Abstract

This thesis attempts to show, through Hegel's critique of Kant, the differences between the Kantian and the Hegelian conceptions of morality. ;The introductory chapter gives an account of the meanings of morality for Kant and for Hegel. It then explicates Hegel's conception of philosophical criticism that allowed him to advance beyond his own initial Kantian commitments. ;The second chapter is a delineation of the young Hegel's reception of and discontent with Kantian morality. It is apparent that the young Hegel had already developed a program, centered on the notion of love, for his later critique of Kant. ;The subsequent chapters are then devoted to a substantive and systematic presentation of the later Hegel's criticisms of the major issues in Kant's ethics. Hegel argues against Kant's "moral formalism" and "moral world-view" as being such as to bring about the unrealizability of morality. Hegel's remedy for the shortcomings of Kant's conception of morality is presented as a phenomenological and dialectical exposition of moral experience, according to which the actualization of moral freedom is a necessary yet limited form of human life, leaving morality ultimately a purely personal matter. A social ethic is to encompass personal morality; the latter ends not in itself but as a moment in the former, in the social-political-cultural milieu of human lived experience and history. ;This investigation leads to the following conclusions. Hegel's critique of Kantian morality is correct in showing that the latter cannot vindicate its promise of being a self-sufficient and indeed the highest form of human life; and that the personal moral life , its limitedness being recognized, has an integral role within a more comprehensive life-form, within the social ethical life , whose full actualization is the rational state. In regard to the latter, finally, questions remain as to whether it is yet another, though more complex, ought-to-be, subject to the very charges levelled by Hegel against Kant; and how Hegel's idea of ethical life can still be a critical theory of today's society, provided that philosophy is a reflection on its own time