As citizens of this state, individuals are private persons, who have their own interest as their purpose. Since this purpose is mediated through the universal, which thus appears to them as a means, it can be attained by them only insofar as they themselves determine their knowing, willing, and acting in a universal manner, and make themselves into a link in the chain of this connection. The interest of the Idea in this — which does not lie in the consciousness of these members of civil society as such — is the process of raising their singularity and naturalness, through natural necessity as much as through the arbitrary will of needs, to formal freedom and formal universality of knowing and willing — of cultivating subjectivity in its particularity.

It is connected with the representations of the innocence of the state of nature, of the simplicity of morals of uncultivated peoples, on the one hand, and, on the other, with the outlook that regards needs, their satisfaction, the enjoyments and comforts of particular life, and so on, as absolute purposes, when culture is regarded, there, as something merely external, belonging to corruption, and, here, as a mere means to those purposes; the one view as much as the other shows an unfamiliarity with the nature of spirit and with the purpose of reason. Spirit has its actuality only in that it divides itself within itself, gives itself this limitation and finitude in natural needs and in the context of this external necessity, and, precisely in that it cultivates itself into them, overcomes them, and thereby gains its objective existence. The purpose of reason is therefore neither that natural simplicity of morals, nor, in the development of particularity, the enjoyments as such that are attained through culture, but rather that natural simplicity — that is, in part the passive selflessness, in part the crudeness of knowing and willing, that is, the immediacy and singularity in which spirit is submerged — be worked away, and that this externality of spirit’s own first receive the rationality of which it is capable, namely the form of universality, intelligibility. Only in this way is spirit, within this externality as such, at home and with itself. Its freedom thus has an existence within this very externality, and it becomes, for itself, within this element that is, according to its determination, in itself alien to freedom, and has to do only with what bears its own seal and is produced by it. — Precisely in this way, then, the form of universality, for itself, comes to existence in thought — the form that alone is the worthy element for the existence of the Idea. Culture is, therefore, in its absolute determination, liberation, and the labour of a higher liberation — namely, the absolute point of passage to the no longer immediate, natural, but spiritual, and, equally, to the shape of universality elevated, infinitely subjective substantiality of ethical life. This liberation is, within the subject, the hard labour against the mere subjectivity of conduct, against the immediacy of desire, as well as against the subjective vanity of feeling and the arbitrariness of liking. That it is this hard labour makes up part of the disfavour that falls upon it. But it is through this labour of culture that the subjective will itself gains, within itself, the objectivity in which it, for its part, is alone worthy and capable of being the actuality of the Idea. — Likewise, this form of universality, up to which particularity has worked and cultivated itself, at the same time constitutes the intelligibility whereby particularity becomes the true being-for-itself of singularity, and, in that it gives to universality its fulfilling content and its infinite self-determination, is itself, within the ethical, an infinitely being-for-itself, free subjectivity. This is the standpoint that demonstrates culture as an immanent moment of the absolute, and its infinite worth.