Abstract
I present Hegel’s position that beauty and moral agency cannot be paired in any productive way, demonstrating this as a culminating claim of the sixth chapter of The Phenomenology of Spirit. In this, we learn that for Hegel, beauty claims an ambiguous position, always eviscerated yet never fully put to rest. This dialectical tension requires that we attend to the place of beauty as it appears in Hegel’s thoughts on morality and marks a departure from a long-standing tradition – exemplified in the work of such thinkers as Plato, Immanuel Kant, the ‘Beautiful Souls’ of 18th-century German Romanticism and Elaine Scary – that matches moral goodness with beauty.
Keywords
With a focus on the Ethical Order and the Beautiful Soul, I explore the role of beauty in the sixth chapter of G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Reviled in the Preface, surfacing and resurfacing through the entire Phenomenology, the spectre of a weak and fragile beauty haunts; its hold on the text is dialectically both persistent and anaemic. As this dialectical tension steers the vicissitudes of the Phenomenology’s sixth chapter, where the character of social life is explored through a series of experiences, the insight that beauty and moral agency cannot be paired in any productive or facile manner is proffered. This position departs from a long-standing tradition – exemplified in the work of such thinkers as Plato, Immanuel Kant, the ‘Beautiful Souls’ of 18th-century German Romanticism and Elaine Scary – that matches moral goodness with beauty. In the allegory of the cave, for example, Plato explains that upon emerging from the metaphysical darkness of the cave, one becomes enlightened and capable of perceiving the ‘reality of the beautiful, the just and the good’ (Republic: 520c). Similarly, in the Critique of Judgment Kant claims that ‘the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good’ (2000: 227); Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, ‘The Confessions of a Fair Soul’ [Bekenntnisse einer schönen Seele], characterizes a moral position which valorizes an aesthetic perfection of the soul, writing ‘my conduct is approximating more and more to the image I have formed of perfection’ (line 220); and Scary in On Beauty and Being Just argues that beauty ‘actually assists us in the work of addressing injustice’ (1999: 62).
Challenging this tradition, Hegel, in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, pronounces his view of beauty:
Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. (1977[1807]: 19)
Here Hegel introduces what he sees to be the problem with beauty. In particular, he views beauty as weak − incapable of engaging in a negativity that serves the ultimate purpose of leading us towards truth. I argue that when this view is considered alongside his discussions of the Ethical Order and the Beautiful Soul it becomes apparent that the Phenomenology’s sixth chapter is engaged in a dialectical struggle between moral agency on the one hand, and beauty on the other. Throughout the experiences of the Ethical Order and the Beautiful Soul we see that the problem with a Kantian-like stance of beautiful goodness originates in beauty’s characteristic purity, stone-like inertness and one-sidedness. On Hegel’s count, beauty is incapable of tolerating the impurities, deformations and contradictions that come with actual life. Thus a pairing of beauty and moral agency is possible only to the point that ethical imperatives are actualized; the requirement, implicit in ethics itself, that something actually happen destroys the partnership of beauty and moral agency. Moreover, the purity which beauty demands, results in a vision of the world in which things are thoroughly good or thoroughly bad. Yet, as soon as ethical efforts are realized in concrete action, moral agency is sullied by the imperfections and ambiguities of the real world, and, lacking purity, it is no longer beautiful.
In other words, Hegel’s work suggests the position that beauty and moral agency, repelling one another like North-magnet and South-magnet, are in contradiction. Here an important clarification is essential. Hegel’s work challenges the principle of identity found in traditional logic, that is, if A = A then it is not the case that A = ~A. In so doing he embraces contradiction and a unique conception of negation, complicating the meaning of this fraught pairing of beauty–goodness. For Hegel, unlike philosophers who employ traditional conceptions of logic, contradiction is not grounds for dismissal. On the contrary, becoming aware of the contradictoriness of a situation is a positive pedagogic realization which teaches us to progress onwards.
For the purposes of this exploration into the tensions between beauty and goodness, the significance of Hegel’s acceptance of contradiction and his emphasis on negation is that we are forced to participate in a double gesture 1 whereby we recognize the problematic contradiction between beauty and goodness and simultaneously maintain the impossible position articulated through this contradiction. We must acknowledge that, on Hegel’s terms, the contradiction between beauty and goodness does not merit an outright dismissal of an ethical stance of beautiful goodness, but leads us to progress onwards in the endeavor of speculative thought. In other words, we cannot simply discard beautiful goodness, but we must tarry with it and its imperfections, and this requires us to participate in precisely that negativity that Hegelian beauty finds intolerable.
In my analysis, focusing on the connections between the Ethical Order and the Beautiful Soul, I draw inspiration from Allen Speight’s (2001) work on the Beautiful Soul. Yet, where Speight emphasizes the literary motifs that run through the Phenomenology’s sixth chapter, noting that the chapter opens with tragedy and ends with the novel, I hold that a tension more significant than that between the tragic and the narrative, is that between beauty and moral agency. The sixth chapter concerns the social formations in and through which human beings live, all the while investing their surrounding world with value and meaning, with beauty and goodness. While following how the tropes of tragedy and novel draw important connections, I hold that a stronger interpretation results from following the dialectical manoeuvers in the relations between beauty and moral agency.
