ABSTRACT
The final two essays in the collection seek in different milieux to combine a metaphysical sense of the ethical inside and outside the law with a sense of its specific socio-historicity. Chapter 9 considers the place of a metaphysical ethics with regard to law in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, and argues that his account of ethics is better read as involving a specifically historical yet real and emergent impulse underlying, but also repressed by, modern law. Chapter 10 considers the Beautiful Soul in Hegel’s early and mature philosophy. It argues that this figure assumes an ideal metaphysical form for Hegel because modern social institutions like those of private property and law cannot sustain or actualise its radical moral implications. However, such implications were themselves historically emergent within Western societies as a result of the 18th century experience of social revolution. As revolutionary possibility was snuffed out by property and law, so did the Beautiful Soul retreat from being a harbinger of present possibility to become, first, its tragic victim and, then, its pathetic outcast. The moral possibilities associated with it therefore had nowhere to go but into the realm of the metaphysical. In both Adorno and the young Hegel, an historically emergent promise of freedom underlies the forms of liberal legality, yet is stifled, repressed and contained by it. Forced in the socio-historical present to be a shadow of what it could otherwise be, it assumes the ideal, metaphysical form of a promise of something that is always still, as Derrida has it, ‘to come’.
