1.  The simple substance of mindful spirit divides itself as consciousness.  ²Just as the consciousness of abstract, sensuous being transits into perception, so does the immediate certainty of real, ethical being.  Just as for sensuous perception simple being becomes a thing of many properties, so for ethical perception a case of action [VI.C.c. Conscience §4.1] is an actual reality of many ethical relations.  ³We recall that sensuous perception pulls the futile multiplicity of properties together into the essential opposition of singularity and universality [II. Perception §§19, 20 M].  How much more so then does ethical perception, as purified, substantial consciousness, turn the multiplicity of sensuous moments into the pair of a law of singularity and one of universality.  ⁴Each of these masses of substance, however, remains the whole of spirited mind; while in sensuous perception the things had no other substance than the two defining terms of singularity and universality, here these two only express the surface tension between the two sides.

2.  Singularity has, in the essence we are considering here, the significance of self-consciousness in general, not that of a single, contingent consciousness.  ²Here customary ethical substance is thus actual substance, absolute spirited mind realized in the multiplicity of existing consciousness.  Mindful spirit is that community, which for us was the absolute essence as we entered into the practical articulation of reason as such [V.B. Self-realization of rational self-consciousness §2.3 ff. M].  Here it has emerged clearly in its truth for itself as conscious, ethical essence and as essence for the consciousness we now have as our object.  ³The essence is mindful spirit that is for itself by maintaining itself within the reflected light of other individuals and is in itself, or substance, by maintaining them within it.  ⁴As actual substance, spirited mind is a people, a polity; as actual consciousness, it is a citizen of the polity.  ⁵This consciousness has its essence in simple mindful spirit and the certainty of itself in mindful spirit's actual reality, in the whole people in which it immediately has its truth, not in something that is not actual, but in a mindful spirit that really exists and is in force.

3.  This mindful spirit can be called the human law, because it exists essentially in the form of actual reality conscious of itself.  ²In the form of universality, this spirit is familiar law and established custom; in the form of singularity, it is real self-certainty in the individuals in general; and self-certainty in simple individuality is mindful spirit as the government.  This spirit's truth is the open, fully public authority, an existence that for immediate certainty takes the form of free emergence.

4.  Another power, divine law, now confronts this customary power and its public sphere.  ²For as the motion of self-conscious action customary state power has its antithesis in the simple, integral, and immediate essence of the ethical order.  As actual universality, it is a power operating against individual being for itself; and as actual reality as such, there is something in addition other than itself in its inner essence.

5.  It has already been observed that each of the opposed modes of existence of customary ethical substance contains it whole, including all its moments [§1.4 above].  ²If then the community is that customary ethical substance as actual action conscious of itself, the other side has the form of immediate, given substance.  ³Here we have the inner concept, the universal possibility, of the ethical order as such, which also has the other moment of self-consciousness within it.  ⁴This is the family, a natural, customary ethical community.  Self-consciousness here is that inner concept expressing the ethical order in this element of immediacy or being and an immediate consciousness of itself as essence just as of this self within another.  ⁵Unconscious, as yet inner concept, the family stands against actual self-conscious reality.  Element of the reality of the people, on the other hand, the family confronts the people itself, the polity.  As immediate customary ethical being, the family confronts the ethical order developing, structuring and maintaining itself through the labour for the general well-being.  Finally, as the penates [household gods in Rome], the family confronts universal spirit/mind.

6.  Although the customary ethical being of the family defines itself as immediate being, internally it is that ethical essence not because the family is a natural relation between its members, nor because their relationship is an immediate one between real single individuals.  For customary ethics is inherently universal and this natural relation is also essentially a mindful spirit and is only ethical as a spiritual/mental essence.  ²We now have to consider in what precisely its distinctive customary ethical character consists.

