System of Ethical Life

[p. 349]

|349| concept, and insofar as the concept subsumes intuition. But because what moves is essentially organic, this distinction [is] thoroughly formal; the intuition which subsumes the concept is itself absolute concept; the concept which [subsumes] intuition is itself absolute intuition. The appearance of this form of this opposition is outside the organic itself; it is in reflection on the movement. For the organic itself it is posited thus: insofar as the concept appears as what subsumes, the organic is posited as individual, as a singular being for itself, against other individual peoples as singular beings; insofar as intuition is what subsumes, thus subsuming takes place really, truly, the universal in itself is what determines the particular and annihilates it within itself, to that extent the people, the totality, is directed against its own, inner particular; this particular is its own because here the universal is posited as the in-itself.

This separation is, as said, a formal one; the movement itself is nothing but an alternation of these two subsumptions; from the subsumption under the concept, in which the opposed are singular, indifference raises itself, and ideally intuits the singular, herewith posited outside the organic, as its own, but still itself in the form of particularity; until it also intuits it really as itself, or absolute identity reconstructs itself.

Being subsumed under the concept would be the abstraction of the relation to foreign peoples, as individuals against one another; but the organic process is immediately an ideal sublating of this difference; or the determinacy immediately becomes the people’s own, a difference within itself, and the living movement absolutely sublates it; internal government and government directed outwards can therefore [be] no absolute principle of division; neither is an organic system comprehended in the universal, subordinate, but at the same time being for itself; rather, the moments of absolute intuition, in order to be recognised as organic, must themselves be systems in which those forms of outer and inner are subordinated; those moments, in order to be systems, must have difference wholly from outside, in reflection, but in themselves absolute identity within themselves, not such that this hovered above them as such, but only as form.

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