Terribly upright

I

The article ‘Spirit of Christianity’ (1798–1800), written in Frankfurt and unpublished during his lifetime, is the centerpiece of Hegel’s early theological writings. In what follows, I will treat this text as a contribution not primarily to the philosophy of religion, but rather to legal philosophy. The text will thereby prove to be an indispensable sourcebook for Hegel’s critique of juridicism for several reasons. First, it has the advantage of clarity: many of the motivations that go on to guide Hegel’s later philosophical system are expounded here in pointed and radical fashion; William Dilthey, who (via his student Nohl) had commissioned the first edition of Hegel’s early religious-philosophical studies, went so far as to claim that Hegel ‘had written nothing more beautiful’ (Dilthey, 1968[1959]). In his Frankfurt phase, where Hegel could not yet present his system in a complete form, because he had not yet developed his dialectical method, the vivid friction between Hegel’s own basic ethical-theoretic intuitions and Kant’s and Fichte’s philosophical methods appears all the more pronounced. Second, Hegel here articulates his critique of Kantian–Fichtean legalism not merely as a criticism of a rival philosophical approach but as an analysis of the pathologies of a life-form. Hegel regards ‘the Jews’ as ‘a people’ uniting in themselves all the flaws of a sociality constituted entirely in terms of the law. Accordingly, his analysis consistently goes beyond theoretical contents to blend theological-philosophical arguments with claims in the style of a historical sociology of religion; the historical fate of Judaism, Hegel suggests, is a direct result of its wholly erroneous ethical theory and practice. Third, the text is in general one of the few discussions in which the phenomenon here described as juridicism is defined clearly and criticized as to its effects on (inter-) subjectivity. In considering this phenomenon, which he calls ‘the spirit of Judaism’, Hegel merges morality and right in such a way that it clarifies the inner connection of these two concepts, which have been traditionally demarcated from each other sharply: not simply a bad morality or an unjust law warp human sociality but so does every normative order as soon and insofar as it is construed in juridical terms.

Hegel’s Spirit of Christianity can be understood as a variation on a principle succinctly stated by Paul in the second Letter to the Corinthians: ‘The letter kills, but the spirit gives life’ (II Corinthians 3: 6). The entire essay is built around a binary dichotomy in a thoroughly undialectical way, where, on the one side, stands the ‘dead’ faith of literalism in Judaism and the philosophy of Kant and Fichte, and, on the other side, the life-giving spirit of Christianity and Hegel’s own philosophy. ¹ This synoptic opposition reads much like a compilation of anti-Semitic clichés ranging from barbarity and hostility, to usury and deviousness, to being shifty-eyed and alienated, and culminates ² in the idiosyncratic equation of Jews with ‘dunghill’ (Hegel, 1986a: 265; ETW: 381). ³ The text, which was composed under the impact of Kant’s Religion Within the Mere Boundaries of Reason published only 5 years earlier, joins with Kant’s own anti-Semitism, but turns his actual characterizations upside down: whereas, for Kant, the Jews are totally incapable of a free respect for the moral law since they are trained to comply with the commandments through carrots and sticks, while Jesus is emblematic of an uncompromising observance of moral duties, ⁴ Hegel accuses the Jews precisely of a naïve loyalty to an abstract law and fashions Jesus as the embodiment of unconditional love and ‘life’ (cf. Meyfeld, 2006: 42). To the frustrating arbitrariness of the failures Hegel ascribes to the Jews, one should add that almost none of the interpretations he offers in his text is biblically supported; Hegel interprets biblical episodes in ways that radically alter their meaning, neglects decisive factors, mistranslates essential concepts, or recounts events simply falsely – Hegel construes Judaism so as to especially exemplify the flaws he chalks up to Kant and Fichte and reaches for prevailing prejudices in order to lend his criticisms a peculiar luridness. ⁵ Hegel completely ignores the actual conceptions of right and practices of law in Judaism, with which he could have easily familiarized himself, and he distorts it in bizarre ways. (In fact, one might argue, had Hegel paid attention to the actual Jewish legal history, he could have found a conception of right that precisely avoids the problems of juridicism he had exposed in the Kantian–Fichtean conception of morality. Unfortunately, I cannot develop this thought further in this article.)

Hegel wants to reconstruct the errors in the Judaic–Kantian system of duties by means of the particular stations in the ‘fate’ of the Jews. The protagonists of this fate, above all, are the biblical figures Noah, Abraham and Moses. Hegel relates the story of Noah – in a certain respect the prelude to history as such – in a way that anticipates Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of the dominance of nature in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. ⁶ With the Deluge, humans suddenly experience nature as hostile and destructive. Noah reacts to this danger with the attempt to dominate nature and must thus set himself in an antagonistic relation to it. The bond with God is a contract, according to which God secures for human beings the ability to restrain nature if human beings restrain themselves. Through this exchange nature was indeed overcome but at the same time the division from it was inscribed yet deeper. For Hegel, the attempt to purchase the mastery of nature through mastery of the self transformed ‘enmities which need made inevitable…into a legal mastery’ (Hegel,1986a: 275; ETW: 183). This original opposition remains preserved in every subsequent law, for the principle of nature-mastery is only a ‘peace of necessity’ that in fact ‘perpetuated’ the enmity (ibid.: 276; ETW: 184). Hegel treats the Deluge as a mythical narrative, not an historical event, but as narrative it illustrates the real process of civilization, which has just as much an historical as a biographical aspect; through laws human beings master outer nature (weather and climate) as much as inner (drives and desires). Noah already commits the mistake, which Hegel explicitly charges Kant with in his Natural Law essay published only a few years later (1802), namely, that if one wants to generate the moral law in an a priori manner, and accordingly proceed from the fact that ‘the real, under the name of sensibility, inclinations, lower appetites, etc…. and reason…do not correspond…and that reason consists in willing out of its own absolute self-activity and autonomy, and in constricting and dominating that sensuousness’ (Hegel, 1986b: 458; NL: 74), then one fixates the dissociative, sundering dimensions of (inner and outer) nature as constitutive essential properties and confuses, neglects, or systematically suppresses those aspects, which are already social in themselves, i.e. ‘ethical’ [sittlich].

