System of Ethical Life

[p. 327]

|327| began with the annihilation of the object, has passed over into its opposite, into annihilation of the subjective, so that the objective is the absolute identity of both.

This totality must be considered according to the moments of its Idea, and indeed in such a way that first its rest, or the constitution of the state, is considered, and then its movement, or government; there the Idea as intuition; here according to relation; but in such a way that now the essence of the totality itself is absolute identity of intuition and concept, and the form of this identity under which it appears is something altogether superficial; the extremes of the relation are absolutely the totality itself, not abstractions which would exist only through the relation.

A. The constitution of the state

The people as organic totality is the absolute indifference of all determinacies of the practical and the ethical; its moments as such are the form of the identity of indifference, then that of difference, and finally that of absolute living indifference; and none of these moments is an abstraction, but a reality.

I. Ethical life as system, at rest

Cross-reference: The estates: in the Groundlines § 201–§ 207; on the estate of bravery § 325 ff.; on rectitude § 150 Remark.

The concept of ethical life has been placed in its objectivity, the sublation of singularity. This being-annihilated of the subjective in the objective, the absolute being-taken-up of the particular into the universal, is

a) intuition; the universal not a formal one, opposed to consciousness and subjectivity, or to individual vitality, but in intuition absolutely one with it. In every shape and expression of ethical life the opposition of a position and a negation sublates itself through their integration; the separation of the particular and the universal, however, would appear first as a bondage of the particular, as something subjected to the moral law; then as the possibility of something else; in the ethical there would be no

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