What I interpret to be one of the central lessons of Hegel’s sixth chapter, the thesis that beauty and moral agency are incompatible, squares with Jay Bernstein’s analysis of aesthetic alienation, where he acknowledges that for Hegel, unlike for Kant, beauty is separated from, alienated from, truth and goodness. Building on Bernstein’s analysis, I explore Hegel’s Ethical Order and Beautiful Soul, showing how, for Hegel, unlike beauty, good deeds are impure, demanding of us a capacity to tolerate the negative and with it imperfections, deformations, ugliness, messiness, ambiguity and failures. In contrast, ’Beauty’ cannot be actualized, undermining the possibility that a good deed be beautiful. Hence a stance of ‘beautiful goodness’ meets with difficulties when the imperative of actualization is met. At the point that efforts towards goodness are actualized, goodness becomes sullied by the imperfections of the actual world, and in losing purity, it can no longer be beautiful. Ultimately, though, in keeping with Hegel’s thoughts on contradiction and negation, this insight involves appreciating that this opposition of beauty and goodness requires the double gesture of tarrying-with and growing-beyond the stance of beautiful goodness.
The ethical order
The Phenomenology of Spirit is an account of the development of consciousness from an irrational, immediate sensation towards a self-consciousness that in belonging to a fully rationalized spiritual community, is aware of being within and defined by a complex nexus of relationships. This progression towards self-knowledge moves through a series of configurations of consciousness, or characters. In so doing, it conforms to Hegel’s stance on contradiction, presenting characters, which all eventually fall into contradiction and give way to a more developed form of consciousness. In each case, the character in question is not thoroughly abandoned, but throughout the remainder of this progression, retains a presence, albeit a ghost-like partial presence. In this text, Hegel’s discussion of the Ethical Order is a consideration of the ethical life of ancient Greek society, which follows a critical assessment of Kantian law. Hegel argues that because of the categorical imperative, Kantian law ends up in an untenable position, positing a fundamental separation between law and actual situations. This division renders the law so abstract that the effort to assess specific circumstances becomes impossible. Ultimately, the law becomes arbitrary: ‘I could make whichever of them I like the law, and just as well neither of them’ (Hegel, 1977[1807]: 262). Kantian law is thus revealed as unlike the unquestionable law it had announced itself to be. Hegel’s need to move beyond 2 Kantian law leads him to ancient Greece and Sophocles’ Antigone. While Hegel’s discussion of Antigone does not explicitly engage with the issue of beauty and its relationship to goodness, I argue that his invokation of beauty, ‘This determination of immediacy means that Nature as such enters into the ethical act, the reality of which simply reveals the contradiction and the germ of destruction inherent in the beautiful harmony and tranquil equilibrium of the ethical Spirit itself’ (ibid.: 289; italics added) is a critical clue towards understanding the Ethical Order and the Phenomenology’s sixth chapter.
While the Ethical Order has been the subject of substantial commentary, I hold that taking Hegel’s reference to beauty as critical offers new insight into this much-discussed section. Where many commentators, Luce Irigaray (1974), Tina Chanter (1995), Patricia Mills (1996), Judith Butler (2000), Nadine Changfoot (2002), for example, read this section as a dialectic between woman and man, between an ancient matrilineal social order and an emerging patriarchy, I hold that this section can also be interpreted, profitably, as a dialectical journey through the contradictions of beauty and moral agency: read in this manner, the Ethical Order makes the claim that the beauty of our moral aspirations is destroyed by their actualization.
The ethical order
Hegel proceeds to argue that it is essential to recognize how ‘the right’ (1977[1807]: 262) is actually encountered. Asking how the law is experienced, Hegel embarks on a phenomenology, which begins with what he understands as the ethical law and customs of the ancient Greek world. In response to the arbitrary nature of Kantian law, Hegel puts forward the immediate decisiveness of the Ethical Order. Since morality predicated on a split between actuality and law falls into contradiction, the possibility that there is no split is a plausible, and fittingly dialectical, alternative. In other words, Hegel abandons a Kantian law, which depends on an impossible mediation between actual circumstance and an abstract rule, for a morality that does not require mediation.
It is thus that he turns to consider the ethical position that takes the right to be immediate and absolute and ‘fancies that in simply knowing laws it possesses them in their own absolute nature’ (1977: 263). Through the course of the experience of the Ethical Order, Hegel will show that this absolute immediacy − as unwavering and thoroughly decisive − involves a purity 3 of spirit that ultimately destroys the agent of the Ethical Order.
According to Hegel, the Ethical Order is split in two: into human law and divine law, man and woman, community and individual, polis and family. 4 The polis is the realm of men and the site of human law. The human law, which concerns the spirit of the polis, is openly accepted and clearly manifested to every member of the community. Confronting this law is the divine law, a law of obscurity and darkness, situated in the family, upheld by women and concerned with the individual particularity of the family members. Where in the polis everyone is a member of a universal spirit, family members are particular individuals: not any man, but this husband, or this brother. ‘The individual who seeks the pleasure of enjoying his individuality, finds it in the Family’ (1977[1807]: 276; original emphases).
As Hegel explains, the family has the duty of performing the act that insures the particularity of the individual. More specifically, this is the duty to deal with and process the death of family members. Through this act, the family saves the deceased from becoming an undifferentiated corpse or an ‘empty singular’ (1977[1807]: 271). The work of mourning and burial bestows human will upon death. It elevates it from a merely natural event to ‘a work deliberately done’ (ibid.: 278), transforming death from something natural to something intentional. Through a consideration of the work of mourning, we learn that ‘the wrong which can be inflicted on the individual in the ethical realm is simply this, that something merely happens to him’ (ibid.: 277; original emphasis). In other words, in the Ethical Order, intentionality or deliberateness is a necessary feature of an ethical act or position.
