The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate. Hegel 1798
Over against the positivity of the Jews, Jesus set man; over against the laws and their obligatoriness he set the virtues, and in these the immorality of “positive” man[1] is overcome. It is true that “positive” man, in respect of a specific virtue which in him and for him is service, is neither moral nor immoral, and the service whereby he fulfills certain duties is not of necessity a nonvirtuous attitude to these same duties; but from another aspect there is linked with this neutrality of character a measure of immorality, because the agent’s specific positive service has a limit which he cannot transcend, and hence beyond it he is immoral.[2] Thus this immorality of positivity does not open on the same aspect of human relations as positive obedience does; within the sphere of the latter the nonmoral [i.e., the morally neutral obedience] is not the immoral (but the opposite of virtue is immorality or vice).[3]
When subjectivity is set against the positive, service’s moral neutrality vanishes along with its limited character. Man confronts himself; his character and his deeds become the man himself. He has barriers only where he erects them himself, and his virtues are determinacies which he fixes himself. This possibility of making a clear-cut opposition [between virtue and vice] is freedom, is the “or” in “virtue or vice.” In the opposition of law to nature, of the universal to the particular, both opposites are posited, are actual; the one is not unless the other is. In the moral freedom which consists in the opposition of virtue to vice, the attainment of one is the exclusion of the other; and, hence, if one is actual, the other is only possible.
The opposition of duty to inclination has found its unification in the modifications of love, i.e., in the virtues. Since law was opposed to love, no in its content but in its form, it could be taken up into love, though in this process it lost its shape. To a trespass, however, law is opposed in content; trespass precludes it, and yet it is. Trespass is a destruction of nature, and since nature is one, there is as much destruction in what destroys as in what is destroyed. If what is one is opposed, then a unification of the opposites is available only in the concept [not in reality]. A law has been made; if the thing opposed to it has been destroyed, there still remains the concept, the law; but it then expresses only the deficiency, only a gasp, because its content has in reality[4] been annulled; and it is then called a penal law. This form of law (and the law’s content) is the direct opposite of life because it signalizes the destruction of life. But it seems all the more difficult to think how the law in this form as penal justice can be superseded. In the previous supersession of law by the virtues, it was only the form of law, not its content, which had vanished; here, however, the content would be superseded along with the form, since the content is punishment.
Punishment lies directly in the offended law. The trespasser has forfeited the same right which his trespass has injured in another. The trespasser has put himself outside the concept which is the content of the law. The law merely says that he must lose the rights comprised in the law; but, because the law is directly only a thought, it is only the concept of the trespasser which loses the right; and in order that this loss may be actualized, i.e., in order that the trespasser may really lose what his concept has lost, the law must be linked with life and clothed with might. Now if the law persists in its awful majesty, there is no escaping it, and there is no canceling the fact that the punishment of the trespass is deserved. The law cannot forgo the punishment, cannot be merciful, or it would cancel itself. The law has been broken by the trespasser; its content no longer exists for him; he has canceled it. But the form of the law, universality, pursues him and clings to his trespass; his deed becomes universal, and the right which he has canceled is also canceled for him. Thus the law remains, and a punishment, his desert, remains. But the living being whose might has been united with the law, the executor who deprives the trespasser in reality of the right which he has lost in the concept, i.e., the judge, is not abstract justice, but a living being, and justice is only his special characteristic. Punishment is inevitably deserved; that is inescapable. But the execution of justice is not inevitable, because as a characteristic of a living being it may vanish and another characteristic may come on the scene instead. Justice thus becomes something contingent; there may be a contradiction between it as universal, as thought, and it as real, i.e., in a living being. An avenger can forgive, can forgo his revenge, and a judge can give up acting as a judge, i.e., can pardon. But this does not satisfy justice, for justice is unbending; and, so long as laws are supreme, so long as there is no escape from them, so long must the individual be sacrificed to the universal, i.e., be put to death. For this reason it is also contradictory to contemplate satisfying the law by punishing one man as a representative of many like criminals, since, in so far as the others are looked on as suffering punishment in him, he is their universal, their concept; and the law, as ordering or punishing, is only law by being opposed to a particular.[5] The condition of the law’s universality lies in the fact that either men in acting, or else their actions, are particulars; and the actions are particulars in so far as they are considered in their bearing on universality, on the laws, i.e., considered as conforming to them or contravening them. From this point of view, their relation to the law, their specific character, can suffer no alteration; they are realities, they are what they are; what has happened cannot be undone; punishment follows the deed, and that connection is indissoluble. If there is no way to make an action undone, if its realty is eternal, then no reconciliation is possible, not even through suffering punishment. To be sure, the law is satisfied when the trespasser is punished, since thus the contradiction between its declared fiat and the reality of the trespasser is annulled, and along with it the exception which the trespasser wished to make to the universality of the law. Only the trespasser is not reconciled with the law, whether (α) the law is in his eyes something alien, or whether (β) it is present in him subjectively as a bad conscience. (α) The alien power which the trespasser has created and armed against himself, this hostile being, ceases to work on him once it has punished him. When in its turn it has done to him just what he did himself, it then lets go, but it still withdraws to a threatening attitude; it has not lost its shape or been made friendly. (β) In the bad conscience (the consciousness of a bad action, of one’s self as a bad man) punishment, once suffered, alters nothing. For the trespasser always sees himself as a trespasser; over his action as a reality he has no power, and thus his reality[6] is in contradiction with his consciousness of the law.
And yet the man cannot bear this disquiet;[7] from the terrifying reality of evil and the immutability of the law he can fly to grace alone. The oppression and grief of a bad conscience may drive him once more to a dishonesty, i.e., it may drive him to try running away from himself and therefore from the law and justice; he throws himself into the bosom of the administrator of abstract justice in order to experience his goodness, in the hope that he will close an eye and look on him as other than he is. It is not that he denies his transgression, but he had the dishonest wish that his transgression may be denied by goodness itself, and he find consolation in the thought, in the untrue idea, which another being may frame of him. Thus at this level no return is possible to unity of consciousness by a pure route; except in dishonest entreaty there can be no cancellation of punishment, of the threatening law and the bad conscience. There can be no other cancellation so long as punishment has to be regarded solely as something absolute, so long as it is unconditional, or so long as it has no aspect from which both it and what conditions it can be seen to be subordinate to a higher sphere. Law and punishment cannot be reconciled, but they can be transcended if fate can be reconciled.
