{"id":901250,"date":"2026-08-27T12:00:24","date_gmt":"2026-08-27T10:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/grundlinien.de\/?page_id=901250"},"modified":"2026-08-27T13:25:40","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T11:25:40","slug":"natural-right-essay","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/grundlinien.de\/en\/natural-right-essay\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

ON THE SCIENTIFIC WAYS OF TREATING NATURAL RIGHT, ITS PLACE IN PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY, AND ITS RELATION TO THE POSITIVE SCIENCES OF RIGHT.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

First published 1802\/1803 in the “Kritisches Journal der Philosophie” (ed. Hegel and Schelling), vol. 2, issues 2 and 3. German text after: G.W.F. Hegel, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4 (Jenaer Kritische Schriften), Hamburg 1968. Passages printed with letter-spacing (Sperrdruck) in the original are rendered here in italics. This is an original English translation prepared for this site.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The science of natural right, like other sciences such as mechanics and physics, has indeed long been recognized as an essentially philosophical science, and \u2014 since philosophy must have parts \u2014 as an essential part of it; but it has shared with the others the common fate that the philosophical element of philosophy was located in metaphysics alone, and little share in it was granted to them, so that they, in their particular principle, were kept wholly independent of the Idea; the sciences cited as examples have finally been compelled to confess, more or less, their distance from philosophy, so that they acknowledge what is customarily called experience as their scientific principle, thereby renouncing any claim to be true sciences, and content themselves with consisting of a collection of empirical items of knowledge, and with making use of the concepts of the understanding on sufferance, without wishing thereby to assert anything objective. If that which called itself philosophical science was, at first against its will, excluded from philosophy and from the category of science as such, and then in the end acquiesced in this position, this exclusion has its ground not in the fact that those so-called sciences did not proceed from the science of philosophy itself and did not maintain themselves in conscious connection with it; for every part of philosophy is capable, in its singularity, of being an independent science and of attaining a complete inner necessity, because that through which it is a true science is the Absolute; in which shape alone it is the peculiar principle that lies above the sphere of its cognition and its freedom, and in relation to which it belongs to an external necessity; but the Idea itself remains free of this determinacy, and is able to reflect itself in this particular science as purely as absolute life expresses itself in every living thing; without the scientific character of such a science, or its<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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inner rationality, rising up into the light of day, into the pure form of the Idea, which is the essence of every science and, in philosophy as the absolute science, is this pure Idea itself; of that peculiar and yet free scientific formation of a science, geometry gives a brilliant example, envied by the other sciences. Just as little is it the case that all reality must be denied to sciences constituted like those named above, on the ground that they are properly empirical; for just as every part or every side of philosophy is capable of being an independent science, so each is thereby immediately also an independent and complete image, and can be taken up and presented in the shape of an image drawn from an intuition which purely and happily keeps itself free from contamination by fixed concepts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The completion of science, however, requires that intuition and the image be united with the logical and taken up into the purely ideal, just as it requires that the separated, though true, science be relieved of its singularity, and its principle be cognized according to its higher connection and necessity, and precisely thereby itself be completely liberated. This alone also makes it possible to cognize the boundaries of the science, boundaries of which, without this, it must remain in ignorance, because otherwise it would have to stand above itself and cognize the nature of its principle according to its determinacy in the absolute form; for from this cognition there would immediately follow for it the cognition and certainty of the extent of the equality of its various determinacies; but as it is, it can only relate to its boundaries empirically, and must now make false attempts to overstep them, now suppose them narrower than they are, and therefore undergo quite unexpected extensions; just as geometry too \u2014 which, for example, knows how to demonstrate the incommensurability of the diameter and the side of the square, but not that of the diameter and the circumference of a circle 1<\/a><\/sup> \u2014 gives an example, and still<\/p>\n\n\n

  1. Fichte prides himself somewhat (in the Introduction to his Natural Right) on the simplicity of his insight into the ground of this latter incommensurability, namely, that the curved is, in earnest, not straight. The superficiality of this ground is self-evident, and is also immediately refuted by the first incommensurability, that of the diameter and the side of the square \u2014 both of which are straight \u2014 as well as by the quadrature of the parabola. As for the aid that, in the same place, is sought from sound common sense against mathematical infinity \u2014 namely, that a polygon of infinitely many sides cannot, precisely because it is a polygon of infinitely many sides, be measured \u2014 this same aid would, on the one hand, have to be available also against the infinite progress in which the absolute Idea is supposed to realize itself; and on the other hand, nothing at all is thereby determined about the main point \u2014 positive infinity, which is not an infinite quantity but identity \u2014 namely, whether this is to be posited; which amounts to saying that nothing is determined about commensurability or incommensurability at all. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n
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    more so does arithmetic, and most of all the union of the two, give the greatest examples of science groping about in the dark at its boundaries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    If critical philosophy has had the important negative effect, upon the theoretical sciences, of demonstrating that what is scientific in them belongs not to something objective but to the middle thing between nothing and reality, to the mixture of being and non-being, and of bringing about their confession that they exist only in empirical opinion, then its positive contribution on this side has turned out all the poorer, and it has not been able to give those sciences back to philosophy. By contrast, it has placed the Absolute entirely in practical philosophy, and in this domain it is positive or dogmatic knowledge. We must regard critical philosophy, which also calls itself transcendental idealism, in general, and particularly in natural right, as the culminating point of that opposition which \u2014 like the circles on the surface of water spreading out concentrically from the point where it is set in motion, until in ever smaller movements they lose their relation to a center point and become infinite \u2014 grew ever greater in earlier scientific endeavors, out of the seclusion of barbarism, from weaker beginnings, until in critical philosophy it came to an understanding of itself through the absolute concept of infinity, and, as infinity, also sublates itself. The earlier ways of treating natural right, and what would have to be regarded as its various principles, must therefore be denied all significance for the essence of science; for although they are in opposition and in negativity, they are not in absolute negativity, or in the infinity which alone is for science, but possess neither the positive nor the negative in pure form, and are mixtures of both. It would only be the interest of a curiosity concerning the history of science that could linger over them, both in order to compare them with the absolute Idea, and to discern, in its very distortion, the necessity with which \u2014 distorted through a determinacy that functions as principle \u2014 the moments of the absolute form present themselves and, even under the dominion of a restricted principle, nonetheless govern these attempts; and also to see the empirical condition of the world reflected in the ideal mirror of science.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    For as regards the latter point<\/em>, in the interconnection of all things the empirical existence and condition of all sciences will indeed likewise express the condition of the world, but the condition of natural right does so most closely, because it relates immediately to the ethical, the mover of all human affairs, and insofar as the science of it has an existence, belongs to the necessity of being one with the empirical shape of the ethical, which is likewise within necessity,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    and must, as a science, express that same shape in the form of universality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    As regards the first point<\/em>, the only true distinction of the principle of a science that can be recognized is whether it is within the Absolute, or whether it is outside the absolute unity, in opposition; in the latter case, however, it could not be a science at all, unless its principle were at least some incomplete and relative unity, or the concept of a relation \u2014 even if it were only the empty abstraction of the relation itself, under the name of attractive force, or the force of being-one. For sciences whose principle is not a concept of relation but merely the empty force of being-one, nothing ideal remains but the first, ideal relation according to which the child differs from the world \u2014 the form of representation into which they place empirical qualities and whose manifold they can merely enumerate; such sciences would properly be called empirical sciences<\/em>. But because practical sciences, by their nature, are directed toward something really universal, or toward a unity that is the unity of what is different, in practical empiricism, too, the feelings must involve not pure qualities but relations \u2014 whether negative ones, such as the drive of self-preservation, or positive ones, such as love and hatred, sociability, and the like; and the more scientific empiricism is distinguished from that pure empiricism not, in general, by having relations rather than qualities as its object, but by fixing these relations in the form of the concept and holding fast to this negative absoluteness, without, however, separating this form of unity from its content; we shall call this empirical science; whereas that form of science in which the opposition is absolute and the pure unity, or infinity \u2014 the negatively absolute \u2014 is separated purely from the content and posited on its own, we shall call a purely formal science.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Although a specific distinction has thus been established between the two inauthentic ways of scientifically treating natural right, according to which the principle of the one is relations and mixtures of empirical intuition and the universal, while that of the other is absolute opposition and absolute universality, it is nevertheless self-evident that the ingredients of both \u2014 empirical intuition and concept \u2014 are the same, and that formalism, in passing over from its pure negation to a content, likewise can arrive at nothing other than relations, or relative identities; because, since the purely ideal, or the opposition, is posited as absolute, the absolute Idea and unity cannot be present; and with regard to intuition, since, along with the principle of absolute opposition or of the purely ideal’s being-absolute, the absolute principle of empiricism<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    is posited as well, the syntheses, insofar as they are meant to have not merely the negative significance of the sublation of one part of the opposition, but also a positive significance of intuition, can only represent empirical intuitions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    These two ways of scientifically treating natural right must first be characterized more closely<\/em>; the first with regard to the manner in which the absolute Idea appears in it according to the moments of the absolute form; the other, as to how the infinite, or the negative absolute, seeks in vain to bring itself to a positive organization; the discussion of this latter attempt will lead directly to a consideration of the nature and the relation of the sciences of the ethical, as philosophical<\/em> sciences, as well as their relation to that<\/em> which is called positive science of right,<\/em> which, though it holds itself outside philosophy, and by itself renouncing philosophy believes it can withdraw itself from its critique, nonetheless at the same time also claims to have an absolute subsistence and a true reality \u2014 a pretension that cannot be overlooked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    As for the way of treating<\/em> natural right which we have called the empirical<\/em> way, in the first place it is not at all possible to engage, as regards their matter, with the determinacies and relational concepts themselves which it seizes upon and asserts under the name of principles; rather, it is precisely this isolating and fixing of determinacies that must be negated. The nature of this isolating brings with it that the scientific element can only concern the form of unity, and that, from an organic relation with the manifold qualities into which it can be divided, some determinacy must be singled out \u2014 provided these are not merely to be enumerated \u2014 in order to arrive at a unity out of this multitude, and this determinacy must be regarded as the essence of the relation; but precisely by this the totality of the organic is not attained, and the rest of it, excluded from that chosen determinacy, comes under the dominion of this determinacy, which is elevated to essence and purpose. Thus, for example, in order to cognize the relation of marriage, now the begetting of children, now the community of goods, and so on, is posited, and from such a determinacy, which is made into the law as the essential element, the whole organic relation is determined and contaminated; or, regarding punishment, now the determinacy of the moral improvement of the criminal, now of the damage done, now of the representation of the punishment in others, now of the criminal’s own representation of it preceding the crime, now of the necessity that this representation be made real, that the threat be carried out, and so on, is seized upon, and such a single feature is made into the purpose and essence of the whole;<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    whereby it naturally follows that, because such a determinacy stands in no necessary connection with the other determinacies still to be dug up and distinguished, an endless tormented struggle arises to find the necessary relation and dominance of the one over the others; and that, because the inner necessity, which is not to be found in singularity, is lacking, each determinacy can very well vindicate its independence from the others. \u2014 Such qualities, seized from the multitude of relations into which the organic is splintered by empirical or imperfectly reflected intuition, and set into the form of conceptual unity, are what that kind of knowledge calls the essence and the purposes, and, since their form as concept is expressed as the absolute being of the determinacy which constitutes the content of the concept, they are set up as principles, laws, duties, and so on; more will be said about this transformation of the absoluteness of the pure form \u2014 which, however, is the negative absoluteness, or pure identity, the pure concept, infinity \u2014 into the absoluteness of the content and of the determinacy taken up into the form, when we come to the principle of critical philosophy, which undertakes that same transformation \u2014 one that occurs unconsciously in the empirical knowledge here under discussion \u2014 with reflection upon it, and as absolute reason and duty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    It is this formal unity, into which determinacy is posited by thought, that at the same time gives the semblance of the necessity which science seeks; for the unity of opposites, considered in relation to these as real, is their necessity. But because the matter of the formal unity here spoken of is not the whole of the opposites but only one<\/em> of the opposites, a mere determinacy, the necessity too is only a formal, analytic one, and relates merely to the form of an identical or analytic proposition in which the determinacy can be presented; and it is through the absoluteness of this proposition that an absoluteness of content is also surreptitiously obtained, and laws and principles are thereby constituted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    But since this empirical science finds itself amid the manifold of such principles, laws, purposes, duties, and rights, none of which is absolute, the image and the need of the absolute unity of all these disconnected determinacies, and of an original, simple necessity, must at the same time hover before it; and we shall consider how it will satisfy this demand, which stems from reason, or how the absolute Idea of reason will be presented in its moments under the dominion of the opposition of the many and the one \u2014 an opposition insuperable for this empirical knowledge; it is in part interesting in itself to discern, in this scientific endeavor, and in the murky<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    medium of this endeavor, the reflection and dominion of the Absolute, even while at the same time perceiving its perversion; and in part, the forms which the moments of the Absolute have taken on within it have become a kind of prejudice \u2014 thoughts held to be beyond doubt and universally valid \u2014 whose nullity critique must expose in order to justify science’s taking no account of them; and this demonstration of their nullity is accomplished most evidently by exposing the reality-less ground and soil out of which they have grown, and whose taste and nature has grown into them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    In the first place, what hovers before empirical science is scientific totality as a totality of the manifold, or as completeness, whereas what hovers before formalism proper is consistency; the former can raise its experiences into universality as it pleases, and carry on the consistency of its thought-out determinacies just so far, until other empirical material, which contradicts the former but has just as much right to be thought and pronounced as a principle, no longer permits the consistency of the preceding determinacy but forces it to be abandoned; formalism can extend its consistency as far as the emptiness of its principle allows at all, or as far as a content which it has surreptitiously acquired allows; but in return it is also entitled proudly to exclude, from its apriority and its science, whatever completeness lacks, under the contemptuous name of the empirical; for it asserts its formal principles as the a priori and the absolute, and hence regards whatever it cannot master by means of them as not absolute and as contingent \u2014 unless it knows how to help itself otherwise, by finding, in passing to the empirical in general, and from one determinacy back to another, the formal transition of advancing from the conditioned to the condition, and, since this condition is again something conditioned, so on into infinity; whereby, however, it not only forfeits every advantage over what it calls empiricism, but, since in the connection of the conditioned with the condition these opposites are posited as subsisting absolutely, itself sinks entirely into empirical necessity, and lends to this necessity, through the formal identity or the negative-absolute by which it holds them together, the semblance of true absoluteness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    This combination of consistency with completeness of the image \u2014 whether it be the latter’s complete, formal, and empty consistency, or the former’s, which, with determinate concepts as principles, passing from one to another, is consistent only in its inconsistency \u2014 immediately displaces, however, the position of the manifold as it is for pure empiricism; for which every item has equal right with every other, and which prefers no determinacy, each as real as the next, over another; to which we shall return below, when comparing pure empiricism<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    with this more scientific kind here under discussion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    After this formal totality, we must consider how the absolute unity appears in the reflection of empirical knowledge \u2014 both as simple unity, which we may call the original unity, and as totality; both unities, which in the Absolute