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 not or cannot abandon this synergism which makes man a rival of the one who commands, which makes him one who also commands and who secretly commands alone, almost every ethics, even though it pretends to be ever so idealistic, is obviously an ethics of being, an ethics of conditioned truth, and therefore an ethics of empty concepts. It is so because it is an ethics of free choice. For what fills the empty concepts, the source of concreteness, and consequently the criterion of good and evil, is the freedom of human choice, or, in other words, man himself. Those who want to continue in this direction should at least be clear about this connection. We maintain, then, that the very unconditionality of the command does not, as a shortsighted understanding of Kant believes, exclude the concrete and specific determination of the content of the command. On the contrary, it includes it. In moral decision it is a question of obeying or disobeying this or that command which apart from our acceptance of it as such is precisely this and this and runs thus and thus. Decision does not lie in deciding the question whether this or that is the good, whether the command wants this or that of me, whether I should do this or that. An ethics which asks questions like this makes no more sense than a dogmatics which asks whether there is a God. The question to be decided in moral decision is whether I will be found obedient or disobedient in my action when confronted with the command at its most concrete and specific. It is not a matter of my freedom of choice but of the divine predestination in moral decision.
To conclude our discussion of this side of the issue, we now have good reason precisely in a theological ethics to make a very special demarcation on this side. It is in keeping with all that has been said that the command addressed to man, as it is present in the message of the Bible which the Christian church accepts and proclaims, almost always occurs as a concrete command and therefore as a plenitude of commands. Jesus does not merely say to the rich young ruler: “You know what you should do,” but: “You know the commandments” [Mark 10:19; Luke 18:20]. You know, then, that in this concrete way you stand in decision. |
It will be well to establish as unequivocally as possible the relation between the concreteness of the unconditioned command and the concreteness of the biblical commands. Obviously neither the totality nor a selection of the biblical imperatives, nor any one of them, is in itself the unconditioned concrete command that comes to you and me today. This neither can nor should be said either of the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament, Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, or the imperatives of the admonitory chapters in the epistles. Precisely for the sake of a proper understanding of the authority of the Bible we must not confuse the issue by an overhasty biblicism. All the biblical imperatives—and we do not say this to impugn the authority of the Bible but to define it—are addressed to others and not to us, and they are addressed to others who differ greatly among themselves, to the people of Israel in different situations, to the disciples of Jesus, to the first Christian churches of Jews and Gentiles. Their concreteness is that of a specific then and there. Again, as we now have them, they are not ⌜for the most part⌝ wholly and absolutely concrete commands addressed to these and these specific people. Their concreteness is relative. ⌜Even⌝ formally they are at least in part—we