Punishment is the effect of a transgressed law from which the trespasser has torn himself free but on which he still depends; he cannot escape from the law or from punishment or from what he has done. Since the characteristic of the law is universality, the trespasser has smashed the matter of the law, but its form – universality – remains. The law, whose master he believed he had become, remains, but in its content it now appears in opposition to him because it has the shape of the deed which contradicts what previously was the law, while the content of the deed now has the shape of universality and is law.[8] This perversion of the law, the fact that it becomes the contrary of what it was before, is punishment. Because the man has cut himself loose from the law, he still remains in subjection to it. And since the law, as a universal, remains, so too does the deed, since it is the particular.
Punishment represented as fate is of a quite different kind. In fate, punishment is a hostile power, an individual thing, in which universal and particular are united in the sense that in it there is no cleavage between command and its execution; there is such a cleavage, however, when law is in question, because the law is only a rule, something thought, and needs an opposite, a reality, from which it acquires its force. In the hostile power of fate, universal is not severed from particular in the way in which the law, as a universal, is opposed to man or his inclinations as the particular. Fate is just the enemy, and man stands over against it as a power fighting against it. Law, on the contrary, as universal, is lord of the particular and has subdued this man[9] to obedience. The trepass of the man regarded as in the toils of fate is therefore not a rebellion of the subject against his ruler, the slave’s flight from his master, liberation from subservience, not a revivification out of a dead situation, for the man is alive, and before he acts there is no cleavage, no opposition, much less a mastery. Only through a departure from that united life which is neither regulated by law nor at variance with law, only through the killing of life, is something alien produced. Destruction of lief is not the nullification of life but its diremption, and the destruction consists in its transformation into an enemy.[10] It is immortal, and, if slain, it appears as its terrifying ghost which vindicates every branch of life and lets loose its Eumenides. The illusion of trespass, its belief that it destroys the other’s life and thinks itself enlarged thereby, is dissipated by the fact that the disembodied spirit of the injured life comes on the scene against the trespass, just as Banquo who came as a friend to Macbeth was not blotted out when he was murdered but immediately thereafter took his seat, not as a guest at the feast, but as an evil spirit. The trespasser intended to have to do with another’s life, but he has only destroyed his own, for life is not different from life, since life dwells in the single Godhead. In his arrogance he has destroyed indeed, but only the friendliness of life; he has perverted life into an enemy. It is the deed itself which has created a law whose domination now comes on the scene; this law is the unification, in the concept, of the equality between the injured, apparently alien, life and the trespasser’s own forfeited life. It is now for the first time that the injured life appears as a hostile power against the trespasser and maltreats him as he has maltreated the other. Hence punishment as fate is the equal reaction of the trespasser’s own deed, of a power which he himself has armed, of an enemy made an enemy by himself.
A reconciliation with fate seems still more difficult to conceive than one with the penal law, since a reconciliation with fate seems to require a cancellation of annihilation. But fate, so far as reconcilability is concerned, has this advantage of the penal law, that it occurs within the orbit of life, while a crime falling under law and punishment occurs on the contrary in the orbit of insurmountable oppositions and absolutely real events. In the latter orbit it is inconceivable that there should be any possibility of canceling punishment or banishing the consciousness of being really evil, because the law is a power to which life is subject, above which there is nothing, not even the Deity, since God is only the power which the highest thought has, is only the administrator of the law. A real even can only be forgotten, i.e., it can be conceived in idea and then can fade away in another weakness [in oblivion],[11] though thereby its being would nonetheless still be posited as abiding. In the case of punishment as fate, however, the law is later than life and is outranked by it. There, the law is only the lack of life, defective life appearing as a power. And life can heal its wounds again; the severed, hostile life can return into itself again and annul the bungling achievement of a trespass, can annul the law and punishment. When the trespasser feels the disruption of his own life (suffers punishment) or knows himself (in his bad conscience) as disrupted, then the working of his fate commences, and this feeling of a life disrupted must become a longing for what has been lost. The deficiency is recognized as a part of himself, as what was to have been in him and is not. This lack is not a not-being but is life known and felt as not-being.
To have felt this fate as possible is to fear it; and this is a feeling quite different from the fear of punishment. The former is fear of a separation, an awe of one’s self; fear of punishment is fear of something alien, for even if the law is known as one’s own, still in the fear of punishment the punishment is something alien unless the fear is conceived as fear of being unworthy. In punishment, however, there is added to the feeling of unworthiness the reality of a misfortune, i.e., the loss of a well-being which one’s concept [or essence] has lost and which therefore one no longer deserves. Hence punishment presupposes an alien being who is lord of this reality [i.e., who inflicts the pain of punishment], and fear of punishment is fear of him. In fate, on the other hand, the hostile power is the power of life made hostile; hence fear of fate is not the fear of an alien being. Moreover, punishment betters nothing, for it is only suffering, a feeling of impotent in face of a lord with whom the trespasser has and wants nothing in common. Its only effect is frowardness, obstinacy in opposition to an enemy by whom it would be a disgrace to be subdued, for that would be the man’s self-surrender. In fate, however, the man recognizes his own life, and his supplication to it is not supplication to a lord but a reversion and an approach to himself.
The fate in which the man senses what he has lost creates a longing for the lost life. This longing, if we are to speak of bettering and being bettered, may in itself be called a bettering, because, since it is a sense of the loss of life, it recognizes what has been lost as life, as what was once its friend, and this recognition is already itself an enjoyment of life. And the man animated by this longing may be conscientious in the sense that, in the contradiction between the consciousness of his guilt and the renewed sensing of life, he may still hold himself back from returning to the latter; he may prolong his bad conscience and feeling of grief and stimulate it every moment; and thus he avoids being frivolous with life, because he postpones reunion with it, postpones greeting it as a friend again, until his longing for reunion springs from the deepest recesses of his soul. In sacrifices and penances criminals have made afflictions for themselves; as pilgrims in hair shirts and walking every step barefoot on the hot sand, they have prolonged and multiplied their affliction and their consciousness of being evil; what they have lost, this gap in their life, they have felt in their very bones, and yet in this experience, though they sense their loss as something hostile, they yet sense it wholly as life; and this has made it possible for them to resume it again. Opposition is the possibility of reunification, and the extent to which in affliction life is felt as an opposite is also the extent of the possibility of resuming it again. It is in the fact that even the enemy is felt as life that there lies the possibility of reconciling fate. This reconciliation is thus neither the destruction or subjugation of something alien, nor a contradiction between consciousness of one’s self and the hoped-for difference in another’s idea of one’s self, nor a contradiction between desert in the eyes of the law and the actualization of the same, or between man as concept and man as reality. This sensing of life, a sensing which finds itself again, is love, and in love fate is reconciled. Thus considered, the trespasser’s deed is no fragment; the action which issues from life, from the whole, also reveals the whole. But the trespass which is a transgression of a law is only a fragment, since there is outside it from the state the law which does not belong to it. The trespass which issues from life reveals the whole, but as divided, and the hostile parts can coalesce again into the whole. Justice is satisfied, since the trespasser has sensed as injured in himself the same life that he has injured. The pricks of conscience have become blunt, since the deed’s evil spirit has been chased away; there is no longer anything hostile in the man, and the deed remains at most as a soulless carcass lying in the charnel-house of actualities, in memories.
