Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

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 estabhshed by nature is essentially just as much a spiritual fact, and is only ethical by being spiritual. Let us see wherein its peculiar ethical character 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 sentiment 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 hfe. 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 relation, 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 Hfted 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 insubstantial 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 natm^e has made to act in this way, may be given up and the truth reinstated. What nature did in the individuaFs 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 fulfilment and final task which the individual as such undertakes 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