چکیده:
The present paper takes as its moniker an assertion of that theologian-cumstate
theorist, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel saw the Reformation as a
moment of transition from dogma to reason in religion, concomitant with the
establishment of the modern secular state in Europe. This paper will argue
that whereas human rights appear as the ethical content or desire of the
rational state, they do not offer a simple corollary or complement of religion;
indeed they tend to reverse or negate principles that are central to most major
religions. The argument is straightforward: I suggest that core religious
symbologies of obligation and community—the obligation of one toward
another and the community in God—are vacated in human rights. Human
rights transform relations of obligation into systems of ownership and debt 8I
am no longer obliged to you; rather you are indebted to me<. They idealise a
relation between the state and the individual that is fundamentally hostile to
notions of community. The argument proceeds under four headings: first I
look at ‘freedom’—drawing on Hegel for the thesis that human rights be read
as a vehicle of religious ethics in a secular state. Second, I refer to Freud and
Levinas for the sense of the divine expressed through 8or manifest in< guilt and
‘obligation’; I contrast briefly the religious expression of these notions with
that found in human rights discourse. Third, a section on ‘community’ argues
that this is not merely ignored in human rights discourse, it is actively
undermined. Finally, I look at the contemporary practice and theory of human
rights envisaged as a system of self and sovereignty channelled through ‘law’
and the state. The argument does not assume incompatibility between human
rights and religion as matters of personal belief—it does however identify
rivalry between the normative directives on behaviour and self-understanding
that inform each as a matter of practice.
خلاصه ماشینی:
The argument proceeds under four headings: first I look at ‘freedom’—drawing on Hegel for the thesis that human rights be read as a vehicle of religious ethics in a secular state.
: Ethics; Human Rights; Religious View; Freedom and Obligation * Associate Professor of Law, London School of Economics and Political Science.
1 By embedding ethical values within civic structures, by making them a matter of education, habit and law—each of which Hegel emphasises as concrete achievements of the state—by positioning individuals as responsible thinking and acting beings who must freely decide to live an ethical life—that is the freedom to choose one’s own constraints—and by providing the means to do so, the state concretises and energises the (dialectical) relation between the secular and the religious.
On two accounts, a human rights ethic may appear inadequate to the normative platform Hegel expects of the contemporary state.
1 Although Levinas’s philosophy is heavily structured around themes and terms derived directly or indirectly from religious faith, like Freud his impetus is to locate these themes in human life and experience, not in a revealed word of God. In Levinas, obligation begins in the original contact or moment of communication between the self and another, in the contact between one face and another—in his famous characterisation—a contact that compels the subject to respond, that calls up an obligation, that triggers the awakening to consciousness as itself an ethical moment, an awakening to ethics, where ethics is the occasion of conduct towards the other—the obligation to our fellow man.