Objective Spirit 439 by side at this level of social consciousness. They may lead to conflict in the life of the individual in the community, and have to be reconciled by force or otherwise; and they become associated and connected with the fundamental differences of individuality above referred to.
The analysis of this level of social life constituted as above furnishes the argument of the following section.]
THE ETHICAL WORLD: LAW HUMAN AND DIVINE: MAN AND WOMAN The simple substance of spirit, being consciousness, divides itself into parts. In other words, just as con- sciousness of abstract sensuous existence passes over into perception, so does immediate certainty of real ethical existence; and just as for sense perception bare "being" becomes a "thing" with many proper- ties, so for ethical perception a given act becomes a reality involving many ethical relations. For the former, again, the unnecessary plurality of proper- ties concentrates itself into the form of an essential opposition between individual and universal; and still more for the latter, which is consciousness puri- fied and substantial, the plurality of ethical moments is reduced to and assumes a twofold form, that of a law of individuality and a law of universality. Each of these areas or " masses " of the substance remains, how- ever, spirit in its entirety. If in sense-perception " things " have no other substantial reality than the two determinations of individual and universal, these determinations express, in the present instance, merely the superficial opposition of both sides to one an- other.
Individuality, in the case of the subject (Wesen) we are here considering, has the significance of self-con- sciousness in general, not of any particular consciousness we care to take. The ethical substance is, thus, in this The Ethical World 441 determination actual concrete substance, Absolute Spirit realised in the plurality of distinct consciousnesses definitely existing. It [this spirit] is the community (Gemeinwesen) which, as we entered the stage of the practical embodiment of reason in general, came before us as the absolute and ultimate reality, and which here comes objectively before itself in its true nature as a conscious ethical reality (Wesen) and as the essential reality, for that mode of conscious- ness we are now dealing with. It is spirit which is for itself', since it maintains itself by being reflected in the minds of the component individuals; and which is in itself or substance, since it preserves them within itself. Qua actual substance, that spirit is a Nation ( Volk); qua concrete consciousness, it is the Citizens of a nation. This consciousness has its essential being in simple spirit, and is certain of itself in the actual realisation of this spirit, in the entire nation; it has its truth there directly, not therefore in something unreal, but in a spirit which exists and makes itself felt.
This spirit can be named Human Law, because it has its being essentially in the form of self-con- scious actuality. In the form of universality, that spirit is law known to everybody, familiar and recog- nised, and is every-day present Customary Convention (Sitte); in the form of particularity it is the concrete certainty of itself in any and every individual; and the certainty of itself as a single individuality is that spirit in the form of Government. Its true and complete nature is seen in its authoritative validity openly and unmistakably manifested, an existence which takes the form of unconstrained independent objective fact, 442 Phenomenology of Mind and is immediately apprehended with conscious cer- tainty in this form.
Over against this power and publicity of the ethical secular human order there appears, however, another power, the Divine Law. For the ethical power of the state, being the movement of self-conscious action, finds its opposition in the simple immediate essen- tial being of the moral order; qua actual concrete universality, it is a force exerted against the indepen- dence of the individual; and, qua actuality in general, it finds inherent in that essential being something other than the power of the state.
We mentioned before that each of the opposite ways in which the ethical substance exists, contains that substance in its entirety, and contains all moments of its contents. If, then, the community is that sub- stance in the form of self-consciously realised action, the other side has the form of immediate or directly existent substance. The latter is thus, on the one hand, the inner principle (Begriff) or universal possibility of the ethical order in general, but, on the other hand, contains within it also the moment of self-consciousness. This moment which expresses the ethical order in this element of immediacy or mere being, which, in other words, is an immediate consciousness of self (both as regards its essence and its particular thisness) in an " other," — and hence, is a natural ethical community — this is the Family. The family, as the inner indwelling principle of sociality operating in an unconscious way, stands opposed to its own actuality when explicitly con- scious; as the basis of the actuality of a nation, it stands in contrast to the nation itself; as the immediate ethical existence, it stands over against the ethical order The Ethical World 443 which shapes and preserves itself by work for universal ends; the Penates of the family stand in contrast to the universal spirit.
Although the ethical existence of the family has the character of immediacy, it is within itself an ethical entity, but not so far as it is the natural relation of its component members, or so far as their connexion is one immediately holding between individual concrete beings. For the ethical element is intrinsically universal, and this relation established by nature is essentially just as much a spiritual fact, and is only ethical by being spiritual. Let us see wherein its peculiar ethical char- acter consists.