– ³The first thing we can say is that since customary ethics is inherently universal, the ethical relationship between the family members is not a relationship of feeling nor one of love.  ⁴It now appears that this ethical dimension must be located in the relation of the single family member to the whole family as the substance, which would mean that his action and actual reality have only the family as purpose and content.  ⁵But the conscious purpose of the action of this whole, when directed at itself, is itself the single individual.  ⁶When acquisition and maintenance of power and wealth arise from need, that belongs to desire.  In its higher sense, however, it becomes something purely mediate.  ⁷This does not lie in the family itself, but relates to the truly universal, to the community.  It is, in fact, negative against the family and consists in pushing the single individual out of it, to subjugate his naturalness and his singleness and to pull him into virtue, into life in and for the general well-being.  ⁸The positive purpose peculiar to the family is the single individual as such.  ⁹Since this relationship should now be ethical, he cannot – neither as the one who acts, nor as the one to whom the action is directed – enter the fray just by chance, in some sort of act of assistance or service.  ¹⁰The content of the ethical action must be substantial, whole and universal.  This is why it can only relate to the whole single individual, or to him as a universal individual.  ¹¹What is happening here is not a question of merely imagining that a service would promote his whole happiness, while in fact, as a direct and effective action, it only accomplishes one single thing for him.  Nor is it a matter of real action as up-bringing, a whole series of actions focussed on him as a whole and producing him, as it were, as its work, in which, isolated from negative purposive action directed against the family, real action is limited in its possibilities.  Just as little, finally, can it be seen as emergency assistance by which the entire individual would indeed be saved.  This is itself a completely contingent act, the occasion for which is a common reality that could just as easily not obtain at all.  ¹²The action then that encompasses the whole existence of the blood relative has him – not the citizen, for the citizen does not belong to the family, nor he who should become a citizen and cease to count as this single individual – but him as this single individual family member as a universal essence elevated above sensuous, actual reality for its object and content.  This no longer refers to the living, but to the dead member, who, out of the long series of disparate forms of existence pulls itself together in the one completed single structure, out of the tumult of contingent life and up into the peace of simple universality.

– ¹³Only real and substantial as a citizen, when the single individual is not a citizen but a family member, he is just an unreal shadow, bereft of marrow.

7.  This universality at which the single individual as such arrives is pure being, death.  It is an immediate condition that emerges naturally, not the action of a consciousness.  ²The family member thus has a duty to add this factor so that his last state of being too, this universal being, does not belong solely to nature and remain something irrational, for it too should be a finished act and the right of consciousness should be asserted in it.  ³The point of the action is rather that, since in truth the peace and universality of a self-conscious living being do not belong to nature, the appearance that nature claims such a condition for itself should be removed and the truth clearly established.

– ⁴Nature's action within the single individual is what makes his development to the universal look like the spontaneous motion of a given, existing being.  ⁵The action certainly falls within the customary ethical community, which is the purpose that gives him orientation.  Death is the completion and the highest work the individual as such undertakes for it.  ⁶He is essentially a single individual, so it is coincidental that his death was immediately related to his labour for the community and resulted from it.  If his death was a result of that labour, then it is the natural negativity and the motion of the single individual as a given being in which consciousness does not return into itself and become self-consciousness.  On the other hand, the motion of given being lies in its overcoming and development into being for itself.  Death is from this perspective the side of division in which the being for itself achieved is distinct from the given being that started the motion.

– ⁷Customary ethical order is spirited mind in its immediate truth, so the sides into which its consciousness separate also fall into this form of immediacy and single individuality passes over into this abstract negativity, which, devoid of comfort and reconciliation in itself, has to receive that individuality with a real and external action.

– ⁸The blood relation thus supplements the abstract natural motion by adding the motion of consciousness, interrupting the work of nature, and rescuing the blood relative from destruction; or better: since the destruction, his passage to pure being, is necessary, it takes the act of destruction upon itself.

– ⁹From this it emerges that dead, universal being too is something that has returned into itself, a kind of being for itself : impotent, pure isolated singularity is elevated to universal individuality.  ¹⁰The dead person has set his being free from his action or negative ones [§10.5 below; VI.C.c. Conscience §4.8], so it is the empty singularity, merely a passive being for another, abandoned to all the lower forms of individuality devoid of reason and the forces of abstract materials, both of which are now more powerful than it, the former for the life in those forms and the latter because of the negative nature of those materials.  ¹¹The family keeps this action of the unconscious desire of abstract beings that dishonours him away from him, replaces it with its own instead and marries the relative to the womb of the earth, the elemental, imperishable individuality.  The family makes him in this way to a companion in a community that subdues and holds in check the forces of those individual materials and the lower living things, that wanted to act freely against him and destroy him.

