1. Hegel's analysis of the good and conscience reveals
that neither notion is self-sustaining. That each is an abstraction that
collapses in on itself from the lack of further determination. The Good
requires further concrete elaboration where conscience lacks the assurance of
universality and objectivity. The truth established in itself by this analysis
is that these can only be moments dependent on something outside and beyond
them. In what remains of The Elements of
the Philosophy of Right (more than half of the book), Hegel will fill out
that beyond lying outside the abstractions of subjective morality that he calls
Ethical Life.
2. Ethical Life is the Idea of Freedom as a "living form". Remember that for Hegel the Idea is the unity of the concept and a content that is its own self-determination, thus the actual realisation and reality of itself. This means that the merely subjective moral point of view has given way to the understanding of freedom as a way of life, an existing world of institutions and subjective roles within the modern world: the family, civil society and the state. Here the subject is immersed in a form of life that has being in and for itself. This is a real social web of institutions and actions reproduced by subjective knowledge and volition (§142). Even at this level we commence with a particular will, but this is not just a legal persona or just a moral conscience but a living, concrete, individual differentiated by gender and age. Such a particular will is still initially marked by an immediate self-understanding that asserts itself as the totality of the Idea while, at the same time, having this form of life as its foundation and content (§ 143).
3. The objective moment of ethical life is the laws and institutions that stand above mere subjective opinion and preferences although created by infinite subjective form. Of course, whether the presentation is that of the rational concept or Hegel’s own idealised modern institutional world is a question that needs to be resolved. This objective side is a constellation of articulated distinctions determined by the rational concept. Here freedom is constituted by the moments of a "circle of necessity:" these are the ethical powers of the family, civil society and the state that govern the lives of individuals (§ 145). They have being in and for themselves. From this objective aspect, these individuals are mere accidents whose existence is a matter of indifference. From the standpoint of subjectivity, this objectivity is self-sufficient. The authority and power of these institutions are absolute, even more irresistible than nature itself (§ 146). Yet, while the latter exhibits a rationality that is external, fragmented and contingent, for the individual the rationality of the ethical powers is not alien but manifestly his/her own essence. This spiritual affinity exists as a self-awareness of a relationship that is more immediate and closer than faith or trust. Here Hegel seems to be struggling to name a social reality and a relationship that we might today call that between individual and the life-world. We are all socialised into a set of institutions and pre-understandings that frame our inherited view of the world. This life-world remains unquestioned and unthematised until some breakdown compels us to focus on some aspect and examine it more forensically. Compared to this, Hegel argues that even the feelings of faith and trust are more conscious and involve a higher degree of reflexivity. However, despite this seeming identity, the fact these substantive objective determinations imply fixed duties that impinge on us means that we do in fact stand in a relationship to them (§ 147). Hegel makes it plan that what follows will be his theory of duties. However, he wants to distinguish his approach from others, like Kant—who also wrote about ethical duties--by underlining that he is not talking about universal duties or existing ethical codes and principles to which one is supposed to adopt a subjective stance. Rather he is referring to a set of ethical determinations that are "necessary relations" (§ 148 Addition L6, p.I92). "Necessary" here means "necessitated by the Idea of freedom and ...therefore actual in their entirety, within the state" Ibid L17).
4. Hegel wants there to be no misunderstanding about the status of this "circle of necessity" that underwrites freedom. The binding duties that flow from these ethical powers only appear as limitations to an indeterminate subjectivity craving abstract freedom. For the individual, however, these same duties are his/her liberation. This is so in the double sense of liberation from dependence of mere natural drives and from the indeterminacy that follows from remaining within oneself and not committing to specific actions (§ 149 Addition H L3, P 192 Read). Hegel is also quite keen to domesticate virtue. Rather than associate it with almost superhuman heroics of the Greeks, he suggests that virtue assumes shape in the socially determined character of the individual. Even the individual who performs adequately to the duties prescribed by the circumstances is displaying the virtue of rectitude. Hegel points out that those who take a purely moral standpoint are prone to show discontent with such mundane adherence to the universal because they crave the distinctiveness of exceptionality (§150 Addition). While he does not deny the reality of a higher virtue in general that emerges from the collisions of duties, Hegel argues that the most all pervasive form of virtue is custom or habit, which appears as a sort of second nature. This unobtrusive second nature is the substance of the living spirit, that normative and symbolic horizon and atmosphere without which no-body could breathe (§151 Addition H, G P195, L11 Read).