are one, and whose identity is the Absolute, must appear in that knowledge as separated and as something different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    As regards, in the first place, that original unity, empiricism cannot be concerned with it as the essence of necessity, which for appearance is an external bond of the manifold; for in the unity that is essential, the manifold is immediately annihilated and is nothing; because manifold being is the principle of empiricism, it is denied to it to press through to the absolute nothing of its qualities, which for it are absolute, and, moreover, through the concept according to which they are simply many, are infinitely many; that original unity can therefore only mean a \u2014 as far as possible \u2014 simple and small quantity of qualities, with which it believes itself able to suffice for the cognition of the rest. This ideal, in which what more or less counts as arbitrary and contingent is blotted out, and the least necessary quantity of the manifold is posited, is, for empiricism, in the physical realm as much as in the ethical, the chaos,<\/em> which in the latter realm is presented now more under the image of being, through fantasy, as the state of nature,<\/em> now more under the form of possibility and abstraction, presented \u2014 as an enumeration, through empirical psychology, of the faculties found in man<\/em> \u2014 as the nature and destiny of<\/em> man; and in this way what is, on the one hand, asserted as simply necessary, in itself, absolute, is at the same time, on the other hand, acknowledged as something not real, merely imagined, and a thing of thought \u2014 there as a fiction, here as a mere possibility \u2014 which is the harshest contradiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    For the common understanding, which abides in the murky mixture of what is in itself and what is transient, nothing is more intelligible than that it should be able to find what is in itself in the following way: that if it separates out from the mixed image of the condition of right everything arbitrary and contingent, then through this abstraction what is absolutely necessary must immediately remain over; if one thinks away everything that a dim intimation can count as belonging to the particular and transient \u2014 such as particular customs, history, culture, and also what belongs to the state \u2014 then man remains, under the image of the bare state of nature, or the abstraction thereof, together with his essential possibilities, and one need only look in order to find what is necessary; \u2014 accordingly, whatever is recognized as standing in relation to the state must therefore also be sepa-<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    …for, because the chaotic image of the necessary can contain not the absolute unity, but only the simple manifold \u2014 the atoms with the fewest possible properties \u2014 so that whatever might fall under the concept of a connecting and ordering of these, as the weakest unity of which the principle of plurality is capable, is thereby excluded from it as something first later and added on to that manifold. Now, in that division, empiricism lacks, in the first place, any criterion at all as to where the boundary between the contingent and the necessary runs \u2014 that is, what must remain in the chaos of the state of nature, or in the abstraction of man, and what must be left out; the guiding determination here can be nothing other than that just as much be contained in it as is needed for presenting what is found in actuality; the judging principle for that a priori is the a posteriori. In order to demonstrate the connection of what is to be made valid in the representation of the condition of right with the original and necessary \u2014 and thus to demonstrate it itself as necessary \u2014 one has, for this purpose, only to place a particular quality or faculty into the chaos; following the manner, common to the sciences that proceed from the empirical in general, of making hypotheses for the so-called explanation of actuality, in which this actuality, in the very same determinacy, is posited only in a wholly formal-ideal shape, as force, matter, faculty \u2014 so that the one is thereby also very easily comprehensible and explicable from the other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    On one side, this dim presentiment of an original and absolute unity, which expresses itself in the chaos of the state of nature and in the abstraction from faculties and inclinations, does not carry through to absolute negative unity, but goes only so far as the extinguishing of a great multitude of particularities and oppositions; yet there remains in it an indeterminable multitude of qualitative determinacies which, taken by themselves, have no necessity other than an empirical one, and among one another have no inner necessity; they stand only in the relation of a many, and, because this many is for one another yet without unity, are determined as opposed to one another and in absolute conflict with one another; and the separated energies of the ethical must, in the state of nature or in the abstractum of man, be thought as in a mutually annihilating war. But it is for this very reason easy to show that, since these qualities are simply opposed to one another and hence purely ideal, they cannot, in this ideality and separateness, subsist as they are supposed to, but rather sublate themselves and are reduced to nothing; empiricism, however, is unable to arrive at this absolute reflection and at the insight into the nothingness of the determinacies within the absolutely simple, so that for it the many nothing remains a multitude of realities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    But to this plurality, the positive unity that expresses itself as absolute totality must, for empiricism, be added as something other and alien; and already in this form of connecting the two sides of the absolute identity it is implied that the totality will present itself just as clouded and impure as that of the original unity. The ground of the being of one of these here separated unities for the other, or of the transition from the first to the second, is as easy for empiricism to state as grounding in general comes easily to it. According to the fiction of the state of nature, it is abandoned for the sake of the evils it brings with it \u2014 which means nothing other than that what one wishes to arrive at is presupposed from the outset, namely that an accord among what conflicts as chaos is the good, or is that to which one must come; or into the representation of the original qualities as possibilities such a ground of transition is immediately inserted, as a drive toward sociability; or the conceptual form of a faculty is renounced altogether, and one proceeds at once to the wholly particular manifestation of that second unity, to the historical \u2014 as the subjugation of the weaker by the more powerful, and so on. The unity itself, however, can, according to the principle of absolute qualitative plurality \u2014 as in empirical physics \u2014 present nothing but, once again, manifold entanglements of the simple and separated many posited as original, superficial contacts among these qualities, which are in themselves, in their particularity, indestructible and capable only of entering into slight, partial combinations and admixtures, in place of the many atomic qualities \u2014 that is, a plurality of what is divided, or of relations; and, insofar as unity is posited as a whole, it can posit nothing but the empty name of a formless and external harmony, under the name of society and the state. Even if this unity, whether taken by itself or in a more empirical relation, is represented, according to its origin, as absolute, receiving its immediate origin from God, and even if, in its subsistence, its center and inner essence too are represented as divine, this representation nonetheless remains again something merely formal, merely hovering over the plurality, not permeating it. Suppose that God is recognized not only as the founder of the union but also as its sustainer, and, in relation to the latter, that the majesty of the supreme power is recognized as its reflection and as in itself divine \u2014 even so, the divine element of the union remains something external for the united many, who must be posited in relation to it only in the relation of dominion, because the principle of this empiricism excludes the absolute unity of the one and the many; at which point of this relation it coincides immediately with the principle opposed to it, for which the abstract unity is the first \u2014 except that empiricism is not embarrassed by its inconsistencies, which arise from the mixing of things posited as so specifically different as the abstract unity and the absolute plurality, and precisely for that reason also has the advantage of not closing off access to views which, apart from their merely material side, are appearances of a pure and divine inwardness \u2014 inasmuch as this can occur only according to the principle of opposition, in which alone ruling and obeying are possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The state of nature, and the majesty and divinity of the whole of the condition of right \u2014 alien to individuals and therefore itself singular and particular \u2014 as well as the relation of the absolute submissiveness of the subjects under that supreme power, are the forms in which the splintered moments of organic ethical life \u2014 the moment of absolute unity, and of this unity insofar as it comprehends within itself the opposition of unity and plurality and is absolute totality, and the moment of infinity, or of the nothingness of the realities of the opposition \u2014 are fixed as particular essences, and precisely thereby, like the Idea, are inverted. The absolute Idea of ethical life, by contrast, contains the state of nature and majesty as simply identical, since the latter is itself nothing other than absolute ethical nature; and no loss of the absolute freedom that one would have to understand by natural freedom, nor any surrender of ethical nature, can be thought through the real being of majesty; but the natural element which, within the ethical relation, would have to be thought of as something to be surrendered, would itself be nothing ethical, and would hence least of all present that same nature in its originality. Just as little are the infinity, or the nothingness, of the individual, of the subjects, fixed in the absolute Idea in relative identity with majesty, as a relation of submissiveness in which singularity too would be something simply posited; rather, in the Idea, infinity is truly \u2014 singularity as such is nothing \u2014 and is simply one with the absolute ethical majesty; and this true, living, non-submissive being-one alone is the true ethical life of the individual.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    We have accused scientific empiricism, insofar as it is scientific, of the positive nullity and untruth of its principles, laws, and so on, because it confers upon determinacies, through the formal unity into which it translates them, the negative absoluteness of the concept, and pronounces them as positively absolute and as being in themselves \u2014 as purpose<\/em> and determination, principle, law, duty and right, forms which signify something absolute; but in order to preserve the unity of an organic relation, which offers up a multitude of such concepts to this qualitative determining, dominance over the other determinacies of the manifold must be given to one<\/em> determinacy expressed as purpose, determination, or law, and the others must be posited before it as unreal and null. It is in this application and consistency that intuition, as inner totality, is annihilated; inconsistency is therefore what can correct that reception of determinacies into the concept and sublate the violence done to intuition; for inconsistency immediately annihilates the absoluteness previously conferred upon a determinacy. From this side, the old, thoroughly inconsistent empiricism must be justified \u2014 not in relation to absolute science as such, but in relation to the consistency of the empirical scientificity that has been under discussion so far. A great and pure intuition is thus able, in the purely architectonic character of its presentation \u2014 in which the connectedness of necessity and the dominance of form do not step forth into visibility \u2014 to express the truly ethical; like a building that mutely presents the spirit of its architect in its scattered mass, without that image itself, gathered into one, being set up within it as a figure. In such a presentation, made with the aid of concepts, it is only an awkwardness of reason that it does not raise what it encompasses and permeates into ideal form and become conscious of it as Idea; if intuition only remains true to itself, and does not let itself be led astray by the understanding, then, insofar as it cannot dispense with concepts for its expression, it will conduct itself awkwardly with regard to them, will assume distorted shapes in its passage through consciousness, and will be, for the concept, both incoherent and contradictory; but the arrangement of the parts and of the self-modifying determinacies allows the \u2014 invisible, yet inward \u2014 rational spirit to be divined, and insofar as this appearance of it is regarded as product and result, it will agree perfectly with the Idea as product. For the understanding, nothing is easier here than to fall upon this empiricism, to set other grounds against those awkward ones, to point out the confusion and contradiction of the concepts, to draw from the isolated propositions consequences that express the harshest and most unreasonable things, and to expose, in manifold ways, the unscientific character of empiricism \u2014 whereby justice is done to it, especially when it either has the pretension of being scientific, or is polemical against science as such. If, on the other hand, determinacies are fixed, and their law is carried through with consistency across the sides thrown up by empiricism, intuition is subjected to them, and what is generally accustomed to being called theory is thereby formed, then empiricism rightly accuses this of one-sidedness; and through the completeness of the determinacies it asserts, it is in its power to force that theory, by instances, into a universality that becomes wholly empty. That confinement of concepts, the fixing of determinacies, the elevation of a seized-upon side of appearance into universality, and the dominance conferred upon it over the others \u2014 this is what, in recent times, has called itself no longer theory but philosophy, and \u2014 insofar as it soared up to empty abstractions and took possession of purer negations such as freedom, pure will, humanity, and so on \u2014 metaphysics; and believed itself to have brought about philosophical revolutions both in natural right and, especially, in political and criminal right, whenever it dragged these sciences back and forth with such essenceless abstractions and positively expressed negations as freedom, equality, the pure state, and so on, or with determinacies picked up from common empiricism that are just as essenceless as those \u2014 such as compulsion, especially psychological compulsion, with its whole retinue of the opposition between practical reason and sensuous incentives, and whatever else is native to this psychology \u2014 and likewise forced such null concepts, with greater or lesser consistency, through an entire science, as absolute purposes of reason, principles of reason, and laws. Empiricism rightly demands that such philosophizing must orient itself by experience; it rightly insists on its tenacity against such a scaffolding and artifice of principles; and it prefers its own empirical inconsistency \u2014 grounded, even if only in a dim intuition of a whole \u2014 to the consistency of such philosophizing, and prefers its own confusion, for example, of ethical life, morality, legality, or, in a single case, in punishment, the confusion of revenge, security of the state, reform, execution of the threat, deterrence, prevention, and so on, whether in a scientific respect or in practical life, to the absolute keeping-apart of these different sides of one and the same intuition and to the determining of the whole of it through a single one of these qualities; it rightly maintains that theory, and that which calls itself philosophy and metaphysics, has no application, and contradicts necessary practice \u2014 an inapplicability that would be better expressed by saying that in that theory and philosophy there is nothing absolute, no reality and truth. Empiricism, finally, rightly reproaches such philosophizing also with its ingratitude toward it, inasmuch as it is empiricism that supplies it with the content of its concepts, and must see this content corrupted and distorted by that philosophizing; for empiricism presents the determinacy of the content in an entanglement and connectedness with other determinacies which, in their essence, form a whole, organic and living \u2014 something that is killed by that dismemberment, and by that elevation of essenceless abstractions and particulars to absoluteness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    An empiricism would assert itself against such theory and philosophy with the greatest right, and would regard the multitude of principles, purposes, laws, duties, and rights not as something absolute, but as distinctions important for the cultivation through which its own intuition becomes clearer to it \u2014 if it were itself pure, and remained so. But when empiricism seems to enter into combat with theory, it usually turns out that the one, like the other, is an intuition already contaminated and sublated beforehand by reflection, and a distorted reason; and that what passes itself off as empiricism is only the weaker party in abstraction, and is that which, with less self-activity, has not itself extracted, distinguished, and fixed its own limitations, but is caught up in such limitations as have become fixed in general culture, are present as common sense, and therefore seem to have been taken up immediately from experience. Between such a fixed distortion of intuition and the abstractions only now being fixed, the picture of the conflict is necessarily just as motley as they themselves are; each uses against the other now an abstraction, now a so-called experience, and on both sides it is empiricism breaking itself against empiricism, and limitation shattering itself against limitation \u2014 now a great show of principles and laws against philosophy, and its exclusion as an incompetent judge over such absolute truths in which the understanding has become firmly lodged, now an abuse of it for the sake of ratiocination and an appeal to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    This relative right, which has been conceded to empiricism \u2014 when intuition is what rules within it \u2014 against the mixing of the empirical and the reflected, refers, as will be recalled, to its unconscious inward aspect; but the middle between the two, between that inward aspect and its outward aspect, consciousness, is the side on which its deficiency, and therefore its one-sidedness, lies; and its drive toward the scientific, and its incomplete linkage and mere contact with the concept \u2014 through which it thereby only contaminates itself \u2014 stems from the necessity that plurality and finitude absolutely submerge themselves in infinity, or in universality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    It is, however, the side of infinity<\/em> that constitutes the principle of the apriority opposed to the empirical \u2014 to a consideration of which we now turn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    The passing-over of empirical opinion, and of its mixing of the manifold with the simple, into the concept, is, in the absolute concept or in infinity, taken out of its wavering, and the incomplete separation is decided. In a lower abstraction, infinity is indeed also raised up as the absoluteness of the subject in the doctrine of happiness in general, and, in natural right in particular, by those systems that are called antisocialist and that posit the being of the individual as the first and highest \u2014 but not into the pure abstraction it has attained in Kantian or Fichtean idealism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    It does not belong here to present the nature of infinity and its manifold transformations; for just as it is the principle of movement and change, so its essence itself is nothing other than to be the unmediated opposite of itself; or it is the negatively absolute, the abstraction of form, which, in being pure identity, is immediately pure non-identity or absolute opposition; in being pure ideality, is just as immediately pure reality; in being the infinite, is the absolutely finite; in being the indeterminate, is absolute determinacy. The absolute passage into the opposite, which is its essence, and the vanishing of every reality into its opposite, can be arrested only by fixing, in an empirical manner, one side of it \u2014 namely the reality, or the subsistence of the opposed terms \u2014 and abstracting from the opposite, the nothingness of this subsistence. This real opposed term is, on one side, manifold being, or finitude, and, over against it, infinity as negation of plurality and, positively, as pure unity; and the absolute concept, constituted in this way, gives, in this unity, that which has been called pure reason. But the relation of this pure unity to the manifold being