Virtue, Individuality and Emptiness in Kant and Hegel
REV 2/18/11
Christopher Yeomans (cyeomans@purdue.edu)
DO NOT CITE OR DISTRIBUTE WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION.
One of the deepest puzzles in Hegel’s treatment of human agency is found in
the problem of the connection and coherence of his many discussions of practical
reason in the Phenomenology of Spirit. On the one hand, one of the real strengths of
those discussions is the fullness with which different self-conceptions of agency are
imagined as specific forms of life with their own characteristic fates. On the other
hand, they are juxtaposed in such an original and surprising way that it is difficult to
see the logic that connects them as the continual development of the idea of
freedom. This difficulty is magnified when one tries to read these discussions as
suggesting, if not constituting, a critical history of practical philosophy, a project that
is all the more tempting precisely because the fullness with which Hegel imagines
these self-understandings of agency appears to unearth the lived context and
existential stakes of practical philosophy, and thus to provide a vital background for
the evaluation of theories of agency.
The apotheosis of this connection of promise and opacity is certainly to be
found in Hegel’s discussion of Kant’s practical philosophy. To begin with the
promise, it is clear that no figure is more decisive for Hegel than Kant: Hegel himself
claims that Kant first put practical philosophy on a solid foundation precisely by the
way in which he located freedom in the “infinite autonomy” of the will (PR§135R).
And it is clear that Hegel takes his own view to have captured this element of Kant to
its fullest extent precisely in virtue of extending it into the social field as such.
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Finally, the way in which Hegel treats theories of practical reason as guiding selfunderstandings of the full lives of individual agents promises to leaven the
abstraction of Kant’s presentation and thus to provide a bridge between Kant’s
theoretical apparatus and lived experience. But the barriers to understanding Hegel
on this point become immediately apparent. First, the centerpiece of Hegel’s
critique of Kant – the so-called ‘emptiness objection’ – is presented in two near
throw-away sections immediately following what appears to be a discussion of the
production and evaluation of cultural products such as works of art; Hegel calls this
realm ‘the spiritual animal kingdom,’ and it does not at first seem to have any deep
resonance with any of Kant’s texts. Second, the emptiness objection is separated by
over 100 pages from Hegel’s fuller discussion of Kant’s moral worldview in the
chapter on spirit. Third, though even the most sympathetic Kant scholar must
acknowledge that there is a grain of truth in Hegel’s charges of formalism, even the
most sympathetic Hegel scholar must acknowledge that this point doesn’t have as
much force as Hegel seems to think it does. Finally, and perhaps most puzzling, how
can Hegel claim to have captured and incorporated into his own theory the Kantian
conception of freedom as autonomy when he rejects the formality of law that
appears to be central to autonomy on Kant’s own view?
In my view, the textual key to completing this particular puzzle lies in the
discussion of virtue that precedes the ‘spiritual animal kingdom.’ Between these two
sections there is even more continuity than is usual in the Phenomenology, and this
continuity is provided by the notion of the development and employment of talents.
Though admittedly difficult at first, probing these sections for a context in terms of
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which to make sense of the emptiness objection and Hegel’s critique of Kant more
generally gradually brings out the fact that they present a sustained and insightful
critical reconstruction of certain neglected but crucial themes in Kant’s moral
psychology.i This reconstruction is oriented by the way in which individuality is
important to Kant’s doctrine of virtue (inner morality), an importance that fits
somewhat uneasily with Kant’s general emphasis on formal universality as the basic
principle of autonomy.
This tension between universality and individuality is reflected in Hegel’s
summary of his critical appraisal of Kant’s ethics in his lectures on the history of
philosophy: “What merits the name of truth in the Kantian philosophy, is that
thinking is grasped as concrete in itself, self-determining itself [sich selbst
bestimmend]; thus freedom is recognized.”ii But: “[Kant] knows not to become
master of the individuality of self-consciousness; [he] describes reason very well,
but does this in a thoughtless, empirical way by which it again robs itself of its
truth.”iii It is difficult at first to make out how Kant’s alleged empiricism is related to
the problem of individuality. But we can shed light on the subject by considering
Schopenhauer in contrast to both Hegel and Kant, since perhaps no one has taken
more seriously than Schopenhauer Kant’s claim that one can be an empirical realist
only by being a transcendental idealist.iv On Schopenhauer’s view, Kant has not
consistently applied this dictum to his own practical philosophy. When the
consistency is enforced, Schopenhauer argues, transcendental idealism denies the
fundamental differentiation of agents at the noumenal level of free will. As a result,
there is no autonomy where there is individuality (in the phenomenal realm), and
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there is no individuality where there is autonomy (in the noumenal). I take it that
both Kant and Hegel want to reject this result that we cannot be individuated qua
free, and thus the tension between individuality and universality must be resolved
or at least productively articulated in some way for both thinkers.
In the process of considering options for such a resolution or articulation,
four Kantian threads can be traced through Hegel’s discussion of virtue and the
spiritual animal kingdom: (1) the notion of virtue as the individualization of duty;
(2) the conception of virtue in terms of duties that persons have in virtue of also
being animals; (3) the picture of virtue as the fight between reason and the
inclinations; and (4) the placement of the development of talents as a duty of virtue.
After following the way in which Kant weaves and Hegel re-weaves these threads
together in an attempt to produce a solution to the problem of individualization, I
show how the ‘emptiness objection’ may be read in this light.
1. Virtue as the individualization of duty
The strand that ties together most securely Hegel’s discussion of virtue in the
Phenomenology and Kant’s doctrine of virtue is the notion of virtue as the
individualization of duty. In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant specifically marks this
individualization as the distinctive task of the doctrine of virtue: “Ethics adds [to the
categorical imperative] only that this principle is to be thought as the law of your
own will and not of will in general, which could also be the will of others…” (MS
6:389). As a matter of moral judgment, this means that duties of virtue are
inherently wide duties that prescribe only general maxims and not specific actions,
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where individual interests are necessarily involved in translating those maxims into
actions (MS 6:390 and 451 (discussing the role of interests in benevolence)).
But paradoxically, the way any particular agent is to accomplish this moral
individualization involves the subordination of their individual, subjective ends to
three different universals: (1) the indeterminacy of different natural ends (also
understood as the capacity to set ends abstracted from its specific exercise), (2)
duty itself (i.e., motivation by the form of law as such), and (3) the happiness of
others (MS 6:386-8). The first indeterminacy is not to be mistaken for a general or
collective description of the specific natural ends agents pursue. That would be to
identify it with happiness, and the rejection of this identification is important for
Kant’s distinction between duties to self and to others. Kant’s arguments for the
development of talents – a duty to self – require the indeterminacy of ends as such,
since talents are to be developed not just for specific ends that are in view of the
agent at the time, but rather for further possible, uncontemplated and unspecified
ends. In contrast, every agent has a duty to further the (morally permissible)
specific ends of others that collectively constitute others’ happiness.
This subordination of the individual has two forms: First, as a matter of the
material ends that they set for themselves, virtuous agents are guided by the three
sorts of universals (MS 6:391-3). Second, as a matter of the philosophical grounding
of duties of virtue, such justification must always begin with the form of law rather
than the matter of the will (the end), since feeling (which is connected with the end)
always belongs to the order of nature (MS 6:376).
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Kant’s suggestion that a theory of virtue must provide resources for the
individualization of the formal principle of duty is somewhat surprising.
Particularly in the Groundwork and the second Critique, Kant grounds the autonomy
in the immediate determination of the will by the formality and universality of its
constitutive norm, and thus the particular features that would individuate agents
appear to be, at best, morally irrelevant. (e.g., GW 4:444, KpV 5:33 and MS 6:213-4)
From Hegel’s perspective, however, the Doctrine of Virtuev is a point at which Kant
recognizes an important unmet need in his practical philosophy. This need can be
clarified by considering Schopenhauer’s development of Kantian moral theory. As
we briefly considered above, Schopenhauer thinks that Kant should have realized
that the consistent application of transcendental idealism to practical philosophy
shows that the theoretical resources necessary for the individuation of agents (i.e.,
space, time, and causation) are unavailable at the level of the (noumenal) free will,
so one agent’s will is not metaphysically distinct from another. As the foundation of
ethics, pity is the affective recognition of this underlying non-differentiation.vi But
transcendental idealism quarantines this underlying mystical conception from the
phenomenal experience of individual agents, and as a result moral responsibility
and sanction become rather utilitarian affairs in Schopenhauer’s view, and the
human being is denied any fundamental dignity as compared with animals – both
consequences that Hegel wants to reject just as much as Kant. But the root problem
that generates these consequences is the lack of morally relevant resources for the
individuation of agents.
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There is much in the Metaphysics of Morals to support Schopenhauer’s
contentions. Despite Kant’s suggestion that virtue is the individualization of
morality, it is not clear what resources there are for the differentiation of agents.