5. This unity of the subjective self will and ethical substantiality brings about the validity of these customs as right. This engenders the subjective realisation that its own dignity and particular ends are based on the actualised rationality of the ethical life. In this latter, subjectivity itself assumes the form of substance and the difference between this subject and the substance is really only a matter of form. Thus right in this context means belonging to ethical actuality. This is Arendt point about the "right to have rights" being the most fundamental right of all. Hegel says, the truth of the citizen’s reason consists in such objectivity. Citizenship is therefore essence and inner universality of the individual. He follows this up in the Addition with a critique of the Rousseau educational strategy in Emile of removing the impressionable youth from all potentially harmful social influences. Hegel argues that such isolation is in fact quite impossible. To remove the individual from the influence of its contemporary spiritual atmosphere is a vain project. He makes this point about the ineradicable interdependence of the subjective and the objective in the most emphatic way in §154. There he maintains that even the right to particularity is a gift of ethical life. In fact, particularity is the mode of outward appearance of a particular modern form of ethical life. This essential interdependence is expressed in the identity of rights and duties. Unlike the slave, who has no duties because his/her freedom has been expunged, the citizen has duties that are only the obverse of rights.
They stem from the reciprocity the citizen owes to others for the enjoyment of his/her own rights §155.
6. Unlike the good of morality that remained abstract, ethical life is an actual substance. Here individual subjectivity and objective laws and institutions form a unity. Hegel makes a methodological point in the Addition to §156 where he argues that starting from the individual and proceeding atomistically as liberal theory favours, leads not to spirit but to an "aggregation". The essential inter-subjectivity of spirit means that it cannot be individual but only the unity of the individual and the universal. The actuality of this ethical substance assumes a variety of shapes. Hegel sees these as the three ethical powers: Family--where this unity is immediate and natural. Civil Society-where the immediate unity gives way to the division of self-sufficient individuals and their unity is suppressed as only the unacknowledged foundation and means to the satisfaction of their needs. And, finally, the State-where this unity itself becomes the focus and the explicit end and actuality of public life. Hegel makes it very clear that the general direction of this unfolding of ethical life is from particularity towards universality. The family contains within itself both moments but these must be developed fully in order for ethical life to realise its full potential both for the individual and the society of which they are both accident and essential moment.
7. Hegel’s analysis of the family reveals in a very striking way the truth of his general philosophical proposition that philosophy is its time expression in thought. Hegel’s account is heavily marked by the patriarchal ideas of his time. However, it is not without interest. The family is the most natural and immediate form of ethical life. Hegel suggests that this unity takes the form of love because, at this point, spiritual unity is expressed as feeling. The feeling of unity means that the appropriate self-consciousness of the individual within the family is that of membership. Individuality is suppressed for the sake of this natural community of interests. We know already that the ethics of love played a vital role in Hegel's early attempts to think through an alternative paradigm to Kantian dualism. Locating it as central to the spirit of the family, Hegel gives it its due while, at the same time, showing its subordination to thought and the concept in his mature thought. Interestingly, Hegel finds an "immense" contradiction at the core of love that the understanding cannot resolve. The self does not wish to be independent as this is regarded as incomplete yet recognised and endorsed in love. This is the idea of a self-consciousness that requires both affirmation and negation. This immanent and apparent "irrationality" can only be resolved at the higher level of reason provided by speculative dialectic. Whether this is such an “immense contradiction” is open to doubt. Hegel here seems to be confused by two connotations of independence where the latter recognised form is not the deficient one he initially describes.
8. This emphasis on feeling and natural membership means that the right that belongs to family is not that of law. Whether this is true is also open to debate. Modern developments in sexual politics and the evolution of family law have made it clear that the family cannot be a law-free zone. For Hegel, the law only appears when the family dissolves and the individual emerges as a self-sufficient person §159. Clearly the social function of the family is precisely that: to serves as the foundation and reservoir of supply for the reproduction· of the self-sufficient person. As important as that self-sufficiency is, Hegel makes it clear that the family not only makes its vital contribution to this outcome. At the same time, it ensures the individual is socialised in a way to fully appreciate their social existence as part of a whole from which they draw not only material but also spiritual sustenance.
