Here the third part of ethical life begins: the state.

What is the state?

The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea. It is ethical spirit that knows itself. It is a will that thinks itself and knows itself. And what it knows, it carries out.

Where does the state live?

Directly, it lives in the customs of a people. Indirectly, it lives in the consciousness of individuals, in their knowledge and action.

And the individuals?

They find their true freedom in the state. Through their attitude, they recognize their own essence in the state. It is their purpose. And it is what they bring forth through their action.

An image from antiquity:

The household gods are the lower gods of the family. Athena, however, is the goddess of the city of Athens. In her, the spirit of the people knows and wills itself. This is how piety in the family relates to the virtue of the citizen. The one lives in feeling. The other wills the universal purpose that it has thought.

Summary: The state is ethical spirit that knows and wills itself. It lives in the customs and in the consciousness of the citizens. In it, they find their true freedom.

§ 535. The state is the self-conscious ethical substance, – the union of the principle of the family and of civil society; the same unity which in the family exists as the feeling of love is its essence, which, however, at the same time, through the second principle — that of a knowing and self-actuating willing — receives the form of known universality, which, together with the determinations that develop within it in knowledge, the knowing subjectivity has as its content and absolute end, that is, wills this rational content in its own right.

§ 535. The state is the self-conscious ethical substance – the union of the principle of the family and of civil society; it is the ethical, in that the same unity which in the family exists in the form of feeling, as love, is its essence, but at the same time, through the second principle — that of a will which knows and is active out of itself — receives the form of known universality, just as this knowing subjectivity receives that unity, and the determinations that develop within it in knowledge, as its content and absolute end, that is, wills this rational content in its own right.