Comments on: 174

By: Hegel (Simple)

Hegel (Simple) — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 10:55:47 +0000

§ 174: Rights and upbringing

Children have a right: the family must feed them and bring them up out of its resources.

And the parents?

The parents may ask the children to help. But only so far as this serves the family and the upbringing. Children are not servants. The most unethical relationship of all would be to keep children like slaves.

Why upbringing?

A human being does not have by nature what he ought to be. He must first acquire it. So the child has a right to upbringing.

Discipline and punishment:

The parents have the right to hold the whims of the children in discipline. Punishments do not aim at justice. They should hold back the child, who still lives wholly in its nature. And they should lift the universal into its consciousness.

Discipline also includes breaking the child’s self-will. Kindness alone is not enough. Whoever only offers reasons to a small child leaves everything to its whims. The parents stand for the universal and the essential. That is why children need obedience.

Summary: Children have a right to food and upbringing. Parents may ask for help, but only in the service of upbringing. Discipline and punishment should break self-will and lift the universal into consciousness.

By: Eduard Gans (Additions)

Eduard Gans (Additions) — Wed, 29 May 1833 13:45:17 +0000

What the human being ought to be, he does not have from instinct, but rather he must first acquire it for himself. On this is grounded the right of the child to be educated. It is the same with peoples under paternal governments: here human beings are fed out of storehouses and are not regarded as independent and of age. The services that may be demanded of children can therefore have only the purpose of education and must relate to it: they must not want to be something for their own sake, for the most unethical relation of all is the slave-relation of children. A chief moment of upbringing is discipline, whose sense is to break the child's self-will, so that the merely sensuous and natural may be rooted out. Here one must not think that mere kindness will do; for it is precisely the immediate will that acts according to immediate whims and cravings, not according to reasons and representations. If one lays reasons before children, one leaves it up to them whether they wish to let these count, and thus makes everything a matter of their own pleasure. From the fact that the parents constitute the universal and essential [element], there follows the need for the children's obedience. If the feeling of subordination in children, which produces the longing to grow up, is not nourished, then impertinent forwardness and precocious insolence arise.

By: Hegel (Notes)

Hegel (Notes) — Wed, 05 Feb 1823 08:06:32 +0000

Discipline – through authority and sensuousness – discipline – on the field of sensuous nature, of the natural will – immediate encounter along this path of dependence – parental power, on which this side is dependent – power at the same time permeated by the ethical motive – reason at the same time shines dimly through and touches in it rational independence – the soul of the child unites itself with this – power, appearance of ethical power – in the manner of power over the dependence of the child –
Precisely this authority, this feeling of their subordination – lack of independence – need of spiritual consciousness as against their natural existence – the wish to be grown up, by which children are raised.