9. Hegel's interpretation of the bourgeois family is interesting. Its conceptual elements are marriage, property and assets and the raising of children. The family is the most primitive fusion of nature and spirit. As an immediate and natural ethical relationship its first moment is "natural vitality". Nature asserts itself as natural drives and the procreative process. However, if one of its moments is the totality of life in its reproductive process, marriage is primarily an ethical rather than a natural relationship. Here Hegel fights a dual fronted struggle against both the past and the future. He is keen to elevate marriage beyond nature and even the merely contractual domain of bourgeois law. Thus he directly contests the Kantian interpretation of marriage as a mutual exchange of sexual rights. But, on the other hand, he is reluctant to reduce this foundational social institution to the whim and contingency of fleeting feelings. While he recognises the indispensable subjective moment in marriage dominated by subjective feeling, he also believes that the family cannot be sustained on this alone and must be given some supporting legal status (§ 161 Addition G, p20l). Hegel elaborates on the emphatic aspect of subjective inclination in the following way. Marriage is a union by free consent. Individuals freely give up their natural and individual personalities to "constitution a single person". This is a self-limitation that in fact is their liberation. This remains the case even when the marriage is i arranged by wise parents. It still remains the case that subjective inclination is decisive and this can never be compelled and its absence spells the failure of the marriage. Hegel will say later that the indissolubility of marriage is an obligation but one that is not practical in cases of complete breakdown (§ 176). On the other hand, Hegel shows real disquiet with a marriage based solely in the "frosty" contingency of individual inclination because this seems almost irreconcilable with its institutional status as an objective determination that implies an 'ethical duty to marriage". The ethical aspect of marriage is the consciousness of a union whose end is the sharing of the whole of individual existence in love and trust. Hegel suggests when this consciousness is present as an actuality, it overwhelms the natural dimension of the relationship. What starts out as a contract makes an ethical leap beyond it. The formal aspect of the church ceremony and legal stipulation involving language and signing are components of the process of spiritualisation that surrounds the natural/sensuous moment with an ethical context. In fact, Hegel seems rather too keen to expunge the natural moment in the celebration of the ethical significance and inherent rationality of the bond. In this respect he is only too ready to give the traditional bourgeois, patriarchal division of labour the status of a conceptual determination. Thus (§ 166, P206 Read ). Despite the obvious patriarchal/ideological aspects of this reading of marriage, there is also potential in Hegel's analysis for a more egalitarian interpretation. In §167 he gives a conceptual justification of monogamy. This lies in the exclusive character of marriage. Here the exclusive individuality of the personality is given in a mutual surrender to the other person. As a result of this reciprocal relationship of truth and inwardness, each gains its true consciousness of itself "only in so far as the other is present in this as a person." Clearly Hegel here seems to capture something of the essential normative reciprocity of modern relationships but was still able to reconcile this understanding with a traditional account of the sexual division of labour and roles with their appropriate aptitudes, attitudes and expectations.
10. That the family and the marriage represent a symbolic unity means that it also has a sort of personality. And just as the legal person required property in order to give some external form to its concrete individuality, the same is true for the family. The family only has substantive existence by means of its property and assets §169. However, if anything, it appears the property needs of a family are even more emphatic and universal than that of the single individual. Afterall, although still finite, a family exists over generations. Its identity is therefore more enduring and its needs more permanent. This means that in the case of the family, property serves not a particular but a communal purpose and therefore has a more ethical quality §170. Although Hegel views family property and assets as common property, he is equally adamant that its legal personality is to be represented by its male head to others §172. Why a common purpose has to be represented by the male head of house alone is not made clear explicitly although it is clear that the attributes of free universality already ascribed to the male seem to be an implicit answer. In any case, the tension between the common purpose and universality of the family as institution and the ineradicable particularity of its ascribed head is manifest in the sort of collisions that occur in inheritance disputes. Hegel views this as the inevitable consequence of the immediacy of the ethical disposition in the family. Because this is the institution least disfigured by reflection, ethicality here assumes the form of the individual ( the male Head of the house) who is most subject to the whims of particularity and contingency §171. But Hegel’s reasoning here seems not completely consistent. If the failing of patriarchy seems to be its particularity and its proximity to unreflective nature, he also seems to favour relations of blood over those that may be a product of much self-reflection and conscious choice.
