[p. 335]
|335| virtues relating to them, driving each other out and abandoned to empirical contingency. But need and the use of things is for the reality of ethical life, or the estate, an absolute necessity which clings to its heels, but which may not cling to it in its form presented above, in its being-held-apart; for its labour may only be a universal labour, whereas labour for need would be a singular one. The satisfaction of need itself is, it is true, itself also absolutely a particularity; but nothing but the satisfaction of it, or pure practical particularity, is to occur here; for as such it is pure annihilation of the object, absolute negation, but no mixing of the ideal with it, and [not] the extension of the consequences of this mixing; no partial positing of intelligence into the object, nothing practical, no forming of something unliving whose result would nevertheless be annihilation; rather, the labour can be none other than that of war, or a forming for this labour; for the immediate activity in the people is not labour, but organic within itself and absolute. Now if they have no relation to need, and this nevertheless cannot be satisfied without labour, then it is necessary that the labour should be done by the other estates, and that what is prepared and manufactured for need should be delivered to it, and that only immediate annihilation in enjoyment should remain for it. But this relation of this estate to the two others is a relation of subsisting reality itself, to be taken up into indifference according to the possible form; this form is here equality; and since according to its content it is a usefulness of the other estates for the first, such that they deliver to it something which is necessary to it, and it makes another’s goods and acquisition its own, it must, according to equality, be useful to the others in return. But this it is in the highest manner, and then in theirs; the relation of usefulness according to its content is partly that of the difference of the two, according to which it is the absolute power for them, partly that of equality, according to which it is for them in the negative, thus in their immanent manner. That first usefulness is that it is the absolute real ethical shape, and thus for them the image of the moving and being absolute; the highest real intuition which ethical nature demands; these estates, according to their nature, stop short at this intuiting; they
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