“The universality which the individual as such attains is pure being, death; it is a state which has reached immediately in the course of Nature, not the result of an action consciously done. The duty of the member of a Family is on that account to add this aspect, in order that the individual’s ultimate being, too, shall not belong solely to Nature and remain something irrational, but shall be something done, and the right of consciousness be asserted in it. Or rather, the meaning of the action is that because in truth the calm and universality if a self-conscious being do not belong to Nature, the illusory appearance that the death of the individual results from a consciousness action on the part of Nature may be dispelled, and the truth established. What Nature did in the individual is that aspect in which his development into a universal is exhibited as the movement of an immediate existent. This movement falls, it is true, within the ethical community, and has this for its End; death is the fullfilment and the supreme ‘work’ which the individual as such undertakes on its behalf. But in so far as he is essentially a particular individual, it is an accident that his death was directly connected with his ‘work’ for the universal and was the result of it; partly because, if his death was such a result, it is the natural negativity and movement of the individual as a mere existent, in which consciousness does not return into itself and become self-consciousness, or partly because, since the movement of what merely exists consists in its being superseded and becoming a being-for-self, death is the side of diremption in which the attained being-for-self is something other than the mere existent which began the movement. Because the ethical order is Spirit in its immediate truth, the sides into which its consciousness sunders itself also fall into this form of immediacy, and individuality passes over into this abstract negativity which, being in its own self with consolation and reconciliation, must receive them essentially through a real and external act. Blood-relationship supplements, then, the abstract natural process by adding to it the movement of consciousness, interrupting the work of Nature and rescuing the blood-relation from destruction; or better, because destruction is necessary, the passage of the blood-relation into mere being, it takes on itself the action of destruction. Through this it comes about that the dead, the universal being, becomes a being that has returned into itself, a being-for-self, or, the powerless, simply isolated individual has been raised to universal individuality. The dead individual, by having liberated his being from his action or his negative unity, is an empty singular, merely a passive being-for-another, at the mercy of every lower irrational individuality and the forces of abstract material elements, all of which are now more powerfull than himself: the former on account of the life they possess, the latter on account of their negative nature. The Family keeps away from the dead this dishonoring of him by unconscious appetites and abstract entities, and puts its own action in their place and abstract entities, and weds the blood-relation to the bosom of the earth, to the elemental imperishable individuality. The Family thereby makes him a member of a community which prevails over and holds under control the forces of particular material elements and the lower forms of life, which sought to unloose themselves against him and to destroy him.” Hegel, The Ethical Order
