Category: Paragraph

Third Part: Ethical Life ETHICAL LIFE is the Idea of freedom in that on the one hand it isthe good become alive — the good endowed in self-consciousnesswith knowing and willing and actualised by self-conscious action —while on the other hand self-consciousness has in the ethical realm itsabsolute foundation and the end which actuates its…

Since this unity of the concept of the will and its existence, which is the particular will, is knowing, the consciousness of the distinction of these moments of the Idea is present, but in such a way that now each is, for itself, the totality of the Idea and has it for its ground and…

Third Part. Ethical Life α) The objective ethical, which takes the place of the abstract good, is the substance made concrete through subjectivity as infinite form. It therefore posits distinctions within itself, which are thereby determined through the concept and through which the ethical has a firm content, one that is necessary for itself and…

That the ethical is the system of these determinations of the Idea constitutes its rationality. In this way it is freedom, or the will that is in and for itself, as the objective, a circle of necessity whose moments are the ethical powers that govern the life of individuals, and which have, in these individuals…

β) The substance, in this its actual self-consciousness, knows itself, and is thereby an object of knowing. For the subject, the ethical substance, its laws and powers, have, on the one hand, the relation of an object, in this sense: that they are, in the highest sense of self-subsistence — an absolute authority and power…

On the other hand, however, they are not something alien to the subject; rather, the spirit bears witness to them as to its own essence, in which it has its feeling of self and lives in them as in an element not distinguished from itself — a relation that is immediately still more identical than…

As these substantial determinations, they are, for the individual — who distinguishes itself from them as the subjective and, in itself, undetermined, or as particularly determined — thereby in a relation to them as to its substantial element: duties, binding for its will. The ethical doctrine of duties — that is, insofar as it is…

As a limitation, binding duty can appear only against the undetermined subjectivity or abstract freedom, and against the drives of the natural will, or of the moral will determining its undetermined good out of its own arbitrariness. But the individual has, in duty, rather its liberation — in part from the dependence in which it…

The ethical, insofar as it is reflected in the individual character determined by nature as such, is virtue, which, insofar as it shows nothing but the individual’s simple adequacy to the duties of the relations to which it belongs, is rectitude. What a human being must do, which duties he has to fulfil in order…

But in simple identity with the actuality of individuals, the ethical appears, as their universal manner of acting, as custom — the habituation of it as a second nature, which is put in the place of the first, merely natural will, and is the pervading soul, meaning, and actuality of its existence — the spirit…

The ethical substantiality has in this way attained its right, and this its validity, in that the self-will and the individual’s own conscience — which would be for itself and constitute an opposition to it — have vanished in it, since the ethical character knows the unmoved universal, but one disclosed in its determinations into…

The right of individuals to their subjective determination to freedom has its fulfilment in this: that they belong to ethical actuality; for the certainty of their freedom has its truth in such objectivity, and it is in the ethical that they actually possess their own essence, their inner universality (§ 147). To a father’s question…

The right of individuals to their particularity is likewise contained in ethical substantiality, for particularity is the outwardly appearing manner in which the ethical exists.

In this identity of the universal and the particular will, duty and right thus coincide in one; and, through the ethical, the human being has rights to the extent that he has duties, and duties to the extent that he has rights. In abstract right, I have the right and another has the duty against…

The ethical substance, containing self-consciousness that is for itself, united with its concept, is the actual spirit of a family and of a nation.

The concept of this Idea is only as spirit, as something knowing itself and actual, in that it is the objectification of itself, the movement through the form of its moments. It is therefore:A. the immediate or natural ethical spirit — the family.This substantiality passes over into the loss of its unity, into division, and…

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…

The family completes itself in three aspects:a) in the shape of its immediate concept, as marriage;b) in external existence — the family’s property and estate, and the care for these;c) in the upbringing of children and the dissolution of the family.