Moreover, in the arguments of the Doctrine of Virtue, Kant does not say much about
what specific sort of individuality of the agent is to be considered. In terms of kinds
of individuation, we might want to distinguish between the subjective appropriation
of duty (something like my own distinctive concern or care for the moral law) and
the specification of the content of duty.vii Both forms of individuation seem to be
important Kant’s conception of virtue. The former can be seen in Kant’s view that I
need to develop my own specific receptiveness to duty by counteracting the
hindrances to duty that are particular to me as an individual. I will discuss this in
more detail in §3 with respect to what I will call the Indirect Strategy for
individuation. The latter conception of individuation can be seen in the
aforementioned general feature of duties of virtue that they are wide duties that can
only be specified through their conjunction with individual interests, and is the
primary target of what I will call the Subsumption and Direct Strategies of
individuation.
In terms of resources for individuation, one occasionally gets hints in the
discussions of the “casuistical questions.” There, the relevant forms of particularity
appear to be given by natural and social features of the context of action that are not
themselves direct objects of duty (e.g., the strength of sexual desire and the position
of a king subject to capture in war (MS 6:426 & 423)). One might then think that
individualization would be a matter of the connection of empirical desires or other
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features with the moral form of duties. I will refer to this suggestion as the
Subsumption Strategy, as it would have it that empirical particularity is subsumed
under the moral law and thereby made relevant to individuation of the agent qua
free. But several things that Kant says mitigate against this reading. The first
concerns individuation in the sense of the specification of content. Early on in the
Metaphysics of Morals, Kant specifically distinguishes empirical attributes as
irrelevant to the agent qua homo noumenon, and so any direct appeal to
independent empirical features as individuating agents qua free is ruled out, and it
appears that Kant merely helps himself to the identity of homo phaenomenon and
homo noumenon while undermining the possibility of an account of that identity (MS
6:239). And yet the phenomenal presence of the individual subject is central to
presenting duties towards her (including, one must think, duties to oneself). This is
made clear by Kant’s reasoning for why the category of duties to God is empty:
“since such a being is not an object of possible experience” (MS 6:241). The second
concerns subjection appropriation: the difference between duties of right (whose
articulation in the agent’s will is essentially the same for everyone) and duties of
virtue (whose articulation in the agent’s will is particularized and thus distinct from
the articulation in other agents’ wills) is that duties of right allow for different
incentives that would vary between agents, whereas in virtue all agents must have
the same incentive, namely duty itself. But this means that the particular empirical
features that might differentiate agents are relevant to actions that fulfill duties of
right, but not to actions that fulfill duties of virtue, and this is precisely the opposite
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of what one would expect if such empirical features were to play the individuating
role for virtuous actions in the way envisioned by the Subsumption Strategy.viii
We can see a second, indirect connection between duty as norm of autonomy
and individualizing natural and social characteristics in Kant’s first argument for
why there must be a distinctively moral end: “For since the sensible inclinations of
human beings tempt them to ends (the matter of choice) that can be contrary to
duty, lawgiving reason can in turn check their influence only by a moral end set up
against the ends of inclination, an end that must therefore be given a priori,
independently of inclinations” (MS 6:380-1). I will refer to this suggestion as the
Indirect Strategy of individuation. In this argument Selbstzwang (self-constraint) is
connected with virtue in precisely the same way that Zwang (coercion) is connected
with right, i.e., as a counterbalance to hindrances to freedom and therefore a
promotion of freedom (MS 6:231). The important thing to note here is the precisely
the conflict between the individualizing features of our sensible nature and the
universal character of the moral end. Indirectly, the moral end derives its individual
character from the fact that it is set up as a counterweight to specifically individual
features of the character of the agent. Thus this tension between the sensible and
the rational seems to introduce into Kant’s theory the resources required for
individualizing the demands of duty for particular agents, via the struggle of the
agent to discipline her sensible nature. Thus the subordination of natural
individuality to universality might take on a morally or autonomously individual
form. In this case individuation by means of subjective appropriation appears to
produce specification of content, at least as far as the end of virtue is concerned.
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But Kant’s fullest discussion of the axes of morally relevant individuality
suggests a somewhat different approach, one that I will refer to as the Direct
Strategy of individuation. This discussion comes in the fascinating, short section
entitled “On ethical duties of human beings toward one another with regard to their
condition (Zustand)” (MS 6:468-9). There, Kant suggests that there are difficult
questions concerning the application of the duties of virtue to persons in their
specific condition, and that their answers require a schematization of the principles
of virtue.ix The focus on application suggests that the specific problem considered
here is the specification of the content of duty. The different variables in specific
condition mentioned are moral virtue itself, cultivation, learning, and kinds of
expertise. Here, the relevant forms of particularity appear to be quite different:
rather than being independent empirical features, they are differences in a kind of
condition that is itself subject to the duty of virtue to promote one’s own perfection.
Thus in this third strategy, individualization does not need to be indirect in the same
way that it is in the self-struggle model of the Indirect Strategy; our duty of virtue is
to be individuated in part by reference to our previous attempts to fulfill this duty
and the outcomes of those attempts. Thus the problem of individuation takes on a
recursive form that in addition has certain prominent Aristotelian resonances. On
the one hand, this eliminates the problematic indirectness of the self-struggle
model; on the other hand, it threatens to become a vicious circularity, since
individualization seems to require prior individualization. As we will see later,
Hegel thinks the two strategies can be combined through Kant’s own notion of the
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interest-guided development of talents in a way that makes the circle productive
rather than vicious.
With this complex of problems from Kant as our horizon, we can make sense
of some of the distinctive features of Hegel’s discussion of virtue. In the
Phenomenology, Hegel describes virtue as being distinctively constituted by the
relation between individuality and universality.x Hegel does not seem to see the
Subsumption Strategy as a live option for considering this relation specifically as a
relation of virtue. The strategy plays a role in Hegel’s argument in the preceding
section on the law of the heart, but consideration of that section would take us too
far afield. We will come back to this strategy in the last section, since it is
reintroduced in Hegel’s versions of the emptiness objection. Instead, Hegel focuses
in his discussion of virtue on the other two strategies (Indirect and Direct). Hegel
first treats virtue as exemplified by the Indirect Strategy. On this view of moral
individuation, the paradox of the struggle to be virtuous is that one must
individualize one’s own sacrifice of individuality to the universal. Virtue is the
commitment to validate personal consciousness precisely by submitting
individuality to the discipline (Zucht) of the universal through action that is itself
inherently an expression of individuality (PhG¶381; cf. Kant, KpV 5:82).
Hegel’s way of understanding this Kantian theme is that the actualization of
virtue always takes place in the medium of individuality, and that abstraction from
this medium seriously distorts both our moral theory and individual agents’ selfunderstanding. Part of Hegel’s point in discussing virtue and the development of
talents first, and only then proceeding to the question of the form of law (and later
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on to other, more specific features of Kant’s moral worldview) is to emphasize that
Kant is not entirely guilty of such abstraction, and yet nonetheless does not
recognize the full consequences of the centrality of individuality to inner morality.
When we do, Hegel thinks, we must recognize that
all the things which engage individuality are ends in themselves, and the use of
powers, along with playing the game of giving them outward expression is
what gives life to what otherwise would be the dead in-itself. The in-itself is
not an abstract universal without existence, not something which is never
accomplished. Rather, it is immediately itself this present moment and this
actuality of the processes of individuality (PhG¶393).
Central to Hegel’s conception here is a certain account of goal-directedness that can
only be hinted at here. The centerpiece of this account is a kind of reciprocal
interaction between end and means such that each comes to particularize the other
in the process of goal-directed activity. On Hegel’s view, what Kant marginalizes as
an issue of the application of concepts of duty to specific conditions can only be
adequately understood as the mutual production and constitution of conditions and
the concrete operating conception of the moral end in the understandings of
individual agents. One might think this is a technical point, but on Hegel’s view this
undermines the distinctiveness of the morally required ends of virtue as opposed to
the normal material ends of individual reason by undermining Kant’s distinction
between immediate determination of the will by reason and mediated
determination by desires.xi Later, we will see that this consequence is important for
Hegel’s attempt to shift the debate away from the problem of the categorical
imperative procedure returning the right result to the subtly different problem of its
functioning in the right way as a structure of autonomy. In Hegel’s presentation, the
danger that Kant’s account collapses into something like Schopenhauer’s is
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presented as the double result of the struggle of virtue with the selfish way of the
world: on the conception of desire-driven particularity that they both share, the
virtuous person is unable to sacrifice, and the self-seeking agent is unable to express
their individuality (PhG¶¶390-3). For Hegel, individuality is the very principle of
the inversion of moral into material ends and vice versa, and thus this inversion is
the price of the concreteness of moral ends (PhG¶¶381-3).
