Commentary on the Philosophy of Right, Chapter 23
The Concept
Ethical life is the truth of Right and Morality — the living unity of objective structures and subjective attitudes. In Right, the will was only external; in Morality, only internal. In ethical life, it is both at once: in institutions that embody its freedom, and in attitudes through which it sustains these institutions.
Ethical life is not custom as mere convention (that would be only the external). It is not morality as mere inner ought (that would be only the internal). It is the form in which institutions are so constituted that they sustain the will, and the will is so formed that it produces and maintains the institutions out of itself. In the terms of the logic of the concept: ethical life is the form of objective spirit in which cognition (theory) and volition (practice) — still divided in Morality — seek their practical unity, as an institutional form of life that is at once known and enacted.
Ethical life is divided into three spheres: family, civil society, state. They are not historically sequential but logically stepped into one another: each presupposes the previous one and sublates it — in the strict sense, that is, while preserving what sustains it.