Throughout his work, Hegel has consistently shown sympathy for tragic figures, such as Socrates and Antigone: failure is not necessarily a sign of moral inferiority. But Hegel does not grant the Jews the attribute of the heroic. Their fate, for him, is not tragic from the very start, because their frailties were not necessary and alternatives already existed at the beginning. (It can, therefore, Hegel writes, arouse only horror not sympathy [Hegel, 1986a: 297; ETW: 204–5].) To envision a different comportment to nature that does not perpetuate but resolves the enmity with it, Hegel employs the concept of reconciliation. This is represented in the Spirit of Christianity not by a Christian, but a Greek figure: the just Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha, who ‘invited men once again to friendship with the world, to nature, made them forget their need and their hostility in joy and pleasure, made a peace of love’ (ibid.: 276; ETW: 185). Here, Hegel alludes to a version of the Deluge story told in Greek mythology. Deucalion asks the oracle how he can people the earth after it is laid waste and receives the advice to throw his mother’s bones over his shoulders. Deucalion and Pyrrha take ‘mother’ to mean the earth, and throw stones over their shoulders, which transform into human beings. Hegel opposes to the (Judaic) separation from nature in the form of commandments the (Greek) memorialization of nature as reconciliation, a preservation of the natural moment in human subjectivity itself.

While Hegel wanted to show, with reference to Noah, that the legally shaped mastery over humans upheld a separation from nature, he shows in two stations of Judaic fate gathered under the name of Abraham the separation of humans from one another. For Hegel, the very first act of autonomy of the founding father of the monotheistic religions is an act of separation: the young Abraham wrenches free in an heroic-individualistic way from the autochthonous trappings in which he had previously lived and becomes a homeless, rootless nomad. From the beginning his mistake consists in not understanding his freedom as freedom for new relationships, but taking it merely as freedom from relationships as such. Here, what was originally laid down in the primordial separation from nature is upheld, the world is opposed to the individual and can never be treated as a friendly entity, but as always alien and hostile. Nothing in nature has a share in God, and God is in the world as much a stranger as is Abraham. Even familial love is placed on the side of nature as a result of this opposition and, hence, must be overcome. The Isaac episode signifies precisely this, as God bids Abraham to kill his only son, a sacrifice for which the servile character of Hegel’s Abraham is already suited without further ado; it is a mere trifle for Hegel to tell this story in such a way that the cold brutality of an abstract loyalty to the world-denying bidding of an imperious God bursts through the vitality of intimate social relations at this point.

Hegel devotes the greatest attention to Moses, the emancipator of Jews from the slavery of the Pharaoh and the law-giver of the people of Israel. In Moses Hegel finds the clearest convergence of Judaic religious practice and Kant’s moral philosophy. For him, the exile of the Israelites is initially marked by total passivity, and it is only God’s gruesome interventions, which the Jews enjoy with cowardly Schadenfreude, that makes their flight possible (thus it is no wonder that Moses’ people, during their march through the desert, yearn at the smallest sign of difficulty to return to the Egyptian meat pots). The freedom so achieved is thus immediately devalued. For, unlike his French contemporaries, Hegel accuses the Jews of not having struggled enough for their freedom – it remains external to them and is therefore a bondage: ‘A passive people giving laws to itself would be a contradiction’ (Hegel, 1986a: 283; ETW: 191). Hegel now links the passivity in regard to the reception of law with its ‘emptiness’ of content. To what extent, however, are the Judaic laws ‘empty’, for they certainly do have concrete regulatory content? Because he deems the Jews incapable of legislation, their slavish subjectivity, he claims, attaches to the form of the law itself. It is not empty because it did not have content, but, because the submissive subject is necessarily indifferent to content, since it does not orient his action to the demands or requirements of a concrete other, but rather, in light of conformity to law. Hegel wants to discern this in the very theological principles of Judaism. The prohibition against idols carried out by the destruction of the golden calf makes the ‘infinite subject’ invisible, to which human beings subject themselves as such through commandments, ‘since everything visible is something restricted’ (ibid.); ⁷ so, with unsurprising consistency one finds in the ‘center of adoration’ only an ‘empty room’ (ibid.: 284; ETW: 192). The Sabbath too, the highest and holiest day of the Judaic week, is marked by the same emptiness as expressed in the prohibition against work. For Hegel, the emptiness and formality cohere with the imperativeness in the Judaic conception of law: such a system of rules, indeterminate with respect to content and having no proper resources for motivating compliance, can only address to the subject the form of imperative, which obtains categorically, that is, independent of any appreciation of context and consideration of consequences. The Judaic God is thus no God of truth, no revealing or knowing God, but, rather, a commanding God; and the comportment to law is no matter of inner belief or knowledge but servile subjection.

