Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

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 consists 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 consciousness, 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 individuahty.

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 hfe 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 individuahty that passes not away.

Thereby the family makes the dead a member of a community t which prevails over and holds under control the powers of the particular material elements and the lower hving creatures, which sought to have their way with the dead and destroy him. This last duty thus accomphshes 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 negative significance of hfting the individual above the confinement 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 <^ft m.*Kt«uu^ seizes upon the individuahty that cuts itself loose from the element and constitutes the self-conscious reahty 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 'i,Tit 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 universal essential principles {Wesen) of the ethical world, as also their connection and transition into one another. The community, the higher law whose validity is open to the Hght 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 {Fiirsichseyn). 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 feehng of their want of independence, and keeping them aware that their life only Hes 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