11. We have already noted that the family is the foundational institution of ethical life. Amongst other things, this means that its basic function is social reproduction. Families produce new humans and their function is to turn out appropriately socialised new self-sufficient candidates for civil society. The social function of the family is to bring about its own dissolution in the successful production of potential new citizens. As always Hegel shows his preference and prejudice for the new bourgeois society when he suggests that property distribution should be orientated by the production of the new family rather than being entangled in the old and distant relations of the kinship group. Children are the real existence of the unity of the marriage as being for itself, which, until then is mere inwardness and disposition (love and trust) § 173 Addition H, p.211 Read). As a philosopher with real family experience, his attitude to children is interesting. He maintains a moderate position. While he rejects the excesses of Roman patriarchy that would render the child the perpetual slave of their father, he is also very sceptical of the libertarian educational philosophy of Rousseau that would allow the child to discover the world according to their own nature and inclinations. Hegel tells us that children have a right to be brought up and supported by the family. While this right does not exclude children supplying services and being disciplined, Hegel believes the limits of both must be circumscribed by the desire to produce fully self-¬sufficient but socialised adults §174 (Addition H, p.211-212). Children are free in themselves and do not belong to parents. The positive side of the immediate natural ethicality of the family is the feelings of love, trust and obedience. However, the negative task of the parents is to raise the children out of this natural immediacy to the freedom of personality. However, to treat them as real equals risks the danger of children who are forward and impertinent. This leads to the ethical dissolution of the family with the children acquiring the capacities to renew the cycle and found their own families. This partly only symbolic dissolution reaches its culmination in the death of parents and the inheritance of what was in fact only common property of the family in the first place.
12. The agent of dissolution in the disintegration of the family is the principle of personality. This takes the form of the continuous founding of a multitude of self-sufficient families. With this dissolution we enter the moment of difference with ethical life. In this phase, the division between particularity and universality is most apparent with the latter being present only as a formal appearance and working as an "invisible hand" behind the backs of the particulars. This appears as a loss of ethical life but since this latter also appears, it constitutes the world of appearance of the ethical, ie. civil society.
2. Ethical Life is the Idea of Freedom as a "living form". Remember that for Hegel the Idea is the unity of the concept and a content that is its own self-determination, thus the actual realisation and reality of itself. This means that the merely subjective moral point of view has given way to the understanding of freedom as a way of life, an existing world of institutions and subjective roles within the modern world: the family, civil society and the state. Here the subject is immersed in a form of life that has being in and for itself. This is a real social web of institutions and actions reproduced by subjective knowledge and volition (§142). Even at this level we commence with a particular will, but this is not just a legal persona or just a moral conscience but a living, concrete, individual differentiated by gender and age. Such a particular will is still initially marked by an immediate self-understanding that asserts itself as the totality of the Idea while, at the same time, having this form of life as its foundation and content (§ 143).
3. The objective moment of ethical life is the laws and institutions that stand above mere subjective opinion and preferences although created by infinite subjective form. Of course, whether the presentation is that of the rational concept or Hegel’s own idealised modern institutional world is a question that needs to be resolved. This objective side is a constellation of articulated distinctions determined by the rational concept. Here freedom is constituted by the moments of a "circle of necessity:" these are the ethical powers of the family, civil society and the state that govern the lives of individuals (§ 145). They have being in and for themselves. From this objective aspect, these individuals are mere accidents whose existence is a matter of indifference. From the standpoint of subjectivity, this objectivity is self-sufficient. The authority and power of these institutions are absolute, even more irresistible than nature itself (§ 146). Yet, while the latter exhibits a rationality that is external, fragmented and contingent, for the individual the rationality of the ethical powers is not alien but manifestly his/her own essence. This spiritual affinity exists as a self-awareness of a relationship that is more immediate and closer than faith or trust. Here Hegel seems to be struggling to name a social reality and a relationship that we might today call that between individual and the life-world. We are all socialised into a set of institutions and pre-understandings that frame our inherited view of the world. This life-world remains unquestioned and unthematised until some breakdown compels us to focus on some aspect and examine it more forensically. Compared to this, Hegel argues that even the feelings of faith and trust are more conscious and involve a higher degree of reflexivity. However, despite this seeming identity, the fact these substantive objective determinations imply fixed duties that impinge on us means that we do in fact stand in a relationship to them (§ 147). Hegel makes it plan that what follows will be his theory of duties. However, he wants to distinguish his approach from others, like Kant—who also wrote about ethical duties--by underlining that he is not talking about universal duties or existing ethical codes and principles to which one is supposed to adopt a subjective stance. Rather he is referring to a set of ethical determinations that are "necessary relations" (§ 148 Addition L6, p.I92). "Necessary" here means "necessitated by the Idea of freedom and ...therefore actual in their entirety, within the state" Ibid L17).
