This determination, whereby the interest and the right of individuals are posited as a vanishing moment, is at the same time the positive [aspect] of their individuality — an individuality which is not contingent and mutable, but which is in and for itself. This relation, and the recognition of it, is accordingly their substantial duty — the duty, through danger and the sacrifice of their property and life, as well as of their opinions and everything else that is naturally comprised within the compass of life, to maintain this substantial individuality, the independence and sovereignty of the state.

It is a very distorted calculation when, in requiring this sacrifice, the state is regarded merely as civil society, and its ultimate end taken to be merely the security of the life and property of individuals; for this security is not attained by the sacrifice of that which is to be secured — on the contrary. What has just been indicated contains the ethical moment of war, which is not to be regarded as an absolute evil and as a merely external contingency whose ground — be it in the passions of rulers or of peoples, in injustices, and so forth, in short in whatever ought not to be — is thus itself merely contingent. Whatever is of the nature of the contingent is subject to the contingent, and this very fate is thus [itself] necessity — just as the concept and philosophy in general make the standpoint of mere contingency vanish, and recognize in it, as mere semblance, its essence, namely necessity. It is necessary that the finite — possessions and life — should be posited as contingent, because this is the concept of the finite. This necessity has, on the one hand, the shape of a natural force, and everything finite is mortal and transient. But in the ethical essence, the state, this force is taken away from nature, and necessity is raised to a work of freedom, to something ethical; that transience becomes a willed passing away, and the negativity underlying it becomes the substantial, proper individuality of the ethical essence. War, as the condition in which the vanity of temporal goods and things — which otherwise tends to be a merely edifying phrase — is taken seriously, is accordingly the moment in which the ideality of the particular receives its right and becomes actuality; it has the higher significance that, through it, as I have expressed it elsewhere¹, “the ethical health of nations is preserved in their indifference to the permanence of finite determinacies, just as the movement of the winds preserves the sea from the putrefaction into which a lasting calm would plunge it, as a lasting or even perpetual peace would plunge nations.” That this, incidentally, is merely a philosophical Idea, or, as one otherwise tends to put it, a justification of providence, and that actual wars still require a different justification, [will be discussed] hereafter. That the ideality which comes to appear in war, as in an external and contingent relation, is the same as the ideality according to which the internal powers of the state are organic moments of the whole, appears in historical phenomena, among other forms, in the fact that successful wars have prevented internal unrest and consolidated the internal power of the state. That nations unwilling to endure, or fearing, internal sovereignty are subjugated by others, and have striven for their independence with all the less success and honor the less it was possible internally to arrive at a primary establishment of the power of the state (their freedom has died of the fear of dying); that states which have the guarantee of their independence not in their armed power but in other considerations (such as, for example, states disproportionately small in relation to their neighbors) can continue to exist under an internal constitution that would in itself guarantee neither internal nor external tranquility, and so forth — these are phenomena that belong precisely to this same point.

¹ in: On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law