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135

These determinations, however, are not contained in the determination of duty itself; rather, since both are conditioned and limited, they thereby bring about the very transition into the higher sphere of the unconditioned — duty. To duty itself, insofar as it is, in moral self-consciousness, the essential or universal element of that self-consciousness, as it relates within itself only to itself, there thus remains only abstract universality; it has contentless identity, or the abstract positive, the undetermined, as its determination.

However essential it is to bring out the pure, unconditioned self-determination of the will as the root of duty — just as the cognition of the will first gained its firm ground and starting point, through the thought of its infinite autonomy, in the Kantian philosophy (see § 133) — so much does the fixation on the merely moral standpoint, which does not pass over into the concept of ethical life, reduce this gain to an empty formalism, and moral science to a rhetoric of duty for duty’s sake. |131| From this standpoint no immanent doctrine of duties is possible; one can indeed bring in material from outside and thereby arrive at particular duties, but from that determination of duty as the absence of contradiction, as formal correspondence with itself — which is nothing other than the positing of abstract indeterminacy — no transition can be made to the determination of particular duties, nor, even when such a particular content comes under consideration for acting, does that principle contain any criterion as to whether it is a duty or not. On the contrary, every unrightful and immoral course of action can be justified in this way. — The further Kantian form — the capacity of an action to be represented as a universal maxim — does indeed bring in the more concrete representation of a state of affairs, but contains, for itself, no further principle than that same absence of contradiction and formal identity. — That no property should exist contains, for itself, just as little a contradiction as that this or that particular people, family, and so on, should not exist, or that no human beings at all should live. If it is otherwise firmly established and presupposed that property and human life should exist and be respected, then it is a contradiction to commit theft or murder; a contradiction can arise only in connection with something that is, with a content that already lies at the basis as a fixed principle. |132| Only in relation to such a content is an action either in agreement with it or in contradiction. But duty, which is to be willed only as such, not for the sake of a content — formal identity — is precisely this: to exclude all content and determination.

The further antinomies and configurations of the perennial ought, in which the merely moral standpoint of relation only wanders about without being able to resolve them and get beyond the ought, I have developed in the Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 550 ff.; compare Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, § 420 ff.1

  1. Encyclopaedia, 3rd ed. § 507 ff. · Phenomenology of Spirit 1807, pp. 550 ff. ↩︎

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5 responses to “135”

  1. Hegel (Natural Right Essay 1802) Avatar
    Hegel (Natural Right Essay 1802)

    Hegel, On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right (Critical Journal of Philosophy, vol. 2, part 2, 1802), p. 437:

    If the determinacy of property in general is posited, then the tautological proposition can be made from it: property is property and nothing else; this tautological production is the legislating done by this practical reason: property, if property exists, must be property; but if the opposed determinacy — the negation of property — is posited, then the legislating of that very same practical reason yields the tautology: non-property is non-property; if there is no property, then that which would be property must be sublated. But it is precisely what is at issue to demonstrate that property must exist; the whole matter turns solely on that which lies outside the capacity of this practical legislating of pure reason.

  2. Hegel (Natural Right Essay 1802) Avatar
    Hegel (Natural Right Essay 1802)

    Hegel, On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right (Critical Journal of Philosophy, vol. 2, part 2, 1802), p. 439:

    A maxim that, on this principle, is immoral because it contradicts itself, is, precisely because it expresses the sublation of a determinacy, absolutely rational, and therefore absolutely moral; for the rational, on its negative side, is the indifference of determinacies, the being-sublated of the conditioned. Thus the determinacy of helping the poor expresses the sublation of the determinacy that is poverty; the maxim whose content is that determinacy, when tested by raising it to the principle of a universal legislation, will prove to be false, for it annihilates itself. If it is thought that the poor are universally helped, then either there are no longer any poor at all, or else there is nothing but poor people, in which case none remain who could help; and so in both cases help would drop away; the maxim, thought as universal, thus sublates itself.

  3. Eduard Gans (Additions) Avatar
    Eduard Gans (Additions)

    Although we emphasized above the standpoint of Kantian philosophy, which, insofar as it establishes the correspondence of duty with reason, is a sublime one, the deficiency must nevertheless be exposed here, that this standpoint lacks all articulation. For the proposition: consider whether your maxim could be set up as a universal principle, would be very good if we already had determinate principles as to what is to be done. For in demanding of a principle that it should also be capable of being a determination of a universal legislation, such a demand already presupposes a content, and were this content present, its application would have to become easy. But here the principle itself is not yet present, and the criterion that there should be no contradiction produces nothing, since where there is nothing, there can also be no contradiction.

  4. Cross-reference Avatar
    Cross-reference

    Cross-reference:
    From the reading group’s excursuses (in German), the following belong here:

    The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate: Jesus’ attitude to the moral commandments – Hegel’s early critique of the mere “ought”

    The Life of Jesus (1795) – Jesus as a teacher of Kantian morality

  5. Hegel (Simple) Avatar
    Hegel (Simple)

    § 135: Empty duty

    Right and welfare are limited. But duty claims to hold without condition. So I cannot simply take its content from right and welfare. What then remains for duty?

    Only the empty form. Duty says: Do your duty. But it does not say what.

    What did Kant achieve?

    Kant showed that the root of duty is the free self-determination of the will. That was a great gain. Only since then has the theory of the will had firm ground.

    Where is the weakness?

    Someone who stops at this duty ends up in empty talk. Kant’s test runs like this: Can my rule become a law for all? Can I will it without contradicting myself?

    But contradiction alone says nothing. An example: It is no contradiction that there is no property at all. A contradiction arises only once we already assume: property ought to exist. Then theft is a contradiction. But the “property ought to exist” does not come from the test. It must already be there beforehand.

    So the test cannot produce any duties. It only checks what we already presuppose. On the contrary: it can justify any wrongful action.

    Summary: Kant grounded duty in freedom. That is a great merit. But mere duty stays empty and cannot bring forth any content.

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