2. Virtue as duties that persons have in virtue of being animals
The second thread is the conception of virtue in terms of duties that persons
have because they are also animals. This conception appears at numerous places in
the Doctrine of Virtue, and most pointedly in the discussions of duties to self. Kant
argues that the obligatory end of my own perfection involves cultivation of my
understanding, which raises me from animality to humanity, since I need concepts
to connect ends with duties (MS 6:386-7).xii In defending the very idea of duties to
self, Kant argues that our dual constitution as both animal and intelligible is what
allows us to make sense of such duties to self, given that they seems to involve two
persons, one that puts another under an obligation (MS 6:418). Here Kant takes up
a specific difficulty that Schopenhauer will later press. On Schopenhauer’s view,
duties to self are impossible: they can be neither duties of justice (since we cannot
be unjust to ourselves for we endorse what we do) nor of love (since we look after
our well-being automatically).xiii Kant’s response here is interesting. One expects
him to resolve the difficulty by arguing that our rational nature puts our animal
nature under obligation (so we can make sense of it as a kind of duty of justice, in
Schopenhauer’s sense), and thus that there is a kind of moral well-being to which
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we do not naturally or automatically attend (so there might also be a duty of love, in
Schopenhauer’s sense). This would appear to be consistent with Kant’s frequent
reference to the natural ends of our animal abilities in the arguments for specific
duties of virtue, and to accord with the development of talents as a duty to self. But
the argument Kant actually makes is that, qua intelligible free person rather than
qua sensible animal with reason, we can be under obligation to humanity in
ourselves. One can see the basis for Kant’s reasoning here (no animal without
transcendental freedom can be subject to obligation), but with respect to
individuation the argument both introduces a new difficulty and robs him of an
obvious resource. Now Kant is obligated to provide an account of differentiating at
the noumenal or intelligible level between the intelligible agent and humanity
within her, and to do so without invoking the natural differences that play such a
dominant role in most human practices of individuation. With respect to
Schopenhauer’s earlier concern about Kant’s consistency with regard to
individuation of agents, this argument amounts to doubling down on the noumenal
bet.
Hegel refers to this conception somewhat playfully in calling the properly
conceptualized operation of virtue in the world “the spiritual animal kingdom (das
geistige Tierreich)” (PhG¶397).xiv In this conception, he says that our “original
determinate nature” (i.e., our individual character, broadly construed) is like the
element in which animals feel at home and self-directed (PhG¶398), and similarly
holds that by the interest-oriented development of our talents we become spiritual
(or minded – geistige) animals.
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Given the way we have just seen Hegel reinterpret the Direct Strategy of
individuation to identify individuality with the end in itself, the role that
individuality plays with respect to the distinction between the animal and the
rational is quite necessarily different in Hegel’s account. On Hegel’s view, it is
precisely the greater individuality of the rational creature that distinguishes it from
less developed animals. As H.S. Harris very suggestively puts it, for Hegel “every
Real Individual is a unique species (like the angels of Aquinas)…The destiny of Real
Individuality is to know itself as the concretely autonomous principle of Kant’s
Practical Reason.” Hegel therefore needs another way of understanding how our
individuality is subordinate to universality as is made most explicit in Kant’s
Indirect Strategy, and he does so by focusing on the related universalities of (1)
indeterminate ends and (3) happiness considered as determined by the whole of the
ends of the agent.
This comes out in Hegel’s view that our determinate individual nature (our
talents and interests) is individuality as the way in which our specific determinacy is
represented as a universal range of action qua medium of self-expression
(PhG¶398). Here, both the indeterminacy and totality of ends are reconceived. The
indeterminacy, which Kant conceives in terms of general utility (and thus ultimately
by reference to natural desires) is now present as capacities to express the agent’s
distinctive take on issues of human concern (die Sache selbst). The totality,
meanwhile, is no longer a heap of ends, but rather a structured articulation of the
values of the agent (cf. PR§§19-21). On this view, the individuality of rational ends
is much more directly connected to the natural constitution of the agent, since the
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latter has an important influence on both the range of ends available to us and the
interests by which we specify those ends. Thus we can interpret Hegel here as
arguing that reinterpretation of the Direct Strategy by bringing out the role that
individuality actually plays within it shows that there is less tension between it and
the Indirect Strategy than there appears to be in Kant. As Hegel puts it, this original
nature is both the content of the end of the individual and the activity of the
individual, so we can see Hegel’s point here as responding to the need for
individuation both as specification of content and as subjective appropriation.xv As
the former it is free qua specific medium of expression, and as the latter qua process
of transformation (PhG¶399).
For Hegel, the individuality and rationality are not in tension; rather,
individuality is the axis along which rational ends are distinguished as being higher
than merely natural ends. This is the continuation of a continuum that separates
different natural forms as well, as Hegel holds that animals are precisely
distinguished from plants in that they are more responsible for their own
individuation (e.g., PhG¶246). Spiritual animals then are, for Hegel, those creatures
who are just starting to take reflective responsibility for their own individuation,
and this is why the notion of the interest-guided development of talents, which is
the primary mechanism for such individuation and has its most natural location in
the human lifespan in later childhood and adolescence, is the focal point of the
moral psychology of this self-understanding of agency in the Phenomenology. We
can make a bit more sense of Hegel’s rephrasing of the problem if we understand
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the specific kind of constraint that constitutes virtue in the light of the mixed nature
of the agent.
3. Virtue as the fight between reason and the inclinations
The third important Kantian thread in Hegel’s discussion of virtue is the idea
of virtue as the fight between reason and the inclinations. Here we have the most
specific use of the self-struggle or Indirect Strategy of individuation. For Kant, we
have the duty to set a certain material (though a priori) end for ourselves, in part
because in this way lawgiving reason checks the influence of the sensible
inclinations that tempt us to other ends contrary to duty. This is the form of our
self-constraint (Selbstzwang) by duty, which makes it the doctrine of (inner) virtue
rather than the doctrine of (outer) right (MS 6:380-1).xvi Hegel, famously, has
difficulty keeping a straight face here. He actually presents two different comic
images of this fight, which may be best understood as differing in that one does, and
one does not, take seriously the transcendental idealist division between the
noumenal rational will and phenomenal material desires. If this division is taken
with Schopenhauerian seriousness, Hegel calls the combatant here the Knight of
Virtue, a figure often compared to Don Quixote. Ferrucio Andolfi puts Hegel’s point
here nicely: “The humorous aspect of this figure arises from the fact that an inner
morality such as the Kantian undertakes a task that is unachievable for it, namely to
be capable of being effective in actuality.”xvii That is, reason is supposed to
participate in the very order of desires, its independence of which constitutes its
purity and thus its morality. But if, as on Hegel’s view, this division of reason and
inclination cannot be taken seriously, then this struggle is really just
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shadowboxing,xviii a parody of self-constraint, where reason attempts to look as if it
is using natural dispositions in a way that is contrary to their selfish employment,
but where, as Kant might put it, the “dear self” is always cropping up again in the
inherent satisfaction of successful exercises of agency (PhG¶386).
Though it is certainly right to emphasize that for Kant, the moral agent is not
constantly in the process of repressing unruly inclinations, this is so because the
moral agent has already succeeded in the long-term process of disciplining those
inclinations. With respect to virtue in particular, Kant is quite clear that the very
nature of virtue is to put individuality at the service of universality in its fight
against particular inclinations. The argument considered above for the necessity of
a priori ends shows this role of individuality, and Kant adds that “a human being’s
moral capacity would not be virtue were it not produced by the strength of his
resolution in conflict with powerful opposing inclinations. Virtue is the product of
pure practical reason insofar as it gains ascendancy over such inclinations with
consciousness of its supremacy (based on freedom)” (MS 6:477).xix
The nature of the fight is, of course, that autonomy is at stake; natural
impulses are necessarily obstacles to freedom and morality (MS 6:380). Or, as Hegel
puts it, the weapons are the essences of each combatant (PhG¶383). The difficulty,
on Hegel’s view, is in the counting of the combatants. One needs an account of
individuation that will allow there to be two instead of just one in order to make
sense of the struggle, but the initial temptation to count by distinguishing pure
reason from natural inclinations has been undermined by the fact that in this fight,
the weapons of both are in fact the same, i.e., the material ends that are a necessary
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element in all agency. Kant would, of course, reject this characterization. The most
obvious way he suggests to do this is to distinguish between ends set prior to and
ends set after the formulation of moral maxims: all ends set prior to moral maxims
are empirical grounds and self-seeking, but ends that result from maxims adopted
as required by the concept of duty can be distinctively moral (MS 6:382).
