System of Ethical Life

[p. 334]

|334| and dissolved them out of their brittleness into absolute softness; the singularity of the individual is not what comes first; rather the vitality of ethical nature, divinity, is; and for its essence the singular individual is too poor to grasp its nature in its whole reality; for the moment it is able, as formal indifference, to present all the moments; but as formal indifference it is the negative, time, and annihilates them again; the ethical, however, must grasp itself as nature, as the subsistence of all potencies, and each in its living shape; it must be one with necessity and subsist as relative identity; but this necessity has no reality except in so far as each potency has reality, i.e. is totality.

The potencies of ethical life, presenting themselves in this reality within the perfect totality, are the estates; and the principle of each is the determinate form of ethical life among those shown above; there is thus an estate of absolute free ethical life, an estate of rectitude, and an estate of unfree or natural ethical life. According to the true concept of an estate, it is not a universality lying outside it and something thought; rather universality is real in it; it recognises itself in its equality and constitutes itself as a universal over against a universal, and the relation of the distinct estates is [not] a relation of singular to singular; rather each singular individual is, through [his] belonging to an estate, something universal, and thereby a true individual, and a person; thus, for example, the estate of slaves is no estate; for it is only something formally universal; the slave relates himself as a singular individual to the lord.

a. The absolute estate has absolute pure ethical life as its principle, and in the above presentation of the latter it is itself presented; for its being-real and its Idea are absolutely one, because the Idea is the absolute Idea. In the being-real of absolute ethical life, all that is to be considered is the manner in which this estate conducts itself with regard to the subsistence of difference, and how being-practical can be indifferentiated in it. In the Idea itself this is, as presented above, absolutely only negative, and in its reality the relations and the

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