Initially, the polis, guided by ‘the law of universality’, opposes the family and establishes its existence ‘through its interference with the happiness of the family, and by dissolving [individual] self-consciousness into the universal’ (1977[1807]: 288). However, this opposition is ultimately overcome, and a mutual dependence between the family and the polis is revealed: ‘We do indeed see it [the Ethical Order] divide itself into two essences and their reality; but their antithesis is rather the authentication of one through the other’ (ibid.: 278). This inter-dependence undermines the initial opposition between the two sides. What was at first encountered as a discord between two antithetical, pure and one-sided positions, is shown in the end to be a chiasmic intertwining of the two sides.
This intertwining operates in two directions. On the one hand, the human law is connected to the divine law. In the polis, the individual is first and foremost a universal individual. One man is the same as the next and hence each man is merely an instantiation of the universal category ‘citizen’ (1977[1807]: 269). The polis constantly works against the isolation of family existence to reinforce the communal universal spirit. To accomplish this, the country will every once and a while go to war, forcing men to leave their families and participate in the polis. Thus the polis, in order to stake its position and nourish the universal communal spirit, must draw men away from their families into war. But in war men meet death and the dead soldier must not simply rot away in the battlefield. Rather there must be a burial and mourning. Thus we return to the realm of the family. Here we see that the political community and human law are connected with the family and divine law.
On the other hand, the divine law leads to human law. In the family, the site of the divine law, three types of relationships exist: husband/wife, parent/child and brother/sister. The first two are characterized by naturalness (as in the spousal relationship) or disparity (as in the parent/child relationship) and thus are not examples of the ethical familial relation. The relationship of the husband and wife is mixed with feeling and hence is characterized in part by mere nature in the form of love and desire. The intentionality and deliberateness that raise this relationship from nature to ethicality do not occur between the two parents, but in a third term: that is, in the child. The relationship between the parents and child is unbalanced and marred with alienation and otherness, which develop from the parent’s experience of watching the children grow up to develop an independent existence and from the children’s experience of their parent’s death. According to Hegel, this lack of balance makes it impossible for the parent–child relationship to be the model of ethical family relationships.
It is in the link between brother and sister that Hegel finds a balanced familial relation of equality, rest and ‘equilibrium’ (1977[1807]: 275). The relationship of brother and sister is untainted by desire and is one of equality; therefore it is the ultimate family relationship. 5 However, it is at the same time the limit of the family: the brother must leave the family and begin his own: the family ‘breaks up and goes beyond itself’ (ibid.). In this way, the family moves into the polis. For Hegel, then, the brother/sister relationship, the very relationship that defines the ethicality of the family, ultimately embodies the connection to the polis and the transition of divine law into human law.
Hence, the two laws are in diametric opposition to one another and at the same time each law is related to the other. According to Hegel:
Neither of the two is by itself absolutely valid; human law proceeds in its living process from the divine, the law valid on earth from that of the nether world, the conscious from the unconscious, mediation from immediacy – and equally returns whence it came. The power of the nether world, on the other hand, has its actual existence on earth; through consciousness, it becomes existence and activity. (1977[1807]: 276)
In other words, neither of these opposing laws is valid or absolute on its own but requires the other for its ultimate realization.
Having described the Ethical Order as a moral realm where the ethical act is immediate, absolute and deliberate and as a social setting divided into two opposing yet interconnected spheres, Hegel demonstrates that the Ethical Order ends up in a conflict. This conflict can be viewed as one between the aspiration that belongs to the ethical agent and the concrete and contingent context of world in which such aspirations might be enacted, ‘it is the conflict of the Ethical Order and self-consciousness with unconscious Nature and the contingency stemming from nature’ (1977[1807]: 285). And it can also be viewed as a collision between the two sides of ethical life; ‘it is the clash between divine and human law’ (ibid.).
Hegel argues that the Ethical Order is reflected through the setting of Antigone, with Antigone and Creon both representing the agent of the Ethical Order. These two characters share qualities of this ethical agent: they both believe they know and will the right immediately and absolutely, they both subscribe rigidly to one of the two universal laws, and they both name their actions as acts of deliberate will. As Hegel’s discussion of Antigone progresses, we learn that this rigid, immediate and deliberate one-sidedness is misguided: despite their intentions, these characters are interconnected with one another and vulnerable to natural occurrences and chance events.
The conflict and Antigone
The ‘immediate firmness’ (1977[1807]: 280) of the Ethical Order is such that the ethical agent is either on the side of human or divine law.
In [the ethical consciousness] there is … no struggle, no indecision, since the making and testing of law has been given up; on the contrary, the essence of ethical life is for this consciousness immediate, unwavering. … The ethical consciousness, however, knows what it has to do, and has already decided whether to belong to the divine or the human law. (1977[1807]: 279–80)
In other words, for the individual ethical agent there is ‘essentially only one law’ (1977[1807]: 280). There is a causal relation here: because of this immediate firmness, the ethical agent is positioned resolutely as either man or woman, adhering either to the human or the divine law, belonging either to the polis or the family. Steadfastly one-sided, the ethical consciousness ‘sees right only on one side and wrong on the other’ (ibid.). Committed to one side or the other, it fails to accept its connection with the other side.
The absolute, immediate and deliberate relation to right that defines the Ethical Order requires an actual ethical agent, one that will achieve such actuality through action: ‘the deed is the actual self’ (1977[1807]: 279). Without action, the particular individual remains a ‘shadowy unreality’ (ibid.). But, this action ‘disturbs the peaceful organization and movement of the ethical world’ (ibid.): it causes a conflict, disrupts the balance and tranquility of the Ethical Order and leads to an ‘unfortunate collision’ (ibid.: 280). As Hyppolite explains, ‘In action, this duality becomes a tragic opposition. But action is necessary, and through it the self of self-consciousness emerges from its obscurity and becomes actual’ (1974: 72; 1946: I, 74).