After this remarkable journey of fundamentally reinterpreting several significant biblical episodes, Hegel arrives at the desired result: the constitutive characteristics of Judaic normativity turn out to be emptiness, formality and imperativeness. This sharp polemic against the alleged Judaic practice of law inevitably puts one in mind of Hegel’s later explicit critique of the categorical imperative, which wants to dismiss any glance towards the empirical and expel every consideration of consequence out of moral deliberation by means of a formal test of universalizability, and thereby robs the moral action of every mundane motivating impulse. If we strip this thought of its anti-Semitic corset, we can see Hegel’s main argument more clearly. Hegel intends to demonstrate that such a form of normativity misunderstands the separation from nature implemented in it, fixates it ideologically as lacking any alternative/s, and thus itself bears unethical consequences. These unethical consequences are expressed not as departure from some law or morality, religion or natural law, but rather as defects of (inter-) subjectivity in the agents themselves. The main worry here is the incapacity for love, insofar as the bond binding society is seen and posited only as external and alien, and the actual intertwining of my own freedom with the freedom of another, the unification of my freedom with the primordial fact of the sociality of my subjectivity, is deemed impossible.

Jay Bernstein has argued that the crucial flaw in Judaic sociality for Hegel is a dismissal of ‘ethical geometry’ – in the place of a horizontality there appears a verticality, in the place of equitability appears a subordinated relation (cf. Bernstein, 2003). However, yet more decisive, for Hegel, than this geometry is the topology of this sociality: what is false in Kantian–Fichtean rationality and the form of life Hegel ascribes to Judaism is the interchange of the inner and the outer. The statutory thought of duties, which reaches its apex in the fetishization of service, posits in the place of inner commitment an outer law. This is problematic for the reason that there can be no outer without opposition, for Hegel, and thus without heteronomy, even if the outer itself is internalized as in the Kantian moral law. If freedom and sociality can be unified, there must be something else that connects us aside from an external law, as Hegel argues against Fichte later in Natural Law: ‘In this way the external character of oneness is utterly fixed and posited as something absolute and inherently necessary; and thereby the inner life, the rebuilding of the lost constancy and faith, the union of universal and individual freedom, and ethical life itself, are made impossible’ (Hegel, 1986b: 471; NL: 85). As with Paul, so with Hegel, the salvation of human beings is an invisible process: it takes place only on the stage of the heart.

II

The ‘spirit of Judaism’, whose principal actors were Noah, Abraham and Moses, for Hegel is opposed in every single point to the ‘spirit of Christianity’ represented by Jesus. While Kant’s and Fichte’s moral philosophies corresponded to Judaism, on the side of Christianity stood, as the barely 30-year-old Hegel declared with a hearty dose of self-consciousness, quite naturally, himself. For Hegel, Jesus’ work is diametrically opposed to his image of the spirit of Judaism in every aspect: against the commandment he posits love and virtue; against passivity, activity; against formality and emptiness, plenitude; against the imperative, the heart; against universality, particularity; against the rule of despotism, the community of believers; against division, separation and dissociation – reconciliation. The rub lies in the distinction between an external and an internal bond: every bond that remains external to the totality of the sensible existence of human beings retains the character of duty and distorts intersubjectivity accordingly. The externality of the connection thereby must not assume the form of statist coercion, but, rather, to stress this once again, can also be internalized. To convey the alleged heteronomy of Judaism into freedom, Hegel does not consider it sufficient to appropriate subjectively that which is commanded. Such a mental appropriation of the commandment is expressed in the Kantian concept of respect: my freedom should not lie in the realization of my faculty of choice, but in the acceptance of the law, which holds good without my assistance. An action from duty, i.e. respect for the law, does not, however, according to Hegel, dissolve the otherness of law, and it remains opposed to human sensibility: through the Kantian test of universalizability, Hegel writes, ‘positivity is only partially removed’ (Hegel, 1986a: 323; ETW: 211). Respect resituates the opposition between reason and nature, that is, the principle of the mastery over nature, solely in the subject itself, to whom, moreover, all corporeality and affectivity appear dangerous: ‘for the particular – impulses, inclinations, pathological love, sensuous experience, or whatever else it is called – the universal is necessarily and always something alien’ (ibid.).

The Swabian Protestant Hegel here clearly argues in line with the Pauline critique of law in the version radicalized by Luther: if externality and emptiness were seen in the religious practice of Judaism, along with a great deal of hypocrisy and ostentation, the practices of Christianity consist in internality and plenitude, as Hegel wants to show with respect to fasting and praying: both are practices that cannot be accomplished at all while the agent maintains a mental reservation, because they consist precisely in complete intentional presence. Analogously, this can also be shown for the example of marriage – Hegel, hinting towards Kant’s juridical conception of marriage, ⁸ points out that this social institution too cannot materialize without the intrinsic emotional participation of the parties involved.