But fate has a more extended domain than punishment has. It is aroused even by guilt without crime, and hence it is implicitly stricter than punishment. Its strictness often seem to pass over into the most crying injustice when it makes its appearance, more terrible than ever, over against the most exalted form of guilt, the guilt of innocence.[12] I mean that, since laws are purely conceptual unifications of opposites, these concepts are far from exhausting the many-sidedness of life. Punishment exercises its domination only in so far as there is a consciousness of life at the point where a disunion has been reunified conceptually; but over the relations of life which have not been dissolved, over the sides of life which are given as vitally united, over the domains of the virtues, it exercises no power. Fate, on the other hand, is incorruptible, and unbounded like life itself. It knows no given ties, no differences of standpoint or position, no precinct of virtue. Where life is injured, be it ever so rightly, i.e., even if no dissatisfaction is felt, there fate appears, and one may therefore say “never has innocence suffered; every suffering is guilt.” But the honor of a pure soul is all the greater the more consciously it has done injury to life in order to maintain the supreme values, while a trespass is all the blacker, the more consciously an impure soul has injured life.
A fate appears to arise only through another’s deed; but this is only the occasion of the fate. What really produces it is the manner of receiving and reacting against the other’s deed. If someone suffers an unjust attack, he can arm and defend himself and his right, or he may do the reverse. It is with his reaction, be it battle or submissive grief, that his guilt, his fate, begins. In neither case does he suffer punishment; but he suffers no wrong either. In battle he clings to his right and defends it. Even in submission he does not sacrifice his right; his grief is the contradiction between recognizing his right and lacking the force actually to hold onto it; he does not struggle for it, and his fate is his lack of will. If a man fights for what is in danger, he had not lost what he is struggling for; but by facing danger he has subjected himself to fate, for he enters on the battlefield of might against might and ventures to oppose his adversary. Courage, however, is greater than grieving submission, for even though it succumbs, it has first recognized this possibility [of failure] and so has consciously made itself responsible for it; grieving passivity, on the contrary, clings to its loss and fails to oppose it with all its strength. Yet the suffering of course is also a just fate, because the man of courage engages with the sphere of right and might. Hence the struggle for right, like passive suffering, is an unnatural situation in which there lies the contradiction between the concept of right and its actuality. For even in the struggle for right there is a contradiction; the right is something thought, a universal, while in the aggressor it is also a thought, though a different one; and hence there would here be two universals which would cancel each other out, and yet they persist. Similarly, the combatants are opposed as real entities, different living beings; life is in conflict with life, which once again is a self-contradiction. By the self-defense of the injured party, the aggressor is likewise attacked and thereby is granted the right of self-defense; both are right, both are at war, and this gives both the right of self-defense. Thus either they leave to power and strength the decision as to the side on which right lies, and then, since right and reality have nothing in common with one another, they confuse the two and make the former dependent on the latter; or else they throw themselves on the mercy of a judge, i.e., their enmity leads them surrender themselves unarmed and dead. They renounce their own mastery of actuality, they renounce might, and let something alien, a law on the judge’s lips, pass sentence on them. Hence they submit to a treatment against which both parties had protested, for they had gainsaid the injury to their right, had set themselves against treatment by another.[13]
The truth of both opposites, courage and passivity, is so unified in beauty of soul that the life in the former remains though opposition falls away, while the loss of right in the latter remains, but the grief disappears. There thus arises a transcendence of right without suffering, a living free elevation above the loss of right and above struggle. The man 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 with 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 the attack he has alienated. To renounce his relationships[14] in this way is to abstract from himself, but this process has no fixed limits. (The more vital the relations are, out of which, once they are sullied, a noble nature must withdraw himself, since he could not remain in them without himself becoming contaminated, the greater is his misfortune. But this misfortune is neither just nor unjust; it only becomes his fate because his disdain of those relations is his own will, his free choice. Every grief which thus results to him is so far just and is now his unhappy fate, a fate which he himself has consciously wrought; and it is his distinction to suffer justly, because he is raised so far above these rights that he willed to have them for enemies. Moreover, since this fate is rooted in himself, he can endure it, face it, because his griefs are not a pure passivity, the predominance of an alien being, but are produced by himself.) To save himself, the man kills himself; to avoid seeing his own being in another’s power, he no longer calls it his own, and so he annihilates himself in wishing to maintain himself, since anything in another’s power would no longer be the man himself, and there is nothing in him which could not be attacked and sacrificed.[15]
Unhappiness may become so great that his fate, this self-destruction, drives him so far toward the renunciation of life that he must withdraw into the void altogether. But, by himself setting an absolutely total fate over against himself, the man has eo ipso lifted himself above fate entirely. Life has become untrue to him, not he to life. He has fled from life but done no injury to it. He may long for it as for an absent friend, but it cannot pursue him like an enemy. On no side is he vulnerable; like a sensitive plant, he withdraws into himself when touched. Rather than make life his enemy, rather than rouse a fate against himself, he flies from life. Hence Jesus [Luke xiv. 26] required his friends to forsake father, mother, and everything in order to avoid entry into a league with the profane world and so into the sphere where a fate becomes possible. Again [Matthew v. 40 and 29-30]: “If a man take thy coat, give him thy cloak also; if a member offend thee, cut if off.”
