System of Ethical Life

[p. 343]

|343| thereby be limited against its nature; partly it would, for that against which it is limiting, be potency in general, superior might, not one with it in essence and spirit; it must have the whole shape in common with it, be one with it in relation to particularity, or, as this is expressed, have the same interest as it, only that the opposition of the governing against the governed is the external form of the indifferent against the different, of the universal against the particular.

Thus old age is the body of absolute indifference against all the estates; it lacks the individuality which is the shape of each singular one; and although priesthood is the indifference which is not left to nature but wrested from it and which annihilates the individual with self-activity, it is to be noted partly that the old of the first estate, as belonging to it, have led a divine life; partly that the old man of the first estate must himself be a priest, and in the transition from manhood into the higher age must live as a priest, and so bring forth for himself an absolute, true old age; partly that the true priest also requires external old age as his body, that his completion cannot be placed, contrary to nature, in an earlier age, but must await the highest.

In this highest government the preservation of [the] absolute relation of the whole is absolutely deposited; it is absolute rest in the infinite movement of the whole, and in relation to that movement; the wisdom of this government is directed towards the livingness of all the parts, and this livingness is that of the whole, and only through this. But the livingness of the whole is not an abstraction of life-force, but absolute identity in difference; the absolute Idea; but this, in its absolute highest falling-apart, is nothing other than the relation of the estates constructed in the first potency; it is the absolute as universal, without any of the determinacy which occurs in the particular potencies; this indifferent Idea of the highest government does not concern any form of particularity and determinacy which presents itself in the ramification of the whole into its subordinate systems; it does not have to repeat this Idea in them; for otherwise it would be a formal potency for them; rather, once this

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