Robbert Veen's Hegel Podcast

When Hegel speaks about the family, he has a very specific form of family life in mind. We call that the petty bourgeois family. In our time we can no longer consider the family essential as an economic entity, nor the larger community of blood relatives. The organization of economic life has limited the various functions that the family can fulfill.

This has meant, for example, that in the family the personal relationship of a sexual and affective nature has become the most important. With in addition a permanent function in the education of children.

However, this does not mean that we can ignore Hegel's views as historically irrelevant. After all, Hekel tries to express in the form of the concept what is essential for the realization of freedom. His question is: what is necessary for the moral construction of common life. The family thus has a necessary function in the realization of such a community. So we must read the texts about the family from our own perspective that hates, that of the realization of freedom.

According to Hegel, man is more than just a legal person or a moral subject. Man is involved in social relationships in a substantial way. The spirit of a community is the condition of morality, and without morality law cannot stand. The social community is able to give a concrete determination to the good, that is to say the unity of law and welfare. The family is the first and immediate form in which the unity of right and welfare is realized. In the family, man is no longer an abstraction. Only within the community do people really exist. The primary situation of communal life is the family.

Love is the element that guarantees the unity of the general and the particular. In the family I do not exist as a separate individual, but I am part of a living community. That community is held together by trust and love. And such unity is not primarily understood, but felt. Family members faithfully care for each other and are emotionally connected. In the family it is not about laws and not about a rational structure of living together. Hence, dislike says that this is about the "individual in his natural generality."

Natural sexual differentiation and forms of spontaneous affectivity is not just a natural given. It is about the natural generality, but it exists as a spiritual reality. The physical duality of the sexes is being transformed into a spiritual unity. Love is reason in% of the feeling. It is unity in the multiplicity. If we take sexuality as purely physical, it remains characterized by a mutual outward goat.

The mind is unable to think of this union in marriage and the multiplicity in the physical distinct union in unity with each other. However, human reason is capable of this.

Love is a paradox according to Hegel. I give up my own independence and now exist in unity with others. That loss is experienced by me as the answer to a desire. It is satisfying that as an individual I can nevertheless give up my independence in order to derive the value and meaning of my existence from my involvement with others.

Discussion of the two paragraphs that mark the transition between Morality and Social Ethics (Sittlichkeit). 

508 But though the good is the universal of will - a universal determined in itself - and thus including in it particularity - still so far as this particularity is in the first instance still abstract, there is no principle at hand to determine it. Such determination therefore starts up also outside that universal; and as heteronomy or determinance of a will which is free and has rights of its own, there awakes here the deepest contradiction. (a) In consequence of the indeterminate determinism of the good, there are always several sorts of good and many kinds of duties, the variety of which is a dialectic of one against another and brings them into collision. At the same time because good is one, they ought to stand in harmony; and yet each of them, though it is particular duty, is as good and as duty absolute. It falls upon the agent to be the dialectic which, superseding this absolute claim of each, concludes such a combination of them as excludes the rest.

507 The truth of these particularities and the concrete unity of their formalism is the content of the universal, essential and actual, will - the law and underlying essence of every phase of volition, the essential and actual good. It is thus the absolute final aim of the world, and duty for the agent who ought to have insight into the good, make it his intention and bring it about by his activity.

A fascinating topic: what are the ordinary presuppositions of our moral life? And what are the limitations or illusions of those presuppositions? Hegel's analysis shows clearly that we find it self evident that we are only responsible for our actions, in so far as our intentions go. There are however unforeseen consequences of our actions. So how do we deal with that? 

# 502  A distinction has thus emerged between the law (right) and  the subjective will. The 'reality' of right, 

which the personal will in  the first instance gives itself in immediate wise, is seen to be due to  the 

instrumentality of the subjective will − whose influence as on one  hand it gives existence to the essential 

right, so may on the other cut  itself off from and oppose itself to it. Conversely, the claim of the  subjective 

will to be in this abstraction a power over the law of right  is null and empty of itself: it gets truth and reality 

essentially only  so far as that will in itself realises the reasonable will. As such it  is morality(2) proper.  

# 501  The instrumentality by which authority is given to intrinsic  right is () that a particular will, that of the 

judge, being  conformable to the right, has an interest to turn against the crime  (which in the first instance, in 

revenge, is a matter of chance), and  () that an executive power (also in the first instance casual) negates  the 

negation of right that was created by the criminal. This negation  of right has its existence in the will of the 

criminal; and  consequently revenge or punishment directs itself against the person or  property of the criminal 

and exercises coercion upon him. It is in this  legal sphere that coercion in general has possible scope − 

compulsion  against the thing, in seizing and maintaining it against another's  seizure: for in this sphere the will 

has its existence immediately in  externals as such, or in corporeity, and can be seized only in this  quarter. But 

more than possible compulsion is not, so long as I can  withdraw myself as free from every mode of existence, 

even from the  range of all existence, i.e. from life. It is legal only as abolishing  a first and original 

compulsion.  

¤ 500  As a violation of right, such an action is essentially and  actually null. In it the agent, as a volitional and 

intelligent being,  sets up a law − a law, however, which is formal and recognized by him  only − a universal 

which has validity for him, and under which he has at  the same time subsumed himself by his action. To 

display the nullity of  such an act, to carry out simultaneously this formal law and the  intrinsic right, in the 

first instance by means of a subjective  individual will, is the work of Revenge. But revenge, starting from the 

interest of an immediate particular personality, is at the same time  only a new outrage; and so on without end. 

This progression, like the  last, abolishes itself in a third judgement, which is disinterested −  punishment.  

Analysis of three paragraphs in section c. Right vs. Wrong, in Hegel's Encyclopedia.

¤ 497  Now so long as (compared against this show) the one  intrinsically right, still presumed identical with the several titles,  is affirmed, willed, and recognized, the only diversity lies in this,  that the special thing is subsumed under the one law or right by the  particular will of these several persons. This is naive, non−malicious  wrong. Such wrong in the several claimants is a simple negative  judgement, expressing the civil suit. To settle it there is required a  third judgement, which, as the judgement of the intrinsically right, is disinterested, and a power of giving the one right existence as against  that semblance. 

¤ 498  But (2) if the semblance of right as such is willed against  the right intrinsically by the particular will, which thus becomes  wicked, then the external recognition of right is separated from the  right's true value; and while the former only is respected, the latter  is violated. This gives the wrong of fraud − the infinite judgement as  identical (¤173) − where the nominal relation is retained, but the  sterling value is let slip. 

¤ 499  (3) Finally, the particular will sets itself in opposition  to the intrinsic right by negating that right itself as well as its  recognition or semblance. (Here there is a negatively infinite  judgement (¤ 173) in which there is denied the class as a whole, and  not merely the particular mode − in this case the apparent  recognition.) Thus the will is violently wicked, and commits a crime

  495 The contract, as an agreement which has a voluntary origin and deals with a casual commodity,
involves at the same time the giving to this 'accidental' will a positive fixity. This will may just as well not be
conformable to law (right), and, in that case, produces a wrong: by which, however, the absolute law (right) is
not superseded, but only a relationship originated of right to wrong.

(c) RIGHT versus WRONG

496 Law (right) considered as the realization of liberty in externals, breaks up into a multiplicity of
relations to this external sphere and to other persons (¤¤ 491, 493 seqq.). In this way there are (1) several
titles or grounds at law, of which (seeing that property both on the personal and the real side is exclusively
individual) only one is the right, but which, because they face each other, each and all are invested with a
show of right, against which the former is defined as the intrinsically right.