Beauty of soul has as its negative attribute the highest freedom, i.e., the potentiality of renouncing everything in order to maintain one’s self. Yet the man who seeks to save his life will lose it [Matthew x. 39]. Hence supreme guilt is compatible with supreme innocence; the supreme wretchedest fate with elevation above all fate.[16] A heart thus lifted above the ties of rights, disentangled from everything objective, has nothing to forgive the offender, for it sacrificed its right as soon as the object over which it had a right was assailed, and thus the offender has done no injury to any right at all. Such a heart is open to reconciliation, for it is able forthwith to reassume any vital relationship, to re-enter the ties of friendship and love, since it has done no injury at all to life in itself. On its side there stands in the way no hostile feeling, no consciousness, no demand on another for the restoration of an infringed right, no pride which would claim from another in a lower sphere, i.e., in the realm of rights, an acknowledgment of subordination. Forgiveness of sins, readiness to reconcile one’s self with another, Jesus makes an express condition of the forgiveness of one’s own sins, the cancellation of one’s hostile fate. Both are only different applications of the same character of soul. In reconciliation with one who hurts us, the heart no longer stands on the right acquired in opposition to the offender. By giving up its right, as its hostile fate, to the evil genius of the other, the heart reconciles itself with him, and thereby has won just so much for itself in the field of life, has made friendly just so much life as was hostile to it, has reconciles the divine to itself; and the fate it had aroused against itself by its own deed has dissolved in to the airs of night.
Apart from the personal hatred which springs from the injury befalling the individual and which strives to bring to fulfillment the right against the other to which the situation gives rise, apart from this hatred there is also the righteous man’s rage, a hating rigorous dutifulness, which must needs rage not over an injury to his individuality but over an injury to his intellectual conceptions, i.e., to the commands of duty. By discerning and laying down the rights and duties of others, and by judging others accordingly and so exhibiting their subjection to these duties and rights, this righteous hatred imposes these same standards on itself. In its righteous wrath against those who transgress these, it sets up a fate for them and does not pardon them; but thereby it has taken from itself the possibility of being pardoned for its own sins, of being reconciled with a fate which they would bring on it, for it has fixed specific standards which do not permit it to soar above its real situation, i.e., above its sins. To this context belong the commands [Matthew vii. 1-2]: “Judge not that yet be not judged; with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” The measuring rod is law and right. The first of these commands, however, cannot mean: Whatever illegality you overlook in your neighbor and allow to him will also be overlooked in you. A league of bad men grants leave to every member to be bad. No, it means: Beware of taking righteousness and love as a dependence on laws and as an obedience to commands, instead of regarding them as issuing from life. If you ignore this warning, you are recognizing over you a lord before whom you are impotent, who is stronger than you, a power who is not yourself. You are then setting up for yourself and for others an alien power over your deed; you are elevating into an absolute what is only a fragment of the whole of the human heart. Thereby you are making the laws dominant, while you make your sensuous side or your individuality a slave. In this way you set up the possibility of punishment, not of a fate; the former comes from the outside, from something independent, the latter is fixed by your nature, and even if it is something now hostile, still it is set up not above you, but only against you.
A man would be entangled in a fate by another’s deed if he picked up the gauntlet and insisted on his right against the transgressor; but this fate is turned aside if he surrenders the right and clings to love. And not this fate only; even a fate aroused against himself by his own deed in unrighteously injuring life he can put to sleep again if his love grows stronger. The punishment inflicted by law is merely just. The common character, the connection of crime and punishment, is only equality, not life. The same blows which the trespasser has dealt he experiences himself; tyrants are confronted by torturers, murdered by executioners. The torturers and executioners, who do the same as the tyrants and the murderers did, are called just, simply because they give like for like. They may act deliberately as avengers or unconsciously as tools; yet we take account not of their soul but only of their deed. Of reconciliation, of a return to life, there thus can be no question so far as justice is concerned. Before the law the criminal is nothing but a criminal. Yet the law is a fragment of human nature, and so is the criminal; if the law were a whole, an absolute, then the criminal would be only a criminal. Even in the hostility of fate a man has a sense of just punishment; but since this hostility is not grounded in an alien law superior to the man, since on the contrary it is from him that the law and right of fate first arise, a return is possible to the original situation, to wholeness. For the sinner is more than a sin existent, a trespass possessed of personality; he is a man, trespass and fate are in him. He can return to himself again, and, if he does so, then trespass and fate are under him. The elements of reality are dissolved; spirit and body are severed; the deed still subsists, but only as something past, as a fragment, as a corpse. That part of it which was a bad conscience has disappeared, and the remembrance of the deed is no longer that conscience’s intuition of itself; in love, life has found life once more. Between sin and its forgiveness there is as little place for an alien thing as there is between sin and punishment. Life has severed itself from itself and united itself again.
Jesus too found within nature [i.e., in “life"] the connection between sins and the forgiveness of sins, between estrangement from God and reconciliation with him, though this is something which can be fully shown only in the sequel [in §iv]. Here, however, this much may be adduced. He placed reconciliation in love and fulness of life and expressed himself to that effect on every occasion with little change of form. Where he found faith, he used the bold expression [Luke vii. 48]: “Thy sins are forgiven thee.” This expression is no objective cancellation of punishment, no destruction of the still subsisting fate, but the confidence which recognized itself in the faith of the woman who touched him, recognized in her a heart like his own, read in her faith her heart’s elevation above law and fate, and declared to her the forgiveness of her sins. A soul which throws itself into the arms of purity itself with such full trust in a man, with such devotion to him, with the love that reserves nothing for itself, must itself be a pure or a purified soul. Faith in Jesus means more than knowing his real personality, feeling one’s own reality as inferior to his in might and strength, and being his servant. Faith is a knowledge of spirit through spirit, and only like spirits can known and understand one another; unlike ones can know only that they are not what the other is. Difference in might of spirit, in degree of force, is not unlikeness, but the weaker hangs on the superior like a child, or can be drawn up to him. So long as he love beauty in another and so long as beauty is in him though undeveloped (i.e., so long as in acting and doing he is not yet set in equipoise and peace against the world, so long as he has not yet reached a firm consciousness of his relation to things), so long is he still at the level of faith alone. As Jesus says (John xii. 36): Until[17] you have light yourselves, believe in the light and thereby become yourselves children of the light. Of Jesus himself, on the other hand, it is said (John ii. 25): He did not commit himself to the Jews who believed on him, because he knew them and because he did not need their witness; it was not in them that he first came to know himself.