4. Hegel wants there to be no misunderstanding about the status of this "circle of necessity" that underwrites freedom. The binding duties that flow from these ethical powers only appear as limitations to an indeterminate subjectivity craving abstract freedom. For the individual, however, these same duties are his/her liberation. This is so in the double sense of liberation from dependence of mere natural drives and from the indeterminacy that follows from remaining within oneself and not committing to specific actions (§ 149 Addition H L3, P 192 Read). Hegel is also quite keen to domesticate virtue. Rather than associate it with almost superhuman heroics of the Greeks, he suggests that virtue assumes shape in the socially determined character of the individual. Even the individual who performs adequately to the duties prescribed by the circumstances is displaying the virtue of rectitude. Hegel points out that those who take a purely moral standpoint are prone to show discontent with such mundane adherence to the universal because they crave the distinctiveness of exceptionality (§150 Addition). While he does not deny the reality of a higher virtue in general that emerges from the collisions of duties, Hegel argues that the most all pervasive form of virtue is custom or habit, which appears as a sort of second nature. This unobtrusive second nature is the substance of the living spirit, that normative and symbolic horizon and atmosphere without which no-body could breathe (§151 Addition H, G P195, L11 Read).
5. This unity of the subjective self will and ethical substantiality brings about the validity of these customs as right. This engenders the subjective realisation that its own dignity and particular ends are based on the actualised rationality of the ethical life. In this latter, subjectivity itself assumes the form of substance and the difference between this subject and the substance is really only a matter of form. Thus right in this context means belonging to ethical actuality. This is Arendt point about the "right to have rights" being the most fundamental right of all. Hegel says, the truth of the citizen’s reason consists in such objectivity. Citizenship is therefore essence and inner universality of the individual. He follows this up in the Addition with a critique of the Rousseau educational strategy in Emile of removing the impressionable youth from all potentially harmful social influences. Hegel argues that such isolation is in fact quite impossible. To remove the individual from the influence of its contemporary spiritual atmosphere is a vain project. He makes this point about the ineradicable interdependence of the subjective and the objective in the most emphatic way in §154. There he maintains that even the right to particularity is a gift of ethical life. In fact, particularity is the mode of outward appearance of a particular modern form of ethical life. This essential interdependence is expressed in the identity of rights and duties. Unlike the slave, who has no duties because his/her freedom has been expunged, the citizen has duties that are only the obverse of rights.
They stem from the reciprocity the citizen owes to others for the enjoyment of his/her own rights §155.
6. Unlike the good of morality that remained abstract, ethical life is an actual substance. Here individual subjectivity and objective laws and institutions form a unity. Hegel makes a methodological point in the Addition to §156 where he argues that starting from the individual and proceeding atomistically as liberal theory favours, leads not to spirit but to an "aggregation". The essential inter-subjectivity of spirit means that it cannot be individual but only the unity of the individual and the universal. The actuality of this ethical substance assumes a variety of shapes. Hegel sees these as the three ethical powers: Family--where this unity is immediate and natural. Civil Society-where the immediate unity gives way to the division of self-sufficient individuals and their unity is suppressed as only the unacknowledged foundation and means to the satisfaction of their needs. And, finally, the State-where this unity itself becomes the focus and the explicit end and actuality of public life. Hegel makes it very clear that the general direction of this unfolding of ethical life is from particularity towards universality. The family contains within itself both moments but these must be developed fully in order for ethical life to realise its full potential both for the individual and the society of which they are both accident and essential moment.
7. Hegel’s analysis of the family reveals in a very striking way the truth of his general philosophical proposition that philosophy is its time expression in thought. Hegel’s account is heavily marked by the patriarchal ideas of his time. However, it is not without interest. The family is the most natural and immediate form of ethical life. Hegel suggests that this unity takes the form of love because, at this point, spiritual unity is expressed as feeling. The feeling of unity means that the appropriate self-consciousness of the individual within the family is that of membership. Individuality is suppressed for the sake of this natural community of interests. We know already that the ethics of love played a vital role in Hegel's early attempts to think through an alternative paradigm to Kantian dualism. Locating it as central to the spirit of the family, Hegel gives it its due while, at the same time, showing its subordination to thought and the concept in his mature thought. Interestingly, Hegel finds an "immense" contradiction at the core of love that the understanding cannot resolve. The self does not wish to be independent as this is regarded as incomplete yet recognised and endorsed in love. This is the idea of a self-consciousness that requires both affirmation and negation. This immanent and apparent "irrationality" can only be resolved at the higher level of reason provided by speculative dialectic. Whether this is such an “immense contradiction” is open to doubt. Hegel here seems to be confused by two connotations of independence where the latter recognised form is not the deficient one he initially describes.
