System of Ethical Life

[p. 357]

B. The second system of government. System of justice

Cross-reference: The administration of justice: § 209 ff.

In the first, the opposition of the universal and particular is formal; value, the universal, and needs, possessions, the particular, do not determine the essence of the thing, but are outside it; the essence remains its relation to a need. But in this system of falling-apart, the ideal determinacy is the essence; the thing related to need, as property, is determined such that, essentially, as this particular possessed thing, it is a universal, that the relation to need, and need is something wholly singular, is a recognised one; the thing is mine, its not-being-annihilated, but rather the relative identity in which I stand with it, or the ideality of being-annihilated, (possession) this objectivity is posited as a subjective one, as being in the intelligences; thereby, as this identity, it is intuition, and not a singular intuition, of this singular individual, but absolute intuition; that relation has objective reality; the I is a universal, made fast, it has being; that relation is determined as a universal one.

The middle, the reality of this relation, is the government; that a relation of possession is not something ideal but at the same time real consists in all I’s positing this relation; in the empirical I of relating existing as the whole multitude of I’s. This multitude, according to the abstraction of its quantity, is public power, and this public power, as thinking, conscious, is the government, here as administration of justice. As administration of justice it is the totality of all rights, but with complete indifference towards the interest of the relation of the thing to the need of this determinate individual; this individual is for it a completely indifferent universal person; in pure justice only the universal, the abstract element of the kind of possession and acquisition, comes into consideration. But justice must itself be something living, and have regard to the person.

Right in the form of consciousness is law, which here relates to

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