In Antigone this disruptive action takes the form of Antigone’s transgression of human law and Creon’s violation of divine law, and it is based on contingent events and chance occurrences of the actual world − on the ‘natural accident of there being more than one’ (1977[1807]: 286). The fact that Antigone had two brothers instead of one is completely accidental: ‘But that he still belongs to Nature from which he wrenched himself free is evidenced by the fact that he emerges in the contingent form of two brothers’ (ibid.: 285; emphasis added). If Antigone had not happened to have two brothers, the fight between Eteocles and Polyneices would never have occurred; Polyneices would not be dead; Creon would not have passed an edict against Polyneices’ burial; and Antigone would not have defied her uncle. Thus the Ethical Order, which was initially peaceful, is disturbed by its own requirement for actual action. Moreover, the Ethical Order, which defines itself as intentional, demonstrates an unassailable connection with a merely natural occurrence, hence revealing an internal contradiction, and in keeping with the logic of the Phenomenology this contradiction requires consciousness to move forward, while simultaneously sustaining the experience of the Ethical Order.
In the Ethical Order, the opposition of the two laws results in the fact that a deed or action will be right according to one law and wrong according to the other – simultaneously an ethical act and a crime. ‘[A]s simple, ethical consciousness, it has turned towards one law, but turned its back on the other and violates the latter by its deed’ (1977[1807]: 282). Antigone’s act is right according to her own principles and to divine law; but according to Creon and human law, it is a crime. Likewise, Creon’s edict is right according to his principles and to human law, but for Antigone it is a crime. In the Ethical Order, every ethical act is immediately a crime in the eyes of one of the two opposing ethical laws: ‘Innocence, therefore, is merely non-action, like the mere being of a stone, not even that of a child’ (ibid.; emphasis added). Ultimately this results in the contradictory situation whereby the capacity of the tragic characters to meet their ethical duty exists only in stone-like non-action; in other words, when the characters do not act they are good; but as soon as they act, they become bad. Again, in keeping with the progressive logic of the Phenomenology, this contradiction will compel consciousness to move forward, while simultaneously maintaining ties to or memories of Ethical Life.
The impossibility of beautiful moral agency
Hegel’s discussion of the Ethical Order concerns a configuration of social existence, which delineates the demands of ethical life in accord with the various social roles that individuals living within this society might occupy. Highlighting the significance of beauty, the beautiful harmony of the Ethical Order, I hold that Antigone and Creon are offered as beautiful moral agents. Due to the nature of the Ethical Order, they immediately defend one of the two laws. However, in order to be actualized as moral agents, each of them needs to engage in action. But this action results in the downfall of the Ethical Order, for two reasons.
First, the actual deed involves contingency. We see that what was supposed to be absolute, immediate and deliberate – that is, the ethical act – is based on chance, revealing itself as merely natural.
This ruin of the ethical Substance and its passage into another form is thus determined by the fact that the ethical consciousness is directed on to the law in a way that is essentially immediate. This determination of immediacy means that Nature as such enters into the ethical act, the reality of which simply reveals the contradiction and the germ of destruction inherent in the beautiful harmony and tranquil equilibrium of the ethical Spirit itself. (1977[1807]: 289)
In Antigone, the ‘Nature’ of the action is revealed through the chance occurrence of there being more than one brother, a contingency upon which all the action of the play is based.
The second reason behind the downfall of the Ethical Order is that the actual deed involves contradiction; in the actual action what initially appears as right is the same as wrong. The action causes a collision between the two sides of the Ethical Order, the beautiful balance of the Ethical Order falls apart 6 and the tragic character becomes criminal. Suggested here is that both Antigone and Creon reveal an unraveling whereby their pure conviction regarding the correctness of their position is belied by the contingencies of the actual deed and their one-sidedness divides ethical existence so that when they act, their self-perceived goodness is criminal from the other’s point of view. Thus, in reading Hegel’s the Ethical Order with emphasis on his description of it as a ‘beautiful harmony’ we see that in their pure one-sidedness, Antigone’s and Creon’s knowledge of their ethical duty is beautiful, but hinders their capacity to sustain the contingencies and contradictions of actual ethical actions. Furthermore, interpreted in this manner, it becomes apparent that a significant point made in Hegel’s discussion, is the idea that because beauty cannot be actualized and because ethics must be actualized, the pairing of beauty and moral agency is an impossible or contradictory ethical stance.
The beautiful soul
In the Phenomenology of Spirit, the analysis of morality culminates in a discussion of a form of moral knowledge that Hegel names ‘Spirit that is Certain of Itself’. This discussion occurs at the end of the sixth chapter entitled ‘Spirit’. Having opened this chapter, the dialectic of beauty and moral agency now re-emerges, again making the point that beauty cannot be actualized and because ethics must be actualized, any ethical stance or moral position that believes beauty and goodness can work together falls into internal contradiction.
At this point in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the project of speculative knowledge has already passed through the experiences of consciousness, self-consciousness and reason. Now, spirit is concretized in social formations and hence the moral positions Hegel considers in this chapter are all social forms of morality. This insight is significant because it is tempting to interpret configurations of this final analysis of morality as being individually determined. For example, the moral position of Conscience may in isolation from the rest of the Phenomenology read as a form of private or subjective moral judgment. However, recognizing the place of ‘Spirit that is Certain of Itself’ within the trajectory of the Phenomenology indicates that the elements of privacy and subjectivity experienced in this configuration are not privacy and subjectivity as such, but tensions – reminders of previous experiences of individuality – within an expressly social configuration of morality.
