Hegel & Community Conscience

Jay Bernstein began his lectures with a few remarks about the task Hegel (with much of continental philosophy) undertook: to translate what was good from the Christian world into the real world, to move from transcendant to entirely immanent, because (as he would say "spoiler alert") - 'there is no God'.  I have thought throughout that what Hegel is doing is more seriously informed by Christianity than our reading of him - much of what he says works as well as theology as in any of the fields he's addressing.

Today I have reached the lecture on morality, which is where he finds people often want to part ways with Hegel. Hegel's project has been to knit back together the things that were not understandable together: society and the individual; the individual's subjectivity and the world's apparent objectivity; reason and the rump of heart and passions and body.  In Kant's theory of morality there are some parallel problems: the reason of the individual is presumed to fully apprehend the situation and to be able to fully determine the morality of an act, although some good intentions have bad results. To Kant, the reason, locked away from the passions, and without access to things in themselves, can nevertheless reach toward a good will.  Hegel says that this is to take as a task an unachievable aim; and more that its unachievability is the condition of the possibility of this kind of morality.  This moral bar set impossibly high is, on Bernstein's reading, attractive solely for social control, and is not a real morality.  It's what parents invent about right and wrong to control their teenagers.  Adults wanting a moral realism find in Hegel that they are defined by the Other; that therefore they are to some extent constitutively committed to certain things (acting beneficially toward others); that in engagement with others they are always acting and defining themselves, but that their acts are subject to redefinition by the community.  So conscientiousness (having a conscience) is a social-historical stage of society.  It's not an infallible internal guide. It's 9/10ths in intersubjectivity, out there in society.

Now, I am probably misunderstanding something simple and key here, but it seems to me that communities are usually terrible repositories of morality.  I once sat in a meeting with business people, and we talked about our achievements.  One man had project managed a housing project which realised the highest prices per square foot for inner city units that the city had seen in years.  Another had turned a chain of petrol stations into major profit centers by extending the range of things you can buy, and turning the attendants into chocolate-offering robots*, fattening and impoverishing the weak of will.  The third was a woman who had used the power of a subsidised foreign supplier to put a major Australian foundry out of business.  All three achievements were, I thought, terrible. They made things worse. But the little community we were closed ranks and marvelled at how noteworthy and therefore good these people were.

The problem with this account of Hegel is that you lose from Kant the possibility of universal, true moral aim points.  You gain by losing the impossibility of totally moral life (with the infinite psychological burden and splitting it entails), but on Bernstein's reading the community is in fact a more than adequate resource. (His strongest argument would be that it is all we really have, anyway, and we're doing OK.  Hegel and Bernstein are somewhat conservative).  I think the breakdown case is (as usual) honor killing and female genital mutilation.  These are strong community values in their communities, but also wrong.  I think I am missing from Bernstein how Hegel's dictum that the particular is the universal, and how the exact situation is what has to determine the right and wrong of your action, apply in those cases. Are we to believe that honor killers don't act with a great sense of righteousness and a good conscience, and that if they understood truly they would feel different?  Maybe we are, but that's not coming through, and if it were I would take quite a lot of convincing.

I think the Christian, though, is in a rather nice position, because we are in community with Jesus. Hegel is probably more on-board with this than Bernstein acknowledges.  He (Jesus) becomes the church's Other, defining its existence and instituting it; and instituting all the individual Christians through conversion to Him. The judgment promises to be based on both intentions and actions/outcomes; and it promises to be full of forgiveness (which I haven't got up to in Hegel yet). The Christian gets the best of Kant (universality) and the best of Hegel (particularity).

* In the original sense of hapless drudges.