8.  This last duty constitutes the complete divine law, the positive ethical action towards the single individual.  ²All other relations to him that do not stop at love but become ethical belong to human law; these have the negative significance of elevating the single individual above his inclusion in the natural community, to which he as an active, effective being belongs.  ³If now human law has actual ethical self-conscious substance, the whole people, for its content and power, while the divine right and law has the single individual beyond actual reality for its content, then that individual is not completely without power.  His power is the abstract, pure universal.  This is the elemental individual pulling the individuality that tears itself away from the element, thereby constituting the self-conscious actual reality of the people, back into the pure abstraction, his essence, and that is no less the ground of that individuality.

– ⁴The manner in which this power functions in the people will be developed further below [§17.4-7 below and VI.A.b. Customary ethical action §11.2-9 M].

9.  There are differences and levels in the one law just as in the other.  ²Both essences have the moment of consciousness in them, so the difference unfolds within them and this constitutes their motion and characteristic mode of life.  ³Studying these differences reveals the modes of activation and of the self-consciousness of the two universal essences of the ethical world as well as relations between them and their transition into each other.

10.  The community (common essence) is the superior, prevailing law, public and laid open before the sun, and it has its real vitality in the government, in which it is an individual.  ²The government is the actual spirited mind reflected into itself, the simple self of the whole customary ethical substance.  ³This simple, integral power allows the (community) essence to grow through its articulation into component members and to give each part duration and its own being for itself.  ⁴Mindful spirit has its reality, its existence in this and the family is the element of this reality.  ⁵But mindful spirit is also the force of the whole that pulls these parts together again into the negative one [§7.10 above; VI.C.c. Conscience §4.8], giving them the feeling of their dependence and keeping them aware that they only have their life in the whole.  ⁶The community may organise itself into the system of personal independence and property, of the law relating to persons and things.  Similarly, it may organize itself on the basis of the modes of labour for initially individual goals – of acquisition and enjoyment – articulating them into individual associations and make these independent.  ⁷The spirit of the general association is simplicity and the negative essence of these systems which isolate themselves.  ⁸To avoid letting them get rooted and become fixed in this isolation process so that the whole falls apart and drives out the spirit, the government must shake them up from time to time internally with wars.  It does this to disturb their regulated order and injure their right of independence, and for the individuals, who immerse themselves therein and tear themselves away from the whole striving after unimpeachable being for itself and security of person, on them it imposes exertions to make them feel the presence of their lord, death.  ⁹Dissolution of the form of duration is how this spirit prevents sinking back into natural existence from out of the customary ethical order and sustains the self of ethical consciousness, elevating it to freedom and into its own force.

– ¹⁰Negative essence [§10.7 above] shows itself to be the genuine power of the community and the force of its self-preservation.  The community thus finds the truth and strengthening of its power in the essence of divine law and in the subterranean realm.

11.  The divine law obtaining in the family also has its own internal differences, whose relationships constitute the vital motion of its own actual reality.  ²First we have the three relations of husband and wife, parents and children, and that of siblings, brother and sister.  The marital relation of husband and wife is the immediate self-recognition of the one consciousness in the other [Preface §26.1] as well as the process of knowledge that lies in mutual recognition.  ³But because it is only natural self-recognition and not the ethical kind, it is only the image and the picture of spirit, not actual, mindful spirit itself.

– ⁴The image or picture has its reality in something other than what it is itself; that's why this marital relation doesn't have its vital reality within itself but in the child – in another whose becoming, whose coming to be and development, is that relation, which disappears into it.  This flux of the genders in their forward motion has its enduring existence in the people.

– ⁵The piety of man and woman for each other is thus mixed with natural relations and with feelings so that their relation's return into itself doesn't happen within it.  The same is true for the second relation, the piety of parents and children towards each other.  ⁶That of the parents for their children is also coloured by the tenderness in the awareness that its vital reality lies in the other and of watching the being for itself developing within them without getting it back.  For the child is ultimately a distinct reality of its own.  In contrast, the relation of child to parent involves the tenderness of having its own self-development, or in itself, in another who will disappear, to achieve being for itself and its own self-consciousness only through separation from the origin, which withers as a result of the separation.