Hegel analyses ‘Spirit that is Certain of Itself’ through the experience of three characters − ‘The Moral View of the World’, ‘Conscience’ and ‘the Beautiful Soul’ − each of which embodies a distinct moral view. In his discussion of the Beautiful Soul, Hegel is engaged with a moral position taken by a real group that existed in his time. As H. S. Harris establishes (1997: 479), the position of the Beautiful Soul originates in the moral philosophy of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), and is then taken up – both explicitly and implicitly – by a group of German writers and philosophers including Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813), Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), Novalis (otherwise known as Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg) (1772–1801), Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) and Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843). Expressing the moral position of the Beautiful Soul, the key works of this group include Jacobi’s Woldemar (1779), Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795: book VI) Novalis’ unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Schlegel’s Lucinde (1799) and Hölderlin’s Hyperion (1797). Common to this group is the idea that morality coincides with aesthetics, or that goodness and beauty go hand in hand. Commenting on this idea, Hegel’s encounter with the Beautiful Soul does not constitute an explicit analysis of beauty as such, but it does grapple with a moral position that valorizes aesthetics, provoking my thesis that his discussion of the Beautiful Soul comments on the pairing of beauty and moral agency. Here Hegel’s analysis tracts the morality of German Idealism as it ‘slides, under Romanticism, into a narcissistic aestheticism, aestheticism into paralyzing purism’ (Comay, 2010: 392–3). Hence, as in his discussion of the Ethical Order, here Hegel suggests that beauty, committed to a one-sided purity that shirks the messy ugliness of real life, is too weak to actualize its conception of goodness, and in the end this weakness reveals the effort towards a beautiful and moral position as its opposite – as evil.
The sixth chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit begins with a consideration of the Ethical Order, represented through the figures of Antigone and Creon. As we have seen above, this configuration fails. It gives way to ‘Culture’ − spirit that is alienated from itself. Where ethical duty was immediate in the Ethical Order, it is mediated in Culture. According to Hegel, the configuration of morality experienced in Culture leads to Robespierre’s Terror. This unacceptable result ushers spirit on towards a third moral configuration − namely ‘Spirit that is Certain of Itself’. In this, spirit possesses itself in its pure duty, reconciling the immediacy of the Ethical Order with the mediacy of Culture. ‘Pure duty as object of consciousness expresses simultaneously what I myself am and what I am to become, the unity of the immediate and the mediation’ (Hyppolite, 1974: 469; 1946: II, 455). In this third configuration, Hegel returns to Kantian moral philosophy; however, where in the chapter on Reason he charged Kant of a contradictory formalism, here he reverses the issue. Now, operating with a social form of morality, he assumes the priority of a common or universal reason and asks whether the individual is capable of meeting the requirements of this reason.
Defining conscience
As related above, the first form of experience encountered in the configuration of ‘Spirit that is Certain of Itself’ involves the unity of immediacy and mediation that Hyppolite speaks of. However, these two elements are not yet reconciled within the experience. Thus, the first character of ‘Spirit that is Certain of Itself’ − that is, the Moral View of the World − attempts to reconcile moral laws with natural laws, or pure duty with actual existence. 7 In this effort, it shuttles back and forth − first holding that the phenomenal world is irrelevant, then maintaining that it is vital; first holding that pure duty exists in an other-worldly beyond, then maintaining that it is here in the actual world. As Klaus Brinkmann explains in ‘Hegel on Forgiveness’, Hegel is focusing on a tension in Kant’s moral thought; in particular Hegel exposes that on the one hand there is an unbridgeable gap between nature and freedom; and on the other hand, there must be a harmony between nature and freedom. The upshot of this tension is the ‘conundrum of a will that must strive to be worthy of happiness but must never become so worthy’ (1977[1807]: 245). Consciousness resolves this problem through a series of postulates, which place the harmonization of moral laws and natural laws beyond itself − in God. This creates a displacement whereby the essential element of morality is moved outside the self.
It is at this point that the character Conscience appears, overcoming the shortcomings of the Moral View of the World and the displacement that arises from the reconciling postulates. It does this by internalizing the Holy Will as an objective standard of duty, thus taking God within itself. At this point, Conscience no longer needs to look to God for confirmation of its moral choice, but is thoroughly certain of itself. This certainty gives Conscience the capacity to act; certain of its duty it acts, following through on its self-assured conviction. While characterized by self-assurance, Conscience is nonetheless a social form of morality. As Harris explains, ‘Conscience … is self-actualizing Reason that is not “subjective,” but confidently and firmly “situated” in its actual social world’ (1997: 460; emphasis added). In other words, while Conscience does not look to God for a moral law, it is not a form of individual morality but recognizes the necessity of having its conscientiousness explicitly acknowledged by other conscientious people.
