The criticism to which this principle has been subjected is familiar to students of ethics. Its point is, in brief, that there is no way of connecting any particular action with the mere idea of a pure will. The forms assumed by evasions of this difficulty, which we fall into when we desire wholly to separate the inner from the outer, or the “ought” from the “is,” are treated by Hegel with unsurpassable vigour and subtlety, as indeed the annihilating criticism of this conception is primarily due to him. The essence of the matter is that the pure will directed towards good for the sake of good, having no real connection with any detailed conduct, may be alleged by self-deception in support of any behaviour whatever, and out of this may spring the {264} whole sophistry and hypocrisy of “pure intention.” He makes the shrewd observation, [1] which is still of interest, that the extreme Protestant doctrine of conscience may take the form of ethical vacuity or instability, and that this had in his time been the cause of many Protestants going over to Rome, to secure some sort of moorings, if not precisely the stability of thought.
[1] Rechtsphil., sect. 141.
Still, out of all this one-sidedness, there survives the permanent necessity that an intelligent being can acquiesce only in what enters into the object of his will. It is his will which affirms the aim to which his nature draws him, and he is absolutely debarred from reposing in anything which does not appeal to his will. The subjective will is the only soil on which freedom can be a reality.
So, within the general organism of Right or realised Free-will, we have found two opposite groups of facts—for the aspirations of intelligent beings are facts—or tendencies or theories, which are connected by opposition, and yet are necessary to the expression of the same underlying need—the letter of the law, and the freedom of conscience.
5. Hegel’s name for the third term, which, as he puts it, expresses the “truth” of these extremes, may be rendered “the Ethical System,” or “the Moral Life,” or “Social Ethics.” It expresses “the truth” of the extremes, as a good theory may express the truth of two one-sided views. Only, as we have said, it is a fact as well as a theory, and therefore is something which actually contains what these two views demand, and does the work which they, and the facts they rely on, {265} exhibit as necessary to be done. This relation is not obscure or unprecedented. Every institution, every life, works as a theory, and either masters its facts or fails to master them; though not every theory is a life or an institution.
The German word which the above-mentioned phrases attempt to render is “Sittlichkeit” The word takes its meaning from “Sitte” which in common usage is equivalent to “custom.” Hegel’s use of the term, in his later writings, as opposed to “Moralität” and as indicating, in comparison with it, a fuller and truer phase of life, is an intentional declaration of war against the Kantian principle of the pure good will, and is the gist of Hegel’s ethico-political view in a nutshell. The word would most naturally apply to the life of a community in which law, custom, and sentiment were not yet very sharply distinguished. According to accepted views, the communities of ancient Greece, before they were stirred by the reflective movement which is associated with the names of Socrates and the Sophists, would be examples of a disposition and order of life which the word “Sittlichkeit” might denote. And it was in the Greek communities, as is shown by the work which he sketched as early as 1802, [1] that Hegel found this suggestion of a whole in which law and custom, duty and disposition, were absolutely at one. He subsequently modified the conception in accordance with the modern idea of freedom, by allowing a greater emphasis and relief to its {266} component parts, and insisting (against Plato’s Republic for instance,) on the principle of individual choice, initiative, and property, as necessary to the complete communion of intelligent beings. As we have just seen, indeed, he introduces reflective morality or conscientiousness into the sphere of Right, to represent the full nature of mind, which is only exhibited in a consciousness which pursues its aims of its own choice and for their own sake.
[1] The System d. Sittlichkeit. The Rechtsphil. was not published till 1817, in its earliest form. See Wallace, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, p. 187.
The Ethical System, then, or Social Ethics, is put forward as the ideal fact which includes, and does the work of both the literal law and the moral will, alike in practice and as a theory. It is the idea of freedom developed (i.) into a present world, and (ii.) into the nature of self-consciousness.
For (i.), in the first place, the ethical system, or the ways of acting which make up social ethics, constitute a present and actual world. So far it partakes of the nature of the literal law and order, the system of property-holding, which, as we have seen, is all but a natural fact. Social Ethic, we might say, is a physical fact. The bodily habits and external actions of a people incorporate it. It transforms the face of a country, “domesticating the untamed earth.” [1] Each individual has his own bodily existence in a determinate mode as a part of the ethical life of society. The rules and traditions of ethical living are, as has been said, “the nature of things.” They are as hard, as “objective” an order as “sun, moon, mountains, rivers, and all objects of nature.” [2] Man lives according to them before he knows that he {267} does so, and always, in a great degree, independently of knowing that he does so. As this group of facts, or considered from this point of view, the ethical system is the body of the moral world.
[1] Aeschylus, Eumenides, I. 14. [2] Rechtsphil., sect. 146.