Hegel's Philosophy of MindHegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy
Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy
§ 522. (3) The children, thus invested with independence, leave the
concrete life and action of the family to which they primarily belong,
acquire an existence of their own, destined however to found anew such an
actual family. Marriage is of course broken up by the _natural_ element
contained in it, the death of husband and wife: but even their union of
hearts, as it is a mere “substantiality” of feeling, contains the germ of
liability to chance and decay. In virtue of such fortuitousness, the
members of the family take up to each other the status of persons; and it
is thus that the family finds introduced into it for the first time the
element, originally foreign to it, of _legal_ regulation.
BB. Civil Society(162).
§ 523. As the substance, being an intelligent substance, particularises
itself abstractly into many persons (the family is only a single person),
into families or individuals, who exist independent and free, as private
persons, it loses its ethical character: for these persons as such have in
their consciousness and as their aim not the absolute unity, but their own
petty selves and particular interests. Thus arises the system of
_atomistic_: by which the substance is reduced to a general system of
adjustments to connect self-subsisting extremes and their particular
interests. The developed totality of this connective system is the state
as civil society, or _state external_.
a. The System of Wants(163).
§ 524. (α) The particularity of the persons includes in the first instance
their wants. The possibility of satisfying these wants is here laid on the
social fabric, the general stock from which all derive their satisfaction.
In the condition of things in which this method of satisfaction by
indirect adjustment is realised, immediate seizure (§ 488) of external
objects as means thereto exists barely or not at all: the objects are
already property. To acquire them is only possible by the intervention, on
one hand, of the possessors’ will, which as particular has in view the
satisfaction of their variously defined interests; while on the other hand
it is conditioned by the ever continued production of fresh means of
exchange by the exchangers’ _own labour_. This instrument, by which the
labour of all facilitates satisfaction of wants, constitutes the general
stock.
§ 525. (β) The glimmer of universal principle in this particularity of
wants is found in the way intellect creates differences in them, and thus
causes an indefinite multiplication both of wants and of means for their
different phases. Both are thus rendered more and more abstract. This
“morcellement” of their content by abstraction gives rise to the _division
of labour_. The habit of this abstraction in enjoyment, information,
feeling and demeanour, constitutes training in this sphere, or nominal
culture in general.
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