Action and conviction are essential elements of Conscience. First, Conscience’s duty is specific and thus requires action. A key feature of Conscience is concreteness, which means that unlike the Moral View of the World − which pursues an empty, pure and other-worldly duty − Conscience gives specific content to duty such that its duty belongs to this world. For Conscience duty is united with actuality and therefore leads to concrete action. Second, Conscience must have conviction that its action is duty. Hegel explains that this character is the moral equivalent of ‘Sense-Certainty’, a form of consciousness encountered in the opening chapter of the Phenomenology. This equivalence indicates defining characteristics of Conscience; in particular, Conscience, like Sense-Certainty, is certain of itself and is immediate. In the case of Conscience, this takes the form of the conviction that its action is duty; hence Conscience is immediately certain, without calculation or discussion, that what it does is duty. Initially these two elements, action and conviction, are one within Conscience: ‘For the essence of the action, duty, consists in conscience’s conviction about it’ (Hegel, 1977[1807]: 388) − which is to say that for the action to be considered duty, conscience must have conviction that it is so. However, as things unfold, Conscience breaks apart and each of these elements develops into a separate variation of Conscience − the judge who has conviction and the agent who acts. While these variations emphasize different elements of the experience of Conscience they both operate under the same moral norm; in particular, they both know that it is necessary that their conscientious deed be acknowledged by a community of conscientious people.
This requirement for acknowledgement means that community and the relations between the individuals within a moral community are central issues in the drama of Conscience. As Hegel explains, recognition within a community of other conscientious people establishes the very reality of Conscience’s act:
The action is thus only the translation of its individual content into the objective element, in which it is universal and recognized, and it is just the fact that it is recognized that makes the deed a reality. The deed is recognized and thereby made real because the existent reality is directly linked with conviction or knowledge; or, in other words, knowing one’s purpose is directly the element of existence, is universal recognition. (1977[1807]: 388)
As Conscience pursues its specific duty, it produces actions that exist in the real world and are hence subject to the evaluating judgments of others. Moreover, Conscience asserts its conviction that its action is duty, and with this declaration situates itself in a linguistic community of other conscientious selves.
Following Harris’ analysis, the historical character Charlotte Corday exemplifies the nuances of Conscience. During the period of the French Revolution, on 9 July 1793 she murdered the Jacobin journalist Jean-Paul Marat in his bath (memorialized in Jacques-Louis David’s famous painting The Death of Marat [1793]).
The experience of conscience
Having defined Conscience, Hegel leads us through a description of its experience. He explains what happens to someone who ascribes to the moral position embodied in the figure of Conscience. As defined, certainty is central to Conscience. This means that Conscience is a form of knowledge; that is, Conscience must know that what it does is right. To attain this knowledge, Conscience must know all of the various implications of its chosen course of action. However, such complete and extensive knowledge is impossible, and Conscience recognizes this impossibility: the conscientious mind ‘knows that, in the case in which it acts, it does not possess that full acquaintance with all the attendant circumstances which is required, and that its pretence of conscientiously weighing all the circumstances is vain’ (1977[1807]: 390). Yet, Conscience must act; and so, faced with the inadequacy of its own knowledge, Conscience makes a decision and acts upon it, thus taking its own incomplete knowledge to be sufficient and complete. As H. S. Harris explains, this means that every honest Conscience, incapable of meeting its own standards, is guilty (1997: 469).
The inadequacy − the very impossibility − of complete knowledge (both of circumstances and consequences) means that the specific content of Conscience’s duty is not necessary, but capricious. ‘Conscience does not recognize the absoluteness of any content. … It determines from its own self’ (1977[1807]: 90). This does not mean that Conscience operates according to mere inclination; rather when, like Corday, Conscience encounters an ethical dilemma (for example, murder Marat or let Marat murder others), it makes a deliberate choice and acts upon it, knowing what it does to be duty. It declares its act to be duty and others recognize that it is fulfilling its duty, thus validating the deed. In other words, Conscience acts in accord with duty because it says so and this ‘saying so’ is a communal event, in the case of Corday a written proclamation, letters and a publicly stated defense.
The moment of caprice in Conscience’s decision means that others may disagree with Conscience’s chosen course of action. For example, Corday was found guilty, executed by guillotine. Further expressing disagreement with her, a popular French song of the time commented, ‘Satan created this wretch. … She has a false appearance of sweetness. Her manner is charming which disguises her wickedness …’ 10 ). Conscience’s act is not necessary and therefore other members of the conscientious community may doubt that Conscience’s action is in accord with duty. In fact, in order to preserve their own conscientious position, they must have conviction that their own acts are good, thus leading them to view the acts of others as evil. In response to this doubt and disagreement, Conscience becomes self-righteous, maintaining its conviction and declaring its assurance that its act is in fact duty.
Consciousness declares its conviction; it is in this conviction alone that the action is a duty; also it is valid as duty solely through the conviction being declared … what is valid for that self-consciousness is not the action as an existence, but the conviction that it is a duty; and this is made actual in language. (1977[1807]: 396; original emphases)
The key point here is that Conscience uses language to establish its position. It is not so much what Conscience does, but what it says. Essential here is that Conscience seeks public recognition through language. Here again we see the importance of community in the experience of Conscience: the verbal performance of conviction − the declaration that its act is duty − situates Conscience in a social formation and linguistic community where it seeks mutual recognition.
The two stories of conscience
As a figure compelled both by a necessity to publicly declare its conviction and by an imperative to act, Conscience proceeds along two paths – one determined by conviction, the other by action. As Jeanette Bicknell comments, these two stories are like the obverse and reverse sides of a coin, describing the same process from different angles (1998: 73). While these two paths emphasize different elements of the experience of Conscience, they share the same moral norm; in particular, they both know that it is necessary that their conscientious act be explicitly recognized by other conscientious people. Ultimately, along both of these paths, Conscience goes through a process of mediating individual actuality within the universality of moral community.
