is determined by their diet; as Feuerbach famously summarizes Moleschott’s view, “Man is what he eats!” The working class, for example, could hope to improve its lot only by switching its diet from potatoes to beans, for only beans will instill revolutionary fervor.19
The claims are crude by today’s standards, but they nonetheless exerted a powerful effect on the philosophical scene. Natural science is seen as the key to resolving—or dissolving—traditional philosophical problems. By the 1860s, even a great skeptic of materialism, Friedrich Albert Lange, has so absorbed its lessons that he writes, “the nature of man is to the Materialist only a special case of universal physiology, as thought is only a special case in the chain of physical processes of life.”20
What kinds of results obtain within moral philosophy when we follow these demands to model our philosophical reflections on the natural sciences? The early materialists tend to endorse a by now familiar form of secular humanism. In Feuerbach, for example, we must clear away the misconceptions of religion: our ideas of god are simply projections of the human essence; in transferring our own essence to an illusory god, we alienate ourselves from our own essence and limit our capabilities.21 Once we recognize this, though, we can venerate man instead of god. Our goal is simple: to realize our own capacities. “Man exists in order to think, love, and will. What is the end of Reason? Reason. Of love? Love. Of will? The freedom to will. We pursue knowledge in order to know; love in order to love; will in order to will, that is, in order to be free” (Essence, 3). Reason, love, and freedom are our tasks.
Feuerbach attempts to justify these demands for reason, love, and freedom by appealing to a drive toward happiness (Glückseligkeitstrieb). He sometimes treats this as our most basic drive, and sometimes as that which is common to all of our drives. Morality is founded on considerations of how our actions affect the happiness of others:
Good is the acceptance, bad the rejection, of the drive to happiness. Happiness, but not reduced into one single person, rather disseminated among different persons, I and Thou integrating, therefore not one-sided but dual-sided and all-sided, is the principle of morality.22
Heady stuff, but the argument is rather unclear. As Engels writes in 1886, “What Feuerbach has to tell us about morals can, therefore, only be extremely meager. The urge toward happiness is innate in man, and must therefore form the basis of all morality.”23
Büchner’s arguments are a bit more developed. He argues that our ideas of good and right are merely adopted from the culture into which we have been educated; our moral concepts are not “innate,” rather “relative in the highest degree” (FM, 169).24 For our “moral notions are justly considered as the result of gradual experience” (FM, 171); societies adopt and instill in their members “those laws and social customs, which human society has from experience gradually found necessary to establish for its self-preservation” (FM, 174). However, Büchner notes, “even these precepts and customs are extremely varying, according to the conditions of external circumstances in regard to time and individual institutions” (FM, 174). He illustrates this with an example that still has relevance today: “the destruction of the fetus in utero was by no means considered an immoral act among the Romans; today it is severely punished” (FM, 174).
Büchner recognizes that these results might seem to threaten morality with relativism. However, he notes that the materialist need not “ignore the value of moral ideas, so far as they form the foundation of human society” (FM, 248). Moral claims are justified as conditions for the preservation of society. Of course, looking somewhat deeper, we can then ask what justifies our commitment to the preservation of society. Büchner’s answer is simple: “refined egotism” (FM, 249). Society is in our long-term, enlightened self-interest. Ultimately, then, moral norms will be justified as those conventions that are in our enlightened self-interest.25 We can look forward to an age in which agents openly recognize this, and clear away the discredited myths of free will, religion, and the like.
But it is, of course, Marx who gives us the most influential conception of the link between materialism and morality. Marx departs from the simple physiology of the earlier materialists. Thus, he famously writes, “The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism…is that the thing, rea
lity, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively” (Theses on Feuerbach, 1). For Marx, the material encompasses not merely physiology, but also economic forces, social institutions, and the concrete desires and powers of human beings.
Marx endorses a superficial interpretation of Hegel, according to which Hegel claims that philosophical theories drive history.26 He argues that Hegel, thus understood, has things exactly backwards: the philosophical thought of an age is determined by the age’s material activity:
The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men…Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behavior. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people.27
Thus material forces determine philosophical, legal, and moral thought. These material forces are chiefly economic:
in the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. (M, 4–5)
The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century Page 89