standing over against it is itself, in turn, likewise a doubled relation \u2014 either the positive relation of the subsistence of both, or that of the annihilatedness of both; but both this subsistence and this annihilatedness are to be understood only as partial, for were the subsistence of both absolute, there would be no relation between the two at all, and were the complete annihilatedness of both posited, there would be no subsistence of either; this partial subsistence and partial negatedness of both \u2014 the opposing of a divisible I to a divisible not-I within the I, that is, within the relation which is for that very reason likewise partial \u2014 is the absolute principle of this philosophy. In the first, the positive relation, the pure unity is called theoretical reason; in the negative relation, practical reason; and because in the latter the negation of the opposition is the first \u2014 and hence unity is what subsists more \u2014 while in the former the subsistence of the opposition is the first \u2014 and hence plurality is what first and more subsists \u2014 practical reason accordingly appears here as the real, and theoretical reason as the ideal. One sees, however, that this determination belongs entirely to the opposition and to appearance; for the pure unity that is posited as reason is, to be sure, negative, ideal, if the opposed many \u2014 which is thereby the unreasonable \u2014 simply has subsistence; just as it appears as more subsisting and more real when the many is posited as negated, or rather as to-be-negated. But that unreasonable many \u2014 as nature is posited over against reason, the pure unity \u2014 is unreasonable only because it is posited as the essenceless abstraction of the many, while reason, conversely, is posited as the essenceless abstraction of the one; considered in itself, however, that many is just as much the absolute unity of the one and the many as this unity is; and nature, or theoretical reason, which is the many, must, as absolute unity of the one and the many, rather conversely be determined as the real reason, while ethical reason, which is the unity, must, as absolute unity of the one and the many, be determined as the ideal \u2014 because in the opposition, reality lies in plurality, but ideality lies in unity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    It is only with what is called practical reason that the formal<\/em> Idea of the identity of the ideal and the real is to be recognized, and this Idea was supposed to be the absolute point of indifference in these systems; but that Idea does not emerge from difference, nor does the ideal attain to reality; for although in this practical reason the ideal and the real are identical, the real nonetheless remains simply opposed; this real is essentially posited as outside reason, and practical reason exists only in its difference from it; its essence is conceived as a relation of causality to the many; as an identity that is absolutely affected by a difference, and does not go beyond appearance. This science of the ethical, which speaks of the absolute identity of the ideal and the real, thus does not act according to its own words; rather, its ethical reason is, in truth and in its essence, a non-identity of the ideal and the real. \u2014 Ethical reason was determined above as the Absolute in the form of unity, and thereby, since it is itself posited as a determinacy, it seems immediately, in this very determination, to be posited just as essentially with an opposition. The difference, however, is that true reality and its Absolute are wholly free of this opposition to nature, and that it is the absolute identity of the ideal and the real. The Absolute is cognized, according to its Idea, as this identity of what is different, whose determinacy is to be, for the one, unity, and for the other, multiplicity, and this determinacy is ideal, that is, it exists only within infinity according to the concept of infinity set forth above: this determinacy is just as much sublated as it is posited; each \u2014 both the unity and the multiplicity, whose identity is the Absolute \u2014 is itself a unity of the one and the many. But the one, whose ideal determination is multiplicity, is the subsistence of what is opposed, positive reality, and therefore it itself necessarily has an opposed, doubled relation-<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    sary. Because the real subsists within it, its identity is a relative one, and this relative identity of what is opposed is necessity; thus, just as it is within difference, so too must its relation itself, or the identity of the relation, be a different one \u2014 such that in it, either unity or multiplicity is the first term; this twofold relation determines the doubled side of necessity, or of the appearance of the Absolute. Since this twofold relation falls upon multiplicity, and if we call the unity of what is different \u2014 which stands on the other side, and in which that reality, or the many, is sublated \u2014 indifference, then the Absolute is the unity of indifference and relation; and because this is a doubled unity, the appearance of the Absolute is determined as the unity of indifference and of that relation, or that relative identity, in which the many is the first, the positive term \u2014 and as the unity of indifference and of that relation in which unity is the first and positive term; the former is physical nature, the latter ethical nature. And since indifference, or unity, is freedom, while relation, or relative identity, is necessity, each of these two appearances is the being-one and the indifference of freedom and necessity. Substance is absolute and infinite; in this predicate, infinity, lies the necessity of the divine nature, or its appearance, and this necessity expresses itself as reality precisely in a doubled relation; each of the two attributes itself expresses substance, and is absolute and infinite, or the unity of indifference and relation; and in the relation their difference is posited such that in the relation of the one, the many is the first term, while in the relation of the other, the one is the first term, or that which is turned outward against the others. But because in ethical nature itself, in its relation, unity is the first term, it is therefore also free within this relative identity, that is, within its necessity; or, because the relative identity is not sublated by unity being the first term, this second freedom is determined such that the necessary does exist for ethical nature, but is posited negatively. Were we now to isolate this side of the relative identity of ethical nature, and not to recognize the absolute unity of indifference and this relative identity as the essence of ethical nature, but rather the side of relation, or necessity, then we would stand at the very same point at which the essence of practical reason is determined as possessing absolute causality \u2014 that is, that it is indeed free, and necessity is posited only negatively, yet is for that very reason still posited, whereby that very freedom fails to emerge from difference, the relation or relative identity is made into the essence, and the Absolute is conceived solely as the negatively Absolute, or as infinity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    The empirical and popular expression through which this conception \u2014 which grasps ethical nature solely from the side of its relative identity \u2014 has so greatly recommended itself, is that the real, under the names of sensibility, inclinations, the faculty of desire, and so forth (the moment of the multiplicity of the relation), does not accord with reason (the moment of the pure unity of the relation) (the moment of the opposition of unity and multiplicity), and that reason consists in willing out of its own absolute self-activity and autonomy, and in restricting and mastering that sensibility (the moment of the determinacy of this relation, namely that in it unity, or the negation of multiplicity, is the first term). The reality of this conception is grounded in empirical consciousness and in everyone’s general experience of finding within themselves both that dissension and this pure unity of practical reason, or the abstraction of the I. Nor can there be any question of denying this standpoint; rather, it was determined above as the side of relative identity, of the being of the infinite within the finite; but this must be maintained: that it is not the absolute standpoint, since, as has been shown, the relation proves to be only one side, and the isolating of it therefore something one-sided, and that, because ethical life is something absolute, that standpoint is not the standpoint of ethical life, but rather that there is no ethical life within it. And as for the appeal to common consciousness, ethical life itself must occur within that very consciousness just as necessarily as that standpoint which \u2014 since the relation, isolated for itself, is posited as existing in itself and not as a moment \u2014 is the principle of unethical conduct; empirical consciousness is empirical precisely because the moments of the Absolute appear within it scattered, side by side, successive, fragmented; but it would not even be a common consciousness if ethical life did not likewise occur within it; among these manifold appearances of the ethical and the unethical that occur within empirical consciousness, that formal philosophy had a choice, and it is not the fault of common consciousness, but of philosophy, that it chose the appearance of the unethical and believed it possessed the true Absolute in negative absoluteness, or in infinity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The exposition of this practical philosophy rests upon setting forth what this negative absoluteness is capable of, and we must trace, in its principal moments, the mistaken attempt to exhibit a true Absolute within the negatively Absolute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    It follows at once that, since pure unity constitutes the essence of practical reason, there can be so little talk of a system of ethical life that not even a plurality of laws is possible; for whatever goes beyond the<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    pure concept \u2014 or rather, because this concept, insofar as it is posited as negating the manifold, that is, as practical, is duty \u2014 whatever goes beyond the pure concept of duty and the abstraction of a law no longer belongs to this pure reason; as Kant, who presented this abstraction of the concept in its absolute purity, quite rightly recognizes, that practical reason lacks all matter for the law, and that it can make nothing more than the form<\/em> of the fitness<\/em> of the maxim of the arbitrary will into the supreme law. The maxim of the arbitrary will has a content, and includes within itself a determinacy; the pure will, by contrast, is free of determinacies; the absolute law of practical reason is to raise that determinacy into the form of pure unity, and the expression of this determinacy taken up into the form is the law. If it is possible for the determinacy to be taken up into the form of the pure concept, and if it is not sublated through this form, then it is justified, and has, through negative absoluteness itself, become absolute \u2014 law, and right, or duty. But the matter of the maxim remains what it is, a determinacy or a particularity; and the universality that the reception into the form confers upon it is thus a purely analytic unity; and when the unity conferred upon it is expressed purely as what it is, in a proposition, then the proposition is an analytic one and a tautology. And it is in the production of tautologies that, in truth, the sublime capacity of the autonomy of the legislation of pure practical reason consists; the pure identity of the understanding, expressed in the theoretical realm as the principle of contradiction, remains, when turned to the practical form, one and the same thing. If the question, what is truth, put to logic and answered by it, presents Kant with the laughable spectacle of one man milking a billy-goat while the other holds a sieve underneath, then the question, what is right and duty, put to that pure practical reason and answered by it, is in the very same case. When Kant recognizes that a general criterion of truth would have to be one valid for all items of cognition without regard to the difference of their objects; but that it is clear that, since in doing so one abstracts from all content of cognition, while truth concerns precisely this content, it is wholly impossible and absurd to ask after a mark of the truth of this content of cognitions, given that the mark is at the same time supposed not to concern the content of cognitions \u2014 in saying this he thereby pronounces judgment upon the very principle of duty and right that is set up by practical reason. For that reason is the absolute abstraction from all matter of the will; through a content a heteronomy of the arbitrary will is posited; but now it is precisely the interest at stake to know what right and duty actually are; the question is asked after the content of the moral law, and it is solely this content that is at issue; but the essence of pure<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    will and of pure practical reason is that it abstracts from all content; and it is therefore inherently contradictory to seek a moral legislation \u2014 since it would have to have a content \u2014 in this absolute practical reason, given that its essence consists in having no content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    For this formalism to be able to pronounce a law at all, it is necessary that some matter, some determinacy, be posited that constitutes the content of the law; and the form that is added to this determinacy is unity, or universality; that a maxim of your will must at the same time be valid as the principle of a universal legislation \u2014 this fundamental law of pure practical reason expresses that some determinacy, which constitutes the content of the maxim of the particular will, is posited as concept, as universal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    But every determinacy is capable of being taken up into the form of the concept and posited as a quality, and there is nothing at all that could not in this way be made into an ethical law. Yet every determinacy is in itself something particular and not something universal; it has the opposed determinacy standing over against it, and it is a determinacy only insofar as such an opposite stands over against it. Either of the two determinacies is equally capable of being thought; which of the two it should be \u2014 which is taken up into unity, or thought, and which is to be abstracted from \u2014 this is wholly undetermined and free; if the one is fixed as subsisting in and for itself, then the other, to be sure, cannot be posited; but this other can just as well be thought, and, since this form of thinking is the essence, be pronounced as an absolute moral law. That the most ordinary understanding, without instruction, can perform that easy operation and distinguish which form in the maxim is fit for universal legislation and which is not, Kant demonstrates by the example, the question of whether the maxim of increasing my fortune by every safe means \u2014 should such a means present itself in a deposit \u2014 could hold as a universal practical law, a maxim whose content would then be that everyone may deny a deposit whose having been entrusted to him no one can prove; this question, he says, decides itself, since such a principle, as a law, would annihilate itself, because it would bring it about that there would be no deposits at all; \u2014 but that there would be no deposits at all, what contradiction would lie in that? That there be no deposit will contradict other necessary determinacies; just as, that a deposit be possible, will hang together with other necessary determinacies, and will thereby itself be necessary; but it is not other purposes and material grounds that are to be called upon here, but rather the immediate form of the concept that is supposed to decide the correctness of the first or the second assumption; but for the form, the one of the<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    opposed determinacies is just as indifferent as the other; either can be conceived as a quality, and this conceiving pronounced as a law. If the determinacy of property in general is posited, then the tautological proposition can be made from it: property is property and nothing else; this tautological production is the legislating done by this practical reason: property, if property exists, must be property; but if the opposed determinacy \u2014 the negation of property \u2014 is posited, then the legislating of that very same practical reason yields the tautology: non-property is non-property; if there is no property, then that which would be property must be sublated. But it is precisely what is at issue to demonstrate that property must exist; the whole matter turns solely on that which lies outside the capacity of this practical legislating of pure reason, namely, deciding which of two opposed determinacies must be posited; but that this should already have occurred beforehand, and one of the opposed determinacies already be posited in advance, is what pure reason demands, and only then can it carry out its now-superfluous legislating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    But the analytic unity and tautology of practical reason is not merely something superfluous, but, in the turn it is given, something false, and it must be recognized as the principle of unethical conduct. Through the mere taking up of a determinacy into the form of unity, the nature of that determinacy’s being is supposed to change; and the determinacy, which by its very nature has another determinacy opposed to it \u2014 of which one is the negation of the other, and for that very reason neither is something absolute (and it is a matter of indifference to the function of practical reason which of the two it is, since it supplies only the empty form) \u2014 is supposed, through this conjoining with the form of pure unity, to be itself made into something absolute, into law and duty; but wherever a determinacy and particularity is elevated into something in-itself, there is a violation of reason, and, in relation to the ethical, unethical conduct is posited. \u2014 This transformation of the conditioned, unreal into something unconditioned and absolute is easy to recognize in its illegitimacy, and to track down along its devious path. The determinacy, taken up into the form of pure unity, or of formal identity, yields, when the determinate concept is expressed as a proposition, the tautology of the formal proposition: determinacy A is determinacy A. The form, or, in the proposition, the identity of subject and predicate, is something absolute, but only a negative or formal absolute, which does not concern determinacy A itself in the least; this content is, for the form, something utterly hypothetical. But the absoluteness that belongs to the proposition according to its form acquires, in practical reason, a wholly different meaning; for it is now also transferred onto<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    the content, which by its nature is something conditioned, and this non-absolute, conditioned content is, contrary to its own essence, elevated into something absolute through that admixture. It is not the practical interest to produce a tautology, and for the sake of this idle form \u2014 which is, after all, its only power \u2014 practical reason would not make such a great fuss; but through the admixture of the absolute form with the conditioned matter, the absoluteness of the form is unnoticedly smuggled in under the unreal, conditioned content, and in this inversion and sleight of hand lies the very nerve of this practical legislation of pure reason; to the proposition, property is property, there is smuggled in, in place of its true meaning \u2014 namely, that the identity which this proposition expresses in its form is absolute \u2014 the meaning that its matter, namely property, is absolute, whereupon any determinacy whatever can be made into a duty. The arbitrary will has the choice among opposed determinacies, and it would only be a piece of clumsiness if, for any action whatsoever, no such ground could be found that assumes not merely the form of a probable ground, as with the Jesuits, but the form of right and duty; and this moral formalism does not go beyond the moral art of the Jesuits and the principles of the doctrine of happiness, which coincide with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    It should be carefully noted here that the taking up of the determinacy into the concept is understood in such a way that this taking-up is something merely formal, that is, that the determinacy is supposed to remain, so that matter and form contradict one another, the one being determinate, the other infinite. But were the content truly equated with the form \u2014 the determinacy with unity \u2014 then no practical legislating would take place at all, but only an annihilation of the determinacy. Thus property itself is immediately opposed to universality; equated with it, it is sublated. \u2014 This annihilation of the determinacy through its being taken up into infinity, into universality, immediately proves troublesome for practical legislating as well; for if the determinacy is of such a kind that it itself expresses the sublation of a determinacy, then, through the elevation of this sublating into universality, or into being-sublated, both the determinacy