I mentioned in the previous post that Hegel's understanding of individuality is tied to our relationships with others and to the national culture. This means that we are not just individuals selfishly pursuing our own interests.

An ethical life includes our families, diverse as they are today - partners, male and female, children and stepchildren, young people desperate for a good education and the chance of a satisfying job, and ageing parents who are both providing and in need of care. As well, family units sit within a neighbourhood and wider community of other families that identify with a common cause, that of a decent life with those we love. This is the basis for a conception of ethical life.

In the Philosophy of Right Hegel makes the following comments about ethical life in the liberal nation state:

142 ... ethical life is the concept of freedom developed into the existing world and the nature of self-consciousness.

146 ... This ethical substance and its laws and powers are on the one hand an object over against the subject ..

147 On the other hand, they are not something alien to the subject. On the contrary, his spirit bears witness to them as to its own essence in which he has a feeling of his selfhood, and in which he lives as in his own element which is not distinguished from himself. The subject is thus directly linked to the ethical order by a relation which is more like an identity than even the relation of faith or trust.

153 The right of individuals to be subjectively destined to freedom is fulfilled when they belong to an actual ethical order, because their conviction of their freedom finds its truth in such an objective order, and it is in an ethical order that they are actually in possession of their own essence or their own inner universality.

As individuals we belogng to, and are a part of, an ethical order.Hegel’s portrayal of the modern subjectivity presupposes civil society at its basis, according to Blasche. Only the subject who is free of the responsibilities of traditional family life is in a position to pursue his own interests and determine his own will. A historically contingent conception of civil society thus serves to ground Hegel’s account of the family and of modern subjectivity.