Hegel rejects this conception as inaccurate moral psychology. On Hegel’s
view, the same role is played by the specific interests of the agent in both cases: a
universal is given life, a concrete form, by the way in which the agent takes an
interest in a particular situation. The prior/posterior distinction, whether regarded
as an issue of the causal history of the action or the constructed justification for it, is
for Hegel an essentially superficial distinction that masks the facts of moral
psychology. This is the import, I believe, of Hegel’s claims that Kant’s account of
practical reason is undermined by its empirical mode of description (e.g., VGP
462).xx The proper question is not the temporal or deductive ordering of desires
with respect to the moral law; the question is their respective function in agency.
Kant’s notion of ends as potentially the product of moral maxims does,
however, take a step towards the right view, from Hegel’s perspective, but one
which is fundamentally obscured by the transcendental distinction between nature
and free will that structures Kant’s moral psychology. The question for Hegel is not
between habituation without critical reflection and effective critical reflection
without habituation (or preceding habituation). For Hegel, the question is whether
the force of critical reflection is external or internal to the motivational stance of the
agent, i.e., whether pure reason is practical of its own, or only as an element within
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the larger goal-directed activity of the agent. Hegel’s point about the problem of
moral individuation in Kant’s account is designed, in part, to motivate an
interpretation of Kantian pure practical reason as, in fact, external to the motivation
state of the autonomous individual, and so as making the claim that there remains an
irreconcilable tension between individuality and autonomy on Kant’s view. As we
will see in the last section, the emptiness objection functions as a further diagnosis
of this tension as grounded in the identification of pure practical reason with the
formal universalization of law.
When we combine this perspective with Hegel’s claim in the Philosophy Right
that the Kantian form of practical reflection actually constitutes the naturalness of
desires,xxi I believe that Hegel’s account is this: Reason is always active in shaping
the motivational stance within which it is the active and critical element (i.e., in
Hegel’s terms, in which it is the element of negativity), but in the Kantian selfunderstanding, an agent justifies her own decision to shape the motivational stance
in the way that she does by characterizing other possible shapes as being merely
natural inclinations. ‘Reason’ and ‘nature’ here do not signify given and fixed
metaphysical categories, but are rather our Enlightenment names for chosen and
rejected options. The distinction between reason and nature within the moral
psychology of the agent is something created by action. This is not to say that it
cannot become a presupposition for future individual actions, but that from the
long-term point of view of the agent’s character as a whole, it is to be regarded as
something produced rather than given. But such a perspective is fundamentally
undermined by an empirical mode of description that looks quite locally to the
20
temporal or deductive ordering of reason and nature, and this is the heart of Hegel’s
criticism of Kant on this point.
This, then, provides a way to read Hegel on Kant’s infinite progressions of
virtue: the unholiness of the agent is a product as much as a presupposition of the
moral agent, and so naturally the same discrepancy between motivation from duty
and from desire recurs with each decision and action. There is no question of an
asymptotic approach to holiness, since the reason/nature distinction is in fact
recreated with each reflective action. From Hegel’s perspective, Kant is
unfortunately right to say that “Virtue is always in progress and yet always starts
from the beginning” (MS 6:409), but only because the nature of its progress is to
continually recreate the beginning so that there is no progress. To put it in terms of
the strategies of individuation, Hegel’s diagnosis is that a misinterpretation of the
Direct Strategy induces a fatally flawed overreliance on the Indirect or self-struggle
Strategy.
From Hegel’s perspective, Kant’s view, if represented by what Henry Allison
calls the Incorporation Thesis, has the true situation exactly backwards.xxii Rather
than taking a given natural desire and incorporating it into a rational principle,
potential rational principles are expelled from reason by the process of decision and
action, and this expulsion is signified by the characterization of those principles as
‘natural.’ From within this self-conception, the characteristics thus made natural
cannot then be made morally relevant except as the object of a struggle against
them, and autonomous action therefore takes the shape of the actual and active
rejection of the direct resources for individuation. But from Hegel’s perspective, this
21
diagnosis is quite charitable as a reading of Kant since it softens the distinction
between Kant’s Indirect and Direct Strategies of individuation by making at least
some of the natural features of the Indirect Strategy a natural by-product of the
autonomous self-shaping of the Direct Strategy. A natural way to understand this is
through the way that the exercise of talents develops and thus specifies those
talents.
4. The development of talents as a duty
The fourth important thread is the notion of the development of talents as a
duty of virtue. Kant gives at least three versions of an argument for that duty, two in
the Groundwork and one in the Metaphysics of Morals. On the FUL version in the
former text, lack of development of talents could be consistently universalized, but
because of our attachment to purposes (i.e., material ends) for which those talents
are useful, we could not will universal lack of development (GW4:422-3). In an FHE
version of this argument from the latter text, Kant argues that humanity involves
setting ends, and so in cultivating our natural capacities for furthering ends we raise
ourselves from animality to humanity (MS 6:391-2). And in a similar argument from
the Groundwork, Kant argues that the development of our talents is a matter of
harmonization with the natural end of humanity (GW4:430).
Here the details of the moral psychology involved start to become clearer.
Even in Kant there appears to be a kind of shaping of humanity as the creative
expression of autonomy, since this way that we raise ourselves to humanity involves
a selective cultivation of individual capacities, and there already appears to be a
natural variation in the capacities found in particular individuals even prior to their
22
development. This suggests that our determinate and specific status or condition
qua human is one that is achieved as much as given.xxiii In his discussion of duties of
virtue in general, Kant associates this duty of cultivation with the Indirect Strategy
for moral individuation focusing on subjective appropriation of duty: “For while the
capacity (facultas) to overcome all opposing sensible impulses can and must be
simply presupposed in man on account of his freedom, yet this capacity as strength
(robur) is something he must acquire…” (MS 6:397)xxiv This account fits very
naturally with the duty to self of moral perfection, but less so with either the duty to
self to develop talents (which is based on the utility of talents with respect to
indeterminate ends) or the duty to promote others’ happiness. The notion of
cultivation appears to be applied in the latter two cases by way of the notion of
humanity as setting ends.
As in the Groundwork argument, this is represented as the development of
talents, and the wideness of the duty to develop them points to the role of individual
interest in guiding that development, and thus to the contrastive and particular
forms of that development in different agents. As Kant construes the duty, we are to
develop our talents according to our free determination, rather than natural instinct
aimed at the benefits of such development to our own happiness, and yet the
particular differences in individuals’ ends makes a difference to how the content of
this duty is specified in practice: “it is a command of morally practical reason and a
duty of a human being to himself to cultivate his capacities (some among them more
than others, insofar as people have different ends), and to be in a pragmatic respect
a human being equal to the end of his existence” (MS 6:445). To produce in myself a
23
humanity that is equal to its vocation thus involves sensitivity to individual ends
(both in myself and in others). For this very reason, the account of cultivation that
looked merely quantitative when connected with the Indirect Strategy’s demand to
progress from weakness to strength takes on a qualitative dimension through the
very different kinds of ends that individuals can set and the very different talents
that they possess.
Now, Kant repeatedly tries to constrain this duty of cultivation by suggesting
that the development of talents is determined specifically by law. As he puts it,
though every aptitude is a subjective perfection of choice, only aptitudes that
determine actions in accordance with law rather than habit are free Wille rather
than arbitrary Willkür (MS 6:407). But the qualitative dimension that Kant’s own
sensitivity to individual ends introduces fundamentally undermines the adequacy of
law to play this role. In fact Kant makes no attempt to explain how the universal
form of law directs the development of talents; instead, Kant’s appeal in these
arguments regarding talents is to the universality of the indeterminacy of ends
(which one might more naturally associate with Willkür than Wille), and even that
appears to be restricted to a certain range that is determined by the individual,
natural constitution of the agent.
For Hegel, the outcome of the consideration of virtue as the correct
employment of talents or natural gifts is the idea that in the development and
employment of those talents the agent expresses her individuality, and thus knows
herself as a free an autonomous individual; humanity is individualized rational
nature (PhG¶¶400-1).xxv In following the discussion of virtue with the discussion of
24
the development of talents through interests in the spiritual animal kingdom, Hegel
seems to hold that the truth underlying this apparent confusion about the proper
constraint on the development of talents in Kant is that talents play the role of a
kind of natural universal that is self-specifying, or at least lends itself to being
specified in particular ways. Here, however, talents are universal not in the manner
a natural law (whose universality is tied to its exceptionless necessity), but rather
through what we might call a determinate indeterminacy (i.e., differential possible
routes of development). In this sense talents are naturally connected to the notion
of duties of virtue as wide duties.xxvi For Hegel, talents are individuated forms of the
capacity to set ends. When combined with Hegel’s earlier claim that individuality is
an end in itself, his argument appears to be that we respect others as ends in
themselves to the extent that we support them in and allow them to develop their
talents according to their interests; and, because our talents are useful to others,
when we develop our own talents according to our interests we serve others as well.
It is for this reason that Hegel characterizes talents as the self-actualizing good
(PhG¶386). Talents and interests together are both the material and the purpose of
activity, and the element that absorbs the shape of individuality (PhG¶396 and 401).