The first story follows a Conscience that prioritizes the conviction that what it does is duty. This Conscience capriciously chooses the content of its duty, and when it is confronted with the opinion of others, it holds fast to its conviction, thus asserting its own ‘moral genius’ (1977[1807]: 397). Conscience knows its own inner voice to be true, to be a ‘divine voice’, thus it invokes a ‘creative power’ (ibid.) whereby it makes any action it chooses the right action.
This solitary divine worship is at the same time the divine worship of a community. (1977[1807]: 398)
On account of this utterance in which the self is expressed and acknowledged as essential being, the validity of the act is acknowledged by others. The spirit and substance of their association are thus the mutual assurance of their conscientiousness, good intentions, the rejoicing over this mutual purity, and the refreshing of themselves in the glory of knowing and uttering, of cherishing and fostering, such an excellent state of affairs. (1977[1807]: 398)
In this community of mutual self-congratulation each conscientious mind has an immediate knowledge of its unity with God. For each, God is immediately present in its mind and heart. As Harris explains ‘This self, here and now, is one with God’, yet it ‘falls short of “absolute Spirit” because it is aware of this identity in an immediate way’ (1997: 482). The issue here is that because it is immediate, this unity with God is hidden and private. As a result, this community is ultimately a community of individual consciences, each withdrawn into its separate self, each looking for universal recognition from others, but each following only its own private judgment.
Thus, despite its linguistic connection to a community of other conscientious minds, Conscience’s adherence to its own moral certainty, its immediate knowledge of its unity with God, constitutes a withdrawal into inner being such that all relations with others and the objective world vanish. Here, ‘refined into this purity, consciousness exists in its poorest form’ (1977[1807]: 399). A claim made by Hegel in the Preface to the Phenomenology indicates what he holds to be the significance of this withdrawal: ‘For it is the nature of humanity to press onward to agreement with others; human nature only really exists in an achieved community of minds’ (ibid.: 43). In other words, as consciousness withdraws into itself, it loses an essential element of human existence. More specifically, in this moral drama, the content Conscience gave to duty received validation – and its very reality – through the recognition of others. Yet, now, as Conscience shirks the opinions of others and retreats into self-worship, this validation is lost – thus rendering Conscience’s content unreal.
This Conscience now makes an attempt to externalize itself by expressing its conviction in language. However, mere words are not enough, and this utterance is only a sound that dies away. Conscience thus lacks the power to externalize itself as something actual and real. Moreover, Conscience fears sullying its own inner perfection with real existence: ‘It lives in dread of besmirching the splendour of its inner being by action and an existence; and, in order to preserve the purity of its heart, it flees from contact with the actual world, and persists in its self-willed impotence’ (1977[1807]: 400). This retreat into the self and withdrawal from action is the ‘Beautiful Soul’ – beautiful and pure because it is untainted by the messiness of the real world. Yet it is a lost soul, because without the substantial existence that results from engagement in the world, it vanishes and dissolves.
The second story follows a Conscience who prioritizes the imperative to act. This Conscience, ‘the agent’, has declared its act to be duty. It puts the act into language where it exists for the entire community and thus acquires a universal status or ‘universal identity’ (1977[1807]: 400). However, insofar as the agent acts, its deed acquires particularity: ‘[I]t fills the empty duty with a specific content from itself, it is positively aware that it, as this particular self, makes the content. … The content which it gives to that knowing is taken from its own self, as this specific self, is taken from itself as a natural individuality’ (ibid.: 400–1). Thus a conflict between universality and particularity arises, or as Hegel describes, ‘the antithesis of individuality to other individuals, and to the universal, inevitably comes on the scene’ (ibid.). In response to this conflict, the agent must act, thus choosing particularity over universality, individuality over community.
The Beautiful Soul, who prioritizes conviction over action, responds to the agent’s choice to act even though doing so undermines the universality of the linguistically declared conviction. Assuming the role of a judge, the Beautiful Soul criticizes the agent on the grounds that its inner being differs from the universal, naming this disparity evil. The Beautiful Soul further judges the agent, calling its action hypocrisy because it uses the language of universality when it declares its action to be duty, but at the same time hides a contempt for universality manifested in its choice to act despite the particularizing force of action itself.
The judge aims to abolish hypocrisy, but ends up doing the opposite, revealing itself as no less hypocritical than the agent. The judge’s verdict is dependent on individuality and particularity, yet it is precisely individuality and particularity that the judge names ‘evil’ in the acting consciousness. ‘In denouncing hypocrisy as base, vile, and so on, it is appealing in such judgment to its own law, just as the evil consciousness appeals to its law’ (1977[1807]: 402). This is to say, both the agent and the judge follow their own law, but this hypocritically contradicts the judge’s intention of being universal. Hence like the agent, the judge sees reality as ‘distinct from the words uttered’ (ibid.: 403). In other words, what the judge does and says are not the same. Moreover, the judge is embroiled in self-contradiction: ‘through the failure to act at all, although the necessity to act is involved in the very talk of duty, for duty without deeds is utterly meaningless’ (ibid.). The judge thus contradicts its own law that the good must be done. It judges the agent as not doing good; however, it does nothing, and this means it too does not do good, and thus does not follow its own law. And finally, while the judge aims to remain in the domain of pure universality by refraining from action, its very judgment is an act.
