They received laws and commanders from the will of their monarch, and the descendants of the boldest chieftains were content with the rank of citizens and subjects; the more highly aspiring spirits gathered round the standard of the emperors; and the abandoned provinces, deprived of political strength or unity, sank imperceptibly into the dull indifference of private life. – With this universal private life, and for the condition in which the people consists only of a second estate, the formal relation of right – which fixes individual being and posits it absolutely – is immediately present, and out of just such a corruption and universal debasement there has also formed and developed the most complete elaboration of the legislation relating to it. This system of property and right, which, for the sake of that fixity of individuality, is nothing absolute and eternal but wholly within the finite and formal, must be really separated and set apart from the noble estate, must constitute itself as an estate of its own, and there be able to expand in its full length and breadth. To it belong, in part, the questions – subordinate in themselves and remaining within the formal – concerning the legal ground of possession, contract, and so forth; but in part also the entire endless expansion of legislation over what Plato lists as the categories of these matters: “those judicial matters – the contracts of individuals against individuals concerning goods or handiwork, as well as slander and assault; regulations concerning jurisdiction and the appointment of judges; and wherever it is necessary to levy or impose tolls in markets and harbors – it is not worthy to prescribe such things to fine and good men; for they will easily find for themselves the many things that must be settled about this, if God grants them the blessing of a truly ethical constitution. But where this is not the case, it follows that they spend their lives fixing and improving many such things, thinking that they will at last lay hold of the best; living as the sick do, who, from want of self-restraint, will not depart from their bad regimen, and who, through their remedies, achieve nothing but the generation of more manifold and greater illnesses, while always hoping, whenever someone recommends them a cure, to be made well by it; just as ridiculous are those who make laws about the matters named, and are forever amending them, in the belief that they will thereby reach an end – not knowing that they are, in fact, as it were, cutting up the Hydra.” – “If, then, it is true that, as licentiousness and sickness increase in a people, the many courts of law throw open their doors, and no greater sign of a bad and disgraceful discipline can be found than that excellent physicians and judges are needed not only by the base and the artisans, but also by those who pride themselves on having been raised in a free education – who are compelled to have justice imposed upon them by others as masters and judges, and who spend much of their time before the courts, both prosecuting and defending” – if this system must at the same time develop there as a universal condition, and must destroy free ethical life wherever it is intermingled with those relations and not originally kept separate from them and their consequences, then it is necessary that this system be taken up with consciousness, recognized in its right, excluded from the noble estate, and granted an estate of its own, as its own realm, wherein it can settle itself and, amid its own confusion and the sublation of one confusion by another, develop its full activity. Accordingly, the potency of this estate determines itself such that it has its place in possession as such, and in the justice that is possible therein with regard to possession; that it at the same time constitutes a coherent system; and, immediately through the fact that the relation of possession is taken up into formal unity, every individual – since he is in himself capable of possession – relates to all as a universal, or as a citizen, in the sense of bourgeois; for the political nullity by which the members of this estate are private persons finds its compensation in the fruits of peace and of acquisition, and in the complete security of the enjoyment of these – both insofar as this concerns the individual and insofar as it concerns the whole of it; but the security bearing on the whole is, for each individual, the fact that he is relieved of courage, and exempted from the necessity – belonging to the first estate – of exposing himself to the danger of a violent death, a danger which, for the individual, constitutes the absolute insecurity of all enjoyment, possession, and right. Through this sublated intermingling of the principles, and their constituted and conscious separation, each obtains its right, and there alone is brought about what ought to be: the reality of ethical life as absolute indifference, and at the same time this very same [ethical life] as the real relation within the subsisting opposition – such that the latter is subdued by the former, and that this subduing is itself rendered indifferent and reconciled. Which reconciliation consists precisely in the recognition of necessity, and in the right that ethical life grants to its inorganic nature and to the subterranean powers, in that it relinquishes and sacrifices to them a part of itself; for the power of sacrifice consists in the intuiting and objectifying of the entanglement with the inorganic – through which intuition this entanglement is resolved, the inorganic separated off and recognized as such, and thereby itself taken up into indifference; while the living [element], in laying into it that which it knows as a part of itself, and sacrificing it to death, has thereby at once acknowledged its right and purified itself of it.

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