Boldness and confidence of decision about fulness of life, about abundance of love, arise from the feeling of the man who bears in himself the whole of human nature. Such a heart has no need of the much-vaunted profound “knowledge of men"[18] which for distracted beings whose nature compromises many and variegated onesidednesses, a vast multiplicity without unity, is indeed a science of wide range and wide utility; but the spirit, which is what they seek, always eludes them and they discover nothing save isolated details. An integrated nature penetrates the feelings of another in a moment and senses the other’s harmony or disharmony; hence the unhesitating, confidence, words of Jesus: Thy sins are forgiven thee.
In the spirit of the Jews there stood between impulse and action, desire and deed, between life and trespass, trespass and pardon, an impassable gulf, an alien court of judgment. When, then, they were referred to love as a bond in man between sin and reconciliation, their loveless nature must have been shocked, and, when their hatred took the form of a judgment, the thought of such a bond must to their minds have been the thought of a lunatic. For they had committed all harmony among men, all love, spirit, and life, to an alien object; they had alienated from themselves all the genii in which men are united; they had put nature in the hands of an alien being. What held them together was chains, laws given by the superior power. The consciousness of disobedience to the Lord found its satisfaction directly in the appointed punishment or payment for guilt. A bad conscience they knew only as fear of punishment. Such a conscience, as a consciousness of self in opposition to self, always presupposes an ideal over against a reality which fails to correspond with the ideal, and the ideal is in man, a consciousness of his own whole nature; but the indigence of the Jews was such that, when they looked into their own hearts, there was nothing left there to see: they had renounced all nobility and all beauty. Their poverty had to serve a being infinitely rich, and by purloining something from him and thereby stealing for themselves a sense of selfhood, these men of bad conscience had made their reality not still poorer but richer. But the result was that they then had to fear the Lord they had robbed; he would let them repay their theft and make sacrifices, and thus he would hurl them back again into the sense of their poverty. Only by a payment to their almighty creditor would they be free of their debts, and after paying they would be once again without possessions.
A guilt-conscious but better soul will purchase no favor by a sacrifice, will not pay back the theft; on the contrary, in willing privation, with a warmhearted gift, with no sense of duty or service, but in earnest prayer and with its whole self, it will approach a pure soul in order to gain what it cannot bring to consciousness in itself,[19] namely, to gain strength of life and win free pleasure and joy in the intuition of the beauty it has beheld in that pure soul. The Jew, per contra, in paying his debt had simply readopted the service he wanted to escape, and he left the altar with the feeling of an abortive question and the re-recognition of his subjection to bondage. In contrast with the Jewish reversion of obedience, reconciliation in love is a liberation; in contrast with the re-recognition of lordship, it is the cancellation of lordship in the restoration of the living bond, of that spirit of love and mutual faith which, considered in relation to lordship, is the highest freedom. This situation is [for the Jew] the most incomprehensible opposite of the Jewish spirit.
After Peter had recognized Jesus as divine in nature [Matthew xvi. 13 ff.] and thereby proved that he had a sense of the whole depth of man because he had been able to take a man as a son of God, Jesus gave over to him the power of the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven. What he bound was to be bound in Heaven, what he loosed was to be loosed in Heaven also. Since Peter had become conscious of a God in one man, he must also have been able to recognize in anyone else the divinity or nondivinity of his being, or to recognize it in a third party[20] as that party’s sensing of divinity or nondivinity, i.e., as the strength of that party’s belief or disbelief which would or would not free him from every remaining fate, which would or would not lift him above the eternal immutable domination and law. He must have understood men’s hearts and known whether their deeds had perished or whether the spirits of them (guilt and fate) still subsisted. He must have been able to bind, i.e., to declare what still fell under the reality of crime, and to loose, i.e., to declare what was elevated above that reality.
Another beautiful example of a returning sinner appears in the story of Jesus: the famous and beautiful sinner, Mary Magdalene. It may not be taken ill if two narratives [Matthew xxvi and Luke vii], divergent in time, place, and other details, and indicative of different events, are here treated only as different forms of the same story, because nothing is to be said about the actual facts, and in our opinion there is no misrepresentation. Mary, conscious of her guilt, hears that Jesus is eating in a Pharisee’s house among a large company of righteous, honest folk (honnêtes gens, those who are bitterest against the sins of a beautiful soul). Her heart drives her through this company to Jesus; weeping, she walks up to his feet, washes them with her tears and dries them with the hair of her head; she kisses them and anoints them with ointment, with pure an costly spikenard. The girl’s pride, shyness, and self-sufficingness forbid the public utterance of her love’s need; far less can she pour out her soul and brave the glances of legally minded and righteous people like the Pharisees and the disciples, because her sins consist in her transgression of what is right; but a soul, deeply hurt and almost in despair, must decry herself and her bashfulness and, despite her own feeling for what is right, must offer all the riches of her loving heart so that she can drown her consciousness in this fervent joy. In face of these floods of tears, these loving kisses extinguishing all guilt, this bliss of love drinking reconciliation from its effusion, the righteous Simon feels only the impropriety of Jesus’ dealing at all with such a creature. He takes this feeling so much for granted that he does not express it or act upon it, but he can forthwith draw the inference that if Jesus were a seer he would know that this woman was a sinner. “Her many sins are forgiven,” Jesus says, “for she loved much; but to whom little is forgiven, the same has loved little.” Simon expressed only his power of judgment. But in Jesus’ friends there was stirring a much nobler interest, a moral one. The ointment might have been sold for three hundred pence and the money given to the poor. Their moral tendency to do good to the poor and their calculating prudence, their watchful virtue (a thing of the head, not the heart), all this is only a crude attitude, for not only did they fail to grasp the beautiful situation but they even did injury to the holy outpouring of a loving heart. “Why do you trouble her,” says Jesus, “she was wrought a beautiful work upon me,” and this is the only thing in the whole story of Jesus which goes by the name of “beautiful."[21] So unsophisticated an action, an action so void of any intent to make useful application of deed or doctrine, is the self-expression only of a woman whose heart is full of love. Not for an empty reason, not even for the sake of giving the disciples a proper outlook, but for the sake of attaining an atmosphere of peace, Jesus has to turn their attention to an aspect to which they are responsive but whose beauty he will not illumine for them. He deduces from the action a sort of reverence for his own person. In face of crude souls a man must be content to avert any act of theirs which would profane a beautiful heart. It would be futile to try explaining to coarse organs the fine fragrance of the spirit whose breath they could not feel. “She has anointed me,” Jesus says, “for my burial.” “Thy many sins are forgiven thee, for thou hast loved much. Go in peace, the faith hath saved thee.” Would anyone say it had been better for Mary to have yielded to the fate of the Jewish life, to have passed away as an automaton of her time, righteous and ordinary, without sin and without love? Without sin, because the era of her people was one of those in which the beautiful heart could not live without sin, but in this, as in any era, could return through love to the most beautiful consciousness.
