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Hegel, the phenomenology of spirit, a guide in mp3 voice
26TheGreekWorld.mp3
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The Greek world
Hegel presents his positive discussion of Greek ethical life in the subsection entitled 'The Ethical World. Human and Divine Law: Man and Woman', in which he portrays Greek society as a complex balance of individuality and universality, where 'these determinations [of individuality and universality] express only the superficial antithesis of the two sides' . Thus, though we find here a social structure marked by important divisions – between the human law and the divine law, between the polis and the family, and between man and woman – Hegel argues that it was possible to harmonize these divisions, since each side complemented the other.
So, according to Hegel, the divine law regulated the private realm of the family in which women were confined, while the human law regulated the polis which was the domain of men, and as such each could co-exist alongside the other. ('The divine receives its honour through the respect paid to the human, and the human in virtue of the honour paid to the divine.') It was crucial here for the man to be able to make the transition from the family as private individual to the state as citizen: but this he could do because the family had an ethical character, in which the individual did not merely find gratification for his desires, but also an education in the virtues, in a way that made him fit for public life. Then, on his death, when the individual no longer counted as a citizen, he could be 'returned' to his family for burial. In this the family served an important role that could not be served by the state (for which 'it is an accident that his death was directly connected with his “work” for the universal and was the result of it'), since this gives meaning to the individual's life in the face of this natural process. The family was associated not with the law of the state, but with the divine law standing over and above nature. Hegel emphasizes two respects in which this structure was harmonious. First, although the death of the individual was given meaning within the sphere of the family and divine law, nonetheless at times of war this served a social function and reinforced social bonds within the sphere of the polis, so bringing these spheres together: 'The community therefore possesses the truth and the confirmation of its power in the essence of the Divine Law and in the realm of the nether world'. Second, these spheres were brought into harmony in the brother–sister relationship (which Hegel portrays as being more stable than the husband–wife or parent–child relationship, which are based around the contingencies of desire and love). Hegel argues that the brother and sister fully recognize each other and what they stand for as equals (in a way that husband and wife do not), where the sister represents the family and the divine law, and the brother represents the polis and the human law, each seeing itself as the complement of the other:
[The brother] passes from the divine law, within whose sphere he lived, over to human law. But the sister becomes, or the wife remains, the head of the household and the guardian of the divine law. In this way, the two sexes overcome their [merely] natural being and appear in their ethical significance, as diverse beings who share between them the two distinctions belonging to the ethical substance.
Hegel thus argues that the harmony of Greek ethical life rested on a kind of division of labour between the sexes, one that was acknowledged by both sides, and on which the stability of the Greek social world depended:
The difference of the sexes and their ethical content remains . . . in the unity of the substance, and its movement is just the constant becoming of that substance. The husband is sent out by the Spirit of the Family into the community in which he finds his self-conscious being. Just as the Family in this way possesses in the community its substance and enduring being, so, conversely, the community possesses in the Family the formal element of its actual existence, and in the divine law its power and authentication. Neither of the two is by itself absolutely valid; human law proceeds in its living process from the divine, the law valid on earth from that of the nether world, the conscious from the unconscious, mediation from immediacy – and equally returns whence it came. The power of the nether world, on the other hand, has its actual existence on earth; through consciousness, it becomes existence and actuality . . . The whole is a stable equilibrium of all the parts, and each part is a Spirit at home in this whole, a Spirit which does not seek satisfaction outside of itself but finds it within itself, because it is itself in this equilibrium with the whole.
Hegel therefore provides a highly suggestive (although not of course uncontentious) picture of the structure of the 'happy state' in which Spirit was realized in the Greek world, one in which divisions existed in a balanced equilibrium, each side finding its own domain in harmony with its opposite, so that 'their antithesis is rather the authentication of one through the other'.
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