Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

452 Phenomenology of Mind to her parents. The relationships of mother and wife, however, are individuahsed partly in the form of something natm:al, which brings pleasm:e ; 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 particular individuahty.

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 f eehng, but to the universal.

The distinction between her ethical life {Sittlichkeit), (while it determines her particular existence and brings her pleasure), and that of her husband consists just in this, that it has always a directly imiversal 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 equihbrium 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 individuahsed, and enabled thereby to turn towards another sphere, towards what is other than and external to itself, and pass over into consciousness of universahty. The brother leaves this immediate, rudimentary, and, therefore, 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 Hved, 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 --^ the ethical world have their specific individuahty in naturally distinct self-consciousnesses, for the reason that the spirit at work in the ethical order is the im- * Cp. Antigone, 1. 910.

454 Phenomenology of Mind mediate unity of the substance [of ethical Hfe] with self-consciousness — an immediacy which thus appears as the existence of a natural difference, at once as regards its aspect of reahty and of difference. It is that aspect which, in the notion of spiritual reahty, came to light as " original determinate nature," when we were dealing with the stage of " Individuahty which is real to itself.

This moment loses the indeterminateness which it still has there, and the contingent diversity of " constitution " and " capacities. It is now the specific opposition of the two sexes, whose natural character acquires at the same time the significance 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 reaHsation, and in the divine law its power and confirmation. Neither of the two is alone self-complete.

Human law as a Hving 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 reahsation upon earth ; it comes through consciousness to have existence and efficacy. The universal elements of the ethical hfe are thus the (ethical) substance qua universal, and that sub-