This is the first of three posts concerning three passages in the third section, "Children & Dissolution," of the third chapter, "Ethics," of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, a book I reread this Christmas.

The passage:

The punishment of children does not aim at justice as such; the aim is more subjective and moral in character, i.e. to deter them from exercising a freedom still in the tolls of nature and to lift the universal into their consciousness and will.

The comment: My parents never beat me, a fact that I find troubling to this day. It's troubling because it seems to indicate that their love for me was cold. Theirs was an arctic love. And I was in the strange situation of living in Africa with icy parents. Outside, a copper sun over the veld; inside, a frosty father and mother at the dinner table. It was not the same for my cousins. If they did something wrong or careless, their mother immediately and repeatedly beat them with a stick or rope. But in her wild swinging and shouting I saw the expression of a love that was on fire, a love for her boys that was as red as molten lava. Why did my parents not love me in this way? Love me to the extreme of a volcanic eruption of violence.