But love reconciles not only the trespasser with his fate but also man with virtue, i.e., if love were not the sole principle of virtue, then every virtue would be at the same time a vice. To complete subjection under the law of an alien Lord, Jesus opposed not a partial subjection under a law of one’s own, the self-coercion of Kantian virtue, but virtues without lordship and without submission, i.e., virtues as modifications of love. If the virtues had to be regarded otherwise than as modifications of one living spirit, if every virtue were an absolute virtue, the result would be insoluble conflicts arising from the plurality of absolutes. If there is no such unification in one spirit, every virtue has something defective about it, since each is by its very name a single and so a restricted virtue. The circumstances in which it is possible – the objects, the conditions of an action – are something accidental; besides, the relation of the virtue to its object is a single one; it precludes other relations to that object as well as relations of the same virtue to other objects. Hence every virtue, alike in its concept and in its activity, has its limit which it cannot overstep. A man of this specific virtue who acts beyond the limit of his virtue can act only viciously, for he remains a virtuous man only in so far as he is true to his virtue. But if there dwells in him another virtue which has its sphere beyond the limit of the first, then we may indeed say that the virtuous disposition considered by itself and in general, i.e., abstracted from the virtues here posited, does not come into conflict, because the virtuous disposition is one and one only. But this is to annul what was presupposed; for, if both virtues are posited, the exercise of one annuls the material of the other together with the potentiality of exercising the other which is just as absolute as the first, and hence the legitimate demands of the other are dismissed. A right given up for the one relation can no longer be a right for the other, or, if it is saved up for the other, the first must starve. In proportion as the multiplicity of human relationships grows, the mass of virtues also increases, and in consequence the mass of inevitable conflicts and the impossibility of fulfillment. If the man of many virtues tries to make a hierarchy of his creditors, all of whom he cannot satisfy, he declares himself as less indebted to those he subordinates than to the others which he calls higher. Virtues therefore may cease to be absolutely obligatory and thus may become vices.
In this many-sidedness of human relations and this multiplicity of virtues, nothing remains save despair of virtue and trespass of virtue itself. Only when no virtue claims to subsist firmly and absolutely in its restricted form; only when every restricted virtue renounces its insistence on entering even that situation into which it alone can enter; only when it is simply the one living spirit which acts and restricts itself in accordance with the whole of the given situation, in complete absence of external restriction, and without at the same time being divided by the manifold character of the situation; then and then only dose the many-sidedness of the situation remain, though the mass of absolute and incompatible virtues vanishes. Here there can be no question of holding that underlying all the virtues there is one and the same basic principle which, always the same in different circumstances, appears differently modified as a particular virtue. Just because such a principle is a universal and so a concept, there must inevitably appear in determinate circumstances its determinate application, a determinate virtue, a specific duty. (The multiple circumstances as given realities, the principle which is the rule for all of them, and the applications of the principle, i.e., the numerous virtues, all these are immutable.) Where they subsist together thus absolutely, the virtues simply destroy one another. Their unity on the strength of the rule is only apparent, for the rule is only a thought, and such a unity neither annuls multiplicity nor unifies it; it only lets it subsist in its whole strength.
A living bond of the virtues, a living unity, is quite different from the unity of the concept; it does not set up a determinate virtue for determinate circumstances, but appears, even in the most variegated mixture of relations, untorn and unitary. Its external shape may be modified in infinite ways; it will never have the same shape twice. Its expression will never be able to afford a rule, since it never has the force of a universal opposed to a particular. Just as virtue is the complement of obedience to law, so love is the complement of the virtues. By it all one-sidednesses, all exclusivenesses, all restricted virtues, are annulled. There are no longer any virtuous sins or sinning virtues, since it is the living interrelation of men in their essential being. In it all severances, all restrictions, disappear, and so, too, the limitations on the virtues cease to exist. Where could there be room for determinate virtues when no right remains to be surrendered? Jesus demands that love shall be the soul of his friends [John xiii. 34-35]: “A new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another; thereby will men know that ye are my friends.”
Universal philanthropy, i.e., the philanthropy which is to extend to all, even to those of whom the philanthropist knows nothing, whom he has not met, with whom he stands in no relation, is a shallow but characteristic discovery of ages which, because their real achievement is so poor, cannot help setting up ideal commands, virtues directed on an ens rationis, for the sake of appearance remarkably splendid in such conceptual objects.[22] Love for one’s nearest neighbors is philanthropy toward those with whom each one of us comes into contact. A thought cannot be loved. Of course “love cannot be commanded”; of course it is “pathological, an inclination”;[23] but it detracts nothing from its greatness, it does not degrade it, that its essence is not a domination of something alien to it. But this dose not mean that it is something subordinate to duty and right; on the contrary, it is rather love’s triumph over these that it lords it over nothing, is without any hostile power over another. “Love has conquered” does not mean the same as “duty has conquered,” i.e., subdued its enemies; it means that love has overcome hostility. It is a sort of dishonor to love when it is commanded, i.e., when love, something living, a spirit, is called by name. To name it is to reflect on it, and its name or the utterance of its name is not spirit, not its essence, but something opposed to that. Only in name or as a word, can it be commanded; it is only possible to say: Thou shalt love. Love itself pronounces no imperative. It is no universal opposed to a particular, no unity of the concept, but a unity of spirit, divinity. To love God is to feel one’s self in the “all” of life, with no restrictions, in the infinite. In this feeling of harmony there is no universality, since in a harmony the particular is not in discord but in concord, or otherwise there would be no harmony. “Love thy neighbor as thyself” does not mean to love him as much as yourself, for self-love is a word without meaning. It means “love him as the man whom thou art,” i.e., love is a sensing of a life similar to one’s own, not a stronger or a weaker one. Only through love is the might of objectivity broken, for love upsets its whole sphere. The virtues, because of their limits, always put something objective beyond them, and the variety of virtues an all the greater and insurmountable multiplicity of objectivity. Love alone has no limits. What it has not united with itself is not objective to it; love has overlooked it or not yet developed it; it is not confronted by it.