Naturally, Hegel’s goal cannot be simply to vaporize the coercive character of the external-universal bond into a sheer sum of unbound particularities, a conglomerate of solipsistic monads. What is sought is a form of sociality that takes full account of inner particularity and, nevertheless, makes possible a connection between them, and indeed in which the connection consists just in bringing to bear the inner particularity of the individual. Hegel discerns this form of sociality, which he will later come to call Sittlichkeit, in love in the Spirit of Christianity. In love the well-being of the other is connected internally with my own well-being, I want to will the well-being of others for their own sake. The necessity of an external bond falls away through this inner interlocking of our interests and needs, and with this, the grammar of universality as well. The one who loves does not interest herself in an abstract law but only in the exigencies of the singularity of each concrete situation. Thus, Jesus does not concern himself with the washing of hands before eating bread, but rather about the fact that no one remains in hunger; Hegel writes that he ‘made undetermined subjectivity, character, a totally different sphere, one which was to have nothing in common with the punctilious following of objective commands’ (Hegel, 1986a: 321; ETW: 209). Unlike what Kant believed and what the Old Testament urged, love cannot become the object of a universal law, for love eliminates every thought of duty ‘since duties require an opposition, and an action that we like to do requires none’ (ibid.: 213; ETW: 213). Love, according to Hegel’s quite demanding image, is anti-juridical according to its essence, for, qua inclination, it can be neither commanded nor prohibited (you cannot force me not to love you, I cannot force you to love me in return), it excludes all objective claims of justification (I cannot say ‘why’ I love you) and it does not erect any abstract standard of equality but rather unites the heterogeneous (I love you because you are you). It can arise only from freedom and thus finds its fulfillment also only in freedom, so that it is ‘love’s triumph…that it lords over nothing, is without any hostile power over another’ (ibid.: 363; ETW: 247). Although love thus presupposes a personal relation – I cannot love anyone whom I do not know – it is worth noting that Hegel does not view love only as a characteristic of a most intimate relation that is restricted to two or a few, but rather quite clearly as a sustainable resource for integration at least for small groups, so far as it is congruent with friendship. One such community of love is the community of the disciples, who through the practice of a common supper not only express their love for one another but also performatively reproduce it repeatedly.

The relation of love and law is one of contradiction, but it is also one of completion. Without naming his sources, Hegel frequently paraphrases the Pauline principle from the Epistle to the Romans: ‘The one who loves another has fulfilled the law’ (Romans 13: 8). In the Epistle to the Romans, Paul substituted for the Judaic representation of redemption through (external) just deeds (or ‘works’) the idea of salvation through (inner) belief, and thus laid, according to the prevailing (Lutheran) opinion, the foundations for Christianity as a free-standing religion. ⁹ Like Paul, who had composed his letter to the Romans in Greek, Hegel employs for the operation of fulfillment the expression πλήρωμα (pleroma). One can see in it a prototype of the Hegelian idea of the triple significance of sublation [Aufhebung]: to fulfill something means at the same time to negate it, as also to preserve it and to raise it to a new level. Love ‘fulfills’ the law just as the New Testament, according to the Christian conception, does not simply annul, revoke, or replace the teaching of the Old, but ‘fulfills’ it. This notion of fulfillment is to be understood in the sense that Jesus posits against the positivity of law an action, which is indeed just (as the Ten Commandments already demanded), but not merely out of respect for laws, but, rather, out of an inner obligation. What is dialectical in this is that love fulfills the law but only insofar as it, at the same time, is indifferent towards it: just action from inner obligation makes the external law superfluous and discards it. Jesus’ action therefore demonstrates, Hegel says, ‘not that laws disappear but that they must be fulfilled [erfüllt werden] through a righteousness of a new kind, in which there is more than is in the righteousness of the sons of duty and which is more complete because it fulfills [Ausfüllung] the deficiency of laws’ (Hegel, 1986a: 326; ETW: 214 [translation modified]). The pleromatic structure of love is thus equally directed at two alternative ways of proceeding with law – rigoristic observance on one side and anarchistic abolition on the other. The law ‘Thou shalt not kill’, for instance, is not done away with through directions to dispute its validity, nor is its validity affirmed in abstraction from any situated context – what is actually disputed is the form of this principle as law, the juridicism of the prohibition of murder, to which Jesus’ ‘higher genius of reconciliation (a modification of love)’ (ibid.: 327; ETW: 215) proves superior. For Hegel, justice ‘in which there is more, which is more complete’ is hence a justice that does not lag behind the achievements of right, but rather transcends them; yet, in doing so it also suspends it as such. (At this point, it becomes quite apparent that Hegel has not yet developed a concept of a complex society and therefore does not actually take into account the many functions the law plays in modernity, such as, for example, enforceability, foreseeability and guaranteeing the rights of absent third parties. He compares ‘love’ and ‘law’ only in regard of their effects: love, he thinks, has the same effect as following a commandment, but out of a different, more noble motivation.)

If the pleroma of law is reached by sublating the contradiction between the lawful ‘ought’ and the element ‘willed’ by an individual, there thus appears in place of an outer bond an inner one. However, as mentioned earlier, this should not be taken to mean that the individuals appropriate the external law, which would merely shift the controlling factor into the individual itself. Rather, Hegel’s position should be taken to mean that in love the social resources already present in human sensibility are being taken into account, that therefore precisely those qualities of life encounter justice, which in conventional political and legal philosophy used to be subsumed under allegedly ‘essential’ properties. Sublating the separation from the other is thus only truly possible by means of sublating the separation from nature. Reconciliation, for Hegel, simultaneously implies reconciliation between subject and object, between reason and nature, along with that which obtains between subjects. The platform for the unification among individuals can thus never be a terrain of morality or right severed from sensibility, but, rather, must take place on the plane of ‘being’ and ‘life’.

A possible objection at this point could be made that it is precisely in the realm of the sensible that human beings are separated, since our cognitions, sensations and emotions are unique and cannot be shared, at least not physically. Hegel does not elaborate on his concept of sensibility at this point and therefore he does not respond explicitly to this argument other than by stating that the development of a social affectivity appears promising, simply because it is constitutive for human subjectivity. Hegel adopts from Aristotle the idea that it is proper to the human mode of existence as such to be a part of a common being. ¹⁰ Against contractualism, apriorism (and utilitarianism), Hegel argues that human beings do not have to be first inducted into cooperative relations among each other by means of rational arguments, but that qua human beings they are always already interwoven into the fabric of intersubjective relations. Hegel thus determines Jesus’ project as the overcoming of the Judaic fragmentation of this primordial organic cohesion and the ‘restoration’ of ‘humanity in its entirety’ (Hegel, 1986a: 324; ETW: 212), which cannot be determined on the plane of positivity, but, rather, must strive for a ‘modification of life’ itself. Instead of giving an argument concerning the structure of human sensibility at this point, Hegel turns to theology, which provides him with a holistic view of the world, inspired by a Spinozist pantheism: everything in the world, Hegel believes, is be-souled by God, hence, all things are connected with each other in an internal way. This view serves as a foil that helps decipher Kantian–Fichtean–Judaic atomism as nothing but the forgetfulness of God, or even of recognition.

