[p. 489]
|489| and is formal ethical life has been shown above. The concept of this sphere is the real practical, considered subjectively that of feeling or of physical need and enjoyment, objectively that of labour and possession; and this practical, as it can occur according to its concept, taken up into indifference, is the formal unity or right possible in it, above which two the third is the absolute or the ethical. The reality, however, of the sphere of relative unity or of the practical and of right is constituted in the system of its totality as an estate of its own.
Thus, according to the absolute necessity of the ethical, there form two estates, of which the one, as the estate of the free, the individual of absolute ethical life, whose organs are the single individuals and which, considered from the side of its indifference, is the absolute living spirit, from the side of its objectivity the living movement and the divine self-enjoyment of this whole in the totality of individuals as its organs and members, whose formal or negative side, however, must likewise be the absolute one, namely labour, which is directed not at the annihilation of individual determinacies but at death, and whose product likewise is not anything individual but the being and preservation of the whole of the ethical organisation. To this estate Aristotle assigns as its business that for which the Greeks had the name πολιτεύειν, which expresses living in and with and for one’s people, leading a universal life belonging wholly to the public, or else philosophising, – which two businesses Plato, in keeping with his higher vitality, wants to see not separated but absolutely bound together. – Then an estate of the unfree, which is in the difference of need and labour and in the right and justice of possession and property, whose labour is directed at individuality and therefore does not include the danger of death in

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