Jesus’ leave-taking from his friends took the form of celebrating a love-feast. Love is less than religion, and this meal, too, therefore is not strictly a religious action, for only a unification in love, made objective by imagination, can be the object of religious veneration. In a love-feast, however, love its lives and is expressed, and every action in connection with it is simply an expression of love. Love itself is present only as an emotion, not as an image also. The feeling and the representation of the feeling are not unified by fancy. Yet in the love-feast there is also something objective in evidence, to which feeling is linked but with which it is not yet united into an image. Hence this eating hovers between a common table of friendship and a religious act, and this hovering makes difficult the clear interpretation of its spirit. Jesus broke bread: “Take, this is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me. Likewise took he the cup. Drink ye all of it; this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for you and for many for the remission of sins; do this in remembrance of me.”
When an Arab has drunk a cup of coffee with a stranger, he has eo ipso made a bond of friendship with him. This common action has linked them, and on the strength of this link the Arab is bound to render him all loyalty and help. The common eating and drinking here is not what is called a symbol. The connection between symbol and symbolized is not itself spiritual, is not life, but an objective bond; symbol and symbolized are strangers to one another, and their connection lies outside them in a third thing; their connection is only a connection in thought. To eat and rink with someone is an act of union and is itself a felt union, not a conventional symbol. It runs counter to natural human feeling to drink a glass of wine with an enemy; the sense of community in this action would contradict the attitude of the parties to one another at other times.
The supper shared by Jesus and his disciples is in itself an act of friendship; but a still closer link si the solemn eating of the same bread, drinking from the same cup. This too is not a mere symbol of friendship, but an act, a feeling of friendship itself, of the spirit of love. But the sequel, the declaration of Jesus that “this is my body, this is my blood” approximates the action to a religious one but does not make it one; this declaration, and the accompanying distribution of food and drink, make the feeling to some extent objective. Their association with Jesus, their friendship with one another, and their unification in their center, their teacher, are not merely sensed. On the contrary, since Jesus calls the bread and wine, which he distributes to all, his body and blood given for them, the unification is no longer merely felt but has become visible. It is not merely represented in an image, an allegorical figures, but linked to a reality, eaten and enjoyed in a reality, the bread. Hence the feeling becomes in a way objective; yet this brad and wine, and the act of distribution, are not purely objective; there is more in the distribution than is seen; it is a mystical action. A spectator ignorant of their friendship and with no understanding of the words of Jesus would have seen nothing save the distribution of some bread and wine and the enjoyment of these. Similarly, when friends part and break a ring an each keeps one piece, a spectator sees nothing but the breaking of a useful thing and its division into useless and valueless pieces; the mystical aspect of the pieces he has failed to grasp. Objectively considered, then, the bread is just bread, the wine just wine; yet both are something more. This “more” is not connected with the objects (like an explanation) by a mere “just as”: “just as the single pieces which you eat are from one loaf and the wine you drink is from the same cup, so are you mere particulars, though one in love, in the spirit”; “just as you all share in this bread and wine, so you all share in my sacrifice”; or whatever other “just as” you like to find here. Yet the connection of objective and subjective, of the bread and the persons, is here not the connection of allegorized with allegory, with the parable in which the different things, the things compared, are set forth as severed, as separate, and all that is asked is a comparison, the thought of the likeness of dissimilars. On the contrary, in this link between bread and persons, difference disappears, and with it the possibility of comparison. Things heterogeneous are here most intimately connected.
In the words (John vi. 56) “Who eats my flesh and drinks my blood dwelleth in me and I in him,” or (John x. 7) “I am the door,” and in similar harsh juxtapositions, we are forced to represent what is bound together as severed into different things compared together, and the bond must be regarded as a comparison. Here, however, bread and wine, like the mystical pieces of the ring, become mystical objects, for Jesus calls them his flesh and blood, and a pleasure, a feeling, is their direct accompaniment. He broke bread and gave it to his friends: “Take, eat, this is my body sacrificed for you.” So also when he took the cup: “Drink ye all of it; this is my blood, the blood of the new covenant, poured out for many for the remission of their sins.” Not only is the wine blood but the blood is spirit. The common goblet, the common drinking, is the spirit of a new covenant, a spirit which permeates many, in which many drink life that they may rise above their sins. “And of the fruit of the vine I will not drink again until the day when all shall be fulfilled, when I shall be with you again and will drink it new, drink a new life with you in my father’s kingdom” [Matthew xxvi. 29]. The connection between the blood poured out and the friends of Jesus is not that it was shed for them as something objective to them for their well-being, for their use. The connection (cf. The saying “who eats my flesh and drinks my blood”) is the tie between them and the wine which they all drink out of the same cup and which is for all and the same for all. All drink together; a like emotion is in them all; all are permeated by the like spirit of love. If they are made alike simply as recipients of an advantage, a benefit, accruing from a sacrifice of body and an outpouring of blood, then they would only be united in a like concept. But because they eat the bread and drink the wine, because his body and his blood pass over into them, Jesus is in them all, and his essence, as love, has divinely permeated them. Hence the bread and the wine are not just an object, something for the intellect. The action of eating and drinking is not just a self-unification brought about through the destruction of food and drink, nor is it just the sensation of merely tasting food and drink. The spirit of Jesus, in which his disciples are one, has become a present object, a reality, for external feeling. Yet the love made objective, this subjective element become a thing, reverts once more to its nature, becomes subjective again in the eating. This return may perhaps in this respect be compared with the thought which in the written word becomes a thing and which recaptures its subjectivity out of an object, out of something lifeless, when we read. The simile would be more striking if the written word were read away, if by being understood it vanished as a thing, just as in the enjoyment of bread and wine not only is a feeling for these mystical objects aroused, not only is the spirit made alive, but the objects vanish as objects. Thus the action seems purer, more appropriate to its end, in so far as it afford spirit only, feeling only, and robs the intellect of its own, i.e., destroys the matter, the soulless. When lovers sacrifices before the altar of the goddess of love and the prayerful breath of their emotion fans their emotion to a white-hot flame, the goddess herself has entered their hearts, yet the marble statute remains standing in front of them. In the love-feast, on the other hand, the corporeal vanishes and only living feeling is present.
