Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

Guilt and Destiny 473 earth, but instead has remained above ground in the sphere of reahty, and has now received, as the force of divine law, a self-conscious actual universaHty. They rise up in hostihty, and destroy the community which has dishonoured and destroyed its own power, the sacred claims, the " piety " of the family.

Represented in this way, the movement of human and divine law finds the expression of its necessity in individuals, in whom the universal appears as a " pathic " element, and the activity of the movement as action of individuals, which gives the appearance of contingency to the necessity of the process.

But individuality and its action constitute the principle of individuation in general, a principle which in its pure universality was called inner divine law. As a moment of the visible community it does not merely exhibit that unconscious activity of the nether world, its operation is not simply external in its existence ; it has an equally manifest visible existence and process, actual in the actual nation.

Taken in this form, what was represented as a simple 3/, <^ process of the " pathic '' element as embodied in individuals, assumes another look, and crime and the resulting ruin of the community assume the proper form of their existence. Human law, then, in its universal mode of existence is the community, in its efficient operation in general is the manhood of the community, in its actual efficient operation is government.

It has its being, its process, and its subsistence by consuming and absorbing into itself the separatist action of the household gods {Penates), the individualisation into insular independent families which are under the management of womankind, and by keeping them dissolved in the fluent

474 Phenomenology of Mind continuum of its own nature. The family at the same time, however, is in general its element, the individual consciousness its universal operative basis.

Since the community gets itself subsistence only by breaking in upon family happiness, and dissolving [individual] self-consciousness into the universal, it creates its enemy for itself within its own gates, creates it in what it suppresses, and what is at the same time essential to it — womankind in general.

Womankind — the everlasting irony in the life of the community — changes by intrigue the universal purpose of government into a private end, transforms its universal activity into a work of this or that specific individual, and perverts the universal property of the state into a possession and ornament for the family.

Woman in this way turns to ridicule the grave wisdom of maturity, which, being dead to all particular aims, to private pleasure, personal satisfaction, and actual activity as well, thinks of, and is concerned for, merely what is imiversal ; she makes this wisdom the laughing-stock of raw and wanton youth, an object of derision and scorn, unworthy of their enthusiasm.

She asserts that it is everywhere the force of youth that really counts ; she upholds this as of primary significance ; extols a son as one who is the lord and master of the mother who has borne him ; a brother as one in whom the sister finds man on a level with herself ; a youth as one through whom the daughter, deprived of her dependence (on the family unity), acquires the satisfaction and the dignity of wifehood.

The community, however, can preserve itself only by suppressing this spirit of individualism ; and because -*^. . the latter is an essential element, the community like-

Guilt and Destiny 475 wise creates it as well, and creates it, too, by taking up the attitude of seeking to suppress it as a hostile principle.

Nevertheless, since, by cutting itself off from the universal purpose, this hostile element is merely evil, and in itself of no account, it would be quite ineffective if the community did not recognise the force of youth, (manhood, which, while immature, still remains in the condition of particularity), as the force of the whole.

For the community, the whole, is a nation, it is itself individuality, and really only is something for itself by other individualities being for it, by its excluding these from itself and knowing itself independent of them. The negative side of the community, suppressing the isolation of individuals within its own bounds, but originating activity directed beyond those bounds, finds the weapons of its warfare in individuals.

War is the spirit and form in which the essential moment of ethical substance, the absolute freedom of ethical self-consciousness from all and every kind of existence, is manifestly confirmed and reahsed.

While, on the one hand, war makes the particular spheres of property and. personal independence, as well as the personality of the individual himself, feel the force of negation and destruction, on the other hand this engine of negation and destruction stands out as that which preserves the whole in security.

The individual who provides pleasure to woman, the brave youth, the suppressed principle of ruin and destruction, comes now into prominence, and is the factor of primary significance and worth. It is now physical strength and what seems like the chance of fortune, that decide as to the existence of ethical Ufe and spiritual necessity. Because the existence of the ethical Hfe thus rests on