|166| First Section. The Family
The family, as the immediate substantiality of spirit, has, as its determination, spirit’s own feeling of its unity, love, so that the disposition [involved] is to have the self-consciousness of one’s individuality within this unity, as of an essentiality that is in and for itself, in such a way as to be within it not as a person for oneself, but as a member.
Form of feeling – in general
Disposition – is inwardness.
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline (1827), § 518:
§ 518. Ethical spirit in its immediacy contains the natural moment of the relationship between the sexes, but raised into a spiritual determination; – the unity of love and the disposition of trust; – spirit is, as family, feeling spirit.
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline (1830), § 518:
§ 518. Ethical spirit, as in its immediacy, contains the natural moment that the individual has its substantial existence in its natural universality, the genus – the relationship between the sexes, but raised into a spiritual determination; – the unity of love and the disposition of trust; – spirit is, as family, feeling spirit.
Love means, in general, the consciousness of my unity with another, such that I am not isolated for myself, but rather gain my self-consciousness only as the surrender of my being-for-self, and through knowing-myself, as the unity of myself with the other and of the other with me. But love is a feeling, that is, ethical life in the form of the natural; in the state it is this no longer: there one is conscious of unity as law, there the content must be rational, and I must know it. The first moment in love is that I do not want to be an independent person for myself, and that, were I this, I would feel myself deficient and incomplete. The second moment is that I gain myself in another person, that I count in her what she in turn attains in me. Love is therefore the most monstrous contradiction, one that the understanding cannot resolve, since there is nothing harder than this point-like character of self-consciousness, which is negated, and which I am nevertheless supposed to have as affirmative. Love is at once the producing and the resolving of the contradiction: as the resolution it is ethical unity.
Cross-reference:
From the reading group’s excursuses (in German), the following belong here:
The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate: love, which reconciles with fate
§ 158: The family rests on love
Here the first section of ethical life begins: the family. What holds a family together? Love.
What is love?
Love means: I know myself as one with another person. I do not want to be alone for myself. Alone, I feel incomplete. And I find myself again in the other. The other counts in me, and I count in the other.
A contradiction:
This is really a great contradiction. Nothing is harder than one’s own self. And yet in love I give it up. And precisely in this way I gain it. Love produces this contradiction and resolves it at the same time.
What does this mean for the family?
In the family, you are not a person for yourself. You are a member. You feel yourself to be part of a whole. Here love is a feeling. In this, the family differs from the state. In the state, people do not feel the unity. They know it, as law.
Summary: The family rests on love. In it, you are a member, not a person for yourself. Here people feel the unity. They do not yet know it as law.
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