But we should not go too far in distinguishing Hegel and Kant here. H.S. Harris is
surely right to hold that it is the discipline imposed by the struggle that forces this
development – thus the struggle itself is the actualization of the good. The Indirect
Strategy with its need for discipline and strength of character does not disappear in
Hegel; it is merely reconceived as the discipline to develop one’s talents as guided by
one’s interests. Despite the fact that the universal and the individual are no longer
25
fundamentally or inevitably in tension, this discipline is still hard work and involves
some element of sacrifice.xxvii
Interests here play the crucial role of guiding free development, and thus
replace the appeal to law in Kant’s conception, but it strikes me that here Hegel is
working with basically Kantian resources to shift the balance of responsibility of the
different elements in Kant’s moral psychology. According to Kant, an interest is “an
incentive of the will insofar as it is represented by reason” (KpV 5:79). An interest,
therefore, involves rational consideration above a mere drive, but Hegel has a very
specific idea about what is involved in such rational consideration. In line with his
general conception of desire as a drive to confirm the independence of the
individual, Hegel holds that when linked with talent, interest is the positing of the
“given circumstances as its own, that is, as purpose” (PhG¶401). Hegel’s idea here is
that interest represents talent as a means to a purpose that is found present in the
circumstances of action, and which the agent furthers just as much as she sets it as
an end. But the interest plays the guiding role with respect to talent in a
fundamentally different way than does the universality of law. Whereas law is a
given form that constrains individuation through its instantiation in specific
circumstances, interests are themselves transformed by the process of their
effectiveness in the development of talents. Kant sometimes sees this when he
discusses how the duty to develop talents is related to the choice of profession, but
again the universality that replaces the form of law as controlling is indeterminate
utility (MS 6:392 and 445-6). Hegel attempts here to do justice to Kant’s
provocative but undeveloped insight that humanity is produced just as much as it is
26
presupposed, but his reconstruction undermines a central feature of Kant’s doctrine
of virtue, which is the asymmetry between the duty of virtue to self and to other.
This undermining signals the final exhaustion of Kantian resources for
individuation, since the asymmetry between duties of virtue to self and to others is
the most theorized account of the individuation of agents offered in the Doctrine of
Virtue, even though it only quite generally distinguishes between self and other, and
not between persons in specific conditions. Our duty to ourselves is to develop our
talents and will, but our duty to others is to promote their happiness. On Kant’s
view, to promote our own happiness cannot be a direct duty for us because it does
not involve Zwang (coercion or constraint): “What everyone already wants
unavoidably, of his own accord, does not come under the concept of duty, which is
constraint to an end adopted reluctantly” (MS 6:386). On the other side, we cannot
have a duty to develop others’ talents or will, since the perfection of the agent is his
ability “to set his end in accordance with his own concepts of duty,” and this cannot
be done for anyone else (MS 6:386).
Hegel’s rejection of the central premise of the second argument – that
individuals necessarily set their own ends for themselves – is so global in the
Phenomenology that it cannot be treated in any detail here.xxviii Proximally, if talents
are individuated forms of the capacity to set ends, it must be said that they take on
their individual forms in the decidedly social contexts of training and education. In
this connection, we have just seen the way in which Hegel sees interests as
identifying purposes in the circumstances of the exercise of talent, where these
circumstances are in many ways independent of the will of the agent.
27
Concerning the argument that happiness cannot be my own duty, we have
just seen why Hegel takes Kant’s own commitments to undermine this. If individual
interests are necessarily involved in the specification of ethical duties – directly in
duties to self but also in the duty of benevolence to others – then acting morally
brings with it a confirmation of one’s own autonomy as refracted through the
particular features of one’s individual outlook and circumstances.xxix Thus, Hegel
thinks, Kant also should recognize that both desire (Begierde) and pleasure (Lust)
involve an element of self-confirmation. The pleasure that results from the
satisfaction of desire is not a merely natural state, but is centrally tied to the
validation of the individual as free and autonomous.xxx And there is some evidence
that Kant does recognize this, though it is admittedly less than fully convincing.xxxi
5. The emptiness objection in the context of individualized virtue
In the Phenomenology, the official emptiness objection immediately follows
the discussion of virtue and the development of talents, in two sections devoted to
reason as law-giving and reason as law-testing. In my view, this structural
placement is consistent with Hegel’s orienting remark in the VGP that though Kant
recognizes the concreteness of autonomous reason, he cannot present it in its
individuality due to his empiricism, and so autonomy and individuality remain in
tension. As a result, Hegel thinks that Kant is forced to conceive of this
individualization as an infinite progression through which the individual tries, in her
own particular way, to subordinate individuality to universality. This is embodied
in Kant’s return back to the formality of law after he has been unable to master the
complexity of phenomenal individuality through the development of talents
28
according to interests. This is why in his framing of the emptiness objection in the
sections on law-giving and law-testing, Hegel represents the appeal to law there as a
retreat from a fuller moral psychology of freedom.xxxii
The emptiness objection must therefore be understood more broadly than is
usually the case, since the earlier re-weaving of the Kantian threads really
constitutes the first stage in the argument, with the second stage itself coming in
two parts in the sections on reason and law-giving and law-testing. In fact, Hegel
claims that the whole development of Active Reason is an emptiness objection, and
he is further clear that the empty universal is to be identified with law (PhG¶381).
This project to realize individual autonomy is undone, Hegel thinks, by the
fact that every attempt reinstates the particularity that was to be subordinated.
This is his diagnosis for why, on Kant’s view, moral perfection is unachievable for
human beings (MS 6:446-7). In the Philosophy of Right, this diagnosis is phrased in
individual terms as the idea that the reflective will generates the naturalness of
desires by its decisions and actions, but in the Phenomenology this is phrased in
more social terms as the idea that virtue recreates the ‘way of the world’ in its own
attempts to combat it. As becomes clear in his presentation of the second stage of
the emptiness objection, Hegel takes the difference between the individual and the
social form of presenting the problem as of significant import. Kantian universal
law formulations of practical reason are already a kind of retreat from the social
relations central to Kant’s theory of virtue and the problems for reason guided by
laws are generated by the fact that it abstracts in this way.
29
In the first stage of the objection Hegel argues that modern advocates of
virtue are in a fundamentally different situation than the ancients. Whereas the
content of the ancient conception of virtue is tied to the status of the good as
something already existing as the community, the modern, Kantian virtuous agent is
reduced to the meager hope of contributing, for her own part, to the realization of
the good. The gap between the agent’s actions and their significance is to be filled in
by faith, and in two senses. First, individually, that God will recognize their
(ultimately unsuccessful efforts) to be virtuous to count as being virtuous (KpV
5:122-4); and second, collectively, that God will apportion happiness to virtue and
create the greatest good (KpV 5:124-5).
On Hegel’s view, this faith connects the individual and the social in the
practice of virtue in the alienating conditions of modern societies, since he holds
that the virtuous agent aims to contribute to the production of the highest good, but
can only have faith that this highest good will come about, or even that his efforts
will contribute to it (PhG¶¶383-4). This is supposed to connect Kant’s appeal to
faith with the fact that for Kant, our natural perfections are essentially capacities
useful for others (MS 6:445-6), but in indeterminate ways. Properly understood,
this uncertainty is quite generally to be attributed to the contingency endemic to
social relations under the anarchic conditions of capitalist societies, and it is
significant that Hegel returns to the Kantian moral worldview in the chapter on
spirit in the context of modes of life that retreat from this alienating feature of
modern social relations.
30
This first step of Hegel’s argument is then completed in the spiritual animal
kingdom, which Hegel presents as an abstract form of the re-socialization of the
Kantian perspective on virtue. I say that this is an abstract form, because the
spiritual animal kingdom lacks the two central social institutions that for Hegel play
the crucial role in the direction of individual autonomy, namely the family and the
estates. The spiritual animal kingdom is, from Hegel’s perspective, a natural way to
understand Kant’s appeal to an external perspective as necessary for giving our
actions their true significance once one recognizes that the asymptotic approach
that was supposed to count as evidence for God’s judgment in this matter is
rendered impossible by the continual recreation of vice in the process of realizing
virtue. Once the infinite duration required to trace the asymptotic approach is
rendered irrelevant, the role of an external, universal perspective that previously
required an infinite God can now be played by other agents (see PhG¶¶400 & 404).
But since, as Kant himself emphasizes, action must have a material end – and
autonomy requires a distinctively moral material end – humanity as an end in itself
must be re-interpreted as something capable of being given distinctive shape by
individual agents within their finite lives. This then becomes what Hegel calls the
Sache selbst, the heart of the matter, and it represents something of universal
significance expressed specifically through the interest-guided employment and
development of talents in public actions. Responsiveness to this form of significance
is now taken to constitute autonomy, replacing the notion of humanity as a rational
nature that is universally shared by all agents at all times. This results directly from
the way in which Hegel’s re-weaving of the thread of virtues as duties we have
31
because we are also animals (§2) together with the thread of the development of
talents as a duty of virtue (§4) results in a reformulation of the universals (1) of the
indeterminacy of ends and (3) of the collection of ends into a conception that
humanity is achieved by different agents through the contrastive development of
different talents according to individual interests.
