Comments on: 324

By: Hegel (Simple)

Hegel (Simple) — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 11:01:15 +0000

§ 324: The ethical moment of war

Individuals have a duty: they must preserve the independence of the state. If necessary, they must risk and sacrifice their property and their life.

A distorted calculation:

Whoever sees the state only as protection for life and property does not understand this. For you do not gain security by sacrificing what you want to secure.

Is war an absolute evil?

No. It is not a mere accident that comes from passion or wrong. Everything finite passes away. In nature this happens through force. In the state it becomes a willed passing away. In war we take seriously that temporal goods are vain.

The winds and the sea:

War preserves the ethical health of nations. In the same way the winds keep the sea from rotting. Lasting calm would let the sea rot. A lasting or even perpetual peace would let nations rot. But this is only the philosophical Idea. Actual wars need a different justification.

More observations:

Successful wars have prevented unrest at home. Peoples who would not endure any power of the state fell under the yoke of others. Their freedom died of the fear of dying.

Perpetual peace:

In a long peace people sink into a swamp. Everything grows stiff as bone. Kant proposed a league of princes for perpetual peace. But a league of states is also an individual. It creates an opponent for itself, an enemy.

Summary: Citizens must defend the independence of the state, even with their lives. War is not an absolute evil. It keeps nations from sinking into a swamp, as the wind keeps the sea from rotting.

By: Eduard Gans (Additions)

Eduard Gans (Additions) — Wed, 29 May 1833 14:26:43 +0000

In peace, civil life expands more, every sphere becomes entrenched in itself, and in the long run it is a stagnation of human beings; their particularities become ever more fixed and ossify. But health requires the unity of the body, and when the parts become hard in themselves, death is at hand. Perpetual peace is often demanded as an ideal toward which humanity must move. Kant thus proposed a league of princes that was to settle the disputes of states, and the Holy Alliance was intended to be roughly such an institution. But the state is an individual, and negation is essentially contained in individuality. So even if a number of states form themselves into a family, this union, as an individuality, must create an opposition and produce an enemy. Peoples do not emerge from wars strengthened alone; rather, nations that are internally discordant gain, through wars abroad, tranquility within. To be sure, war brings insecurity into property, but this real insecurity is nothing but the movement that is necessary. One hears so much said from the pulpits about the insecurity, vanity, and instability of temporal things, but everyone thinks, however moved he may be, that he will nevertheless keep what is his. But when this insecurity now actually comes up in the shape of hussars with drawn sabers, and it is in earnest, then that moved edification, which had foretold everything, turns to pronouncing curses upon the conquerors. Nevertheless, wars, where they lie in the nature of the case, do take place; the seeds shoot up again, and the talk falls silent before the earnest repetitions of history.

By: Hegel (Encyclopedia 1817)

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

Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline (1817), § 445:

§ 445. This condition shows substance in the necessary moment of its individuality proceeding toward absolute negativity, in which it feels itself to be in power over individuals — whose particular self-subsistence and the condition of their being sunk into the external existence of possession and into natural life it feels as a nullity — and in which the preservation of the universal substance mediates itself with itself, through the sacrifice of this natural and particular existence, in the disposition of freedom and the nullification of the vain.

By: Hegel (Natural Right Essay 1802)

Hegel (Natural Right Essay 1802) — Thu, 01 Jul 1802 11:06:32 +0000

Hegel, On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right (Critical Journal of Philosophy, vol. 2, part 2, 1802), p. 459:

It is this nothing other than the performance of tragedy within the ethical, which the Absolute eternally plays with itself, in that it eternally gives birth to itself into objectivity, thereby surrendering itself, in this its shape, to suffering and to death, and rising from its ashes into glory. The divine, in its shape and objectivity, has immediately a doubled nature, and its life is [...]