Jena Philosophy of Spirit

[p. 263]

|263| is the hereditary monarch, he is the firm immediate knot of the whole. – The spiritual bond is public opinion; – this the true legislative body, national assembly – (universal culture) – useless artifices boards to improve laws – declaration of the universal will – it lives in the execution of all commands – the government officials belong to this spirit – Now there is different governing – and living in states whose constitution is still the same – and this changes gradually with time – the government must not step onto the side of what is past and obstinately protect it – But be, as it were, the last to be convinced; and change – actual doing actual will – through election of the officials – each sphere town guild [represented] in the administration of its particular affairs – A people is bad when it is the government – and as bad as it is irrational. But the whole is the middle, the free spirit, which bears itself free from these completely fixed extremes, the whole [however is] independent of the knowing of the singulars, as well as of the character of the regent – empty knot.

This is the higher principle of the modern age, which the ancients, Plato did not know, – in ancient times, the beautiful public life was the custom of all, – beauty, immediate unity of the universal and singular, a work of art in which no part separates itself from the whole, but this genial unity of the self that knows itself and of its presentation [is;] but the absolute knowing-itself of singularity, this absolute being-within-itself, was not present – The Platonic republic – is, like the Lacedaemonian state – this vanishing of self-knowing individuality.¹⁵²⁾ – Through this principle the external actual

152) In the margin: Plato did not set up an ideal, but grasped the state of his time in its inner being – but this state has passed away – not the Platonic republic is not practicable – because it lacked the principle of absolute singularity – The actual, to be sure, does not [look] so externally, as the ideal – because the observer holds to the immediate – to the necessary – excess, ruin, dissoluteness, viciousness of the singular ones must be able to be borne – the state is the cunning

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