The discussion of virtue and talents thus deserves to be considered a proper
first part of the emptiness objection. That is, the first step attempts to show that the
new project is one way of consistently developing Kant’s moral psychology of virtue,
a way that leads in a strikingly different direction than Schopenhauer’s
development. Schopenhauer rests his case on the distinction between phenomena
and things-in-themselves as the fundamental criterion of fidelity to Kant. Since for
Hegel this distinction is fundamentally a symptom of Kant’s empiricism, the spiritual
animal kingdom represents a non-empiricist development of Kant’s moral
psychology.
The second step of this more broadly conceived emptiness objection – the
step found in the specific sections on law-giving and law-testing – is designed to
show that the notion of universal law is of no use for agents who are trying to guide
their actions by responsiveness to the heart of the matter (¶¶418,428, and 432); the
universality involved in such guidance must be of a fundamentally different form. Of
course, as the first step makes clear, this project is not Kant’s own official project,
and so, if taken on its own, the emptiness objection presented in the sections on
reason as law-giving and law-testing is bound to appear decidedly off-target. But
from Hegel’s perspective, the spiritual animal kingdom already represents the most
32
charitable reconstruction possible of Kant’s practical philosophy, since it is the
reconstruction that goes the furthest towards solving the problem of the
individuation of free agency with the resources of Kant’s moral psychology of virtue.
To put this point in terms of our strategies, the appeal to law fits most naturally with
the Subsumption Strategy. If it is right to think that in the spiritual animal kingdom
Hegel brings together the Indirect and Direct strategies, then responsiveness to the
heart of the matter should be a form of both subjection appropriation and
specification of content (the two kinds of individuation we have considered as
important to Kant). The emptiness objection in its second stage then has the
function of clearly separating the Direct Strategy from the Subsumption Strategy so
as to make the conjunction of the Direct and Indirect Strategies more secure. But
since the Subsumption Strategy is not Kant’s considered view, the second stage of
the emptiness objection can be read as an argument that Kant should have seen that
his rejection of that strategy also entailed the rejection of the appeal to the
nomological conception of the moral universal. Thus Hegel is again trying to enforce
a different kind of Kantian consistency than Schopenhauer.
Hegel begins with reason as law-giving, since this is the most natural Kantian
account of autonomy. And yet this form of autonomy is specifically described as
being an abstraction from both the individuality of the agent and the social reality of
the action. The former abstraction is signified by the fact that Hegel says that the
character of the individual has lost its status as the medium and purpose of its
activities, and now counts merely as qualitative difference within the universal – a
return to the failed Subsumption Strategy (¶418). The second abstraction from
33
social reality is signaled in the very next paragraph by the idea that the true result of
the spiritual animal kingdom is the notion of spirit as consisting of distinct social
spheres (what will become the estates). Hegel is thus already describing moral
reflection focused on the form of law as a retreat from a more adequate conception
that is implicit in it. With respect to Kant this is best read as the claim that Kant’s
own doctrine of virtue presents a higher point of view than the constructions of
universal law. Thus it is not surprising to see that Hegel’s procedure in presenting
the emptiness objection is a familiar one to readers of the Phenomenology – to draw
out commitments that are internal to the form of consciousness being described but
are obscured by its self-presentation. The primary form this takes in the analysis of
law-giving is in terms of the notion of immediacy. The immediacy of the
determination of the will by the moral law is a central element in Kant’s theory of
autonomy, but we have already in §1 seen the way in which Hegel argues that any
adequate account of free individuality must dispense with the distinction between
immediate determination of the will by law and mediated determination by desires.
The focus on immediacy in law-giving explains Hegel’s otherwise puzzling
formulation of the first moral command he considers: “Every one ought to speak the
truth” (¶423). We are accustomed to hearing this command in the negative as a
perfect duty (“Don’t lie.”), and so at first Hegel’s derivations of the problems with
such a command appear to attack a straw man (cf. MS 6:429). But Hegel’s idea here
is that only the positive version could answer to the criterion of serving as an
immediate determiner of the will, since the negative version could only be relevant
in the context of other motivations, and only produces its signature effect by that
34
contrast (cf. KpV 5:74-5). Hegel then develops out of this positive version a
contingency at its heart: “Each ought to speak the truth according to his knowledge
and conviction about it at the time. – However, as a result what is universally
necessary, what is valid in itself, that is, what the proposition wanted to articulate is
to a greater degree turned topsy-turvy into a complete contingency” (¶423). This
contingency is made into even more of a distinctively practical problem in Hegel’s
discussion of the command to “Love thy neighbor as thyself” (¶424), where Hegel
notes that benefiting others is not merely a matter of intention, but of knowledge
and ability as well.
The argument here is that Kant’s own requirement of immediacy of
determination of the will cannot be satisfied by the nomological conception of
universality as exceptionless necessity that animates Kant’s universal law
formulations. Again, if I am right about the importance of the placement of the lawgiving and law-testing sections after the discussion of virtue, the function of this
point of Hegel’s is to motivate a conception of autonomy as responsiveness to
another form of significance, namely that which Hegel terms the heart of the matter.
The immediacy of free moral determination of the will remains an important
component in Hegel’s account of autonomy, but the nature of that immediacy must
be radically reinterpreted in a way that absorbs the contingency of social relations.
Hegel makes this most explicit in the section on law-testing, where he considers the
question, “Ought it be a law in and for itself that there should be property?” (¶429),
which he later connects with Kant’s example of the deposit (¶436). The ethical
disposition that maintains recognition of the deposit as the property of the other is
35
not to be explained by any potential inconsistency in refusing to recognize it as such.
Because of the rather loose relation between the multiple elements of the social
existence of property and its universal conception, consistency or inconsistency is
always a matter of perspective, and thus mediated. But the immediate constancy of
perspective is what constitutes the ethical disposition – an unwavering point of view
that itself defines the perspective from which consistency or inconsistency is
determined. Again, the fundamental point Hegel is trying to make here is that the
nomological conception of universality is of no use to agents trying to express
something of universal significance from their own particular perspective.
But the issues raised in §1 should remind us that this problem is not
unimportant for Kant himself, even if it is not as important as the clarification of the
fundamental moral criterion, and Hegel’s emptiness objection is best understood as
attempting to motivate a re-interpretation as more central than Kant realizes of
Kant’s own claim that “it is a command of morally practical reason and a duty of a
human being to himself to cultivate his capacities (some among them more than
others, insofar as people have different ends), and to be in a pragmatic respect a
human being equal to the end of his existence” (MS 6:445).
It is perhaps best to read Hegel here as inverting the order of significance of
individuation and the moral criterion; whereas the problem of individuation
receives its distinctive formulation in virtue of being a subordinate problem to that
of the pure moral criterion for Kant, for Hegel the problem of the criterion is
presented as one element in the larger problem of the expression of individual
autonomy. xxxiii This would be confirmed by Hegel’s view that the failures of law-
36
giving and law-testing come from their abstraction from the social reality of the
agent, and his claim that the lesson to be learned is that they are actually subsidiary
elements (moments) that define the honest consciousness’ attempt to navigate the
varied terrain of that reality (¶¶432-4). In this inversion, the problems of judgment
that Kant tends to marginalize become central, because autonomy is now
understood as constituted by expressive particularization of the universal, rather
than being secured by that universal itself (with judgment acting only as a further
application). Or perhaps it is better to say that in Hegel’s conception, the question is
not so much one of (determining) judgment but rather one of interpretation; not
‘What is the morally necessary or permissible thing to do?’ but ‘Does X’s action
articulate from X’s perspective what is fundamental significance in this situation?’
This comes out in the distinctive form of the law-giving example that one must
speak the truth, where contingency is introduced precisely as a problem for the
interpretation of the relation between individual expression and universal truth.
I believe that this also helps to make some sense of Hegel’s superficially
bizarre transformation of the moral question of theft into a referendum on the
justice of property relations in the section on law-testing.xxxiv If one shifts to seeing
autonomy as responsiveness to the heart of the matter, then the question of moral
evaluation becomes whether a thief’s action shows, from his particular perspective,
an appreciation for why we organize our social relations by property claims. But as
the right of necessity shows, such a question cannot always be answered in the
negative. Kant is deeply suspicious of such a right, calling it at one point “an
absurdity.”xxxv When he does endorse it, Kant thinks of it as an impotence of law:
37
[T]here can be no penal law that would assign the death penalty to someone
in a shipwreck who, in order to save his own life, shoves another, whose life
is equally in danger, off a plank on which he had saved himself. For the
punishment threatened by the law could not be greater than the loss of his
own life…Hence the deed of saving one’s own life by violence is not to be
judged inculpable… but only unpunishable…The motto of the right of
necessity says: ‘Necessity has no law’… Yet there could be no necessity that
would make what is wrong conform with law (MS 6:235-6).
