System of Ethical Life

[p. 326]

|326| highest subject-objectivity; and this identity of all is for that very reason not an abstract one, not an equality of citizenship, but an absolute one, and one intuited in empirical consciousness, presenting itself in the consciousness of particularity; the universal, spirit, is in each and for each, even in so far as each is something singular. At the same time this intuiting and being-one is immediate; the intuiting is not something other than the thought; it is not symbolic; there does not step between the Idea and reality a particularity which would first have to be annihilated through thought and would not already in and for itself be equal to the universal; rather the particular, the individual, is as particular consciousness absolutely equal to the universal; and this universality, which has absolutely united particularity with itself, is the divinity of the people, and this universal, intuited in the ideal form of particularity, is the god of the people; he is an ideal manner of intuiting it.

Consciousness is the infinite, the absolute concept, in the form of unity; in empirical consciousness, however, the concept is posited only as relation; the opposites of the concept are, and are thus opposites; their unity is as such a hidden one; it appears in both as quantity, i.e. under the form of possibility of being divided (in one consciousness), and the actuality of being divided is precisely the opposition; in ethical life, however, this separation is for empirical consciousness itself an ideal determinacy; it recognises in the opposite, the object, absolutely the same as what the subject is; it intuits the sameness.

This intuition is absolute because it is absolutely objective, all being-singular and feeling being extinguished in it, and it [is] intuition because it is in consciousness; its content is absolute because it is the eternal and freed from everything subjective; the oppositions, the empirical and the appearance, fall so much within the absolute intuition itself that they present themselves only as play. All relation to need and annihilation is sublated, and the practical, which

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