[p. 325]
|325| intuition under a relation, serving necessity, and posited as something limited, having infinity outside itself.
In ethical life, therefore, the individual exists in an eternal manner; his empirical being and doing is something absolutely universal; for it is not the individual that acts, but the universal absolute spirit in him. The view which philosophy takes of the world and of necessity, according to which all things are in God and there is no singularity, is perfectly realised for empirical consciousness, in that every singularity of acting or thinking or being has its essence and significance solely in the whole, and in so far as its ground is thought, this alone is thought, and the individual knows and imagines no other; since non-ethical empirical consciousness consists in inserting, between the being-one of the universal and the particular, of which the former is the ground, some other singularity as ground; here, on the contrary, the absolute identity which before belonged to nature and was something inner has come forth into consciousness.
The intuition of this Idea of ethical life, however, the form in which it appears on the side of its particularity, is the people. The identity of this intuition and of the Idea is to be cognised. For in the people the relation of a multitude of individuals is in general formally posited, not a relationless multitude, nor a mere plurality; not the former, since a multitude in general does not posit the relation which is in ethical life, the subsumption of all under a universal which would have reality for their consciousness, would be one with them, and would have might and force over them in so far as they wished to be singular, and would be identical with them in a friendly or hostile way; rather the multitude is absolute singularity, and the concept of the multitude, in so far as they are one, is their abstraction, alien to them, outside them; – nor a mere plurality, for the universality in which they are one is absolute indifference; in a plurality, however, this is not posited; rather the plurality is not absolute multiplicity, as the presentation of all differences, through which allness alone indifference can present itself really and be a universal one.
Since the people is the living indifference, and all natural difference is annihilated, the individual intuits himself in each as himself; he attains to the
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