CHAPTER XII HEGELIANISM AND ETHICS LITERATURE.-A. The ethical sections (Objective Mind) of the Philosophy of Mind, translated by Professor Wallace. More fully in the Philosophy of Right, translated by Dr. Dyde. B. Many sections of the Phenomenology. C. Mr. F. H. Bradley's Ethical Studies and Green's Prolegomena to Ethics are the most important works in this department produced in the course of the British Hegelian movement. A Manual by Professor Mackenzie, and a briefer one by Professor J. H. Muirhead, contain more recent statements of ethics from the same general point of view. THE ordinary British reader is accustomed to do his ethical thinking under the guidance of an intuitionalist theory. He believes that the final court of appeal is the voice of conscience in the human breast. He further believes though perhaps he is increasingly conscious of the difficulties which such a position involves—that the oracle within, when you can reach it, supplies the same answers to the same questions in every human heart. He may follow one of two opinions as to particular intuitions. He may think of them as practically numberless; or he may conceive that there are a few grand ultimate moral intuitions, which for the most part are deductively and derivatively applied by the understanding, lawyer fashion, to particular cases. Either way, soon or late, intuitionalism leaves us face to face with an atomic plurality of distinct and separate moral axioms. These are regarded as self-evidently true, and as called in question only by a dishonest heart. Accordingly, the effort to find an explanation of their authority, or the effort to unify them, is thought to be already tinged with immoral casuistry. So closely does English popular opinion identify an earnest ethical philosophy with intuitionalism, that Kant has generally been catalogued in our country as an intuitionalist. The truth is very different. Kant has really gone far towards making intuitionalism impossible. On the side of knowledge he has shown that the supposed given elements of perception are all shot through with the work of thought, and that the supposed distinct first principles of a priori connexion between things are the manifold utterances or applications of the idea of an orderly and knowable universe in Space and Time-with the vague presentiment lurking behind of a more absolute and systematic unity, such as corresponds more fully to the nature of thought. Similarly, on the side of conduct, Kant has urged that there must be one ideal operative in all the dicta of conscience. He finds, in fact, that conscience is reason working practically; and, since he accepts the theory that self-consistency is the nature of reason, he defines morality as absolutely self-consistent behaviour. ("Act so that thou canst will the maxim of thine action to be law universal.") Hegel and other critics have had no difficulty in showing that Kant's theory breaks down at this point. If reason is purely abstract, it can yield no concrete law of duty, and formal self-consistency cannot result in material precepts or prohibitions. On watching at all closely, we see Kant reading into the idea of abstract self-consistent law those detailed differences which constitute a significant list of duties. Hegel, however, somewhat strangely and very characteristically, seems to hold, not that Kant is wrong, but rather that Kant has brought to light the weaknesses of the merely moral consciousness. The contradictions of merely or subjectively moral thinking are supposed to play the part which is everywhere assigned in the Hegelian system to contradictions. They drive us onwards, and thus there results a more healthy and more concrete form of morality. Then later contradictions spring up which drive us entirely out of morality and the objective mind into the Absolute Mind as Art (Hegel puts this first), or as Religion (Hegel puts this second, but the English Hegelians generally incline to draw a straight line from morals to religion), or last of all as Philosophy. Yet we must not suppose that Hegel rejects morality because of its contradictions. He acts as usual: he condemns it and he spares it. Alternatively, English and Scottish ethical thought has taken the direction of hedonism and empiricism. Dismissing intuitionalism as a lurking-place of fallacies and a bulwark of indefensible and irrational abuses, eager political reformers like Bentham and the Mills have sought to make all things crystal-clear by the application of the pleasure-test. Virtue is the purchase of a deferred annuity of future pleasures at the cost of present pain. Or virtue is the law of society imposed upon the restless and possibly selfish individual, restraining him in the interests of maximum average happiness. Not to dwell upon other difficulties-the position is by no means so crystal-clear as its votaries hoped-this evidently is a fashion not of explaining but rather of explaining away the moral consciousness. Recent empiricist work has not the frankness of Jeremy Bentham's. It inclines rather to assume morality as given, and to study the phenomena of its development. It would be ungracious to quarrel with this new procedure. Certainly empiricism is nearer the ways of truth when it assumes than when it denies the validity of the moral ideal. Still, it was a healthy demand on the part of the older empiricists that a reckoning should be taken, sooner or later, for all assumptions employed. How will that reckoning be faced? If empiricists are rightif we live in a world of mere phenomenal sequenceshave ideals any standing ground? Evolution can do a good deal, but, if it works merely on phenomenal lines, can it ever justify conscience? Error has its evolution as well as truth. By asking what has evolved? we do not discriminate. If logic is given effect to, consistent empiricism must brand conscience as a morbid growth. Such thoroughness has already been shown by some. Over-against Intuitionalism and Empiricism, Idealism takes its stand, offering something new. It proposes to scrutinise the assumptions which Intuitionalism merely reiterates; and it hopes to explain or sanction ethics without explaining it away. The general theory offered us is in essence Kant's, with a correction. Conscience is again defined as Practical Reason—or, in Hegel's own terms, Mind [Geist] when Theoretical is Mind Subjective and Practical Mind is Mind Objective. Its aim or ideal is self-realisation. The self to be realised is not the natural individuality or natural temperament, but rather the self as rational or social-the self which finds its interest and its satisfaction in the claims made upon it by a seemingly alien society. Hegel himself is evidently less interested in the moral consciousness than in the moral institution. He finds deliverance in the latter from the defects and from the sharp antitheses of the former. Sociology, Politics, Economics, Ethics, all enter into his "Philosophy of Right"- the very name is significant. If there is a stepchild in the family, it is ethics. Hegel's contempt for the subjective foams constantly into ebullition. Thus, while he admits that marriage may be entered upon either from inclination or at the paternal command, he finds that only the latter system is just to the moral interests and moral significance of the marriage union. Again, to make education pleasant to children is dangerous; we ought to break them in. Again, to claim as a right liberty for the press-to "say what it pleases"-is "undeveloped crudity and superficiality of fanciful theorising." Indeed, Hegel treats the moral consciousness almost with the impatient contempt with which his interpreter Dr. Hutchison Stirling treats the Aufklärung. It had to come in— of course! It has its place-no doubt! Still, it is pitifully weak and subjective; it is riddled through and through with contradictions;1 let us hasten onwards to pleasanter and worthier themes! Hegel's triplicity here may be taken as follows: Morality first begins to arise in the consciousness of abstract or individual rights over-against other individuals. Then Right gives place to Duty, and men say, with Carlyle or with Comte, "Thou hast one right -to do thy duty." But the higher truth is found in 1 The criticism in the Phenomenology is particularly merciless. |