In the first place, because the ethical element is the intrinsically universal element, the ethical relation between the members of the family is not that of senti- ment or the relationship of love. The ethical element in this case seems bound to be placed in the relation of the individual member of the family to the entire family as the real substance, so that the purpose of his action and the content of his actuality are taken from this substance, are derived solely from the family life. But the conscious purpose which dominates the action of this whole, so far as that purpose concerns that whole, is itself the individual member. The procuring and maintaining of power and wealth turn, in part, merely on needs and wants, and are a matter that has to do with desire; in part, they become in their higher aspect something which is merely of mediate significance. This aspect does not fall within the family itself, but concerns what is truly universal, the community; it acts rather in a negative way on the family, and consists in setting the individual outside the family, in subduing 444 Phenomenology of Mind his merely natural existence and his mere particularity and so drawing him on towards virtue, towards living in and for the whole. The positive purpose peculiar to the family is the individual as such. Now in order that this relationship may be ethical, neither the individual who does an act nor he to whom the act refers, must show any trace of contingency such as obtains in rendering some particular help or service. The content of the ethical act must be substantial in character, or must be entire and universal; hence it can only stand in relation to the entire individual, to the individual qua universal. And this, again, must not be taken as if it were merely in idea that an act of service furthered his entire happiness, whereas the service, taken as an immediate or concrete act, only does something particular in regard to him. Nor must we think that the service really takes him as its object, and deals with him as a whole, in a series of efforts, as if it were a process of education, and produces him as a kind of work, where apart from the purpose, which operates in a negative way on the family, the real act has merely a limited content. Finally, just as little should we take it that the service rendered is a help in time of need, by which in truth the entire individual is saved; for it is itself an entirely casual act which can as well be as not be, the occasion of which is an ordinary actuality. The act, then, which embraces the entire existence of the blood rela- tion, does not concern the citizen, for he does not belong to the family, nor does it deal with one who is going to be a citizen and so will cease to have the significance of a mere particular individual: it has as its object and content this specific individual belonging to the family, The Ethical World 445 takes him as a universal being, divested of his sensuous, or particular reality. The act no longer concerns the living but the dead, one who has passed through the long sequence of his broken and diversified existence and gathered up his being into its one completed embodiment, who has lifted himself out of the unrest of a life of chance and change into the peace of simple universality. Because it is only as citizen that he is real and substantial, the individual, when not a citizen, and belonging to the family, is merely unreal insub- stantial shadow.
This condition of universality, which the individual as such reaches, is mere being, death; it is the immediate issue of a natural process, and is not the action of a conscious mind. The duty of the member of a family is on that account to attach this aspect too, in order that this last phase of being also, (this universal being), may not belong to nature alone, and remain something irrational, but may be something actually done, and the right of consciousness be asserted in it. Or rather the significance of the act is that, because in truth the peace and universality of a self-conscious being does not belong to nature, the apparent claim which nature has made to act in this way, may be given up and the truth reinstated.
What nature did in the individual's case, concerns the aspect in which his process of becoming universal is manifested as the movement of an existent. It takes effect no doubt within the ethical community, and has this in view as its purpose: death is the fulfil- ment and final task which the individual as such under- takes on its behalf. But so far as he is essentially a particular individual, it is an accident that his death was connected directly with his labour for the universal 446 Phenomenology of Mind whole, and was the outcome of his toil: partly because if it was so, it is the natural course of the negativity of the individual qua existent, in which consciousness does not return into itself and become self-conscious; or, again, because, since the process of the existent con- sists in becoming cancelled and transcended and attaining the stage of independent self-existence, death is the aspect of diremption, where the self-existence, which is obtained, is something other than that being which entered on the process.
Because the ethical order is spirit in its immediate truth, those aspects into which its conscious life breaks up, fall also into this form of immediacy; and the individual's particularity passes over into this abstract negativity, which, being in itself without consolation or reconcilement, must receive them essentially through a concrete and external act.
Blood-relationship therefore supplements the abstract natural process by adding to it the process of conscious- ness, by interrupting the work of nature, and rescuing the blood-relation from destruction; or better, because destruction, the passing into mere being, is necessary, it takes upon itself the act of destruction.
Through this it comes about that the universal being, the sphere of death, is also something which has returned into itself, something self-existent; the powerless bare particular unity is raised to universal individuality. The dead individual, by his having detached and liberated his being from his action or his negative unity, is an empty particular, merely existing passively for some other, at the mercy of every lower irrational organic agency, and the [chemical, physical] forces of abstract material elements, both of which are now The Ethical World 447 stronger than himself, the former on account of the life which they have, the latter on account of their negative nature.* The family keeps away from the dead this dishonouring of him by the desires of unconscious organic agencies and by abstract elements, puts its own action in place of theirs, and weds the relative to the bosom of the earth, the elemental individu- ality that passes not away. Thereby the family makes the dead a member of a community f which prevails over and holds under control the powers of the particular material elements and the lower living creatures, which sought to have their way with the dead and destroy him. This last duty thus accomplishes the complete divine law, or constitutes the positive ethical act towards the given individual. Every other relation towards him which does not remain at the level of love, but is ethical, belongs to human law, and has the nega- tive significance of lifting the individual above the con- finement within the natural community to which he belongs as a concrete individual. But, now, though human right has for its content and power the actual ethical substance consciously aware of itself, the entire nation, while divine right and law derive theirs from the particular individual who is beyond the actual, yet he is still not without power. His power lies in the abstract pure universal, the shadowy individual, which seizes upon the individuality that cuts itself loose from the element and constitutes the self-conscious reality of the nation, and draws it back into the pure abstraction which is the essential nature of the shadowy individual, while at the same time the latter is its ultimate ground * The description here refers to the process of bodily corruption, t i.e. the earth?
