System of Ethical Life

[p. 339]

|339| Its ethical life is trust in the absolute estate, according to the totality of the first estate, which must have that relation and influence; for its crude ethical life can be open to the singularisation of doing only in trust, or under compulsion. For the sake of its totality it is also capable of bravery, and is able to join the first estate in this labour and in the danger of death.

II. Government

Cross-reference: The internal constitution of the Groundlines: § 272 ff.

In the preceding potency the system of ethical life was presented in its rest; the organic for itself, as also taking the inorganic up into itself, and forming a system in its reality; but this potency considers how the organic is different against the inorganic; it recognises the difference of the universal and particular, and how above it there is the absolutely universal, which eternally sublates and produces it; or the absolute subsumed under the absolute concept, the absolute movement, or the process of ethical life; this movement, which extends itself into the unfolding of all the potencies and which properly first posits and brings forth this unfolding, must be presented in them; and since the essence of this potency is the difference of the universal and particular, but at the same time the sublation of that difference, and this organic movement must have reality, while the reality of the universal consists in its subsisting as a multitude of individuals, this opposition is to be recognised thus: how the universal is real, or in the hands of individuals, that these are in truth in the universal and indifferentiated, and in separation take such a movement that through it particularisation is subsumed under the universal and becomes absolutely equal to it. In terms of power the universal in its reality is superior to the particular, for in whatever potency it may be, that which governs is formally the absolutely universal, the power of the whole is attached to it; but the government must at the same time be the positive absolutely universal, thereby it is absolute potency; and the question everywhere in difference is that the government truly be potency against the

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