Is not the good again robbed of its originality, is it not thought of as placed in the lower order of being, if it is possible to regard it as a form which has still to be filled, if it is possible to differentiate it as an intrinsically general and abstract good from the definition that arises only with our own decision, if we can have knowledge of it without what we will and do being automatically determined by it in advance?
A general, formal, and abstract command is obviously no command but an object of theory like any other. If the good is indeed unconditioned and therefore not general and theoretical truth; if it is command, claim, a claim made upon us and not just a statement of our own thought that is given the rank of claim; then it is concrete, individual, definite command [a command] whose content is not under our control, but which is controlled with the same unconditionality as is proper to its form, a command which comes to us already filled and definite in content. It is then for the first time clear to us that the good is a question which is directed to us and which we must answer with our act, with an act which for its part is always concrete and individual. Nor will this answer be one that we have given ourselves, so that with our act we shall simply confirm and repeat it, thus remaining faithful to the choice and preference that follows our knowledge (and therefore to ourselves), or at worst being again unfaithful to them (and therefore to ourselves). This agreement or nonagreement with ourselves, which is confirmed by our act, may be an interesting matter but it has nothing whatever to do with obedience or disobedience to the good; if by the good we do not uncritically mean our own goodness but are clear that the good means the challenging of our own goodness.
We clearly misunderstand the meaning and scope of those general concepts, the moral law, the idea of the good, the categorical imperative, the will of God, etc., if we try to find in them the good or the command that is given to us. The moral law or the idea of the good is, as the name says, conceptualized being, the concept of the good, of morality or the command. It is the good projected on to the plane of being and the knowledge of being in a way that cannot be avoided in thinking about the good. It is the good as the ⌜real⌝ thought of a norm that unconditionally claims our will and conduct. Even ethical reflection is thinking and as such theory. To limit that plane concretely by the very different plane of practice, to push on to the thought of the norm which is not one of being but is original, which is not conceptualized but real—to do this it must first enter that place unafraid. How else can it leave it with the ostentation that is needed? But as ethical reflection arrives at the thought of the original and real norm, it negates its reality as simply a thought norm, maintaining that only the command which is issued to us and not a concept of it, not an idea, ⌜not a real conceptualized being⌝ of the good, is the court which we must obey or disobey in moral decision. |
The same is true of the categorical imperative. It may be understood in the purity in which Kant understood it as a formula for the unconditionally binding character of the idea of the good.2 Or to the purely formal content of the Kantian imperative there may be preferred the post-Kantian one which includes some general content. Either way, and even in the ethics that is proudest of its content, we can have only a formula for the concept of command which is abstracted from the reality of the given command, not the command itself. Command, a truly categorical imperative, can arise only on the far side of ethical reflection, when the course is over and the ethicist concerned, setting aside a general formula, has the courage and perhaps the right to come to this or that man and tell him in God’s name, as a prophet, what he should do in this or that specific situation or question of life. What he can say before when he is generally formulating the concept of the imperative is not the imperative itself but at best an insight about it. This is something quite different. Precisely with his strict formalism Kant is perhaps further away than his followers or critics or supposed improvers from the idea that his imperative or one of his formulae for it is the imperative itself, the real command which comes to man and claims him. When the command comes to man, it does not say: “Act in such a way that your action can be the principle of general legislation,”3 or something similarly abstract and general. It says: “Do this and do not do that in this unique situation which will not be repeated.” In this wholly concrete: “Do this and do not do that,” and not in its formal distinctiveness as an imperative or as an attempt to grasp in general the fulness of concretions, the possibilities of the this and that, it is a real imperative. Conversely, to the extent that what encounters man is only the formal phenomenon of an imperative, no matter how categorical, or only what is ultimately the equally formal phenomenon of a formula for what might perhaps be regarded as concretions, to that extent it is certainly not the command that encounters him. The good point about general definitions abstracted from the real command, whether they be formal or material, is that they can be reminders of and pointers to the command which really has been and is issued. They are not even that, however, but “morals” in the worst sense, leading to the illusion in which man himself wills to be good instead of letting the good be good, if they pretend to be the real command, as has happened often enough under the dominion of a rather naive understanding of Kant. |
The same misunderstanding obtains where conscience is made the court which man must obey or not obey in moral decision. Conscience is the totality of our self-consciousness inasmuch as it can be the recipient and publisher of the command that comes to us. It has the promise that it can. But this “can” falls in the category of eschatological concepts. Only in the light of coming perfection, the hope of redemption, can conscience be addressed as the organ of the crisis that overtakes our willing and doing and therefore of our participation in the good. It is not a given factor. But the command that conscience can hear and validate to us by binding our existence to it is an absolute given factor. It does not first become this through our conscience, nor does it first acquire concreteness through our conscience, but it either has this in itself or it is not the real command, and our conscience can only witness to its givenness and concreteness. Hence our conscience is not the command. |
Least of all is the concept of the will of God adapted to be played off against the concreteness and particularity of the given command as the real command behind and above it, or to be explained as the empty form that needs to be filled out as we see best. The concept of the will of God brings fully to light the impossibility of the abstraction of the good in general from the good in particular as revealed in the specific acts of specific people. In the third subsection of the present section we shall have to draw the line more precisely between the concepts “command” and “God.” It ought to be clear already, however, that if one would and could and perhaps should equate the good and therefore the command with God, then the good cannot be understood as a schema at whose filling out by ourselves God is present as a spectator to exhort, console, and finally reward. Even less can the concept of God as the concept of a real imperative be united with the distance presupposed there between form and content, with the division of roles between the good and ourselves. In the same way we must be on guard when, in place of the concept of God’s will, A. Ritschl, for example, extols that of the kingdom of God4 or when without express reference to the idea of God the concept of righteousness or of love is exalted as the good. |
Against all such constructions which relate to a general formula for the good we object that the unconditionality of the truth of the good is very seriously damaged by the idea that the good is simply a divided foolscap page whose columns have to be filled by our application of the general rules, by our deliberations on the special cases that occur. If this synergism in ethics is right, then one must admit that in ethics, too, there can be only conditioned truth. Obviously because people either will