that is to be sublated and the sublating itself are annihilated; so that a maxim referring to such a determinacy \u2014 one that, thought in its universality, annihilates itself \u2014 would be incapable of becoming the principle of a universal legislation, and would thus be immoral. Or: the content of the maxim, which is the sublation of a determinacy, contradicts itself once raised into the concept; if the determinacy is thought as sublated, then its sublation falls away; or else this determinacy is supposed to remain, in which case the sublation posited in the maxim is in turn not posited; and so, whether the determinacy remains<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    or does not remain, its sublation is in no case possible. But a maxim that, on this principle, is immoral because it contradicts itself, is, precisely because it expresses the sublation of a determinacy, absolutely rational, and therefore absolutely moral; for the rational, on its negative side, is the indifference of determinacies, the being-sublated of the conditioned. Thus the determinacy of helping the poor expresses the sublation of the determinacy that is poverty; the maxim whose content is that determinacy, when tested by raising it to the principle of a universal legislation, will prove to be false, for it annihilates itself. If it is thought that the poor are universally helped, then either there are no longer any poor at all, or else there is nothing but poor people, in which case none remain who could help; and so in both cases help would drop away; the maxim, thought as universal, thus sublates itself; but should the determinacy that is the condition of this sublation \u2014 namely, poverty \u2014 remain, then the possibility of help remains, but only as possibility, not as actuality, as the maxim asserts; if poverty is to remain so that the duty of helping the poor can be exercised, then this very allowing poverty to persist immediately fails to fulfill the duty. So too the maxim of defending one’s fatherland against enemies with honor, and countless others, sublate themselves when thought as the principle of a universal legislation; for that maxim, for instance, so extended, sublates the determinacy of a fatherland as much as that of enemies, and of defense itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Just as little as unity has the purely negative meaning of the mere sublation of determinacies, just as little is it the true unity of intuition, or the positive indifference of determinacies; and the comparison with this will make the perverse nature of that unity clearer from another side. For that unity of practical reason is essentially affected by a difference: whether it is posited as the fixing of a determinacy, in which case other determinacies are immediately excluded by it, posited negatively; or as an analytic proposition, in which case its identity, this its form, contradicts its content. This can also be grasped as follows: as a proposition, it contradicts, with its content, the demand made on a proposition that it be a judgment; something was supposed to be said with the proposition, but with the identical proposition nothing is said, for it is no judgment, because the relation of subject to predicate is merely formal, and no difference between them whatsoever is posited. Or let unity be taken as universality: then it has its bearing entirely on an empirical manifold, and the determinacy is opposed, as a present one, to an infinite multitude of empirically other ones. The unity of intuition, by contrast, is the indifference of the determinacies that make up a whole, not a fixing of them as separated and opposed,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    but rather a bringing-together and objectifying of them; and hence, since this indifference and the differing determinacies are unconditionally united, it is no separation\u2014of the former as possibility, the latter as actualities, or of the latter itself, partly as possible and partly as actual\u2014but rather absolute presence. And in this power of intuition and presence lies the power of ethical life in general, and naturally also of that particular ethical life which that legislating reason is primarily concerned with, and from which, rather, precisely that form of the concept, of formal unity and universality, is unconditionally to be kept away; for it is precisely this form through which the essence of ethical life is immediately sublated, in that it makes what is ethically necessary into something contingent by letting it appear in opposition to something else; but what is contingent in ethical life\u2014and the contingent is one with the empirically necessary\u2014is unethical. A pain that exists is raised, by the power of intuition, out of the feeling in which it is an accident and a contingency, into unity, and into the shape of an objective, self-subsistent necessity, and is preserved in its absolute presence by this immediate unity, which does not look to left or right at the possibilities that formal unity brings in its train; but through the objectivity of intuiting and the elevation into this unity of being-for-itself, it is truly separated from the subject, and, in the fixed intuiting of it, made ideal; whereas, when compared through the unity of reflection with other determinacies, or thought as a universal and not found to be universal, it is in both ways made contingent, and thereby the subject recognizes itself merely in its contingency and particularity\u2014a recognition which is the sentimentality and unethical nature of powerlessness. Or, if the ethical relates to relations of individuals to individuals, then it is the pure intuition and ideality present, for example, in the trust placed in a deposit, that is to be held fast, and from which the intrusion of formal unity and of the thought of the possibility of other determinations is to be kept away; the expression of that unity of intuition\u2014property of another entrusted to me is the property of another entrusted to me and nothing else whatsoever\u2014has an entirely different meaning than the universally expressing tautology of practical legislation: property of another entrusted to me is property of another entrusted to me; for this proposition is opposed just as well by the other: a non-property of another entrusted to me is non-property of the other; that is to say, a determinacy that is raised into the concept thereby becomes ideal, and its opposite can just as well be posited. The expression of intuition, by contrast, contains a this;<\/em> a living relation and absolute presence, with which possibility itself is unconditionally<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    bound up, and a possibility separated from it, or a being-otherwise, is unconditionally annihilated\u2014it being precisely in this possible being-otherwise that the unethical lies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Now if the unity of practical reason were not this positive unity of intuition, but had merely the negative meaning of annihilating the determinate, then it would purely express the essence of negative reason, or of infinity, of the absolute concept. But because infinity is fixed and separated off from the absolute, it shows itself, in its essence, to be the opposite of itself, and it mocks the reflection that wants to hold it fast and grasp an absolute unity within it, in that it just as unconditionally brings about the opposite of that, a difference and a plurality, and thus, between this opposition, which reproduces itself infinitely, permits only a relative identity\u2014and thus, even as infinity, is itself the opposite of itself, absolute finitude. And in being thus isolated, it is itself merely the powerless form, abandoned by the truly annihilating might of reason, which takes the determinacies up into itself and harbors them without annihilating them\u2014rather, on the contrary, perpetuating them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    It is on the opposition set forth, the fixing of it as a reality, and its incomplete connection as a relative identity, that the more recent determination of the concept of natural right, and of its relation within the whole science of the ethical, depends; and we must consider what has so far been set out in general terms in this closer connection, examining how the once-posited insurmountable separation appears, in its own peculiar way, in the science of natural right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The<\/em> absolute concept, which is the principle of opposition and the opposition itself, presents itself, once fixed, within the separation, such that, as pure unity, it is opposed to itself as plurality; so that it remains the absolute concept both under the form of pure unity and of pure plurality; thus, in the form of plurality, it is not a manifold of differently determined concepts, but is subsumed under plurality just as it is subsumed under unity; in many determinate concepts it subsumes, and is not a many, but a one. The absolute concept, as itself a plurality, is a multitude of subjects; and to these it is opposed, in the form of pure unity, as absolute quantity, over against this its qualitative positedness. Both, then, are posited: an inner being-one of the opposed terms, which is the essence of both, the absolute concept, and a being-separated of this same concept under the form of unity, in which it is right and duty, and under the form of plurality, in which it is the thinking and willing subject. That first side, according to which the essence of right and duty\u2014and the essence of the thinking and willing subject\u2014are unconditionally one, is\u2014as in general the higher abstraction of infinity\u2014the great side of the Kantian and Fichtean philosophy; but it has not remained faithful to this being-one,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    but rather, while indeed acknowledging this same being-one as the essence and as the absolute, it posits the separation into one and many just as absolutely, and places the one alongside the other with equal dignity; through this, it is not the positive absolute that constitutes the essence of both, and in which they would be one, but rather the negative, or the absolute concept; and, further, that necessary being-one becomes formal, and the two opposed determinacies, posited as absolute, thereby fall, in their subsistence, under ideality, which to that extent is the mere possibility of both; it is possible that right and duty have reality independently, as something particular, separate from the subjects, and the subjects separate from that; but it is also possible that the two be conjoined. And it is absolutely necessary that these two possibilities be kept particular and distinguished, so that each grounds its own science: the one, which concerns the being-one of the pure concept and the subjects, or the morality of actions; the other, which concerns the not-being-one, or legality; and indeed in such a way that, once in this division of the ethical into morality and legality these two become mere possibilities, precisely for that reason both are equally positive. The one is indeed negative for the other; but this holds for both alike; it is not that the one is the absolute positive and the other the absolute negative, but each is both, in its relation to the other; and, because, in the first place, both are only relatively positive, neither legality nor morality is absolutely positive or truly ethical; and then, because both, the one as positive as the other, are absolutely necessary, the possibility that the pure concept and the subject of duty and right are not one must be posited as unalterable and unconditional.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The fundamental concepts of the system of legality follow from this immediately, in the following way: it is a condition of pure self-consciousness\u2014and this pure self-consciousness, I, is the true essence and the absolute, yet, notwithstanding this, it is conditioned, and its condition is that it proceed onward into a real consciousness\u2014that these, in this relation of being conditioned upon one another, remain unconditionally opposed to one another; that pure self-consciousness, the pure unity, or the empty moral law, the universal freedom of all, is opposed to real consciousness, i.e. to the subject, the rational being, individual freedom; which Fichte expresses in a more popular way as the presupposition that good faith is lost; and upon this presupposition a system is grounded, by which, notwithstanding the separation of the concept and the subject of ethical life, but precisely for that reason only formally and externally\u2014and this relation is called coercion<\/em>\u2014the two are supposed to be united. In that, then, this externality of the being-one<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    is unconditionally fixed and posited as something absolute, existing in itself, inwardness\u2014the rebuilding of the lost good faith, the being-one of universal and individual freedom, and ethical life\u2014is made impossible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    In the system of such an externality\u2014and here we refer to the Fichtean system as the most consistent presentation, the one least formal, but which actually attempts a consistent system that would not need an ethical life and religion foreign to it\u2014it is the case, as in everything that proceeds from one conditioned term to another, that either no unconditioned can be exhibited at all, or, if such a thing is posited, it is the formal indifference which has the conditioned, differing terms outside itself: essence without form, power without wisdom, quantity without inner quality or infinity, rest without motion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The supreme task, in the arrangement operating with mechanical necessity whereby the efficacy of each individual is to be compelled by the general will, is how this general will can be necessarily real in the subjects who are its organs and administrators\u2014a task that presupposes the opposition of the individual will to the general will; the being-one with the general will can thus not be grasped and posited as an inner, absolute majesty, but only as something that is to be brought about through an external relation, or coercion. But here, in reality, in the progression of compelling and supervising that is to be posited, one cannot proceed in an infinite series and leap from the real to the ideal; there must be a supreme positive point from which the compelling, in accordance with the concept of universal freedom, begins; but this point, like every other point, must itself be compelled to compel in accordance with the concept of universal freedom in this way; a point that was not compelled within this general system of coercion would step outside the principle, and would be transcendent. The question, then, is how this highest will likewise, through coercion and supervision, is to be made conformable to the concept of the general will, so that the system remains wholly immanent and transcendental. This could happen in no other way than that the power of the whole be distributed between the two sides that stand opposed to one another, so that the governed are compelled by the government, and the government by the governed. If the power, and hence the possible coercion, is posited as of unequal strength on the two sides, then, to the extent that the one part has more force than the other\u2014by the excess of the one over the other\u2014only one part is compelled, and not the opposing one, which is not what is supposed to be the case. But properly speaking, it is only the overpowering side that has power at all, for in order for something to be a limit to another, it must be equal to it; the weaker side is therefore no limit for the other; both, then, must be compelled reciprocally with equal force<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    and to compel one another. But if, in this way, action and reaction, stand and resistance, are equally strong, then the power on both sides is reduced to equilibrium, and thereby all activity, expression of will, and acting are sublated; whether the reduction is thought of positively or negatively\u2014whether action and reaction are thought of as existing and effective, or whether they are posited negatively, the equilibrium consisting in there being as little acting as reacting present. Wanting to remedy this death by extending the immediate standing-opposed into a circle of effects, so that the midpoint of contact\u2014the point at which the reduction of the opposed terms appears\u2014is apparently sublated by the deceptive leaving-empty of this midpoint, is likewise no true way out. Against the hierarchy of coercion descending, through its ramifications, from the supreme power down to every particular, there is supposed to rise up, from these particulars, an equal and opposite pyramid, ascending to a supreme apex of counter-pressure against the descending one, so that the whole curves round into a circle, in which the immediacy of contact would vanish, the forces, insofar as they form a mass, would be kept apart, and, through intermediate links, that artificial difference would be produced, so that no link would react immediately upon that by which it is moved (which is what produces the reduction to equilibrium), but always upon something other than that by which it is moved, so that the first would move the last, and this last would in turn move that first. But such a perpetuum mobile<\/em>, whose parts are all supposed to move round in a series, instead of moving, sets itself at once into perfect equilibrium, and becomes a perfect perpetuum quietum<\/em>; for pressure and counter-pressure, compelling and being compelled, are perfectly equal to one another, and stand just as immediately opposed to one another, and bring about precisely the same reduction of forces as in the first conception; pure quantity is not to be deceived by such a mediation, through which no difference, or true infinity and form, is in any way brought into it, but it remains, as before, a wholly undivided, pure, shapeless power. In this way, no coercion is possible against the power, to make it conform to the concept of universal freedom, for no force is to be found outside it, and no separation can be posited within it itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    For this reason, refuge is then taken in an entirely formal distinction: actual<\/em> power is indeed posited as one<\/em> and united in the government; but what is set over against it is possible<\/em> power, and this possibility, as such, is supposed to be capable of compelling that actuality. To this second, powerless existence of the common will, namely, is supposed to belong the judgment as to whether the power has abandoned the former, with which it is bound up, whether the<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    power is no longer in conformity with the concept of universal freedom; it is supposed to oversee the supreme power generally, and, as soon as a private will takes the place of the general will within it, to wrest that power away from it, and the manner in which this is to happen is supposed to be a public declaration, having absolute effect, of the total nullity, from that moment on, of all acts of the supreme power of the state. That the power should separate itself off of its own accord, by its own judgment\u2014which would be insurrection\u2014is not, must not, be allowed to happen; for this pure power consists of nothing but private wills, which therefore cannot constitute themselves as a common will. But it is that second common will which is to declare this multitude, as the commons, or the pure power, likewise united with the Idea of the general will, once it is no longer present in the previous holders of power. Whatever determinacy be posited, by which something is to be compelled against the supreme power, that determinacy would have to be conjoined not with mere possibility but with real power; but since this real power lies in the hands of the other representation of the common will, this latter is capable of preventing any such determinacy, and of nullifying whatever functions may be assigned to the Ephorate\u2014the overseeing, the public declaration of the interdict, and whatever formalities may be devised; and indeed with just as much right as those in whose hands the efficacy of this determinacy would be placed, for these ephors are no less, at the same time, private wills than those others are; and whether the private will of these has separated itself from the general will is something the government can just as well judge as the Ephorate can judge concerning it, and can, moreover, unconditionally make that judgment prevail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    As is well known, on the occasion of the dissolution, undertaken in recent times by a government, of a rivaling legislative power that was hampering it, a man who had himself been caught up in the affair rightly judged, regarding the notion that the establishment of a supervisory commission similar to the Fichtean Ephorate would have prevented such an act of violence, that a council so charged with oversight, and wishing to resist the government, would have been dealt with just as violently. \u2014 Finally, however, if the supreme power-holders were voluntarily to permit this second representative of the general will to summon the commons, so that they might judge between them and the overseers, what would be to be done with such a rabble, which is itself supervised in everything that is a private matter, still less leads a public life, and is thus formed not at all for a consciousness of the common will and for acting in the spirit of a whole, but solely for the opposite?