The agent’s act is duty, which means it has universal status. However, as Hegel explained in his discussion of the Moral View of the World, duty for duty’s sake is unreal; thus, for this duty to be real it must be enacted through the individual agent. But this gives the act an individual element. Moreover, every action, as an action, actualizes the agent, meaning that the agent will always benefit from its act. The judge focuses on this individual and particular side of the agent’s act, seeing only the selfish motives in it and ignoring the universal element. In this sense the judge is like a valet, who deals only with the particular details of his master’s life, such as dress, food and bath. The valet does not see the universal elements of his master’s life and thus cannot see how the master may be heroic. But this is only one perspective: the agent’s act can also be seen from a point of view that would recognize it as duty and see its universal status.
Madness and reconciliation
The agent recognizes that the judge is the same as itself – that they are both hypocritical and evil. The agent then confesses to being ‘evil’, admitting to its particularity, individuality and finitude. Here, the agent admits that both it and the judge are natural individuals. In this manner, the agent overcomes its individuality: by acknowledging that it shares shortcomings with other people, it enters into a community. The agent ‘gives expression to their common identity in his confession’ (1977[1807]: 405). The agent expects that the Beautiful Soul – or the judge – will confess to its own particularity, allowing for a mutual recognition in which each acknowledges the individuality of itself and forgives that of the other. In other words, the agent expects that the judge will join it in the community of individual moral agents. However, this does not occur. Rather, the judge hardens its heart, rejecting any continuity or common identity with the agent. Refusing to confess, the judge mutely keeps to itself.
Once the judge refuses any continuity with the agent, ‘the situation is reversed. The one who made the confession sees himself repulsed, and sees the other to be in the wrong when he refuses to let his own inner being come forth into the outer existence of speech’ (1977[1807]: 406). Now, evil is embodied in the judge’s refusal to enter into discourse with the other. The judge, in its stony silence, rejects ‘Spirit’ – that is, it rejects a universal community of mutual recognition and forgiveness. Moreover, with this refusal, the judge falls into self-contradiction: it remains the ‘“beautiful soul,” lacking actual existence, entangled in the contradiction between its pure self and the necessity of that self to externalize itself’ (ibid.). Hence, the judge’s purity and silence close it off from the real world so that it cannot attain an actual existence, but this contradicts its own need to be an actual member of a universal moral community. It recognizes its contradiction and becomes ‘distorted to the point of madness’ (ibid.: 407). Further, explaining how this failure to actualize is significant, Allen Speight comments, ‘Hegel pushes … toward an understanding of intention itself as something that the philosophy of action must consider as revisable ‘in light of what an agent’s action comes to involve’ (2001: 303). In other words, for Hegel intention and action are not necessarily, or easily, separated, thus any form of forgiveness which might spare the Beautiful Soul through a pardon premised on a claim to good intentions is indefensible.
When nearly wasted away in madness, the judge finally surrenders its particularity, seeing itself in the agent. The judge extends forgiveness to the agent, a forgiveness that is the judge’s renunciation of itself. Just as the agent abandoned the subjective characterization of action, so now the judge abandons the subjectively determined judgment. The judge breaks its silence, offering the ‘word of reconciliation’ (1977[1807]: 408) – ‘the reconciling Yea’ (ibid.: 409) – allowing itself and the agent to enter into a shared community. Within this community, both the judge and the agent appreciate that the individual deed, the action and the judgment are only moments within a larger whole. As Kelly Oliver explains:
The judge and the agent recognize that what they share is precisely their individuality, which is to say their difference. This individuality is what puts them at odds with one another but it is also what brings them together and makes community possible. The Universal, it turns out, is this shared characteristic, individuality recognized in the other. (2003: 281)
Both the agent and the judge set aside their one-sidedness; each sees itself in the other, admits to its own limitations and excuses the limitations of the other. The result is a community of mutual recognition and forgiveness. 11
In the story of Conscience and the Beautiful Soul, Hegel shows that in its withdrawal from the world, the Beautiful Soul loses the possibility of actualizing itself, and is thus weakened to the point of wasting away. Moreover, while the Beautiful Soul aims for goodness, its judgment and refusal to recognize itself in the agent constitutes an evil hypocrisy. While Hegel is not explicitly engaged in an analysis of beauty, I hold that his discussion of these moral positions comments on the partnership of beauty and moral agency, developing the understanding that as beauty aims for purity it reveals a fragility of character which requires it to reject the chaos of real life. Hence, from Hegel’s discussion of the Beautiful Soul, we learn that beauty is too weak to sustain actual moral agency.
Conclusion
In the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel criticizes beauty for being weak and incapable of engaging in the negativity that ultimately leads us to truth. In his discussion of the Ethical Order he considers a social formation marked by a beautiful harmony of ideals and values, which is destroyed by its very actualization, its very enactment in the natural world of contingency and opposition. This dialectic between beauty and moral agency appears again, more robustly, in the final sections of the chapter, in the experiences of the Beautiful Soul. Departing from canonical interpretations of the Ethical Order, I suggest that in emphasizing the role of beauty in the Phenomenology’s sixth chapter ‘On Spirit’, he offers new insight, explaining a central thread which runs from the opening scenes to the final curtain. In particular, the importance of the dialectic beauty and moral agency comes to the fore. From this perspective, Hegel’s point is that beauty cannot be paired with actual good deeds, and that the problem with beauty lies in its characteristic purity, which constitutes a withdrawal from the disorder of real life, precluding the possibility of actualization. Thus, beauty is only good until there is an actual deed, at which point beauty withers away. Ultimately, in any position of both beauty and moral agency, we meet with a contradiction which demands participation in a double gesture whereby we acknowledge beautiful goodness as a failure and simultaneously hold on to it as a memory or lesson; in other words, we are compelled to engage in precisely that negativity which Hegelian beauty finds intolerable.