12.  Both these relations get stuck within the transitions and inequality between the two sides.

– ²The unmixed relation happens between brother and sister.  ³They are the same blood, which in them has found its tranquillity and balance.  ⁴They do not desire each other.  Neither of them has given nor received their being for itself from the other; they are individualities free for each other.  ⁵Thus the feminine has the highest insight into the ethical essence as sister.  The feminine does not, however, achieve consciousness and the actual reality of the customary ethical essence here.  That's because law in the family is inner essence in itself that does not lie open in the light of consciousness.  It remains inner feeling and that divine aspect removed from actual reality.  ⁶The feminine is bound to such penates, household gods, seeing partly its general substance, partly its own singularity in them, but in such a way that this relation of singularity should not also be the natural one of pleasure.

– ⁷As daughter, woman must watch the parents disappear in the natural motion with the customary calm, for only at the expense of this relation to the parents does she come to the being for itself of which she is capable.  She does not see her being for itself in the parents in a positive manner.

– ⁸The relations of mother and of wife, however, have singularity partly as something natural, which belongs to pleasure, partly as something negative that only sees its disappearance therein and that's why it is partly contingent, something that can be replaced by another.  ⁹In the house of the customary ethical order it is not this man, not this child, but a man, children as such, not the feeling, but the universal on which these relations of woman are based.  ¹⁰The difference between their respective customary ethics is clear.  Even in woman's commitment to singularity and pleasure she remains immediately universal declining the singularity of desire, whereas, in contrast, in the man these two sides are clearly separated.  As citizen he possesses the self-conscious force of the general community, through which he acquires the right to desire while also maintaining his freedom from desire.  ¹¹Singularity is thus mixed into his relation to the woman, so his customary ethical life is not pure; but to the extent that it is pure, the singularity is indifferent and the woman lacks the moment of recognizing herself as this self within her other, her partner [Preface §26.1].

– ¹²The brother, however, is for the sister the same calm essence, her self-recognition in him is pure and unmixed with natural relations.  Thus, the indifference of singularity and its ethical contingency is not present in the sibling relationship.  The moment of the single self acknowledging and being acknowledged can here assert its rights to the full because it is bound to the balance of blood and the relationship free of desire.  ¹³This is why the loss of the brother is irreplaceable for the sister and her duty to him is the highest.

13.  This relation demarcates the border line on which the family, closed within itself, goes into dissolution and moves outside itself.  ²The brother is the side on which the spirit of the family becomes individuality, turns against others and passes over into the consciousness of universality.  ³The brother departs from this immediate, elementary and, for that reason in fact, negative ethical order of the family in order to acquire real, self-conscious customary ethics and to be able to generate that himself too.

14.  He passes out of the realm of the divine law, where he lived and grew, over to the realm of the human law.  ²The sister becomes, or the wife remains, the head of the household and keeper of the divine law.  ³This is how the two genders overcome their natural essence and emerge into their ethical significance as different beings distributing the two aspects ethical substance gives itself among themselves.  ⁴These two universal essences of the ethical world have their determinate individuality in naturally distinct self-consciousnesses, because customary ethical spirit is the immediate unity of substance with self-consciousness.  In terms of reality and difference, this immediacy appears to be a natural difference.

– ⁵It is the aspect that showed itself in the pattern of individuality real to itself, in the concept of spiritual/mental essence as originally determinate nature [V.C.a. Spirit/mind animal kingdom etc. §2.1-§5.1 M].  ⁶This moment loses its indefiniteness, which it still possessed there, and those contingent differences of talents and capabilities.  ⁷We now have the determinate antithesis of the two genders, whose naturalness thereby acquires its customary ethical significance.

15.  The difference of the sexes and their customary ethical content remains however within the unity of substance and the motion of the difference is precisely the persistent development of substance.  ²It's the spirit of the family that sends the man out into the community, there to find his self-conscious essence.  This is what gives the family its universal substance and continuity in the community just as, conversely, the community has in the family the formal element of its actual reality, in the divine law its force and authentication.  ³Neither of the two is alone in and for itself.  In its vital motion, human law takes its cue from the divine law, the law valid on the earth from that of the underworld, the conscious from the unconscious, mediation from immediacy and each of them likewise returns back into what it started from.  ⁴In contrast, the subterranean power has its actual reality on the earth, consciousness giving it existence and vitality, activity.

16.  The universal customary ethical essences are thus substance as universal and substance as single consciousness.  They have the people and the family for their universal actual reality, but man and woman for their natural self and activating individuality.  ²In this content of the ethical world we see the goals finally achieved that previous patterns of consciousness, which were devoid of substance, had set themselves.  What reason took to be object has become self-consciousness and what this only had within itself is now present as true actual reality.