448 Phenomenology of Mind as well. How this power is made explicit in the nation itself will come out more fully as we proceed.
Now in the one law as in the other there are differences and stages. For since these laws involve the element of consciousness in both cases, distinction is developed within themselves: and this is just what constitutes the peculiar process of their life. The consideration of these differences brings out the way they operate, and the kind of self-consciousness at work in both the uni- versal essential principles (Weseri) of the ethical world, as also their connection and transition into one an- other.
The community, the higher law whose validity is open to the light of day, makes its concrete activity felt in government; for in government it is an individual whole. Government is concrete actual spirit reflected into itself, the self pure and simple of the entire ethical substance. This simple force allows, indeed, the community to unfold and expand into its component members, and to give each part subsistence and self-existence of its own (Fursichseyn). Spirit finds in this way its realisation or its objective existence, and the family is the medium in which this realisation takes effect. But spirit is at the same time the force of the whole, combining these parts again within the unity which negates them, giving them the feeling of their want of independence, and keep- ing them aware that their life only lies in the whole. The community may thus, on the one hand, organise itself into the systems of property and of personal independence, of personal right and right in things; and, on the other hand, articulate the various ways of working for what in the first instance are particular The Ethical World 449 ends — those of gain and enjoyment — into their own special guilds and associations, and may thus make them independent. The spirit of universal assem- blage and association is the single and simple prin- ciple, and the negative essential factor at work in the segregation and isolation of these systems. In order not to let them get rooted and settled in this isolation and thus break up the whole into fragments and let the common spirit evaporate, government has from time to time to shake them to the very centre by War. By this means it confounds the order that has been established and arranged, and violates that right to independence, while the individuals, (who, being ab- sorbed therein, get adrift from the whole, striving after inviolable self-existence (Fursichseyn) and personal security), are made, by the task thus imposed on them by government, to feel the power of their lord and master, death. By thus breaking up the form of fixed stability, spirit guards the ethical order from sinking into merely natural existence, preserves the self of which it is conscious, and raises that self to the level of freedom and its own powers. The negative essential being shows itself to be the might proper of the community and the force it has for selfmaintenance. The community therefore finds the true principle and corroboration of its power in the inner nature of divine law, and in the kingdom of the nether world.
The divine law which holds sway in the family has also on its side distinctions within itself, the relations among which make up the living process of its realisation. Amongst the three relationships, however, of husband and wife, parents and children, brothers and sisters, the 450 Phenomenology of Mind relationship of husband and wife is to begin with the primary and immediate form in which one conscious- ness recognises itself in another, and in which each finds reciprocal recognition. Being natural self-know- ledge, knowledge of self on the basis of nature, and not on that of ethical life, it merely represents and typifies in a figure the life of spirit, and is not spirit itself actually realised. This figurative representation, however, gets its realisation in an other than it is. This relationship, therefore, finds itself realised not in itself as such, but in the child — an other, in whose coming into being that relationship consists, and with which it passes away. And this change from one generation onwards to another is permanent in and as the life of a nation.
The reverent devotion (Pietat) of husband and wife towards one another is thus mixed up with a natural relation and with feeling, and their relationship is not inherently self-complete; similarly, too, the second rela- tionship, the reverent devotion of parents and children to one another. The devotion of parents towards their children is affected and disturbed just by its being consciously realised in what is external to themselves (viz. the children), and by seeing them become some- thing on their own account without this returning to the parents: independent existence on the part of the children remains a foreign reality, a reality all their own. The devotion of children, again, towards their parents is conversely affected by their coming into being from, or having their essential nature in, what is external to themselves (viz. the parents) and passes away; and by their attaining independent existence and a self-consciousness of their own solely through separation The Ethical World 451 from the source whence they came — a separation in which the spring gets exhausted.
Both these relationships are constituted by and hold within the transience and the dissimilarity of the two sides, which are assigned to them.
