ABSTRACT
IT WOULD BE satisfying in some ways to make Hegel the culmination of the history of ethics: partly because Hegel himself saw the history of philosophy as ending with himself; more importantly because by Hegel’s time all the fundamental positions have been taken up. After Hegel they reappear in new guises and with new variations, but their reappearance is a testimony to the impossibility of fundamental innovation. The young Hegel set himself a problem which has already appeared in the argument: why are modern Germans (or Europeans in general) not like ancient Greeks? His answer is that through the rise of Christianity the individual and the state have become divided, so that the individual looks to transcendent criteria rather than to those implicit in the practice of his own political community. (Christianity separates the man whose destiny is eternal from the citizen; its God is the ruler of the world, not the deity of hearth and city.) Greek ethics presupposed the shared structure of the πλις, and the consequent shared goals and desires. Modern (eighteenth-century) communities are collections of individuals. Hegel usually writes as if the Greek πλις were more harmonious than in fact it was; he often ignores the existence of slaves. But then, so did Plato and Aristotle. Yet if Hegel’s vision of Greek harmony is exaggerated it provides him with clues for the diagnosis of individualism, and with clues of a historical kind. For Hegel is the first author to understand that there is not a single permanent moral question. His whole philosophy is an attempt to show that the history of philosophy is at the core of philosophy. And he believes this because he believes that philosophy clarifies and articulates the same concepts which are implicit in ordinary thought and practice. Since these have a history, philosophy too must be a historical discipline. It is true that Hegel, especially in his later writings, often treats concepts as if they are timeless entities somehow independent of the flux of the changing world. But even here there is usually some saving clause to make it clear that this is only a façon de parler.
