The Moral View of the World Summary and Analysis

Duty is the starting point here as mentioned above. The self-consciousness that Hegel is seeking now, is one that is specifically moral in structure. What makes this distinctive from ethical judgments Hegel explored in previous sections? Here his intention is to find a level of self-consciousness that is itself moral. In the preceding chapters, ethical decisions were made from individuality but they were not so much in relation to religion or to morality as such, but had grown through individual development and relation to societal custom.

In this case, Hegel is intentionally reviewing morality as ethics with respect to religion and practical life, in contrast to ethics in relation to culture. In order to do this, he claims that a moral view of the world itself is a mandated starting point...