Only on the basis of such a holistic conception of the world, which integrates all oppositions into an overarching unity, can this idea of a normativity immanent in life itself be upheld. A human life then relates to another as a part of an organism to another part, such that the failure of one part is effectively the failure of all parts. But, perhaps, even without these heavyweight premises Hegel’s reference to affective-emotional injuries, to which the devout compliance with law can lead, is plausible. Hegel calls ‘the righteous man’s rage, a hating rigorous dutifulness’ (Hegel, 1986a: 352; ETW: 237), whose indignation is not directed against a concrete case of discrimination or disrespect, but against injury to right as such. One who is fanatically law-abiding undermines precisely the ethical substance of community, for whose protection the law was actually created; and those who refuse forgiveness establish social relations, which preclude their own forgiveness as well.

Forgiveness is the antithesis of ‘hating rigorous dutifulness’. In his efforts to give forgiveness pride of place, Hegel goes so far as to advise a waiver of rights for the victim of a crime as well. Here, he patently follows Jesus’ command to love one’s enemy as preached in the gospels (e.g. ‘If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt’: Luke 6: 29). From the irreconcilability of right it clearly follows that true unification among individuals, which is held to be the constant object of concern in all action, has to be achieved in a sphere lying beyond that of right. Hegel argues that prosecution of a legal claim, even where this is justified, ratifies the legitimacy of an alien tribunal and merely swaps the hostile strength of the judge for the hostile strength of opposed parties. Because forensic objectification in a court of law, to which every legal appeal must lead, only prolongs the irreconcilability, the bellicose circle of accusation and defense can be broken only through a kind of one-sided declaration of peace:

The one who lets go what another approaches with hostility, who ceases to call his what the other assails, escapes grief for loss, escapes handling by the other or by the judge, escapes the necessity of engaging the other. If any side of him is touched, he withdraws himself therefrom and simply lets go into the other’s hands a thing which in the moment of attack he has alienated. (Hegel, 1986a: 349; ETW: 235)

Clearly, such an advice seems overly demanding and impossible to follow through for any actual human being. It is no coincidence that Hegel sees such an attitude embodied only in Jesus, the Son of God. In the Spirit of Christianity, the beautiful soul (later criticized by Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit on account of its world-renouncing quality) attains to a ‘sublation of right without suffering’ (ibid.) precisely through the retreat into emptiness. Hegel declares that whoever is in the position to cultivate such a disposition is always capable of recovering lost living relations, no dissociative emotional hurdles stand in the way: forgiveness redeems the forgiver too. However, the cost of cultivating this disposition can be so high that it consists in the sacrifice of the entire secular aspect of one’s own existence: a completely hostile world, in which an individual constantly renounces legal claims, without its being such that this asceticism is gratified by reconciliation, is ultimately unliveable.

III

It comes as no surprise that in contrast to the fate of Judaism, the fate of Christianity for Hegel is thoroughly tragic, for Jesus’ actions represent the ‘inevitable slip of a beautiful character’ (Hegel, 1986a: 297; ETW: 205). Jesus’ fate is inevitable on the basis of the absolute degeneracy of the Jews: because his milieu proved unyielding, no choice remained for him but to stand entirely outside it. He renounced political community and at best maintained an indifference towards its laws; he never became, as Hegel requires in his Philosophy of Right, ‘a citizen of a state with good laws [eines guten Staates]’ (Hegel, 1986d: 304 [§ 153]; PR: 109; also see Hegel, 1986b: 508; PR: 115). The last consequence of this world-renunciation is the flight into heaven, whereby the world again becomes empty (cf. Hegel, 1986a: 402; ETW: 287). ¹¹ Jesus’ work is necessary but it remains deficient: the slip lies in the isolation. The same problem arises for the disciple who wants to spread good tidings in the world but at the same time remains beholden to the power of personal relations. A community that is bound through love and whose love must find confirmation through sacramental practices is per definition limited. Love divides: into the loving ones and the rest. The attempt, however, to extend and eventually to universalize such a love is self-contradictory and must ultimately lead to the erosion or corruption of the original idea. Hegel acknowledges this with the idea of ‘universal philanthropy’, which transforms love itself into a demand upon individuals. He diagnoses such a disintegration in the Christian Church, which begins by proclaiming love as ‘ideal’ and hence as positivity. The attitude of the Christian to love assumes a character similar to the one Jews have towards law: love preserves a moment of ‘otherness’ and thus becomes heteronomous. From this point of time on Christianity becomes a ‘religion’, and its fate begins to fuse with the fate of the world unconsciously. ¹² Love in a hostile milieu, Hegel therefore says, can choose only between two evils: to be domineering or to be isolated.