In contrast, Hegel defends a rather robust right of necessity as follows: “If...[life] can
be preserved by stealing a loaf [of bread], this certainly constitutes an infringement
of someone’s property, but it would be wrong to regard such an action as common
theft,” since the point (Sache) of the institution of property is to make free human
life possible (PR§127Z). For this reason Hegel is able to embed a right of necessity
into the very system of property law, in part in the form the protection of debtor’s
tools and other necessary productive resources from the grasp of creditors
(PR§127R). Sometimes, the exception proves the rule and this cannot be
accommodated within the nomological conception of moral universality, any more
than such a conception can orient interpretation of individual expression with
respect to the truth.
To come back to the issue of faith, we can understand Hegel’s argument that
the immediacy of moral determination cannot be nomological as providing the basis
for a diagnosis of why faith becomes so central to Kant’s practical philosophy. In the
summation of his consideration of law-giving and law-testing, Hegel says that the
former is an invalid establishment of laws and the latter is an invalid freedom from
the laws. On Hegel’s views, both mistakes arise from the fact that for Kant, the
moral law is not the internal essence of individual consciousness in the way that
38
Kant holds it to be. The only way to understand this is in terms of the failure with
empiricist Kantian resources to make any headway on the problem of individuation.
On Hegel’s view, the true nature of this immediate relation between moral
commands and the conscious individual is actually to be located in the agent’s
identification with her social reality – the roles and relations in terms of which she
reflects morally. The major function of the emptiness objection is to demonstrate
the knowledge of social forms that is necessarily implicit in self-direction
immediately through law (PhG¶¶421-2). Hegel is essentially offering a protoMarxist social explanation for the conflict between the universal and particular in
Kant: the actual experience of this conflict is in the lack of control that the individual
has over her works in the modern context in which there is an indeterminate and
socially contested relation between her works and their significance, and this is then
theorized as the incompatibility of the self-identical universality of activity as such
(the formal element of rational autonomy) and the indeterminate individuality of
the nature that is expressed in the work (the particular element of motivations,
abilities, and circumstances) (PhG¶¶405 and 429).
But again, it seems to me that from this perspective, Hegel is largely working
in a Kantian vein. Kant explicitly acknowledges that universalization as such does
not generate the maxim to develop one’s talents, or even rule out the maxim not to
develop them (GW4:422-3). And, as we noted before, Kant holds that a complete
presentation of a moral system must include a schematization of the principles of
virtue in terms of the condition of the agent. We can summarize the emptiness
objection in the Phenomenology in the following way: it consists of a reiteration of
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Kant’s own recognition of the necessity of a schematization of moral commands, but
with the additional argument that one must radically alter the conception of the
significance of those commands for such a schematization to be possible.
But if it must be said that Hegel is right to see in Kant’s practical philosophy a
kind of retreat from the alienation of the modern social order, it must equally be
said that the contemporary social order has long ago outrun Hegel’s own analysis of
its incipient form in early 19th Century Germany (where history had already stopped
on that side of the Rhine, as Marx puts it). The social institutions so crucial to
Hegel’s conception of social agency – the family and the estates – have traversed a
quite different path of development than the one envisioned by Hegel in the pages of
his Philosophy of Right. The estates – the bridge between Willkür and Wille on
Hegel’s view (PR§206) – have perhaps never functioned in the way that Hegel
imagined; in any event, we are all workers now, even farmers and (unionized) civil
servants. And though the family continues to play a vital and philosophically
severely under-recognized role, it must be said that the patriarchalism and narrow
structure of Hegel’s own analysis of the family must render it only slightly less
foreign to us today than Aristotle’s functionalist account. We might be tempted to
fall back on a bare account of mutual recognition stripped of its specific institutional
articulations, but the power of Hegel’s emptiness objection can be motivated just as
easily against such a project as against Kant’s. The future of a broadly Hegelian
social philosophy can only be found in a new critical theory that tries to identify
within current social and economic conditions those structures and institutions in
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virtue of which human agents are enabled and frustrated in their attempts to
express something of universal significance from their own particular perspective.
The relevant discussion is in PhG¶¶381-417. Citations are as follows:
Hegel: ‘PhG’ = Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, cited by paragraph number to Terry
Pinkard’s bilingual edition (available at
http://web.mac.com/titpaul/Site/Phenomenology_of_Spirit_page.html); ‘VGP’ =
Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie (Vol. 20 in Hegel’s Werke, ed.
E. Moldenhauer and K.M. Michel (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1970); ‘PR’ = Hegel’s
Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Vol. 7 in Hegel’s Werke).
Kant: ‘MS’ = Metaphysik der Sitten; ‘KpV’ = Kritik der praktischen Vernunft; and ‘GW’
= Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. Kant’s works are cited by Academy
pagination (except for the A/B pagination of the first Critique), and translations are
from Practical Philosophy, trans. M. Gregor (Cambridge University Press, 1996).
ii VGP 460.
iii VGP 462.
iv See Kant KrV A27-8/B43-4.
v I will follow the standard practice of using capitalization to signal the stretch of
text that constitutes the second part of the Metaphysics of Morals, and lower-case
letters to refer to the theoretical project presented there and in other texts.
vi On the Basis of Morality, trans. E.F.J. Payne (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), 203-222.
vii Patrick Kain helped me to see the relevance of this distinction.
viii Another individuating strategy that one might consider would be differences in
maxims, since Kant writes that different agents can have different maxims for the
same practical law (MS 6:225). But I suspect that what would make maxims
different would be some sort of empirical natural or social feature, and so this
proposal is just a rephrasing of the Subsumption Strategy. In any event, it is not
clear that such a strategy would work for virtue, since Kant holds that ethics gives
laws for maxims themselves, and the “playroom” for individuality appears to be
between maxims and actions, i.e., in the way that the maxims that we all share are
translated into specific actions given our circumstances.
ix Though Kant suggests that such a schematization and application “belongs to the
complete presentation of the system” of ethics, he does not himself present one.
One can easily see Hegel’s presentation of specific ethical institutions in his
philosophy of objective spirit as the presentation of this schematization, and I will
argue in section 7 that the emptiness objection is understood best as Hegel’s version
of the argument Kant himself makes here for the necessity of such a schematization.
Cf. MS 6:216-7, where Kant similarly says that the metaphysics of morality requires
principles of application just as the metaphysics of nature does, but there claims
that such principles would touch only on subjective conditions.
x Though I will have very little to say about Hegel’s treatment of some of the same
material in the Philosophy of Right, it is important to note that there as well Hegel
associates virtue with individuality. This association plays an important role in
Hegel’s argument for why, in the modern world, virtue plays a subsidiary role: in the
i
41
modern world, the universal does the job that was left to “the distinctive genius of
individuals” in earlier times (PR§150R). In the same discussion, Hegel writes of
virtues as “the ethical in its particular application.”
xi H.S.Harris is right to say that for Hegel, “The ‘end’ of Virtue is to display Reason
‘for its own sake.’ But the ‘truth’ of this display is that Reason is revealed as the
means-end continuum of the free activity of rational individuality.” Harris, Hegel’s
Ladder (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), vol.2, p. 57
xii This is connected with his characterization of human freedom in these mixed
terms, according to which “freie Willkür” is determinable by pure reason, “tierische
Willkür” is determined by sensible impulses, and “menschliche Willkür” is affected
(affiziert) but not determined (bestimmt) by impulses and can therefore be
determined by pure will (“aus reinem Willen”) (MS 6:213). At MS 6:379-80 (and
note), in one of the more evocative passages on this point, Kant argues that duty is a
kind of reciprocal self-constraint (Selbstzwang) of a rational natural being who is
unholy enough to break the law or to obey it only reluctantly, but also holy enough
that they break the law only reluctantly as well. Additionally, several MS arguments
for specific duties make use of the notion of either a natural purposiveness of our
natural being for specific goals (e.g., of lust for the perpetuation of the species, and
of the capacity to communicate for others’ awareness of my own mental states), or
for the way in which the natural being in general should be subordinate to
personality (e.g., the discussions of suicide and drunkenness).
xiii On the Basis of Morality, 58-9.
xiv In the Philosophy of Right there is analogous language: virtue is described as “The
ethical, in so far as it is reflected in the naturally determined character of the
individual as such” (PR§150); and the theory of particular duties is said to be a
“spiritual natural history” (“eine geistige Naturgeschichte”) (PR§150R).
xv Though there is no space to delve into the issue in this paper, Hegel’s point here is
deeply connected with the productivity of the concept as it is articulated at
WL409/SL571 with reference to EL§148. I hope to have more to say about this
connection in future work.