But what prevents the action [of eating and drinking] from becoming a religious one is just the fact that the kind of objectivity here in question is totally annulled, while feeling remains, the fact that there is a sort of confusion between object and subject rather than a unification, the fact that love here becomes visible in and attached to something which is to be destroyed. The bread is to be eaten, the wine to be drunk; therefore they cannot be something divine. What, on the one hand, they presuppose (namely, the fact that the feeling attached to them reverts, as it were, from their objectivity to its own nature, the fact that the mystical object becomes a purely subjective thing once more), this, on the other hand, they lose just because love is not made objective enough by them. Something divine, just because it is divine, cannot present itself in the shape of food and drink. In a parable there is no demand that the different things compared shall be understood as a unity; but here the thing and the feeling are to be bound together; in the symbolical action the eating and drinking and the sense of being one in Jesus are to run into one another. But thing and feeling, spirit and reality, do not mix. Fancy cannot bring them together in a beautiful image. The bread and wine, seen and enjoyed, can never rouse the feeling of love; this feeling can never be found in them as seen objects since there is a contradiction between it and the sensation of actually absorbing the food and drink, of their becoming subjective. There are always two things there, the faith and the thing, the devotion and the seeing or tasting. To faith it is the spirit which is present; to seeing and tasting, the bread and wine. There is no unification for the two. The intellect contradicts feeling, and vice versa. There is nothing for imagination (in which intellect and feeling are both present and yet canceled) to do; here it cannot provide any image in which seeing and feeling would be unified. In an Apollo or a Venus we must forget the marble, the breakable stone, and see in its shape the immortal only. In looking at the shape, we are permeated with the sense of love and eternal youth. But grind the Apollo or the Venus to dust and say “This is Apollo, this Venus,” and then the dust confronts you and the images of the immortals are in you, but the dust and the divine never coalesce into one. The merit of the duty lay in its form, and the form has gone, while the dust is now the chief thing. The merit of the bread lay in its mystical significance, and yet at the same time in its property as bread, something edible; even in the act of worship it has to be present as bread. When the Apollo is ground to dust, devotion remains, but it cannot turn and worship the dust. The dust can remind us of the devotion, but it cannot draw devotion to itself. A regret arises, and this is the sensing of this separation, this contradiction, like the sadness accompanying the idea of living forces and the incompatibility between them and the corpse. After the supper the disciples began to be sorrowful because of the impending loss of their master, but after a genuinely religious action the whole soul is at peace. And, after enjoying the supper, Christians today feel a reverent wonder either without serenity or else with a melancholy serenity, because feeling’s intensity was separate from the intellect and both were one-sided, because worship was incomplete, since something divine was promised and it melted away in the mouth.
1. i.e., the man whose morality consists in obedience to positive commands, who is a slave to the law and in its service.
2. If morality is supposed to consist in performing certain specific services, then anything else the man does beyond these is immoral.
3. This phrase was in Hegel’s original manuscript, but he later deleted it.
4. i.e., by the existence of the trespass, a real fact which yet negates the content of the law.
5. Hegel seems here to be criticizing the Pauline doctrine of the Atonement as resting on legal conceptions superseded by the teaching of Jesus about love and as being unsatisfactory even on that basis.
6. i.e., his action as a part of himself.
7. Angst, i.e., “dread”
8. The universality of the law persists even if the trespasser denies the content of the law by his act, and it reasserts itself in the punishment. The latter is a deed, like the trespass, and as such it is a content of the law; but because the punishment is the result of the law, its content is universal as enshrining the law itself.
9. i.e., the same man who will fight against fate.
10. i.e., the murderer thinks he has killed his victim. But he has only turned life into an enemy, only produced a ghost to terrify him.
11. The meaning is doubtful. Perhaps the real event is here regarded as a weakness in face of the law, so that, itself a weakness, it fades away in another. Or, alternatively, our memory image, or idea, of the event may be regarded as a weakness in comparison with the event itself, and this may be the weakness which fades away in oblivion, the other weakness.
12. Hegel is thinking of tragedy, where fate sometimes overtakes a hero (e.g., Oedipus) as a result of something he has innocently done. Schuld, “guilt,” is used in German either with or without a moral reference. The criminal has Schuld for his crime, but the wind is also said to be schuldig for melting the snow, i.e., is the cause of the melting, or is responsible for it.
13. i.e., each quarreled with the other in the first place because each claimed a right and neither would submit to the other or tolerate any infringement of his right by the other.
14. i.e. property relationships. But other relations with others are also meant. E.g., X may try to alienate Y’s friend, and Y may just withdraw out of this friendship relation and make no resistance. But this is to “abstract from himself,” i.e., to renounce part of his own being.
15. i.e., in wishing to escape another’s power, in wishing to maintain his own independence, he has to carry abstraction so far that he ultimately destroys himself. With this account of the “beautiful soul” compare Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, English trans. (2d ed.), pp. 663 ff.
16. Try to escape all responsibility, cut yourself off from everything in life that may hurt or contaminate, and you find that annihilation follows; you are caught after all in an insurmountable fate.
17. Here, as usual in his citations of the New Testament, Hegel is making his own translation direct from the Greek text. But although his substitution of “until” for the usual translation (“while”) is not wholly impossible, it is probably incorrect.
18. i.e., “the knowledge whose aim is to detect the peculiarities, passions, and foibles of other men, and lay bare what are called the recesses of the human heart” (Hegel’s Encyclopedia 3d ed., § 377).
19. i.e., an inner consciousness of “beauty” is impossible for a soul conscious of being sullied by guilt.
20. i.e., the recognition of divinity in Jesus made Peter capable of recognizing divinity, or the lack of it, in himself and then in any third party.
21. The Greek word καλου, translated in the A. V. by “good” means “excellent.” It is often translated “beautiful,” but the reference in this passage, and commonly elsewhere, is probably to moral rather than to aesthetic excellence.
22. i.e., it is possible to feel one’s self magnificent on the strength of having fine ideals, empty of reality, even if one’s real achievements are miserably poor.
23. Hegel is quoting and criticizing Kant. See Kant’s Theory of Ethics, trans. Abbott, pp. 176-76.