sublates itself; with this it has indeed been demonstrated that coercion is nothing real, nothing in itself; but this will become still clearer if we show this in coercion itself, according to its concept, and according to the determinacy that the relation of this connection has—for that the relation in general is nothing in itself is something that dialectic has, in part, to demonstrate, and that has, in part, already been briefly set forth above.

Of the concepts in general that are bound up with coercion, and that express precisely this relation, it has already, in part, been shown that they are essenceless abstractions, thought-things, or beings of the imagination, without reality; there comes first the null abstraction of a concept of the universal freedom of all, which would be separated from the freedom of individuals, and then, on the other side, this very freedom of the individual, just as isolated; each, posited for itself, is an abstraction without reality; but if both are absolutely identical, and then posited merely on the basis of this first, underlying identity, they are something entirely different from those concepts whose meaning lies solely in non-identity. Then, natural or original freedom is supposed to limit itself through the concept of universal freedom; but that freedom which can be posited as limitable is, for that very reason, once again nothing absolute; and then it is inherently contradictory to put together an Idea whereby, with absolute necessity, the freedom of the individual, through the externality of coercion, is to be in conformity with the concept of universal freedom—which means nothing other than that it is imagined that the individual, through something not absolute, is nevertheless absolutely equal to the universal. In the concept of coercion itself, something external is immediately posited for freedom; but a freedom for which something were truly external, alien, would be no freedom at all; its essence and its formal definition consist precisely in there being nothing absolutely external to it.

The view of freedom is to be entirely rejected according to which it is supposed to be a choice between opposed determinacies, such that, if +A and −A were present, it would consist in determining itself either as +A or as −A, and would be unconditionally bound to this either-or. Something like this possibility of choice is simply an empirical freedom, which is one with empirical, common necessity, and is simply not separable from it. Freedom is rather the negation or ideality of the opposed terms, of both +A and −A, the abstraction of the possibility that neither of the two is; something external would exist for it only insofar as it were determined solely as +A or solely as −A; but it is precisely the opposite of this, and nothing is external for it, and so no coercion is possible for it.

Every determinacy is, according to its essence, either +A or −A; and to +A, −A is chained indissolubly, just as to −A, +A is; just as the individual

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