An unmixed intransitive form of relationship, how- ever, holds between brother and sister. They are the same blood, which, however, in them has entered into a condition of stable equilibrium. They therefore stand in no such natural relation as husband and wife, they do not desire one another; nor have they given to one another, nor received from one another, this independence of individual being; they are free individualities with respect to each other. The feminine element, therefore, in the form of the sister, premonises and foreshadows most completely the nature of ethical life (sittliches Weseri). She does not become conscious of it, and does not actualise it, because the law of the family is her inherent implicit inward nature, which does not lie open to the daylight of consciousness, but remains inner feeling and the divine element exempt from actuality. The feminine life is attached to these household divinities (Penates), and sees in them both her universal substance, and her particular individuality, yet so views them that this relation of her particular being to them is at the same time not the natural one of pleasure.
As a daughter, the woman must now see her parents pass away with natural emotion and yet with ethical resignation, for it is only at the cost of this con- dition that she can come to that individual existence of which she is capable. She thus cannot see her independent existence positively attained in her relation 452 Phenomenology of Mind to her parents. The relationships of mother and wife, however, are individualised partly in the form of some- thing natural, which brings pleasure; partly in the form of something negative which finds simply its own evanescence in those relationships; partly again the individualisation is just on that account something contingent, which can be replaced by an other par- ticular individuality. In a household of the ethical kind, a woman's relationships are not based on a reference to this particular husband, this particular child, but to a husband, to children in general, — not to feeling, but to the universal. The distinction between her ethical life (Sittlichkeit), (while it determines her particu- lar existence and brings her pleasure), and that of her husband consists just in this, that it has always a directly universal significance for her, and is quite alien to the impulsive condition of mere particular desire. On the other hand, in the husband these two aspects get separated; and since he possesses, as a citizen, the self-conscious power belonging to the universal life, the life of the social whole, he acquires thereby the rights of desire, and keeps himself at the same time in detachment from it. So far, then, as particularity is implicated in this relationship in the case of the wife, her ethical life is not purely ethical; so far, however, as it is ethical, the particularity is a matter of indifference, and the wife is without the moment of knowing herself as this particular self in and through an other.
The brother, however, is in the eyes of the sister a being whose nature is unperturbed by desire and is ethically like her own; her recognition in him is pure and unmixed with any sexual relation. The indifference The Ethical World 453 characteristic of particular existence, and the ethical contingency thence arising, are, therefore, not present in this relationship; instead, the moment of individual selfhood, recognising and being recognised, can here assert its right, because it is bound up with the balance and equilibrium resulting from their being of the same blood, and from their being related in a way that involves no mutual desire. The loss of a brother is thus irreparable to the sister, and her duty towards him is the highest.* This relationship at the same time is the limit, at which the circumscribed life of the family is broken up, and passes beyond itself. The brother is the member of the family in whom its spirit becomes individualised, and enabled thereby to turn towards another sphere, towards what is other than and external to itself, and pass over into consciousness of universality. The brother leaves this immediate, rudimentary, and, there- fore, strictly speaking, negative ethical life of the family, in order to acquire and produce the concrete ethical order which is conscious of itself.
He passes from the divine law, within whose realm he lived, over to the human law. The sister, however, becomes, or the wife remains, director of the home and the preserver of the divine law. In this way both the sexes overcome their merely natural being, and become ethically significant, as diverse forms dividing between them the different aspects which the ethical substance possesses. Both these universal factors of tihe ethical world have their specific individuality in naturally distinct self-consciousnesses, for the reason that the spirit at work in the ethical order is the im- 454 Phenomenology of Mind mediate unity of the substance [of ethical life] with, self-consciousness — an immediacy which thus appears as the existence of a natural difference, at once as regards its aspect of reality and of difference. It is that aspect which, in the notion of spiritual reality, came to light as " original determinate nature," when we were dealing with the stage of " Individuality which is real to itself." This moment loses the in- determinateness which it still has there, and the contin- gent diversity of " constitution " and " capacities." It is now the specific opposition of the two sexes, whose natural character acquires at the same time the signifi- cance of their respective ethical determinations.
The distinction of the sexes and of their ethical content remains all the same within the unity of the ethical substance, and its operation is just the constant process of that substance. The husband is sent forth by the spirit of the family into the life of the community, and finds there his self-conscious reality. Just as the family thereby finds in the community its universal substance and subsistence, conversely the community finds in the family the formal element of its own realisa- tion, and in the divine law its power and confirmation. Neither of the two is alone self-complete. Human law as a living and active principle proceeds from the divine, the law holding on earth from that of the nether world, the conscious from the unconscious, mediation from immediacy; and returns too whence it came. The power of the nether world, on the other hand, finds its realisation upon earth; it comes through consciousness to have existence and efficacy.
The universal elements of the ethical life are thus the (ethical) substance qua universal, and that sub- The Ethical World 455