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    What has hereby been shown is that the ethical, which is posited solely in terms of the relation\u2014that is, externality and coercion\u2014when thought as a totality,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    sublates itself; with this it has indeed been demonstrated that coercion is nothing real, nothing in itself; but this will become still clearer if we show this in coercion itself, according to its concept, and according to the determinacy that the relation of this connection has\u2014for that the relation in general is nothing in itself is something that dialectic has, in part, to demonstrate, and that has, in part, already been briefly set forth above.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Of the concepts in general that are bound up with coercion<\/em>, and that express precisely this relation, it has already, in part, been shown that they are essenceless abstractions, thought-things, or beings of the imagination, without reality; there comes first the null abstraction of a concept of the universal freedom of all, which would be separated from the freedom of individuals, and then, on the other side, this very freedom of the individual, just as isolated; each, posited for itself, is an abstraction without reality; but if both are absolutely identical, and then posited merely on the basis of this first, underlying identity, they are something entirely different from those concepts whose meaning lies solely in non-identity. Then, natural or original freedom is supposed to limit itself through the concept of universal freedom; but that freedom which can be posited as limitable is, for that very reason, once again nothing absolute; and then it is inherently contradictory to put together an Idea whereby, with absolute necessity, the freedom of the individual, through the externality of coercion, is to be in conformity with the concept of universal freedom\u2014which means nothing other than that it is imagined that the individual, through something not absolute, is nevertheless absolutely equal to the universal. In the concept of coercion itself, something external is immediately posited for freedom; but a freedom for which something were truly external, alien, would be no freedom at all; its essence and its formal definition consist precisely in there being nothing absolutely external to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The view of freedom is to be entirely rejected according to which it is supposed to be a choice between opposed determinacies, such that, if +A and \u2212A were present, it would consist in determining itself either<\/em> as +A or<\/em> as \u2212A, and would be unconditionally bound to this either-or<\/em>. Something like this possibility of choice is simply an empirical freedom, which is one with empirical, common necessity, and is simply not separable from it. Freedom is rather the negation or ideality of the opposed terms, of both +A and \u2212A, the abstraction of the possibility that neither of the two is; something external would exist for it only insofar as it were determined solely as +A or solely as \u2212A; but it is precisely the opposite of this, and nothing is external for it, and so no coercion is possible for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Every determinacy is, according to its essence, either +A or \u2212A; and to +A, \u2212A is chained indissolubly, just as to \u2212A, +A is; just as the individual<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    has posited itself in the determinacy of +A, then it is also bound to -A, and -A is something external for it and not within its power; rather, on account of the absolute connection of +A with -A, it would be, immediately through the determinacy of +A, under an alien power of -A, and the freedom that would consist in choosing to determine itself as either +A or as -A would not get outside of necessity at all. If it determines itself as +A, it has not annihilated -A; rather -A continues to exist as something external to it, absolutely necessarily so, and conversely if it determines itself as -A. It is freedom only in that it unites -A with +A, positively or negatively, and thereby ceases to be in the determinacy of +A; in the union of both determinacies, both are annihilated: +A -A = 0. If this nothing is thought only relative to +A and -A \u2014 the indifferent A itself taken as a determinacy, and a + or – as opposed to another – or + \u2014 then absolute freedom is exalted above this opposition just as much as above every other, and above all externality; and it is utterly incapable of coercion, and coercion has no reality at all for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    But this Idea of freedom itself seems to be an abstraction, and if, for instance, one were speaking of a concrete freedom, the freedom of the individual, then that being of a determinacy \u2014 and hence mere empirical freedom as a possibility of choice, and thus also empirical necessity and the possibility of coercion in general \u2014 would posit the opposition of universality and singularity. For the individual is a singularity, and freedom is an annihilating of singularity; through singularity the individual stands immediately under determinacies, whereby something external is present for it, and thereby coercion becomes possible. But it is one thing for determinacies to be posited in the individual under the form of infinity, and another for them to be posited in it absolutely. Determinacy under the form of infinity is thereby at the same time sublated; and the individual is only as a free being \u2014 that is, in that determinacies are posited in it, it is the absolute indifference of these determinacies, and herein consists, formally, its ethical nature; just as in this \u2014 that, insofar as individuals in general, whether against themselves or against something else, are different and stand in a relation to something external, this externality itself is indifferent and a living relation \u2014 the organization consists, and thereby, since totality is present only in organization, the positive of ethical life consists. \u2014 But the indifference of the individual as a singular being is, in relation to the being of determinacies, a negative<\/em> one; but where its being as singularity is actually posited \u2014 that is, a negation positively insurmountable for it, a determinacy through which externality as such holds itself fast \u2014 then nothing remains for it but the utterly negative<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    absoluteness, or infinity: the absolute negation of both -A and +A, that is, that it absolutely takes up this singular being into the concept<\/em>. Insofar as -A is something external opposed to<\/em> the determinacy +A of the subject, it is, through this relation, in an alien power; but in that it can equally negatively posit, sublate, and divest itself of its +A as a determinacy, it remains utterly free both with regard to the possibility and to the actuality of alien power. In negating both +A and -A, it is subdued<\/em>, but not coerced<\/em>; it would only have to suffer coercion if +A were absolutely fixed in it, whereby an infinite chain of other determinacies could be fettered to it, as to a determinacy. This possibility of abstracting from determinacies is without limit \u2014 that is, there is no determinacy that is absolute, for this would contradict itself immediately; rather, freedom itself, or infinity, is indeed the negative, but the absolute, and its singular being is a singularity absolutely taken up into the concept, negatively absolute infinity, pure freedom; this negatively absolute, pure freedom, is in its appearance death, and through its capacity for death the subject proves itself free and utterly exalted above all coercion. It is the absolute subjugation; and because it is absolute, or because in it singularity becomes purely and simply pure singularity \u2014 namely, not the positing of a +A with the exclusion of -A, an exclusion which would be no true negation but merely the positing of -A as something external, and at the same time of +A as a determinacy \u2014 but rather the sublation of both the + and the -, it is thus the concept of itself, hence infinite, and the opposite of itself, or absolute liberation, and the pure singularity that is in death is its own opposite, universality. In subduing, then, freedom consists in this: that it goes purely to the sublation of a determinacy, both insofar as it is posited positively and insofar as it is posited negatively, subjectively and objectively, not merely to one side of it, and thus, considered in itself, holds itself purely negative \u2014 or, since the sublating itself can also be grasped and expressed positively by reflection, the sublation of both sides of the determinacy then appears as the perfectly equal positing of the determinate thing according to both its sides. \u2014 Applied, for instance, to punishment: in it alone is retribution rational, for through it the crime is subdued \u2014 a determinacy +A, which the crime has posited, is completed through the positing of -A, and thus both are annihilated; or, viewed positively: to the determinacy +A there is joined, for the criminal, the opposed -A, and both are posited equally, whereas the crime had posited only one; thus punishment is the restoration of freedom, and the criminal has remained free \u2014 or rather has been made free \u2014 just as the<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    one punishing has acted rationally and freely. In this its determination, then, punishment is something in itself, truly infinite and something absolute, which thus has its own reverence and its own dread within itself; it comes from freedom, and remains, even as subduing, within freedom. If, on the other hand, punishment is represented as coercion, then it is posited merely as a determinacy and as something utterly finite, carrying no rationality within it, and falls entirely under the common concept of a determinate thing opposed to another, or of a commodity for which something else \u2014 namely the crime \u2014 is to be purchased; the state, as judicial power, holds a market in determinacies called crimes, which are for sale to it against other determinacies, and the code of laws is the price list.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    But however null these abstractions and the relation of externality arising from them may be, the moment of the negatively absolute, or of infinity, which in this example is marked as determining the relation of crime and punishment, is a moment of the Absolute<\/em> itself, and must be exhibited in absolute ethical life<\/em>; and we shall grasp the manifold shapes of the absolute form, or of infinity, in its necessary moments, and show how they determine the shape of absolute ethical life, from which the true concept and the relation of the practical sciences will result. Since what matters here, in the first instance, is the determination of the relations contained within this, and hence the side of infinity must be brought out and singled out, we presuppose as the positive that the absolute ethical totality is nothing other than a people \u2014 which will already become clear, even from the negative that we are considering here, in its following moments. \u2014 In absolute ethical life, then, infinity, or form as the absolutely negative, is nothing other than the subduing grasped above, itself taken up into its absolute concept, in which it does not relate to individual determinacies but to their entire actuality and possibility, namely to life itself \u2014 and is thus equal to the matter of the infinite form; but in such a way that the positive of this same infinity is the absolutely ethical, namely belonging to a people; the being-one-with-which the single individual proves, in the negative, unambiguously, only through the danger of death. Through the absolute identity of the infinite \u2014 or of this side of the relation \u2014 with the positive, the ethical totalities, such as peoples are, take shape, constitute themselves as individuals, and thereby present themselves as singular over against other singular peoples; this positing and individuality is the side of reality \u2014 without it, thought, they are mere things of thought; it would be the abstraction of essence without the absolute form, an essence which precisely thereby would be essence-less. This relation of individuality to individuality is a relationship, and hence a twofold one; the one is the positive, the calm, equal<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    subsisting-alongside-one-another of both in peace; the other the negative, the excluding of one by the other, and both relations are absolutely necessary. For the second we have grasped the rational relation as a subduing taken up into its concept, or as the absolute formal virtue that is courage. Through this second side of the relation, the necessity of war is posited for the shape and individuality of the ethical totality \u2014 a war which, because in it lies the free possibility that not merely individual determinacies but the entirety of them, as life, is annihilated, and indeed for the Absolute itself, or for the people, thereby preserves the ethical health of peoples in their indifference toward determinacies and toward the habituation and fixation of the same \u2014 just as the movement of the winds preserves lakes from the putrefaction which a lasting calm would produce in them, as a lasting, or even an eternal, peace would in peoples.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    With the negative of infinity just now considered \u2014 since the shape of the ethical totality, and its individuality as a singular being turned outward, and this its movement, is determined as courage \u2014 the other side is immediately conjoined; namely, the subsistence of opposition; the one is infinity, negative, just as the other; the first is the negation of the negation, opposition against opposition; the second is negation and opposition itself in its subsistence as determinacies, or manifold reality. These realities in their pure inner formlessness and simplicity \u2014 that is, the feelings \u2014 are, in the practical sphere, feelings that reconstitute themselves out of difference and, out of the sublatedness of undifferentiated self-feeling, pass through an annihilation of intuitions and restore themselves; physical needs and enjoyments which, posited again for themselves within the totality, obey, in their infinite entanglements, one<\/em> necessity, and form the system of universal mutual dependence with regard to physical needs, and of labor and accumulation for the same \u2014 which, as a science, constitutes the system of so-called political economy. Since this system of reality lies entirely within negativity and infinity, it follows for its relation to the positive totality that it must be treated by the latter in an entirely negative manner, and must remain subject to its dominion; what is by its nature negative must remain negative, and must not become something fixed. In order to prevent it from constituting itself for itself and becoming an independent power, it is not enough to set up the propositions that everyone has the right to live, that in a people the universal must see to it that every citizen has his livelihood, and that a perfect security and ease of acquisition should be present; this last, thought as an absolute principle, would rather<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    exclude a negative treatment of the system of possession, and would let it have entirely free rein and establish itself absolutely; rather, the ethical whole must keep it in the feeling of its own inner nullity, and must hinder its shooting-up in respect of quantity, and its formation toward an ever greater difference and inequality \u2014 which is what its nature tends toward; something which is also brought about, in every state, more unconsciously and in the shape of an external natural necessity which the state would itself wish to be exempt from \u2014 through the ever greater expenditure of the state itself, growing along with the growth of the system of possession, and, correspondingly, rising levies, and hence a diminishing of possessions and a hindering of acquisition \u2014 brought about most of all through war, which throws whatever tends in that direction into manifold confusion, as well as through the jealousy of other estates, and the oppression of trade, in part deliberately, in part against their will through lack of understanding, and so forth \u2014 brought about, that is, to such degrees as allow the positive ethical life of the state itself, its independence from the purely real system, and the assertion of a negative and restraining bearing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The reality in the relation in which it has just now been considered, and of which physical need, enjoyment, possession, and the objects of possession and enjoyment are different sides, is pure reality; it merely expresses the extremes of the relationship. But the relationship also contains an ideality, a relative identity of the opposed determinacies; and this can therefore not be positively absolute, but only formal. Through the identity into which the real is posited in the relation of relationships, possession becomes property, and particularity in general \u2014 even living particularity \u2014 is at the same time determined as a universal; whereby the sphere of right is constituted. \u2014 As for the reflection of the Absolute in this relationship, it has already been determined above, on its negative side, against the subsistence of the real and determinate, as a subduing; on the positive side, for the subsistence of the real, indifference in this determinate material can express itself only as an external, formal equality; and the science that relates to this can only aim, in part, at the gradations of inequality, and, in part, in order that this be possible, at determining the manner in which something living, or inward in general, is to be posited so objectively and externally that it becomes capable of that determination and calculation. Against this superficial appearance, the absolute reality of ethical life, in this power, is restricted by the subsistence of the reality present in the opposition. Not only does the equating and calculating of inequality have its limits, for the sake of the fixed determinacy which encloses within itself an absolute opposition, and strike, as geometry does, upon incommensurability, but, because it is wholly within determinacy, and yet cannot, like<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    geometry, abstract, but is simply \u2014 since it lies within living relationships \u2014 always confronted with whole clusters of such determinacies, is likewise driven simply to endless contradictions. This contradiction among determinacies is indeed remedied and brought to an end, in a given case of intuition, by fixing and holding fast to individual determinacies, whereby a decision can result \u2014 which is still always better than that none should result; for, since there is nothing absolute in the matter itself, it is properly the formal fact that a decision and determination is made at all which is essential, while it is something quite different that a decision be reached in this way in accordance with true, total justice and ethical life \u2014 which is impossible precisely through the fixing and absolute holding-fast to determinacies, and is possible only in their confusion, and is actual only through immediate ethical intuition, which subjugates the determinacies posited as absolute, and holds fast only to the whole. \u2014 It is, says Plato, in his simple language, concerning the two sides of the endless determining of the infinite reception of qualities into the concept, and of the contradiction of their singularity against intuition and, at the same time, among themselves \u2014 it is clear, he says, that the legislative art belongs to the kingly art; but the best thing is not that the laws should hold sway, but rather the man who is wise and kingly, because law is not capable of prescribing perfectly, with the utmost precision and full universality, what would be most excellent and most just; because the inequalities among human beings and among actions, and the never-resting character of human affairs, permit nothing self-identical to be exhibited, regarding any matter, over all its sides and for all time, in any art. Law, however, we see directing itself precisely toward one and the same thing, like a stubborn and crude person who allows nothing to happen against his ordinance, nor allows anyone to question him about it, even when something else, something better, presents itself contrary to the relation he has fixed; \u2014 it is thus impossible that what is never self-identical should be well served by what is thoroughly self-identical. \u2014 That one clings to the thought that in this sphere of human affairs there is possible an in-itself and absolute, determinate right and duty stems from the formal indifference, or the negatively absolute, which alone has room within the fixed reality of this sphere, and which indeed is in itself; but insofar as it is in itself, it is empty, or there is nothing absolute in it except precisely the pure abstraction, the wholly contentless thought of unity. It is by no means, say, a conclusion drawn from experience thus far, nor is it to be regarded as a contingent imperfection of the concrete and of the execution of an a priori true Idea; rather it is to be recognized that what is here called Idea, and a hope for a better future in this regard, is null in itself, and that a perfect legislation, just as a<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    true justice corresponding to the determinacy of the laws is, in the concrete exercise of judicial power, impossible in itself. As for the first: since the absolute is supposed to be within determinacies as such, it is only the infinite, and it is precisely the same empirical infinity, and an in-itself endless determinability, that is posited in the thought of comparing a determinate measure with an absolutely indeterminate line, or a determinate line with an absolutely indeterminate measure \u2014 of measuring an infinite line, or of absolutely dividing a determinate line. As for the second: of the likewise infinitely many, and infinitely differently shaped, intuitions that are the object of judicial activity, each is determined ever more manifoldly by the growing multitude of determinations; that formation of distinctions through legislation makes each individual intuition more distinguishable and more cultivated, and the expansion of legislation is not an approach toward the goal of a positive perfection \u2014 which, as shown above, has no truth here \u2014 but only the formal moment of increasing cultivation. And in order that, within this manifold, the one of judicial intuition of right and of judgment may organize itself, may become a true one and a whole, it is absolutely necessary that each individual determinacy be modified \u2014 that is, precisely insofar as it presents itself, as an absolute existing for itself, as law, be in part sublated, so that its being-absolute is not respected; and there can be no talk of a pure application, for a pure application would be the positing of individual determinacies to the exclusion of others; but through their being, these others make, just as much, the demand that they be taken into consideration, so that the counter-effect, determined not by parts but by the whole, may itself be a whole. To this clear and determinate cognition, the empty hope and the formal thought of an absolute legislation, as well as of an adjudication withdrawn from the inner judgment of the judge, must succumb.