Love and Law: Hegel’s Critique of Morality

Abstract

X he Spirit of Christianity and its Fate (hereafter Spirit) provides the most direct and eloquent presentation of the logical structure and moral content of Hegel's ethical vision. This is a vision of ethical life itself, of how Hegel conceives of the meaning of ethics, what it is about and its internal dynamic logic, and of ethicality so understood as constitutive of our relation to ourselves, others, and the natural world. In working out the substance of ethical living, above all in opposition to Kant's morality of universal law, Hegel is simultaneously elaborating the structural contours of human experience. Hegelian idealism is constituted by this identification of the normative logic of ethical life with the structure of experience in general. Hegel's ethical vision is hence the vision of the demands and fatalities of ethical life