This last realization – that love can have the character either of positivity or of isolation – jeopardizes Hegel’s view far more than he would like to admit. For it implies that Christianity is marked by precisely the qualities that were supposed to justify the inferior status of Judaism. Hegel sees in the way love becomes positive the phenomenon of a decay resulting from the expansion of Christianity. From the perspective of Jews, who, as Hegel himself concedes, insist on their own normative orientations against love, the potential of love to turn into masterful dominance reveals itself at a much earlier stage. In Hegel’s contradistinction of Judaism and Christianity the potentially coercive side of love manifests itself in the form of conversion. Hegel writes that the Jews are incapable of reconciliation because they denigrate not only single individuals or other nations but the divine itself. The fate of the Jewish people all the way up to the ‘mean, abject, wretched circumstances in which they still are today’ (Hegel, 1986a: 292; ETW: 199) is thus only the just consequence of this self-inflicted incapacity to receive the good tidings of love. In the Conflict of the Faculties Kant had maintained that this nation could have only availed of the ‘universal conversion of Jews’ as the sole means of becoming worthy of rights in a civil condition, a process he chose to describe as the ‘euthanasia of Judaism’ [Euthanasie des Judentums] (Kant, 1998c: 321). In Hegel, the prescription to convert entails a wholly manifest threat of violence: the Jews, he writes, will be ‘continually maltreated [by fate] until they appease it by the spirit of beauty and so annul it by reconciliation’ (1986a: 292; ETW: 200). ‘Reconciliation’ is not a process implying a reciprocal understanding, dialogic outreach, or acceptance of guilt. It is not, as Hegel defines later in the Phenomenology of Spirit, ‘the reconciling Yea, in which two “I”s let go their antithetical existence’ (Hegel, 1986c: 494; PS: 409): it requires a one-sided and unconditional (theological and political) capitulation of the Jews. Baptism as ‘culmination of faith’ (Hegel, 1986a: 389; ETW: 273) is not only the presupposition for the redemption of the Jews from their ignominious fate, but also for the fact that they may claim a legitimate seat in the natural order at all. ¹³ Without doubt, love becomes just another imperative. In the Christian concept of ‘reconciliation’ there always already resonates this latent violence-laden conformism.

In that the early Hegel construes the Jews as an exceptional case of a people, he solves a systematic problem of his theory in a racist fashion. For, systematically considered, the Jews simply embody the case of failed insight or refused love: if this people disappears, then for Hegel the double threat of isolation and positivity of love also disappears. If, however, love is a request that is not enforceable but rather must arise from freedom, then the refused requital of love in principle presents a condition of possibility of love. Such a refusal, however, as Adorno declared (with reference to law), is not to be ‘glossed over in disavowal’ (Adorno, 1990: 380) – for it shows that the one addressed in a declaration of love does not recognize herself in it and that therefore the reconciliation, which Hegel presupposes, ‘did not take place’ (ibid.). Under such conditions reconciliation becomes either an ideology or a threat, for it either de-articulates or subordinates the continuing recalcitrance of those who do not actually return love. The request for love can produce a deterrent, expropriative, stifling, constricting, or reifying effect. That is, love can be external, alien, formal and imperativistic – it can assume the same properties that Hegel had criticized in law. The paradigmatic milieu for such acts of violence conducted under the guise of love is the family, for which Hegel reserves a central place in his system of ethcial life; this becomes frequently clear when those subordinated in it, especially children and women, enter into a struggle for recognition. To that extent, all love bears the danger of contributing to a process for which Adorno, in quite another context, had found the fitting expression ‘forced reconciliation’. ¹⁴

IV

I believe that Hegel quickly came to realize the shortcomings of his approach. Just two years after the composition of Spirit of Christianity, he reformulated his interpretation of the relation of law and love in his Jena article ‘Natural Law’ (1802/3). The goal was to provide a legitimate space for right as a dissociative-privative moment of society, but at the same time to delimit it functionally. In Natural Law there appears for the first time the concept of Sittlichkeit instead of the pantheistic conception of life. Also, Hegel now no longer views the pathologies of juridicism as paradigmatically embodied in Judaism, but, rather, in the Romans; it is utterly impressive how Hegel is able to find for almost all of the Jewish figures referenced in Spirit of Christianity corresponding figures in the mythical history of Rome. ¹⁵ From now on, explicit anti-Semitism no longer plays a primary role in his imaginary, but troubling enough, central concepts of the Hegelian system remain shaped by this early opposition.

Another important change in Natural Law is that Hegel introduces a further factor in his model, namely political economy. Moreover, Hegel reads formal right, ‘which fixes, and posits absolutely, individual separate existence’ (Hegel, 1986b: 492; NL: 102) as the direct result of the dissolution of traditional classes through the universalization of the private subjectivity of the bourgeoisie. If one does not want simply to follow Hegel in lamenting the invention of legal equality as a ‘blending’ of the estates, then his point can possibly be reformulated as the diagnosis of an historical irony: it is ironic that universal emancipation itself established once again a system of ‘universal degradation’ (ibid.) based on property and right. No longer the Jews, but the Romans are now invoked to illustrate the ominous consequences of this kind of absolutization of the juridical form: Hegel presents the fall of the Roman Empire as proof for the claim that social cohesion withered as soon as citizens retreated from the public into the ‘anguid indifference of private life’ (ibid.). Hegel detects precisely the same pattern in his contemporary civil society, which comes to be dominated by the ‘political nullity’ (ibid.: 494; NL: 103) of the members of the bourgeoisie. If in the Spirit of Christianity Hegel still had to conceive of Judaic religion as a kind of fundamental theological miscalculation, by virtue of focusing on Rome he now can provide an almost sociological explanation (although still not a wholly ‘materialistic’ one) for why an increase of such a juridical absolutization and one-sidedness occurred under certain historical-social conditions; the dissociative centrifugal forces of capitalism have destroyed the earlier, primarily familial bonds of feudalism and thereby liquidated all alternative resources for social integration, thus compelling (gradually) everyone into considering themselves principally as private owners and subjects of right. A modified diagnosis of the symptoms of juridicism goes along with this pathogenesis: in place of the ‘hating rigorous dutifulness’ (that can nevertheless be thoroughly committed) there now appears apathy or vacillation.