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    It has been shown, in the system of reality just considered, that absolute ethical life must comport itself negatively toward it; within it, the Absolute, as it appears under the fixed determinacy of that system, is posited as negatively absolute, as infinity, which presents itself, over against the opposition, as a formal, relative, abstract unity \u2014 in that negative comportment, hostile; in this latter, itself under its dominion; in neither indifferent toward it. But the unity that is the indifference of the opposed terms, and that annihilates and comprehends them within itself, and the unity that is only a formal indifference, or the identity of the relationship of subsisting realities, must themselves be simply one, through a complete taking-up of the relationship into indifference itself. That is to say, the absolutely ethical must, as shape \u2014 for the relationship is the abstraction of the side of shape \u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    organize completely. In that the relation is simply rendered indifferent in figure, it does not cease to have the nature of a relation; it remains a relation of the organic to the inorganic nature. But, as shown above, the relation, as a side of infinity, is itself doubled: the one time insofar as unity, or the ideal, is the first and ruling [moment], the other time insofar as the many, or the real, is the first and ruling [moment]. According to that [former] side it is properly in figure, and in indifference; and the eternal unrest of the concept, or of infinity, lies partly in the organization’s consuming itself, surrendering the appearance of life – the purely quantitative – so that, as its own seed-grain, it may eternally raise itself up out of its own ashes to new youth; and partly in eternally annihilating its difference outward, nourishing itself from the inorganic and producing it, calling forth out of indifference a difference, or a relation to an inorganic nature, and again sublating this same [relation], consuming it just as it consumes itself; we shall presently see what this inorganic nature of the ethical is. But secondly, in this side of the relation, or of infinity, the subsistence of the annihilated is likewise posited, for precisely because the absolute concept is the opposite of itself, with its pure unity and negativity the being of difference is also posited; that is, the annihilating posits something which it annihilates, namely the real; and thus there would be an actuality and difference unconquerable for ethical life: the individuality which, through the seat that infinity has here taken up in the full force of its opposition, and stands in opposition not merely according to possibility but actu,<\/em> according to actuality, would be unable to purify itself of the difference and take itself up into absolute indifference. That both of these – the sublatedness of the opposition and the subsistence of the same – should be not merely ideal but also real, is in general the positing of a separation and a setting-apart, such that the reality in which ethical life is objective is divided into a part which is absolutely taken up into indifference, and one in which the real as such subsists, and is thus only relatively identical, bearing within it merely the reflection of absolute ethical life. There is hereby posited a relation of absolute ethical life – which wholly inheres in individuals and is their essence – to relative ethical life, which is likewise real in individuals. The ethical organization can preserve itself purely in reality in no other way than by the general diffusion of the negative within it being checked and placed on one side. How, now, indifference appears in the subsisting real, and is formal ethical life, has been shown above. The concept of this sphere is the real practical,<\/em> considered subjectively as feeling, or physical need and enjoyment, objectively as labor and possession; and this practical [element], as it can occur according to its concept, taken up into indifference<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    is the formal unity, or the right,<\/em> that is possible within it; over both of which stands the third, as the absolute, or the ethical;<\/em> but the reality of the sphere of relative unity, or of the practical and juridical, is constituted, within the system of its totality, as its own estate. Thus, according to the absolute necessity of the ethical, two estates are formed: the one, as the estate of the free, is the individual of absolute ethical life, whose organs are the individual human beings; and this, considered from the side of its indifference, is the absolute living spirit, [and] considered from the side of its objectivity, is the living movement and the divine self-enjoyment of this whole in the totality of individuals as its organs and members; whose formal or negative side, however, must likewise be the absolute – namely labor that is directed not at the annihilation of individual determinacies but at death, and whose product is likewise not something individual but the being and preservation of the whole of the ethical organization. To this estate Aristotle assigns as its business that for which the Greeks had the name politevein,<\/em> which expresses living in and with and for one’s people, leading a universal life belonging wholly to the public; – or philosophizing; which two occupations Plato, in accordance with his higher vitality, wishes to see not kept apart but simply bound together. – Then [there is] an estate of the unfree, which subsists in the difference of need and labor, and in the right and justice of possession and property; whose labor is directed at particularity, and thus does not involve the danger of death. To this must be reckoned the third estate, which, in the crudeness of its non-formative labor, has to do only with the earth as its element, and whose labor has before it the whole of need in the immediate object without intermediate links, and is thus itself a solid totality and indifference, like an element; and which, standing outside the differentiation belonging to the understanding of the second estate, thereby preserves its bodies and its spirit in the possibility of formal absolute ethical life, of courage and of a violent death, and is thus able to augment the first estate in respect of mass and elemental essence. These two estates relieve the first of the relation in which reality, partly in its resting and partly in its active relation, is fixed as possession and property and as labor – in the manner in which, among modern peoples, in a way for the time being confined to this, the acquiring class has gradually ceased to perform military service, and courage has formed itself, more purified, into a particular estate, which is relieved of that business of acquisition, and to which possession and property are at least something contingent. The constitution of that second estate, as to its matter, Plato determines thus: that the kingly art does not allow those who are drawn to brave and disciplined custom, and whom something else besides drives to virtue, to become partakers<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    of, but only of that which, through its evil, violent nature, impels toward godlessness, insolence, and injustice – subduing and casting such natures out through death, banishment, and the utmost disgrace; whereas the kingly art subjugates those natures that lie in crudeness and baseness to the servile race; and Aristotle recognizes as belonging to this class whatever, by its nature, is not its own but another’s – that which relates to a spirit as a body does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    But the relation of this [element] – which by its own<\/em> nature belongs to another, and does not have its spirit within itself – to the absolutely self-subsistent individuality, is capable, according to its form, of being twofold: namely, either a relation of the individuals of this estate, as particulars, to the individuals of the first, as particulars; or [a relation] of universal to universal. That relation of slavery has, in the empirical appearance of the universality of the Roman empire, vanished of itself, in the loss of absolute ethical life; and with the debasement of the noble estate, the two previously particular estates became equal to one another, and with the cessation of freedom, slavery necessarily ceased as well. Inasmuch as the principle of formal unity and equality had to make itself prevail, it sublated, in general, the inner true difference of the estates, and, in the first place, brought about neither the separation of estates posited above, still less the form of their separation conditioned by it – according to which, under the form of universality, they stand only as whole estate to whole estate, in a relation of domination and dependence, such that even in this relation the two terms standing in the relation remain universal; whereas, by contrast, in the relation of slavery it is the form of particularity that is determining for it, and it is not estate against estate, but rather this unity of each part is dissolved in the real relation, so that individuals are dependent upon individuals. The principle of universality and equality first had to take possession of the whole in such a way that it put a mingling of the two estates in the place of a separation; in this mingling, under the law of formal unity, the first estate is in truth wholly sublated, and the second made into the sole people; the image of which change Gibbon expresses in these terms: the long peace and uniform dominion of the Romans introduced a slow and secret poison into the vital powers of the empire. The dispositions of men were gradually brought to one level, the fire of genius extinguished, and even the military spirit evaporated. Personal courage remained, but they no longer possessed this public<\/em> courage, which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honor, the presence of danger, and the habit of command<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    They received laws and commanders from the will of their monarch, and the descendants of the boldest chieftains were content with the rank of citizens and subjects; the more highly aspiring spirits gathered round the standard of the emperors; and the abandoned provinces, deprived of political strength or unity, sank imperceptibly into the dull indifference of private life.<\/em> – With this universal private life, and for the condition in which the people consists only of a second estate, the formal relation of right – which fixes individual being and posits it absolutely – is immediately present, and out of just such a corruption and universal debasement there has also formed and developed the most complete elaboration of the legislation relating to it. This system of property and right, which, for the sake of that fixity of individuality, is nothing absolute and eternal but wholly within the finite and formal, must be really separated and set apart from the noble estate, must constitute itself as an estate of its own, and there be able to expand in its full length and breadth. To it belong, in part, the questions – subordinate in themselves and remaining within the formal – concerning the legal ground of possession, contract, and so forth; but in part also the entire endless expansion of legislation over what Plato lists as the categories of these matters: “those judicial matters – the contracts of individuals against individuals concerning goods or handiwork, as well as slander and assault; regulations concerning jurisdiction and the appointment of judges; and wherever it is necessary to levy or impose tolls in markets and harbors – it is not worthy to prescribe such things to fine and good men; for they will easily find for themselves the many things that must be settled about this, if God grants them the blessing of a truly ethical constitution. But where this is not the case, it follows that they spend their lives fixing and improving many such things, thinking that they will at last lay hold of the best; living as the sick do, who, from want of self-restraint, will not depart from their bad regimen, and who, through their remedies, achieve nothing but the generation of more manifold and greater illnesses, while always hoping, whenever someone recommends them a cure, to be made well by it; just as ridiculous are those who make laws about the matters named, and are forever amending them, in the belief that they will thereby reach an end – not knowing that they are, in fact, as it were, cutting up the Hydra.<\/em>” – “If, then, it is true that, as licentiousness and sickness increase in a people, the many courts of law throw open their doors, and no greater sign of a bad and disgraceful discipline can be found than that excellent physicians and judges are needed not only by the base and the artisans, but also by those who pride themselves on having been raised in a free education – who are compelled to have justice imposed upon them by others as masters and judges, and who spend much of their time before the courts, both prosecuting and defending” – if this system must at the same time develop there as a universal condition, and must destroy free ethical life wherever it is intermingled with those relations and not originally kept separate from them and their consequences, then it is necessary that this system be taken up with consciousness, recognized in its right, excluded from the noble estate, and granted an estate of its own, as its own realm, wherein it can settle itself and, amid its own confusion and the sublation of one confusion by another, develop its full activity. Accordingly, the potency of this estate determines itself such that it has its place in possession as such, and in the justice that is possible therein with regard to possession; that it at the same time constitutes a coherent system; and, immediately through the fact that the relation of possession is taken up into formal unity, every individual – since he is in himself capable of possession – relates to all as a universal, or as a citizen, in the sense of bourgeois;<\/em> for the political nullity by which the members of this estate are private persons finds its compensation in the fruits of peace and of acquisition, and in the complete security of the enjoyment of these – both insofar as this concerns the individual and insofar as it concerns the whole of it; but the security bearing on the whole is, for each individual, the fact that he is relieved of courage, and exempted from the necessity – belonging to the first estate – of exposing himself to the danger of a violent death, a danger which, for the individual, constitutes the absolute insecurity of all enjoyment, possession, and right. Through this sublated intermingling of the principles, and their constituted and conscious separation, each obtains its right, and there alone is brought about what ought to be: the reality of ethical life as absolute indifference, and at the same time this very same [ethical life] as the real relation within the subsisting opposition – such that the latter is subdued by the former, and that this subduing is itself rendered indifferent and reconciled. Which reconciliation consists precisely in the recognition of necessity, and in the right that ethical life grants to its inorganic nature and to the subterranean powers, in that it relinquishes and sacrifices to them a part of itself; for the power of sacrifice consists in the intuiting and objectifying of the entanglement with the inorganic – through which intuition this entanglement is resolved, the inorganic separated off and recognized as such, and thereby itself taken up into indifference; while the living [element], in laying into it that which it knows as a part of itself, and sacrificing it to death, has thereby at once acknowledged its right and purified itself of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    This is nothing other than the performance of tragedy within the ethical, which the Absolute eternally plays with itself: that it eternally gives birth to itself into objectivity, thereby surrendering itself, in this its figure, to suffering and to death, and raising itself up out of its ashes into glory. The divine, in its figure and objectivity, has immediately a doubled nature, and its life is the absolute oneness of these natures; but the movement of the absolute conflict of these two natures presents itself, in the divine [nature] that has comprehended itself therein, as courage – with which it frees itself from the death of the other, conflicting nature, yet through this liberation surrenders its own life, for this life exists only in being bound together with that other; but it likewise rises again out of it absolutely, for in this death, as the sacrifice of the second nature, death is itself conquered; – appearing, however, in the other nature, the divine movement presents itself such that the pure abstraction of this nature, which would be a merely subterranean, purely negative power, is sublated through its living union with the divine, in that the latter shines into it and, through this ideal oneness in spirit, makes it into its own reconciled living body – which, as body, at once remains in difference and in transience, and, through spirit, beholds the divine as something alien to itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The image of this tragedy, more closely determined for the ethical, is the outcome of that trial of the Eumenides – as the powers of right that subsists in difference – and of Apollo, the god of indifferent light, over Orestes, before the ethical organization, the people of Athens; which, in human fashion, as the Areopagus of Athens, casts equal votes for both powers into the urn, acknowledges the coexistence of both, yet thereby neither settles the strife nor determines any relation or connection between them; but, in divine fashion, as the Athena of Athens, gives back wholly to himself the one entangled, by the god himself, in this difference, and, together with the separation of the powers that both had a part in the criminal, also brings about a reconciliation such that the Eumenides would be honored by this people as divine powers and would henceforth have their seat in the city, so that their wild nature might enjoy the sight, from their altar erected below in the city, of Athena enthroned on high upon the citadel opposite, and would thereby be pacified.