Comments on: 131

By: Hegel (Simple)

Hegel (Simple) — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 10:53:55 +0000

§ 131: The good needs me

For the single person, the good is the most important thing of all. His worth and his dignity depend on it. Someone who sees and wills the good has dignity. Someone who does not will it loses his dignity.

But the two are still apart:

The good faces a person like a task. He ought to make it his purpose. He ought to realize it. By nature, a human being is not good. He becomes good only by working on himself.

And the other way round:

The good needs the person too. Without a will that does it, the good remains a beautiful thought. Only through the single person does it become actual.

Summary: A person’s worth depends on the good. He must first make it his purpose. And the good becomes actual only when a person does it.

By: Eduard Gans (Additions)

Eduard Gans (Additions) — Wed, 29 May 1833 13:33:44 +0000

The good is the truth of the particular will, but the will is only what it makes of itself: it is not good from the outset, but can only become what it is through its own labor. On the other hand, the good, without the subjective will itself, is merely an abstraction lacking reality, which is to come to it only through that will. The development of the good accordingly contains three stages: 1. that the good be, for me as willing, a particular will, and that I know it as such; 2. that one say what is good, and develop the particular determinations of the good; 3. finally, the determining of the good for itself, the particularity of the good as an infinite, self-subsisting subjectivity. This inward determining is conscience.

By: Hegel (Notes)

Hegel (Notes) — Tue, 14 Jan 1823 08:10:32 +0000

Not yet the development of the determinations – particularity not yet posited. Subjectivity as such, not yet posited within the good, hence at first a relation – relative – content in fact indeterminate – subject – hence arbitrariness.
Relation – objectivity as against the subjective will – infinite importance of the development.
Ought only to be determined – toward actuality – The determinacy is not yet posited – But the determinacy, as infinite – true form – is subjectivity – I, this one, personality only immediate – therefore devoid of determination, i.e. contingency, externality of the determination –
is meant to be that which belongs to the subjective will –

By: Hegel (Encyclopedia 1817)

Hegel (Encyclopedia 1817) — Wed, 30 Apr 1817 23:06:32 +0000

Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline (1817), §§ 422, 425:

§ 422. γ) The good is at first abstractly universal; but as essential to the will it is in itself negative, and hence a particular. There is therefore many a kind of good and many a duty, whose diversity stands dialectically against one another, and brings them into collision.

§ 425. ε) This inner side is, in general, to be joined together with objectivity through action, through the activity of the subject. But since objectivity, as the other, self-subsistent extreme, constitutes a peculiar world of its own, it is contingent whether it harmonizes with subjective purposes; whether the good actualizes itself in it and evil, the purpose that is null in and for itself, is null in it; – further, whether the subject finds its welfare in it; and more particularly, whether the good subject becomes happy in it, and the evil one unhappy. – But the world is to let the good action be carried out within it, just as it is to grant the good subject the satisfaction of its particular interest, while denying it to the evil subject, and likewise to bring evil itself to nothing.