xvi Since, as Kant puts it in his justification for external coercion (die Befugnis zu
zwingen), “Resitance that counteracts the hindering of an effect promotes this effect
and is consistent with it,” (MS 6:231), the setting of this material end is an indirect
way of acting from duty, motivated by the form of law alone.
xvii 220.
xviii Spiegelfechterei, literally ‘fencing at mirrors’.
xix Kant’s official definition of virtue includes this as well: “[T]he capacity and
considered resolve to withstand a strong but unjust opponent is fortitude (fortitudo)
and, with respect to what opposes the moral disposition within us, virtue (virtus,
fortitudo moralis)” (MS 6:380). See also MS 6:376: As applied to virtue, the relevant
concept of duty must be one “of the force and herculean strength needed to subdue
the vice-breeding inclinations…” and MS 6:405-6 and 408 (where the point is that
we need to shape our inclinations to avoid passions that structure reflection).
xx In Hegel’s conception of ethical life, even the specific pursuit of particular
interests as merely constrained by respect for universal principles has moral import
42
as the expression of individual autonomy – this is the importance of civil society in
modern institutional life. In contrast, Kant tends to view the inequalities inherent in
modern capitalist economies with a much greater moral skepticism than Hegel. As
he famously puts in the casuistical questions about beneficence, “Having the
resources to practice such beneficence as depends on the goods of fortune is, for the
most part, a result of certain human beings being favored through the injustice of
the government, which introduces an inequality of wealth that makes others need
their beneficence. Under such circumstances, does a rich man’s help to the needy,
on which he so readily prides himself as something meritorious, really deserve to be
called beneficence at all?” (MS 6:454). Though Hegel has his own deep concerns
about the threat of poverty in modern societies, he does not see the inequality of
wealth as being produced by government injustice, but rather by the unequal
distribution of the means by which individuals are useful to each other. In Hegel’s
terms in the Phenomenology, Kant sees the rich person as having succeeded by
following the vicious “way of the world” instead of virtue, whereas Hegel sees him as
having – perhaps indirectly – discharged his duty to attend to the happiness of
others through his productive activity, and having been rewarded by the market for
his usefulness to others.
xxi PR§21R; PR§15R identifies the reflective will discussed in PR§21R with Kant’s
account.
xxii See Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom (New York: Cambridge, 1990), pp. 5-6 and
Kant’s Religion at 6:24.
xxiii On this theme, see Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy (New York:
Cambridge, 2008).
xxiv Also MS 6:399ff spells out what is presupposed, but must be cultivated
xxv It is important to note here that Hegel does not put the discussion of virtue in
terms of duty. H.S. Harris advances this as a reason for thinking that Kant is not
Hegel’s intended reference here (Hegel’s Ladder vol. 2, p. 63). But the same notion
of an imperative oriented by a conception of the soul in tension is unmistakably
there. In Hegel, it is further explicit that the imperative is to know oneself as free.
Furthermore, in the Philosophy of Right, the build-up to the emptiness objection (i.e.,
the structurally analogous discussion) is precisely in terms of duty.
xxvi With respect to the second imperfect duty to self, i.e., the duty of moral
perfection, even the maxim to strive to do duty from duty is general (i.e.,
indeterminate) with respect to the “inner action in the human mind” that attempts
to apply this principle. Thus the law that gives us moral perfection as our end is
similarly wide and imperfect (MS 6:392-3).
xxvii Harris vol. 2, p.54.
xxviii Given his doctrine of the constitution of subjectivity through mutual
recognition, it is perhaps best to read Hegel as rejecting Kant’s principle as
dangerously naïve. This naivete is presented in the spiritual animal kingdom as
generating the surprise that the individual agent registers when she sees that her
own interpretation of her action involves an important element of contingency in
the determination of her purpose, and that others are so immediately involved in
this interpretation (PhG¶¶404 and 417).
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As Allison puts it in discussing Schiller’s criticism of Kant, Kant’s point is that “we
cannot have an inclination to do something because it is our duty to do it (an
inclination to duty). If we did, then the moral requirement would not be
represented as a duty because the law would not take the form of an imperative.
And since the latter is necessary for unholy beings such as ourselves, so too is the
moment of moral constraint” (Kant’s Theory of Freedom, 184). But Hegel’s point is
that - quite obviously, constantly and parochially – we do have an inclination to do
something because it is our duty to do it. This follows, for Hegel, from the
satisfaction that agents necessarily derive from action that confirms their free
individuality, and like Kant he thinks that free individuality is a matter of rational
self-direction. But it therefore follows for Hegel that there is no real point to the talk
of duty and imperatives, nor of the unholiness of individual agents. Hegel replaces
this stance with the acknowledgment, through forgiveness, of the inevitable distance
between individual action and universal norms.
xxx In a passage that contains Hegel’s starting point for his discussion of agency, and
which might equally serve as a summary of his critical appreciation of Kant’s moral
psychology, Hegel connects these notions with the idea of action as a unification of
persons in a universal: “[Acting self-consciousness] therefore arrives at the
enjoyment of pleasure, that is, it arrives at the consciousness of its actualization in a
consciousness which appears to be self-sufficient, that is, it arrives at the intuition of
the unity of both self-sufficient self-consciousnesses. It achieves its purpose, and it
then experiences in that achievement what the truth of its purpose is. It
comprehends itself as this individual essence existing- for-itself. However, the
actualization of this purpose is itself the sublation of the purpose, since selfconsciousness becomes not an object to itself as this individual self- consciousness
but to a greater degree as the unity of itself and the other self- consciousness, and
thereby as a sublated individual, that is, as universal” (PhG¶362).
xxxi There is not too much Kantian text to work with here, so I will just
summarize the different points at which this connection comes up or appears to be
implied. Kant sometimes talks of the third natural end of humanity as if it is
enjoyment of life (e.g. MS 6:420), but sometimes as if it is more closely connected
with agency (as in the second edition). Sometimes it looks as if it is perhaps his idea
that there is a kind of an awareness of agency that counts as proper enjoyment. At
this point the connection is specifically put in terms of the natural ends that we have
insofar as we are animals.
In addition, the perfection that is our duty is a kind of qualitative, i.e.,
teleological perfection (i.e., “the harmony (Zusammenstimmung) of a thing’s
properties with an end” (MS 6:386)). The relevant harmony is that towards the end
that we have qua human, so successful action would be a confirmation of our human
status. Even the struggle of the virtuous person against her inclinations is combined
with pleasure in triumph, and this pleasure is taken by Kant to be crucial to the longterm constancy of the virtuous character (MS 6:484), so the teleological picture
gives one a positive sense of holding one’s own against external forces. For Kant, of
course, the key difference between pathological and moral pleasure is that the first
is a preceding motivation but the second is only the result of having done duty for
xxix
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the sake of law directly and immediately (MS 6:377-8), so it makes sense to think
that this moral pleasure might be the satisfaction of being autonomous. Finally, the
vice of stinginess (Geiz) is that of maintaining “all the means to good living, but with
no intention of enjoyment” (MS 6:432). Kant says that this makes us subordinate to
our possessions rather than their masters, and so it makes sense to think of the
pleasure we take in our possessions as either producing or produced by our
recognition of our independence with respect to them.
xxxii The form of this retreat is set out nicely by Sally Sedgwick with respect to the
Natural Law essay as the move from empiricism to formalism. This move ties the
presentation of the emptiness objection in the Phenomenology to that of the Natural
Law essay. Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 50:4 (Oct. - Dec., 1996), pp. 563584.
xxxiii In many respects, I think, Hegel and critics of the emptiness of objection have
been talking past one another on this point, given their very different senses of the
distinctive problem to which modern moral philosophy responds. For
contemporary critics (and perhaps for Kant as well), the problem is the specter of
relativism, and the Kantian solution is an a priori foundation, based on autonomy, to
establish liberal moral and political principles. But for Hegel, the problem is
whether the universal moral reflection demanded of modern individuals can play a
role in expressing their free individuality, which individuality is itself the basic
moral and political value. As a result, for Hegel, the problem isolated by the
emptiness objection is not that of generating the right result for moral dilemmas,
but rather clarifying the self-constitution of the agent through universal moral
principles. This is why, in the development of the problem to which universal law is
auditioned as the solution, Hegel puts the indeterminacy of moral reflection not
abstractly in terms of relativism, but rather interpersonally in terms of deception
(Betrug). This is the problem of determining whether the individual has adequately
expressed the universal through her own interest, or only something idiosyncratic
(where the particular at best falls under the universal rather than animating it)
(PhG¶¶414-7).
xxxiv See also Hegel’s treatment of the deposit example in this light in the essay on
natural law (TWA II, 462-3).
xxxv “On the common saying: That may be correct in theory, but it is of no use in
practice,” 8:300.
45