The significance of ethical life is that it produces – just like love – a unity, but interprets it – unlike love – in such a way that it includes separation. The character of this new interpretation can be readily read off the relations to nature: if in the Spirit of Christianity the mythic – Greek – figures Deucalion and Pyrrha depicted an anamnetic reconciliation with nature as a polar counterpoint to Noachian mastery of nature, then Hegel in the Natural Law selects the Oresteia ¹⁶ – again Greek – as symbolizing a redemptive relation to nature. Athena enables breaking the infinite circle of violence and counter-violence only by granting the subterranean goddesses of vengeance, the Erinnyes, ‘their place in the city’ (Hegel, 1986b: 496; NL: 105). Reconciliation here consists not in overcoming the difference from nature, but rather ‘in the knowledge of the necessity, and in the right which ethical life concedes to its inorganic nature, and to the subterranean powers by making over and sacrificing to them one part of itself’ (ibid.: 494; NL: 104). Because reconciliation among humans is of the same kind as reconciliation between humans and nature, the structure of ethical life is at the same time pre-delineated in the course of Orestes’ prosecution. The Erinnyes do not only represent ‘inorganic nature’ but also the ‘powers of the law in the sphere of difference’ (ibid.: 495; NL: 105), while Apollo, who has thrown in with Orestes, is designated as the ‘God of indifferenced light’ (ibid.). The course of the trial, one may say, crafts a compromise between separation (difference) and unification (indifference), so far as a legitimate place is cleared for both in the framework of a higher whole. The ‘relative ethical life’ of right is not negated by ‘absolute ethical life’ altogether, but, rather, recognizes its authority.

In the language of the Spirit of Christianity this means that Judaic–Kantian juridicism and Christian love do not confront each other head-on, but complement each other instead, because Hegel now acknowledges that an individual’s temporary withdrawal from the social bond with others must be granted some legitimacy. Hegel tempers the fantasy of ‘unification’ towards a more modest notion of ‘integration’, accepting that even division and privation ‘have a place’ in an ethical community. The particular (and the isolated) is sublated in the universal, not in the form of a positive opposition, but, rather, ‘identified with it [indifferentiiert] and assimilated to it’ (Hegel, 1986b: 521; NL: 126). Hegel then elucidates this legal ‘place’ arrived at in said ways as also an historical one, like a stage in one’s life-history: as the legitimacy of a part functionally derives from the whole, so the legitimacy of a ‘stage’ becomes comprehensible retrospectively from the standpoint of the end. Reconciliation, here, is no more the elimination of division but rather its acceptance. Hegel designates it as the ‘performance, on the ethical plane, of the tragedy which the Absolute eternally enacts with itself’ ¹⁷ (ibid.: 495; NL: 104) – the tragic element in this performance is the fact that one must let the original idea of reconciliation as a harmonious unification fall away: ‘societies of this type’, Christoph Menke accurately writes, ‘integrate themselves only in such a way that they divide in irreconcilable ways’ (Menke, 1991: 496). Importantly, we should note that Hegel’s present use of ‘eternally’ is misleading, for this tragedy is precisely nothing eternal, but rather a specific modern phenomenon. ¹⁸ The organic cohesion of the polis is ruined in the modern epoch. By integrating political economy and law, Hegel’s thought takes a ‘realistic turn’ (cf. also Horstmann, 1975: 279 ff.): Hegel relinquishes the ideal of the ancient polis-Sittlichkeit not because he had to view it as normatively inferior to modern civil society, but because it can no longer be restituted, realistically speaking. The ‘subterranean powers’ too serve us in an important way – roughly, because they offer a possibility of withdrawing in the face of the terror of familial love and accordingly account for the individual’s right to individuality – but this function becomes necessary only because the seamless identity of universality and particularity is already fractured. The powers in the sphere of difference simply become stronger than what one could cope with otherwise.

Hegel therefore no longer opposes a ‘true’ (love-oriented) form of life to a ‘false’ (right-oriented) one. According to the idea of integrating indifference and difference in the concept of ethical life, social dysfunctions and ethical deficits always occur when one sphere in the community begins to release itself from the place assigned to it and assumes a social predominance. The legitimacy of right entails a reflection on its limits: if it pretends to be more than it is or even claims to subordinate other ‘spheres’ [Potenzen], then it is ‘wrested altogether from its truth’ (Hegel, 1986b: 517; NL: 122). Hegel again uses the analogy with an organism to illustrate his point: individual organs each have functions that justify them, but this justification is lost if any one of them is made into the highest purpose, subordinating all other corporal functions to itself – this leads unfailingly to disease and death. The threat of such absolutization, however, lies latent in the singular moments or spheres of ethical life themselves. As examples of such juridical hubris Hegel mentions international law, where the mundane contractualism of civil right overrules the absolute majesty of ethical life represented in the people; constitutional law, whereby the police force directly attacks an individual’s life and destroys civil freedoms in a totalitarian way; and the ‘intrusions’ of morality into the system of law, which amounts to the ‘complete loss of the idea of an ethical organization’ (ibid.: 519; NL: 124). Ethical life can counteract this inherent propensity for absolutization in its individual moments only by constantly ‘reminding’ the latter of their derived character and their boundaries. This reminding, however, does not take the shape of philosophical admonitions, but projects material interventions by the state in the free play of the spheres of ethical life. The overarching ethical totality undercuts the absolutizing aspirations of the individual spheres [Potenzen] through their mutual balancing and consequent neutralization of their respective negative effects. If necessary, Hegel envisions the mobilizing of all social realms as in war, whereby the ethical totality