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    If tragedy consists in this: that ethical nature separates its inorganic [nature] from itself as a fate, and sets it over against itself, so that it may not become entangled with it, and is reconciled, through the acknowledgment of this [fate] in the struggle, with the divine essence as the unity of both – then, by contrast, to carry this image further, comedy<\/em> in general will fall on the side of fatelessness: either in that it falls within absolute vitality, and thus presents only shadow-images of oppositions, or jests of struggles with a manufactured fate and a fictitious enemy; or [in that it] falls within non-vitality, and thus presents only shadow-images of self-subsistence and of absoluteness; the former [being] the ancient or divine comedy,<\/em> the latter the modern comedy. Divine comedy is without fate and without genuine struggle, because in it the absolute confidence and certainty of the reality of the Absolute is without opposition, and whatever, as opposition, brings a movement into this perfect security and repose is only an unserious opposition, having no inner truth; this opposition now presents itself either against a divinity that appears foreign and external, yet stands there in absolute certainty, as the remnant or dream of a consciousness of isolated self-subsistence – also as a consciousness of particularity that is indeed fixed and held onto, but is itself in complete impotence and powerlessness; – or else the opposition presents itself within a divinity that is itself self-felt and self-conscious, which with consciousness generates for itself oppositions and games, in which, with absolute levity, it stakes individual members of itself on the winning of a determinate prize, and lets its manifold sides and moments bring themselves forth into complete individuality and form themselves into organizations of their own; just as, in general, it can also, as a whole, take its movements not as movements against a fate but as contingencies – certain of its own invincibility, counting loss as nothing, certain of its absolute mastery over every particularity and excess, and conscious of what Plato says in another connection, that a polis has a nature admirably strong. Such an ethical organization will, for example, without danger or anxiety or envy, drive individual members out to extremes of talent in every art and science and skill, and thereby make them into something special; secure in itself that such divine monstrosities do not harm the beauty of its figure but are comic features that lend a moment’s cheer to its shape; as such cheerful heightenings of individual features we may, to name one particular people, regard Homer, Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristophanes, and so on; but we must also fail to mistake – both in the earnest reaction against the ever more serious particularization of Socrates, and fully in the remorse over it, as well as in the swarming multitude and high energy of the individualizations sprouting up at the same time – that this stepping-forth of inner vitality into its extremes announced, in the ripeness of these seed-grains, their strength, but also the nearness of the death of this body that bore them; and that the oppositions which it thereby called forth in general, and which it had previously, even in their more serious and far-reaching appearance – such as wars – been able to stir up and carry on as contingencies and with equal levity, could no longer be taken for shadow-images, but had to be taken for an overpowering fate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    But on another side there is the other comedy;<\/em> whose complications are without fate and without a true struggle, because the ethical nature is itself caught up in that very complication; the knots are tied here not in playful, but in opposites that are serious for this ethical drive, though comic for the spectator, and deliverance from them is sought in an affectation of character and absoluteness that finds itself constantly deceived and deposed. The ethical drive, (for it is not the conscious absolute ethical nature that is at play in this comedy) must, to put it briefly, transform what subsists into the formal and negative absoluteness of right, and thereby give its anxiety the opinion of firmness for its possession, raise its belongings through treaties and contracts and every conceivable clause to something secure and certain, deduce the systems concerning this from experience and reason, as though from certainty and necessity itself, and ground them with the most profound reasonings \u2014 but, like the subterranean spirits in the poet who saw the plantations they had laid out in the infernal wastes swept away by the next storm-wind, so too, through the next turning or even the uprising of the earth-spirit, whole and half sciences are washed away that had been proven from experience and reason, one system of right supplanted by another, here humanity taking the place of harshness, there at the same time the will of power taking the place of contractual security, and, in the domain of science as in actuality, the most rightfully acquired and most assured possessions of principles and rights laid waste \u2014 and either they suppose that it is their own endeavors, hovering above fate with reason and will, that toil away in such material, and that had brought forth such changes; or else they grow indignant at these changes as something unexpected and improper, and first call upon all the gods against such necessity, and then submit to it; in both cases the ethical drive, which seeks an absolute infinity in these finitudes, yields only the farce of its faith and its undying self-deception, which is darkest precisely where it is brightest, already in loss and wrong where it supposes itself to be resting in the arms of justice, reliability, and enjoyment itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Comedy separates the two zones of the ethical from one another in such a way that it lets each hold sway purely for itself, so that in the one the oppositions and the finite are an essence-less shadow, but in the other the absolute is a self-deception; but the true and absolute relation is that the one shines in earnest into the other, each stands in bodily relation to the other, and they are for one another, reciprocally, the serious fate; the absolute relation is thus set up in tragedy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    For although in the living shape or the organic totality of ethical life that which constitutes its real side is in the finite, and therefore cannot, in and for itself, take up its bodily essence perfectly into its divinity, it nevertheless already expresses, in itself, its absolute Idea, though distorted; it does not indeed unite within itself, into absolute infinity, the moments of that Idea which are held apart as necessity, but has this unity only as an imitated negative independence, namely as the freedom of the individual; but this real essence is nonetheless absolutely bound to the absolute, indifferent nature and shape of ethical life; even if it must behold that nature only as something alien, it does behold it, and is, in spirit, one with it. It is, even for it, absolutely the first thing that the wholly pure and indifferent shape and the absolute ethical consciousness be, and the second, indifferent matter, that it, as the real, relate to that shape only as its empirical consciousness; just as it is the first thing that an absolute work of art be,<\/em> and only the second whether this particular individual is its author, or merely beholds and enjoys it. As necessary as that existence of the absolute is, so necessary too is this distribution: that one part be the living spirit, the absolute consciousness and the absolute indifference of the ideal and the real of ethical life itself, and the other its bodily and mortal soul and its empirical consciousness, which may not perfectly unite its absolute form and its inner essence, but nonetheless enjoys the absolute intuition of it as of something as it were alien to it, and, for the real consciousness, is one with it through fear and trust as well as through obedience, but for the ideal consciousness, in religion, in the common god and the service of that god, unites itself wholly with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    But that which we have set on one side under the outer form of the first estate is the real absolute consciousness of ethical life. It is consciousness, and as such, on its negative side, pure infinity, and the highest abstraction of freedom, that is, the relation of subduing driven to the point of its own sublation, or the free, violent death; but on the positive side, consciousness is the singularity and particularity of the individual. But this in-itself negative, namely consciousness in general, of which the distinctions indicated are only its two sides, is absolutely taken up into the positive, its particularity and infinity or ideality absolutely taken up into the universal and real in a perfect manner; and this being-one is the Idea of the absolute life of ethical life. In this being-one of infinity and reality within the ethical organization, the divine nature shines forth of which Plato says that it is an immortal animal whose soul and body, however, are eternally born together, so as to present the wealth of its manifoldness at once in the highest energy of infinity and unity, which becomes the wholly simple nature of the ideal element. For the most perfect mineral does indeed present, in every part separated from a mass, the nature of the whole, but its ideal form, both as the inner form of the fracture and as the outer form of crystallization, is an outside-one-another, and not, as in the elements of water, fire, and air, is each particular part the perfect nature and the representative of the whole, both according to essence and according to form or infinity. No less is its real form penetrated by the true identity of infinity; rather its senses have no consciousness, its light is a single color, and does not see; or if it is the indifference of these, then there is no point of arrest against their passage through it; its tone sounds when struck by something alien, but not out of itself; its taste does not taste, its smell does not smell, its weight and hardness do not feel; and if it does not belong to the singularity of the sense-determinations but unites them in indifference, it is the undeveloped, closed-up lack of differentiation, not the unity that separates itself within itself and subjugates its own separation; just as the elements too, which are equal to themselves in all their parts, contain within themselves only the possibility, not the actuality, of differences, and only the indifference under the form of quantity, not indifference as the qualitatively posited. The earth, however, as the organic and individual element, spreads itself out, through the system of its shapes, from its first rigidity and individuality onward into the qualitative and into difference, and only resumes itself, in the absolute indifference of ethical nature alone, into the perfect equality of all parts and the absolute real being-one of the individual with the absolute \u2014 into the first Aether, which, out of its self-equal, fluid and soft form, scatters its pure quantity, through individual formations, into singularity and number, and thereby perfectly subdues this absolutely brittle and rebellious system, in that number is purified into pure unity and into infinity, and becomes intelligence, and thus the negative \u2014 precisely by becoming absolutely negative, for the absolute concept is the absolute immediate opposite of itself, and nothing is, as an ancient says, no less than something \u2014 can be perfectly one with the positively absolute; and in intelligence, form, or the ideal, is absolute form, and as such real, and in absolute ethical life the absolute form is most truly united with the absolute substance. Of the individualities of the formations that lie between simple substance in reality, as pure Aether, and it as espoused with absolute infinity, none can bring form and qualitative unity \u2014 whether through the quantitative, elemental equality of wholes and parts, or, in higher formations, through an individualization that goes into the more particular details of the parts, together with the formal unification of these into a whole through the sociability of the leaves of plants, of sex, of the herd-like life and communal labor of animals \u2014 into absolute indifference with the essence and substance that is present in ethical life; because it is in intelligence alone that individualization is driven to the absolute extreme, namely to the absolute concept, the negative driven to the point of being absolutely negative, the unmediated opposite of itself. This alone is therefore capable, in that it is absolute singularity, of being absolute universality; in that it is absolute negation and subjectivity, of being absolute position and objectivity; in that it is absolute difference and infinity, of being absolute indifference, and the totality actu<\/em> in the unfolding of all oppositions, and potentia<\/em> in the absolute annihilatedness and being-one of these \u2014 the highest identity of reality and ideality. When the Aether has cast out its absolute indifference, in the indifferences of light, into manifoldness, and has, in the flowers of the solar systems, given birth outward, into expansion, to its inner reason and totality, yet those individuals of light are scattered in a plurality; while those which form the circling leaves of these must relate to them in a rigid individuality, so that the unity of the former lacks the form of universality, and the unity of the latter lacks pure unity, and neither of the two bears the absolute concept as such within itself \u2014 then, in the system of ethical life, the flower of the heavenly system, unfolded outside-one-another, is folded back together, and the absolute individuals are perfectly united into universality, and reality, or the body, is at the highest degree one with the soul, because the real plurality of the body itself is nothing other than abstract ideality, absolute concepts, pure individuals, whereby these themselves are capable of being the absolute system. For this reason, if the Absolute consists in this: that it beholds itself, and indeed as itself, and that intuition and this self-cognition, that infinite expansion and this infinite taking-back of itself into itself, are absolutely one, then, if both are real as attributes, spirit is higher than nature; for while nature is the absolute self-beholding and the actuality of the infinitely differentiated mediation and unfolding, spirit, which is the beholding of itself as itself, or absolute cognition, is, in the taking-back of the universe into itself, both the totality of this plurality cast outward, over which it reaches, and also the absolute ideality of that plurality, in which it annihilates this outside-one-another, and reflects it into itself as the unmediated point of unity of the infinite concept.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    (To be continued in the next issue.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    From this Idea of the nature of absolute ethical life there now follows a relation still to be discussed, the relation of the ethical life of the individual to real absolute ethical life,<\/em> and the relation of the sciences of these, of morals and of natural right. For since real absolute ethical life comprehends within itself infinity, or the absolute concept, pure singularity taken simply and in its highest abstraction, unified within itself, it is immediately the ethical life of the individual, and conversely, the essence of the ethical life of the individual is absolutely the real and therefore universal absolute ethical life; the ethical life of the individual is a pulse-beat of the whole system, and itself the whole system. We note here also a hint given by language, one otherwise dismissed, but which is fully vindicated by what has preceded \u2014 namely, that it lies in the nature of absolute ethical life to be a universal, or customs [Sitten];<\/em> that, accordingly, the Greek word that designates ethical life [Sittlichkeit], and the German word as well, excellently express this its<\/em> nature; but that the newer systems of ethics, since they make a being-for-itself and singularity into their principle, cannot fail to expose their own relation to these words; and this inner hint proves itself so powerful that those systems, in order to designate their own matter, could not misuse those words for the purpose, but instead adopted the word morality [Moralit\u00e4t], which, though by its origin it points in the same direction, being more a word freshly coined, does not so immediately resist its worse meaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    Absolute ethical life, however, is, according to what has gone before, so essentially the ethical life of all that one cannot say of it that it is merely mirrored, as such, in the individual; for it is as much his essence as the Aether that permeates nature is the inseparable essence of the shapes of nature, and as space, the ideality of nature’s appearing forms, does not simply particularize itself into a nothing in any one of them; but just as the lines and edges of the crystal, in which it expresses the outer form of its nature, are negations, so ethical life, insofar as it expresses itself in the individual as such, is a negative. It cannot, in the first place, express itself in the individual unless it is his soul, and it is his soul only insofar as it is a universal and the pure spirit of a people; the positive is, by nature, prior to the negative; or, as Aristotle says, the people is by nature prior to the individual; for since the individual, taken separately, is nothing self-subsistent, he must, like all the parts, be in one<\/em> unity with the whole; but whoever cannot be in community, or needs nothing from self-subsistence, is no part of the people, and is therefore either animal or god. Accordingly, insofar as ethical life expresses itself in the individual as such, it is posited under the form of negation, that is, it is the possibility of the universal spirit; and the ethical properties that belong to the individual, such as courage, or moderation, or thrift, or generosity, and so on, are negative ethical life, meaning namely that in the particularity of the individual no singularity is in truth fixed, and no real abstraction is made; and they are possibilities or capacities for being within universal ethical life. These virtues, which are in themselves possibilities and are of a negative significance, are the object of morals, and one sees that the relation of natural right and morals has thereby been inverted; namely that to morals belongs only the domain of the in-itself negative, while to natural right belongs the truly positive, as its name indicates, in that it is to construe how ethical nature attains its true right; whereas, by contrast, if the negative, as well as this negative taken as the abstraction of externality, of the formal moral law, of pure will and of the will of the individual, and then the syntheses of these abstractions, such as coercion, the restriction of the freedom of the individual through the concept of universal freedom, and so on, were to express the determination of natural right, it would be a natural wrong, since, upon the laying of such negations as its foundation, taken as realities, ethical nature is cast into the highest ruin and misfortune.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    But just as these properties are the reflex of absolute ethical life in the individual as the negative, yet in the individual who is in absolute indifference with the universal and the whole, and are thus its reflex in his pure consciousness; so too there must be a reflex of the same in his empirical consciousness, and such a reflex must constitute the ethical nature of the second estate, which is in fixed reality, in possession and property, and outside of valor. It is this reflex of ethical life, then, for which the ordinary meaning of morality can more or less fit; the formal<\/em> indifference-positing of the determinacies of the relationship, that is, the ethical life of the bourgeois<\/em> or of the private person, for whom the difference of relationships is fixed, and who depends on them and is in them. A science of this morality is, accordingly, in the first instance, the knowledge of these relationships themselves; so that, insofar as they are considered in relation to the ethical \u2014 since, for the sake of the absolute fixedness in question, this relation can only be formal \u2014 precisely that above-mentioned pronouncement of tautology has its place here: this relationship is only this relationship; if you are in this relationship, then be, in relation to it, within it; for if, in actions which bear a relation to this relationship, you do not act in relation to it, then you annihilate it, you sublate it. The true sense of this tautology at the same time immediately includes within itself that this relationship itself is nothing absolute, and hence also that the morality which pertains to it is something dependent, and nothing truly ethical; which true sense follows, according to what was said above, from the fact that only the form of the concept, the analytic unity, is the absolute, and hence negatively absolute, on account of the content, which, as something determinate, contradicts the form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Those properties, however, that are truly ethical, in that in them the particular or negative appears purely taken up into indifference, may be called ethical properties, and only then virtues, when they individualize themselves anew in a higher energy and, still within absolute ethical life, become as it were their own living shapes, like the virtues of an Epaminondas, a Hannibal, a Caesar, and a few others. As such energies they are shapes, and hence not absolute in themselves, no more than the shapes of the other organic formations are, but rather the stronger emergence of one side of the Idea of the whole; and the morals of the virtues \u2014 or, if we wish to distinguish morals in general from morality, and if the name Ethics<\/em> were to be taken for the presentation of virtue \u2014 Ethics must for this reason be only a natural description of the virtues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Now just as this bears a relation to the subjective or negative, the negative in general must also be<\/em> distinguished as the subsistence of difference, and as the lack of it; that first negative is the one of which we spoke above; but this other negative, the lack of difference, presents the totality as something enveloped and undeveloped, in which movement and infinity are not present in their reality. The living thing under this form of the negative is the becoming of ethical life, and upbringing,<\/em> according to its determinacy, is the appearing, ongoing sublation of the negative or subjective; for the child, as the form of the possibility of an ethical individual, is a subjective or negative thing, whose attaining of maturity is the ceasing of this form, and whose upbringing is the discipline or the subduing of it; but the positive, and the essence, is that, nourished at the breast of universal ethical life, it lives in the absolute intuition of that life at first as of something alien, comprehends it ever more, and thus passes over into the universal spirit. It follows of itself from this that those virtues, as well as absolute ethical life, no less than the becoming of that life through upbringing, are not an endeavor after a peculiar and separate ethical life of one’s own, and that the striving after a peculiar, positive ethical life of one’s own is something vain and in itself impossible; and, with regard to ethical life, the saying of the wisest men of antiquity alone is true, that to be ethical is to live in accordance with the customs of one’s own land; and, with regard to upbringing, that which a Pythagorean answered to one who asked him what the best upbringing for his son would be: if you make him the citizen of a well-ordered people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    Now, if the absolutely ethical thus has its own peculiar organic body in individuals, and its movement and vitality, in the common being and doing of all, is absolutely identical as universal and particular, and we have considered it in particularity, but in such a way that its essence is the absolutely identical, so \u2014 that is, in that identity in general \u2014 it must also present itself in the form of universality<\/em> and of cognition, as a system of legislation;<\/em> such that this system perfectly expresses the reality, or the living, present customs; so that it does not happen, as is often the case, that what is right and is in actuality in a people cannot be recognized from its laws \u2014 which incapacity to bring true customs into the form of laws, and this anxiety about thinking these customs, about regarding and acknowledging them as one’s own, is the mark of barbarism. But this ideality of customs, and their form of universality in the laws, must, insofar as it subsists as ideality, at the same time also be perfectly reunited again with the form of particularity, and thus ideality as such must receive a pure, absolute shape, and so be beheld and worshipped as the god of the people, and this intuition itself must in turn have its own vitality and joyful movement in a cult.