Preface

[9th Paragraph]

The particular form of bad conscience that manifests itself in the kind of eloquence with which that shallowness plumes itself can be noted here; specifically, that where it is most unspiritual, it speaks most of the spirit, where it talks most deadly and leathery, the word life and introducing into life, where it expresses the greatest egoism of empty pride, it most uses the word people. The peculiar mark it bears on its forehead, however, is hatred of the law. |XIV| That right and ethical life, and the actual world of the right and the ethical, are grasped through thought, and through thought give themselves the form of rationality, namely universality and determinacy—this, the law, is what that feeling which reserves for itself its own pleasure, that conscience which places right in subjective conviction, rightly regards as most hostile. The form of right as a duty and as a law is felt by it as a dead, cold letter and as a fetter; for in it, it does not recognize itself, and thus does not find itself free therein, because the law is the reason of the matter, and this does not allow feeling to warm itself at its own particularity. The law is therefore, as noted somewhere in the course of this textbook⁶⁾, primarily the Shibboleth by which the false brothers and friends of the so-called people are separated.

6) Hegel refers to his own Remark to § 258; the footnote there, “The book in question is, on account of the character just described, of an original kind …”, stands in the first edition of 1820 on pages 245–250 and does not belong in the preface.

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