None the less, many of the judge’s remarks imply that the ethical as he understood it accorded with the Hegelian notion of Sittlichkeit just outlined. He says, for instance, that the self which it is the task of the ethical individual to develop must not be thought of as existing ‘in isolation’, in the manner envisaged by certain ‘mystical’ doctrines; he stands in ‘reciprocal relations’ with his public surroundings and conditions of life, the self he seeks to realize being ‘a social, a civic self’, not an abstract one that ‘fits everywhere and hence nowhere’.
