Hegel’s philosophical embrace of temporality took him to some fascinating places. Here is one.
On a Hegelian (and, later, a ”continental”) approach, nothing whatsoever can be understood without knowing something about where it came from; for if everything we deal with is in time, it is there replacing something else that didn’t work out. So to understand a current situation requires understanding the problems with the previous situation which it remedies.
Applying this principle to, for example, Kant’s distinctive account of moral agency as the capacity to act from a single universal principle, the “categorical imperative,” requires asking how such moral agency has come to be. This kind of question usually has more than one answer. In the current case, one answer is that Kantian moral agency came to be from Kant: “moral agency” captures his understanding of a similarity holding for certain actions—those which we consider good, which all come into being in accordance with the categorical imperative. Kant has thus seized upon a similarity (or what he thinks is a similarity) among a number of events and has given it a name, making it publicly accessible (#3).
Thus, it is only fitting that Hegel’s account of Kantian moral agency finds a place in his broader discussion of Kant’s philosophy. But then Hegel asks a question which goes beyond Kant: how does one become a moral agent? Kant never answers this question: though his entire philosophy, at least as I understand it, is devoted to strengthening our capacity to act according to a universal principle, he never tells us how we acquire that capacity in the first place. Indeed, he explicitly refuses to do so:
But how this peculiar property of our Sensibility itself is possible, or that of our Understanding and of the apperception which is necessarily its basis and that of all thinking, cannot be further analyzed or answered, because it is of them that we are in need for all our answers and for all our thinking about objects .
Kant, Prolegomena Akademie-Ausagabe IV 318f
As I have argued elsewhere (Time and Philosophy, Chapter One) this conflates an explanation of fact with one of validity. We cannot think without the Understanding, but we cannot think without our brains either: is Kant saying that brain research is impossible?
Hegel, however, does tackle the question, in the course of his Philosophy of Right. He begins with the notion of a human being who is not a moral agent—one who, then, is guided entirely by desires. Such guidance does not work out because desires are inconstant and inconsistent: desires for various things (or people) follow one another at random, all of them are never fulfilled, and someone who has no other spiritual resources is pushed around by the lack of fulfillment.
So much is standard philosophical fare from Plato on; but Hegel goes into much more detail than is usual about how a person moves from that pre-moral state to the universal concern for humanity implied in Kant’s categorical imperative to treat everyone as “ends in themselves.” His treatment has, I think, two distinctive features. One is an insistence that moral agency has an affective dimension—in order to treat all people as ends in themselves, you have to care about them. The other is the claim that we are brought to such universal care by the institutions of modern society.
Thus, marriage—which is grounded mainly in the urgent contingency of sexual desire—shapes that desire into a stable relationship of two hearts. In the family, the purely physical side of this eventually dies away, “extinguished in its own satisfaction.” But this also doesn’t work out, because families require sustenance. To get that, one must enter into civil society, the market-driven realm in which a person succeeds by providing others with goods and services that they require. This means taking into account, not merely the needs of one’s spouse, but those of a wider circle—one’s clients or customers, for one must figure out what they need in order to provide them with it. The market economy, in turn, requires state regulation. Eventually, erotic love turns into patriotism, and one’s physical desires are educated into a panoply of cultural and spiritual concerns. But states, too, are mortal, as we see at the end of the book. To be truly enduring, then, the emotion of patriotism must turn into concern for humanity at large.
Life in the modern state thus constructs the individuals who inhabit it:
The principle of modern states has this monstrous strength and profundity, to allow the principle of subjectivity to perfect itself into the self-sufficient extreme of personal diversity (Besonderheit) and simultaneously to lead it back to the substantial unity [of the state], and so to maintain that unity in the principle of subjectivity itself.
Hegel, Philosophy of Right §260
The modern state thus allows individuals to take shape in the most diverse ways—religiously, ethnically, professionally, and in whatever other “extreme” way is called for, while still providing channels for them to care, and care actively, about their fellows. This is the earliest explicit defense of human diversity I have found in Western philosophy, and still one of the most powerful for it claims that my being who I have to be enriches everyone. It is no accident that American thinkers as profound as W. E. B. Dubois and Martin Luther King were students of Hegel.
But all this, from Kant’s point of view,—and not only Kant’s—is misguided. For moral agency, on Hegel’s account, is historically conditioned, and so not, in Kant’s sense, “universal” at all. Before Kant, one could noconceive of such moral agency; and without the modern state, one cannot live it. On a Kantian approach—indeed, on the approach of all traditional philosophy, from Parmenides on—the capacity to act from a universal principle can only be either a state of affairs which obtains for reasons we cannot and need not fathom—or a mere ideal which cannot actually exist anywhere in our experience.