System of Ethical Life

[p. 328]

|328| necessity; pain would not be endured, for it would not be intuited in its objectivity, and not separated off; and the ethical action would become a contingency of insight, for with the separation the possibility of another consciousness is posited.

b. this ethical life, as this living, self-standing spirit, which appears as a Briareus with myriads of eyes, arms and the other members, each of which is an absolute individual, is something absolutely universal, and in relation to the individual each part of this universality, everything that belongs to it, appears as an object, as a purpose; it is something ideal for the individual as such; or as it enters into his consciousness; but its entering into his consciousness means nothing other than that it is posited as individual. But it is something else in so far as the individual subsumes absolute ethical life under himself, and it appears in him as his individuality. Here, as in general, it is just as little meant that will, arbitrary will, determinacies posited by the individual, subsume ethical life in such a way that they would dominate it and posit it negatively as enemy and fate; rather the subsuming is solely the external form of subjectivity under which ethical life appears without its essence being affected thereby; this appearance of it is the ethical life of the singular individual, or the virtues; because the individual is the singular, possibility, the negative, determinacy, the virtues too are, in their determinacy, something negative, possibilities of the universal. Here, then, the difference of morals from natural right is posited, not as though they were separated, the former excluded from the latter; rather its content is wholly within natural right; the virtues appear in what is absolutely ethical, but only in their transience.

Ethical life is now

a) as absolute ethical life; not the sum but the indifference of all virtues; it appears not as love of fatherland and people and laws, but as absolute life in the fatherland and for the people; it is absolute truth, for untruth lies only in the fixing of a determinacy; in the eternal of the people, however, all singularity is sublated; it is absolute culture, for in the eternal is the real empirical annihilation of all determinacies and

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