System of Ethical Life

[p. 340]

|340| particular, that the individuals necessarily be in the universal and ethical. This formal determination of the concept of a constitution, the reality of the universal insofar as it is in opposition to a particular and thus appears as potency and cause, must at the same time be recognised as totality, in the falling-apart of the potencies, and this system, determined according to the necessity in which they separate, and according to how in the separation the potency of government is at the same time formed for each of these determinacies, is the true constitution. A truly ethical totality must have gone into this separation, and the concept of government must present itself as wisdom of the constitution; so that the form and consciousness is just as real as the absolute is in the form of identity and nature; the totality is only as the unity of essence and form, neither of which can be lacking. Crudeness in relation to constitution, in which nothing is separated but the whole as such moves immediately against every singularity of determination, is formlessness, and sublation of freedom; for freedom lies in form, and in the singular part, a subordinate system of the whole organism, being self-active for itself in its determinacy.

This government therefore divides itself immediately into the absolute government and that of the singular potencies.

A.

The absolute government seems immediately to be the first estate, because this is the absolute potency for the remaining ones; the reality of absolute ethical life, and the real, intuited spirit of the others; the others, however, are in the particular. But it is itself estate against estate, and there must be something higher than itself and its difference against the other. As absolute universal reality it is indeed the absolute government; but organic nature goes towards the annihilation of the inorganic and the taking of it into itself, and the latter preserves itself through itself, through the inner spirit which posits organic nature, and its reflection as an inorganic one; this subsists in the concept, as something absolutely universal, and the annihilation and potentiating of it by the organic necessarily concerns

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