8. This emphasis on feeling and natural membership means that the right that belongs to family is not that of law. Whether this is true is also open to debate. Modern developments in sexual politics and the evolution of family law have made it clear that the family cannot be a law-free zone. For Hegel, the law only appears when the family dissolves and the individual emerges as a self-sufficient person §159. Clearly the social function of the family is precisely that: to serves as the foundation and reservoir of supply for the reproduction· of the self-sufficient person. As important as that self-sufficiency is, Hegel makes it clear that the family not only makes its vital contribution to this outcome. At the same time, it ensures the individual is socialised in a way to fully appreciate their social existence as part of a whole from which they draw not only material but also spiritual sustenance.
9. Hegel's interpretation of the bourgeois family is interesting. Its conceptual elements are marriage, property and assets and the raising of children. The family is the most primitive fusion of nature and spirit. As an immediate and natural ethical relationship its first moment is "natural vitality". Nature asserts itself as natural drives and the procreative process. However, if one of its moments is the totality of life in its reproductive process, marriage is primarily an ethical rather than a natural relationship. Here Hegel fights a dual fronted struggle against both the past and the future. He is keen to elevate marriage beyond nature and even the merely contractual domain of bourgeois law. Thus he directly contests the Kantian interpretation of marriage as a mutual exchange of sexual rights. But, on the other hand, he is reluctant to reduce this foundational social institution to the whim and contingency of fleeting feelings. While he recognises the indispensable subjective moment in marriage dominated by subjective feeling, he also believes that the family cannot be sustained on this alone and must be given some supporting legal status (§ 161 Addition G, p20l). Hegel elaborates on the emphatic aspect of subjective inclination in the following way. Marriage is a union by free consent. Individuals freely give up their natural and individual personalities to "constitution a single person". This is a self-limitation that in fact is their liberation. This remains the case even when the marriage is i arranged by wise parents. It still remains the case that subjective inclination is decisive and this can never be compelled and its absence spells the failure of the marriage. Hegel will say later that the indissolubility of marriage is an obligation but one that is not practical in cases of complete breakdown (§ 176). On the other hand, Hegel shows real disquiet with a marriage based solely in the "frosty" contingency of individual inclination because this seems almost irreconcilable with its institutional status as an objective determination that implies an 'ethical duty to marriage". The ethical aspect of marriage is the consciousness of a union whose end is the sharing of the whole of individual existence in love and trust. Hegel suggests when this consciousness is present as an actuality, it overwhelms the natural dimension of the relationship. What starts out as a contract makes an ethical leap beyond it. The formal aspect of the church ceremony and legal stipulation involving language and signing are components of the process of spiritualisation that surrounds the natural/sensuous moment with an ethical context. In fact, Hegel seems rather too keen to expunge the natural moment in the celebration of the ethical significance and inherent rationality of the bond. In this respect he is only too ready to give the traditional bourgeois, patriarchal division of labour the status of a conceptual determination. Thus (§ 166, P206 Read ). Despite the obvious patriarchal/ideological aspects of this reading of marriage, there is also potential in Hegel's analysis for a more egalitarian interpretation. In §167 he gives a conceptual justification of monogamy. This lies in the exclusive character of marriage. Here the exclusive individuality of the personality is given in a mutual surrender to the other person. As a result of this reciprocal relationship of truth and inwardness, each gains its true consciousness of itself "only in so far as the other is present in this as a person." Clearly Hegel here seems to capture something of the essential normative reciprocity of modern relationships but was still able to reconcile this understanding with a traditional account of the sexual division of labour and roles with their appropriate aptitudes, attitudes and expectations.
