Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

The Ethical World 449 ends — those of gain and enjojnuent — into their own special guilds and associations, and may thus make them independent. The spirit of universal assemblage and association is the single and simple principle, 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 estabhshed and arranged, and violates that right to independence, while the individuals, (who, being absorbed therein, get adrift from the whole, striving after inviolable self-existence (Fürsichseyn) 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 lif 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 Hving process of its reahsation. Amongst the three relationships, however, of husband and wife, parents and children, brothers and sisters, the VOL. II. D

450 Phenomenology of Mind relationship of husband and wife is to begin with the primary and immediate form in which one consciousness recognises itself in another, and in which each finds reciprocal recognition. Being natural self-knowledge, knowledge of self on the basis of nature, and not on that of ethical life, it merely represents and typifies in a figure the fife of spirit, and is not spirit itself actually reahsed.

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 {Pietät) 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 relationship, the reverent devotion of parents and children to one another.

The devotion of parents towards their children is afiected and disturbed just by its being consciously realised in what is external to themselves (viz. the children), and by seeing them become something 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 ; 3^ (J 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, however, holds between brother and sister. They are the same blood, which, however, in them has entered into a condition of stable equihbrium.

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 individuahties 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 Wesen).

She does not become conscious of it, and does not actuaUse it, because the law of the family is her inherent implicit inward nature, which does not he open to the dayhght of consciousness, but remains inner feeling and the divine element exempt from actuality.

The feminine hfe is attached to these household divinities {Penates), and sees in them both her universal substance, and her particular individuahty, 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 condition 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