one punishing has acted rationally and freely. In this its determination, then, punishment is something in itself, truly infinite and something absolute, which thus has its own reverence and its own dread within itself; it comes from freedom, and remains, even as subduing, within freedom. If, on the other hand, punishment is represented as coercion, then it is posited merely as a determinacy and as something utterly finite, carrying no rationality within it, and falls entirely under the common concept of a determinate thing opposed to another, or of a commodity for which something else — namely the crime — is to be purchased; the state, as judicial power, holds a market in determinacies called crimes, which are for sale to it against other determinacies, and the code of laws is the price list.

But however null these abstractions and the relation of externality arising from them may be, the moment of the negatively absolute, or of infinity, which in this example is marked as determining the relation of crime and punishment, is a moment of the Absolute itself, and must be exhibited in absolute ethical life; and we shall grasp the manifold shapes of the absolute form, or of infinity, in its necessary moments, and show how they determine the shape of absolute ethical life, from which the true concept and the relation of the practical sciences will result. Since what matters here, in the first instance, is the determination of the relations contained within this, and hence the side of infinity must be brought out and singled out, we presuppose as the positive that the absolute ethical totality is nothing other than a people — which will already become clear, even from the negative that we are considering here, in its following moments. — In absolute ethical life, then, infinity, or form as the absolutely negative, is nothing other than the subduing grasped above, itself taken up into its absolute concept, in which it does not relate to individual determinacies but to their entire actuality and possibility, namely to life itself — and is thus equal to the matter of the infinite form; but in such a way that the positive of this same infinity is the absolutely ethical, namely belonging to a people; the being-one-with-which the single individual proves, in the negative, unambiguously, only through the danger of death. Through the absolute identity of the infinite — or of this side of the relation — with the positive, the ethical totalities, such as peoples are, take shape, constitute themselves as individuals, and thereby present themselves as singular over against other singular peoples; this positing and individuality is the side of reality — without it, thought, they are mere things of thought; it would be the abstraction of essence without the absolute form, an essence which precisely thereby would be essence-less. This relation of individuality to individuality is a relationship, and hence a twofold one; the one is the positive, the calm, equal

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