10. That the family and the marriage represent a symbolic unity means that it also has a sort of personality. And just as the legal person required property in order to give some external form to its concrete individuality, the same is true for the family. The family only has substantive existence by means of its property and assets §169. However, if anything, it appears the property needs of a family are even more emphatic and universal than that of the single individual. Afterall, although still finite, a family exists over generations. Its identity is therefore more enduring and its needs more permanent. This means that in the case of the family, property serves not a particular but a communal purpose and therefore has a more ethical quality §170. Although Hegel views family property and assets as common property, he is equally adamant that its legal personality is to be represented by its male head to others §172. Why a common purpose has to be represented by the male head of house alone is not made clear explicitly although it is clear that the attributes of free universality already ascribed to the male seem to be an implicit answer. In any case, the tension between the common purpose and universality of the family as institution and the ineradicable particularity of its ascribed head is manifest in the sort of collisions that occur in inheritance disputes. Hegel views this as the inevitable consequence of the immediacy of the ethical disposition in the family. Because this is the institution least disfigured by reflection, ethicality here assumes the form of the individual ( the male Head of the house) who is most subject to the whims of particularity and contingency §171. But Hegel’s reasoning here seems not completely consistent. If the failing of patriarchy seems to be its particularity and its proximity to unreflective nature, he also seems to favour relations of blood over those that may be a product of much self-reflection and conscious choice.
11. We have already noted that the family is the foundational institution of ethical life. Amongst other things, this means that its basic function is social reproduction. Families produce new humans and their function is to turn out appropriately socialised new self-sufficient candidates for civil society. The social function of the family is to bring about its own dissolution in the successful production of potential new citizens. As always Hegel shows his preference and prejudice for the new bourgeois society when he suggests that property distribution should be orientated by the production of the new family rather than being entangled in the old and distant relations of the kinship group. Children are the real existence of the unity of the marriage as being for itself, which, until then is mere inwardness and disposition (love and trust) § 173 Addition H, p.211 Read). As a philosopher with real family experience, his attitude to children is interesting. He maintains a moderate position. While he rejects the excesses of Roman patriarchy that would render the child the perpetual slave of their father, he is also very sceptical of the libertarian educational philosophy of Rousseau that would allow the child to discover the world according to their own nature and inclinations. Hegel tells us that children have a right to be brought up and supported by the family. While this right does not exclude children supplying services and being disciplined, Hegel believes the limits of both must be circumscribed by the desire to produce fully self-¬sufficient but socialised adults §174 (Addition H, p.211-212). Children are free in themselves and do not belong to parents. The positive side of the immediate natural ethicality of the family is the feelings of love, trust and obedience. However, the negative task of the parents is to raise the children out of this natural immediacy to the freedom of personality. However, to treat them as real equals risks the danger of children who are forward and impertinent. This leads to the ethical dissolution of the family with the children acquiring the capacities to renew the cycle and found their own families. This partly only symbolic dissolution reaches its culmination in the death of parents and the inheritance of what was in fact only common property of the family in the first place.
12. The agent of dissolution in the disintegration of the family is the principle of personality. This takes the form of the continuous founding of a multitude of self-sufficient families. With this dissolution we enter the moment of difference with ethical life. In this phase, the division between particularity and universality is most apparent with the latter being present only as a formal appearance and working as an "invisible hand" behind the backs of the particulars. This appears as a loss of ethical life but since this latter also appears, it constitutes the world of appearance of the ethical, ie. civil society.
13. To obtain a contemporary
take on Hegel’s analysis of the family in Elements
of the Philosophy of Right it is useful to turn to Axel Honneth’s Freedom’s Right with its much more
detailed contemporary analysis of the modern adventures of the concept of freedom.
While he is deeply attracted to Hegel’s vision of the realization of modern
social freedom in its various interlocking spheres, he also recognizes that the
original Hegelian picture (1820) is much in need of renovation. The wealth of
detail and richness that informs Honneth’s reconstruction in this respect turns
out to be a vital and usually unsung contribution to the overall story of
modern freedom.
14. For Honneth, the great advantage of the Hegelian method is
that it creates equilibrium between historical and social conditions and the
capacities for rationality. This is achieved by searching within social reality
for the conditions that enable an imminent realization of rational aims. Only
by establishing freedom as an objective medium is it actually possible for
individual subjects to exercise their own autonomy
14. We have seen that he priority Hegel accords to this more
encompassing understanding of freedom is expressed methodologically in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right.
Hegel gives the reader a dynamic sequence of ‘shapes of experience’ that appear
across the interval between his initial one-sided starting point – Abstract
Right – gradually moving to a fully mediated and more concrete conception –
Ethical Life. We have seen that this logical sequence possesses a twofold
aspect. On the one hand, it is constituted by a hierarchically ordered
succession of the spheres of ‘objective freedom’ that in their totality –
family, civil society and the state – form the fundamental normative and
institutional structure of modern society. This constitutes the conditioning context
that makes possible the activity of autonomous and self-reflexive individuals.