– ³What observation knew to be pre-existing, something it found in which the self would have had no part, is here pre-existing custom and an actual reality which is also act and work of the one finding it.

– ⁴The single individual, seeking the joy of pleasure in his singularity, finds it in the family and the necessity, in which joy passes away, is his own self-consciousness as a citizen of his people.  Or, it is this: the law of the heart [V.B.b. Law of the heart etc.] as the law of all hearts; it's a question of knowing the consciousness of the self as the recognised universal order.  It is virtue [V.B.c. Virtue etc.] enjoying the fruits of its sacrifice.  It makes happen exactly what it seeks: it brings the essence out into the actual present finding its pleasure in this universal life.

– ⁵At last, the consciousness of the matter itself is satisfied in real substance, which contains and sustains in a positive manner the abstract moments of that empty category [V. Certainty and Truth of Reason §§5 - 8; V.C.a. Spirit/mind animal etc. §1.1].  ⁶It has a true content in the customary ethical powers and this content takes the place of those commandments devoid of substance healthy reason wanted to know and establish in force.  This also gives it a full criterion, self-determined by content, for scrutinizing not the laws but what is actually done [V.C.b. Reason making law §§6 - 10].

17.  The whole is a calm balance of all the parts and each part is an indigenous mindful spirit that does not seek its satisfaction beyond itself.  Being present in this balance with the whole is precisely what gives each spirit its satisfaction within itself.

– ²This balance can only become vital and living when imbalance emerges within it and the whole is then brought back to equality by justice.  ³But justice is neither an essence located in an alien beyond, nor the reality unworthy of itself of mutually opposed pitfalls, betrayals, ingratitude, etc. that would accomplish the judgement in the manner of a thoughtless coincidence of an uncomprehended relation and an unconscious action and omission.  It is the justice of the human law, which brings the being for itself that has fallen out of the balance back into the independence of the classes and individuals in the universal.  In this sense it is the government of the people which is the individuality present to itself of the universal essence and the self-conscious will of all.

– ⁴The justice, however, that brings the over-mighty universal dominating the single individual back to balance is just as much the simple spirit of he who has suffered injustice.  Not split into the one who has suffered and an essence beyond, that simple spirit itself is the subterranean power and his Erinye, his fury that seeks vengeance; for his individuality, his blood, lives in the house further; his substance has an enduring actual reality.  ⁵The injustice that can be done to the single individual in the realm of the ethical order is only this: that something simply happens to him.  ⁶The power exercised on consciousness by this injustice in turning it into a pure thing is nature; not the universality of the community, it is the abstract universality of being.  Singularity then turns for the resolution of the injustice suffered not against the former, for it has not suffered from that, but against the latter.  ⁷The consciousness of the blood of the individual resolves this injustice, as we have seen, in such a manner that what happened becomes rather a work so that being, the final outcome, should be also something willed, something to be happy about [§7.2-11 above M].

18.  This all makes of the customary ethical realm in its constancy an immaculate world unsullied by dissension.  ²Its motion is a stable process of the one power of the realm turning into the other, so that each sustains and produces its other.  ³We see each split itself into two essences and their realities, but their antithesis is really the confirmation of the one through the other and their midpoint and element, where they directly contact each other as actual, is their immediate and mutual interpenetration.  ⁴The one extreme, universal spirited mind conscious of itself, is bound together with its other extreme, unconscious spirit, its own force and element, by the individuality of the man.  ⁵In stark contrast, the divine law has its individuation, or the unconscious spirit of the single individual has its existence, in the woman.  She is the midpoint through which that unconscious spirit moves up out of its unreality into actual reality, out of the shades of the ignorant and anonymous into the conscious realm.  ⁶The union of man and woman constitutes the active midpoint of the whole and the element which, divided into these extremes of divine and human law, is just as much their immediate union making both of those first syllogisms into the same syllogism, uniting in one the countervailing motions of actual reality down into unreality – that of the human law organizing, articulating itself into independent parts down to the danger, and indeed the trial, of death – and of subterranean law up to the reality of the light of day, to conscious existence. The downward motion is the business of the man and the upward, that of woman.