…destroys their uncontrolled growth and their self-organization by at moments confounding all of them at once, presenting re-absorbed into totality, and letting them go again reborn out of this unity, with the reminder of this dependence and the sense of their weakness if they wanted to be on their own. (Hegel, 1986b: 520; NL: 120)

This idea of ‘absolute ethical life’ as a system of checks and balances between the conflicting spheres of ‘relative ethical life’, as presented in the ‘Natural Law’ essay, gives Hegel’s critique of juridicism as a specifically modern and ethically deficient form of intersubjectivity a new turn in comparison with his earlier writings. No longer can Hegel baldly deduce the deficient character of juridical relations from their unfortunate fate. Rather, this deficit is first made visible and held accountable as such against and in the light of a well-balanced total system. The meaning of this balance may be glossed in identity-theoretic as well as social-theoretic terms: since several distinct dimensions of ethical life must come together for the sake of the imminent development of personal identity in modernity, so the lack or subordination of one or more of these spheres entails the breakdown of the individual conception of life (cf. Honneth, 1996), just as the lack of subordination of one or more social spheres of ethical life leads to the social body becoming dysfunctional. The dominance of the juridical form (and equally, the morality form) is problematic when it suppresses other constitutive forms of intersubjective relations. For example, ethical cohesion is undermined through a colonization of the family by juridical patterns of interaction, since those affective-habitual dispositions are developed thereby which hinder participation in social practices. ¹⁹

Continuing the clinical metaphor, Axel Honneth has repeatedly pointed out that Hegel attributes a ‘therapeutic significance’ (e.g. Honneth, 2010) to ethical life for the treatment of such social maladies. The cure accordingly consists in a reflexive realization of all stages and aspects of relative freedom, which, only when taken together, constitute the ensemble of the social conditions for a successful self-actualization. If, on the individual level, this is understood as the intellectual re-enactment of one’s path of development towards affirmative or ‘positive freedom’ (Hegel, 1986d: 298 [§149 Addition]; NL: 260), then to it corresponds on the social level the production of an institutional arrangement in which every particular dimension of ethical life plays the role suitable for it.

V

Using a concept of juridical subjectivity, Hegel has identified and analysed a form of social pathology, which had otherwise received little attention in philosophy. He thus proposes an important extension to the analysis and critique of intersubjective failures, recent research into which has focused for the most part on economically induced phenomena like alienation, reification, acceleration, or depletion. That is to say, Hegel provides the tools for diagnosing what is wrong with Kohlhaas – and with his contemporary emanations, be it in the form of excessively defending presumed or real rights, a rigid formalism blind to context, or the juridification of the politics, leading to a decay of the public sphere and to political agents withdrawing from the process of democratic deliberation by retiring to a legal standpoint instead of giving political or moral arguments. Hegel’s general objection against such tendencies is that every form of community whose essential categories are formulated in a legalistic vocabulary and which can take no further moral resources as its basis, unduly empties and limits human subjectivity and intersubjectivity. At least two important consequences follow from this: first, a complete inventory of socially produced misery and misfortune can be assembled only when social grievances are not all described in the vocabulary of right or as violations of quasi-juridical claims; second, Hegel’s discovery of the pathologies of juridicism makes precarious all political propensities to simply convert emancipative demands into juridical currency, inasmuch as it reveals the dangers of domestication and dissociation inherent to law.

Despite these apparent advantages of his analysis, the solution Hegel proposes still proves problematic, as it seems questionable according to the pathogenesis he himself puts forward whether the recommended therapy is indeed capable of mending the sufferings diagnosed. The most fundamental reason for this is that, at bottom, the new approach he had developed in Jena between 1800 and 1802 merely compounds problems: to the coercion of right he simply adds the imperative of love. At first sight, this idea of a well-balanced system of ethical life, understood merely as a proper ratio of ingredients, seems at odds with his own earlier criticism of formalism.

Essentially, neither of the relevant spheres has been altered in its respective shape: right remains positive and, hence, external, empty, alien, formal and dissociative, so that it continues to call for a subjectivity as obstinate as it is empty; love remains isolated and exclusionary or, as soon as it is proclaimed as a demand, it transforms into a positive injunction. Simply being able to switch between the two solves neither problem. Both spheres are encountered as present by individual subjects, who cannot suitably modify anything in them: right remains presupposed and love isolated or decreed. Further, the solution cannot actually consist in a permanent retreat: if it is correct that the subject cannot relinquish any of the diverse spheres of ethical life in order to attain a healthy development of identity, as it was Hegel’s premise, then an intersubjectivity redeemed from the ‘pathologies’ of modernity can only exist when these spheres are themselves structurally modified in such a way that in each of them a free recognition of the other becomes possible.

Hegel had defined ethical life with a beautiful expression: it is supposed to be a ‘genuine, living, non-servile oneness’ (Hegel, 1986b: 449; NL: 67). For the law to enable relationships that are both genuine and non-servile – that is, to take seriously Adorno’s insight that reconciliation may neither be prematurely proclaimed nor violently forced – it would not only have to be complemented, but take a radically transformed content and form. Most importantly, it seems that Hegel would have to allow for a collective involvement in the shaping of legal relations by individuals, which therefore would merit their respect and identification. Whether or not Hegel’s further elaboration of the concept of ethical life in his subsequent work can meet this ambitious demand stands on another page. ²⁰