On the other hand, we have the sequence of forms of practical subjectivity, of
active attitudes and roles that modern individuals must assume to actually
fulfill the claim that they are willing their own freedom. It is the
contradiction between the required forms of social objectivity and the
corresponding forms of practical subjectivity that provides the key to
derivation. What drives the exposition forward is the non-correspondence between
these two. Honneth adopts this method of a normative reconstruction of the
layered order of modern institutional spheres where each makes its specific
contribution to the most concrete form of the realization of freedom. However,
a vital task is to bridge the historical gap between Hegel and now by taking
into account the intervening evolutionary learning processes both technical and
communicative, in both their victory and defeats.
15. Honneth charts this evolution of the domain of social freedom
within the institutional forms and shapes of experience laid out by Hegel. But
Honneth replaces the old bourgeois family by considering the social and
historical transformation wrought by the intervening two hundred years and extends
his canvass to cover the spectrum of intimate relations from friendship to
love. The key meaning of this intimacy is the norm of being ‘with oneself in
the other’. This means the possibility of a deeper emotional experience in
which individuals see in others the chance and condition of their own
self-realization. It announced at least the possibility of complementary role
obligations between sexual partners that would allow participants to realize
what they regarded as their own best possibilities through reciprocal
confirmation. This possibility, which came to fruition in Hegel’s own time,
was, however, disfigured by hegemonic male authority, oppressive gender roles
and the constraints of social status. With the further loosening of external
pressures and social tasks, the space was created for the extension of such
subjective feelings. In what is one of the most positive parts of Honneth’s
normative reconstruction, he shows how these accelerating changes have not only
redefined gender identities and assigned roles but, in doing so, have also
enriched the prospects for modern individuals to exercise their own autonomy
and maximize their self-realization. Honneth’s normative reconstruction of this
other ‘great transformation’ can be summarized under the slogan of the
democratization of intimacy and the family. For Honneth, both these categories
are eminently historical, and he argues that in pre-modern times friendship and
love were constrained by social hierarchy, economic interests and social
alliances.
16. The further normative possibilities of these intimate
relationships in terms of mutual reciprocity announced themselves at the end of
the 18th century, but it will take another two hundred years for this potential
to be fully unfolded in the social mores of contemporary social life. In the
19th century a patriarchal division of labour and the unequal authority
accorded the male dominated bourgeois family existence. The changes that might have
more fully realized the anticipated equality of romantic love were further
delayed by the world wars in the early 20th century and the subsequent retreat
into traditional authority and conventional gender roles. For Honneth, it was
post-war economic prosperity that saw all this change culminating in the social
and cultural upheaval of the ’60s. From this time, an avalanche of changes all
contribute to elevated prospects of further individualization, the de-coupling
of inter-subjective attachments based on emotion and sexual attraction from the
institutions of marriage and family and finally the de-institutionalization of
the nuclear family. Honneth reinforces the point that during all this time the
normative rules of intimate relations had not fundamentally changed despite the
stresses sometimes placed on them by increasing individual emancipation.
17. Honneth does not
underplay the threats and dilemmas that have confronted the contemporary social
life-world in the intervening neoliberal era. He notes that modern
individualization and privatization may be a threat to the trust required by
the new norms of equality and reciprocity in love and marriage. He also
considers the way in which the neoliberal economy continues to colonize the
life-world with new, more demanding forms of employment and mobility that
create special stresses for the work/life balance and raise the stakes of
commitment. Nevertheless, his account of the changes brought about in the
contemporary social world since the ’60s is overwhelming. These changes signify
not only a further step towards the generalization of the norms of reciprocal
equality in intimate and family relations but also a profound extension of
social freedom in the sense he attributes to Hegel. Honneth is not content with
a purely retrospective evaluation. One of his clearest examples of rapid
cultural changes is the disappearance of perversion from our reckoning of
sexual practices. The new sexual openness, however, does not mean the
disappearance of normative rules but their shift away from surface physical
acts to the level of reciprocal attitudes. However, it follows from this that
the denial of the right of marriage to homosexuals represents a glaring
injustice in the contemporary world. Simply because this current injustice is
so at odds with contemporary norms of reciprocity, Honneth sees the promise of
a sure remedy in the future.
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