Particularity, for itself, on the one hand, as the satisfaction of its needs, of contingent arbitrary will, and of subjective liking, indulging itself in every direction, destroys itself and its substantial concept in its enjoyments; on the other hand, as infinitely excited, and, in its thoroughgoing dependence on external contingency and arbitrary will as well as on the power of universality, limited, the satisfaction of the necessary need, as much as of the contingent one, is itself contingent. Civil society offers, within these oppositions and their entanglement, the spectacle equally of excess, of misery, and of the physical and ethical corruption common to both.

The self-subsistent development of particularity (compare § 124, Remark) is the moment which shows itself, in the ancient states, as the corruption of morals breaking in, and as the ultimate ground of their decline. These states, built, in part, on the patriarchal and religious principle, in part on the principle of a more spiritual, but simpler, ethical life, and, in general, on original natural intuition, could not withstand the division within them and the infinite reflection of self-consciousness, and succumbed to this reflection, as it began to show itself, first in disposition and then in actuality — because their still simple principle lacked the truly infinite force that lies solely in that unity which allows the opposition of reason to develop to its full strength, and has overpowered it, thereby preserving itself within it, and holding it together within itself. — Plato, in his Republic, presents substantial ethical life in its ideal beauty and truth; but he is unable to come to terms with the principle of self-subsistent particularity, which had broken in, in his time, upon Greek ethical life, except by setting his merely substantial state against it, and excluding this principle altogether, down into its very beginnings, which it has in private property (§ 46, Remark) and in the family, and then, in its further development, as the individual’s own arbitrary choice of estate, and so on. It is this deficiency that also causes the great substantial truth of his state to be misconceived, and that state to be commonly regarded as a mere reverie of abstract thought, as what is often even called an ideal. The principle of the self-subsistent, infinite-in-itself personality of the individual, of subjective freedom — which arose inwardly in the Christian religion, and outwardly, and therefore bound up with abstract universality, in the Roman world — does not come into its right within that merely substantial form of actual spirit. This principle is, historically, later than the Greek world, and, likewise, the philosophical reflection that descends to this depth is later than the substantial Idea of Greek philosophy.