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Having thus presented absolute ethical life in the moments of its totality, and constructed its Idea, and having likewise annihilated as insubstantial figments of thought the distinction, prevailing in relation to it, between legality and morality, together with the abstractions of a universal freedom of a formal practical reason connected therewith \u2014 and having determined the differences between the science of natural right and morality according to the absolute Idea, not through some mixture of the two principles, but through the sublation of these and the constitution of the absolute ethical identity \u2014 we have thereby established that their essence is not an abstraction but the vitality of the ethical, and that their difference concerns only what is external and negative; and that this difference is at the same time the wholly inverted relation to the other distinction, inasmuch as, according to the latter, the formal and the negative are supposed to be given to natural right as its essence, and the absolute and the positive to morality \u2014 but in such a way that even this absolute, according to the truth, is no less formal and negative, and that what is here called the formal and negative is, in the end, simply nothing at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    In order now to indicate the relation of natural right to the positive sciences of right<\/em>, we need only take up its threads again where we did not pursue them further, and mark the point at which it runs out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    We remark in advance, in general, that philosophy, through the universality of the concept of a determinacy or a power, arbitrarily sets its own boundary in relation to a determinate science; the determinate science is nothing other than the continuing presentation and analysis (taking the word in its higher sense) of how that which philosophy leaves undeveloped as a simple determinacy branches out again and is itself a totality. The possibility of such a development lies, formally<\/em>, in the fact that the law of absolute form and of totality is immediately present in the Idea, according to which a determinacy is to be further cognized and developed; the real<\/em> possibility, however, is present in that such a determinacy or power, not developed by philosophy, is not an abstraction or a truly simple atom, but, like everything in philosophy, is reality \u2014 and a reality is reality precisely because it is a totality and itself the system of the powers; to present the power as such is the development that belongs to the determinate science.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    It follows from this that we might say, for the time being, that a good part of what is called the positive sciences of right \u2014 perhaps the whole of it \u2014 would fall within a philosophy fully developed and extended; and that, precisely because they constitute themselves as sciences in their own right, they are neither excluded from philosophy nor opposed to it; through the being-for-itself and the empirical differentiation of this body of sciences, no true distinction from philosophy is thereby established. That they call themselves empirical sciences \u2014 partly because they have their applicability in the actual world and wish to make their laws and manner of procedure valid before the common mode of representation as well, partly because they relate to the individual systems of existing constitutions and legislations, and belong to a determinate people as well as to a determinate time \u2014 this determines no difference that would necessarily exclude them from philosophy; for nothing needs to be so applicable to actuality, and so justified before the universal mode of representation \u2014 that is, the truly universal one, for there are common modes of representation that are, in this respect, quite particular \u2014 as that which comes from philosophy; just as, likewise, nothing can be so individual, living, and subsisting as that very same thing. In order to be able to speak of the relation of these sciences to philosophy, a difference must first be fixed and determined, by which they are positive sciences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    In the first place, then, the positive sciences comprehend, under the actuality to which they profess to relate, not only what is historical, but also concepts, fundamental principles, relations, and in general much that belongs in itself to reason and is supposed to express an inner truth and necessity. To appeal to actuality and experience regarding such matters, and to maintain it as something positive over against philosophy, must in and for itself be recognized as inadmissible. What philosophy demonstrates to be not real cannot possibly truly occur in experience; and if the positive science appeals to actuality and experience, philosophy can likewise express its demonstration of the non-reality of a concept asserted by the positive science in terms of that same empirical relation, and deny that what the positive science claims to find in experience and actuality is in fact found there. Philosophy will readily grant the opinion that such a thing is experienced as a contingent, subjective view; but the positive science, when it professes to find and exhibit its representations and fundamental concepts in experience, thereby means to assert something real, necessary, and objective, not a subjective view. Whether something is a subjective view or an objective representation, an opinion or a truth, only philosophy can decide. It can turn the positive science’s own manner of proceeding against it ad<\/em> hominem<\/em>, and, besides denying to it the fact that a representation of its own occurs in experience, can conversely maintain that only philosophy’s representation is to be found in experience. The ground on which philosophy is able to exhibit its representation in experience lies immediately in the ambiguous nature of what is called experience. For what counts as experience is not immediate intuition itself, but that same intuition raised into the intellectual, thought and explained, taken out of its singularity and pronounced as necessity. Hence, in what is exhibited in experience and as experience, what matters is not that in it which we could call actuality in relation to the separation that thinking introduces into intuition. But once intuition has been drawn into the field of thought, opinion must give way to the truth of philosophy. That distinction, then, between what the positive science supposes itself to have taken immediately from intuition \u2014 but which it has itself determined as a relation and concept of that intuition \u2014 and what does not belong to thought at all, is in every case very easy to exhibit, and thus to demonstrate philosophy’s complete entitlement to take possession of it. Now, because a thinking of this kind, which appeals to actuality, tends in its opinion to be truly positive precisely by being caught in opposition and holding fast to determinacies \u2014 thus taking figments of thought or products of imagination as absolute, and deriving its fundamental principles from them \u2014 it is exposed to having the opposite determinacy demonstrated against it at every determinacy, and to having, from what it assumes, rather the very opposite derived. Just as, when an increased density or specific weight<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    of a body is explained as an increase of the attractive force, it can just as well be explained as an increase of the repulsive force; for only as much can be attracted as is repelled; the one has meaning only in relation to the other; by however much the one would be greater than the other, by that much it would not exist at all; and so what ought to be regarded as an increase of the one can, with equal justice, be regarded as an increase of its opposite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    So too, if within natural right in general, or in the theory of punishment in particular, a relation is determined as coercion, while philosophy demonstrates the nullity of this concept, and the positive science appeals to experience and actuality, insisting that coercion is indeed something real, that coercion really does take place, then the non-reality of coercion demonstrated by philosophy can, with equal right and with equal appeal to experience and actuality, be expressed by saying that there is no coercion at all, and that no human being is ever coerced, or ever has been coerced. For here everything depends solely on how the appearance is explained \u2014 whether, for the purposes of the representation of coercion, something is regarded as merely external, or rather as internal. Wherever, then, the existence of coercion is to be demonstrated, the very opposite can be shown of one and the same appearance, namely, that it is not a coercion but rather an expression of freedom; for by being taken up into the form of representation, and thereby determined through the inner, the ideal, the subject stands in freedom over against it. And if that which is supposed to count as external and as coercion is, in order to remove the opposition of the inner or of freedom, relocated into the inner itself, and a psychological coercion is thereupon asserted, this transposition of the external into the internal helps just as little. For thought remains simply free, and psychological or mental coercion is unable to bind it; the possibility of sublating the determinacy that is represented and is supposed to serve as coercion is absolute; it is simply possible that the loss of a determinacy, threatened by the punishment, be taken upon oneself, and that what the law seeks to wrest away through the punishment be surrendered. If, then, in the explanation of an appearance, the representation of a determinacy is supposed to act, or to have acted, as coercion, the explanation from the opposite \u2014 that the appearance is an expression of freedom \u2014 is just as simply possible. That the sensuous incentive, whether it be one that drives toward an action, or one that, on the side of the law, is meant to deter from it, is something psychological, that is, something inner, means that it is thereby immediately posited within freedom, which could either abstract from it or not, and either way is freedom of the will. But if it is objected that one nonetheless believes<\/em>, and that it is a general<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    mode of representation that a coercion, and indeed a psychological one, takes place \u2014 this is, in the first place, not true; rather it is believed, just as readily and no doubt more generally, that an action, or the omission of an action, proceeds from the free will; and in that case one would need to trouble oneself about this opinion, in setting up principles and determining laws, no more than astronomers, in their cognition of the laws of the heavens, allow themselves to be detained by the opinion that the sun, the planets, and all the stars move around the earth, and are exactly as large as they appear, and so on; no more than the ship’s captain concerns himself with the opinion that the ship is at rest and the shores are moving away; if both held to that opinion, the former would find it impossible to comprehend the solar system, and the latter would let the rowers stop their work, or have the sails taken in, and both would at once find themselves unable to attain their purpose, and would immediately become aware of the non-reality of the opinion \u2014 just as, were they to concede it reality, it has been shown above that coercion, thought as reality, that is, represented within a system and within the totality, immediately sublates itself and the whole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Since, then, a determinacy held fast by the opinion of<\/em> the positive science is precisely the opposite of itself, it is equally possible for each of the two parties, each of which holds to one of the opposed determinacies, to refute the other; and this possibility of refutation consists in this, that of each determinacy it can be shown that it is not thinkable at all, and is nothing at all, without relation to its opposite; but precisely because it only is, and has meaning only in relation to that opposite, this opposite must and can likewise immediately be present, and be exhibited. That +A has no sense without relation to a -A serves to demonstrate that with +A there is immediately -A as well \u2014 which the opponent then takes to mean that -A is rather what is present here, rather than +A; but the very same can be retorted against his -A. Often, however, this trouble is not even taken, and, for example, it is not shown, regarding the freedom opposed to the sensuous incentives \u2014 which, precisely on account of this opposition, is just as little a true freedom \u2014 that everything that is supposed to be explained as an expression of this freedom must properly be explained as an effect of the sensuous incentives, which can be done very well, but no better than the converse can in turn be shown, namely that what is supposed to be experienced as an effect of the sensuous incentive must properly be experienced as an effect of freedom; instead, freedom is simply abstracted from altogether, and it is asserted that it does not belong here at all, because it is something inner, more than that something moral, and even something metaphysical; without, however, considering that the other determinacy, the one at which a halt has been made,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    namely coercion and the sensuous incentive by which it is supposed to be posited as something external, has, in turn, no meaning at all without its opposite, the inner, or freedom, and that this latter simply cannot be separated from coercion. The action that constitutes a crime, considered from the side on which something determinate<\/em> is willed contrary to the threatened punishment and the sensuous incentive that the law sets up through this threat, is, under this determinacy, called something sensuous, and one will say that it is a sensuous stimulus from which the crime derives; but considered from the side on which the action is a willing, and there lies within it the possibility of abstracting from the sensuous incentive of the law, it appears as free; and neither view \u2014 neither that determinacy nor this possibility \u2014 can be left out, but the one is simply bound up with the other, so that each can immediately be derived from its opposite. But the logic of opinion supposes that, once one determinacy, one opposite, is posited, one can in truth abstract from and dispense with the other, opposed determinacy; just as that logic, by virtue of the nature of its principle of contradiction, is altogether unable to comprehend that, in such determinacies, the opposite of each is wholly indifferent for the determination of intuition, and that, in this abstracting and negative nature, the opposite is entirely equal to its own opposite; still less can it comprehend that both together \u2014 the freedom that stands opposed to sensuousness, and sensuousness and coercion \u2014 are simply nothing real at all, but mere figments of thought and beings of the imagination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Insofar, then, as a science of right is positive by virtue of holding to opinion and to insubstantial abstractions, its appeal to experience, or to its determination of applicability to actuality, or to common sense and the general mode of representation, or even its appeal to philosophy, has not the slightest sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    If we now consider more closely the ground by which the science becomes positive in the manner indicated, and reflect in general on the ground of semblance and of opinion, it emerges that it lies in the form<\/em>; namely, in that what is ideal, an opposed and one-sided moment, and has reality only in absolute identity with its opposite, is isolated, posited as being-for-itself, and pronounced to be something real. It is this form through which intuition is immediately sublated, and the whole dissolved, ceasing to be a whole and something real; this distinction between the positive and the not-positive thus does not concern the content. Through this form it is possible not only, as indicated above, that a purely formal abstraction be fixed and falsely<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    asserted to be a truth and a reality, but also that a true Idea and a genuine principle be misconstrued as to its limit, and be posited outside the power in which it has its truth, thereby losing that truth entirely. That a principle belongs to a power is the side of its determinacy; but within the power itself, this determinacy is present in a way equally indifferentiated and really pervaded by the Idea, and is thereby a true principle; and then, as the Idea appearing in these determinacies as its shape, it is recognized only as the principle of this power, and thereby its limit and conditionedness are recognized as well. But it is torn entirely from its truth if it is made absolute within its conditionedness, or even extended over the nature of other powers. The absolute, clear unity of ethical life is absolute and living precisely in that neither a single power, nor the subsistence of the powers in general, can be fixed; rather, ethical life, even as it eternally expands them, just as absolutely strikes them together and sublates them, and enjoys itself in undeveloped unity and clarity; and in relation to the powers, secure and undivided in its inner life, it now curtails one through another, now passes over wholly into one and annihilates the others, just as, out of this movement generally, it likewise withdraws into the absolute rest in which all are sublated. Sickness and the onset of death, by contrast, are present when a part organizes itself and withdraws from the rule of the whole, and through this isolation negatively affects the whole, or even forces it to organize itself solely for the sake of this power \u2014 as when the vitality of the intestines, which normally obeys the whole, forms itself into animals of its own, or the liver makes itself the ruling organ and forces the whole organization to serve its function. So it can happen, within the universal system of ethical life, that, for example, the principle and system of civil right, which concerns possession and property, becomes so absorbed in itself, and, in the diffuseness into which it loses itself, takes itself for a totality that is in itself unconditioned and absolute. The inner negativity of this power has already been determined above, also as regards its content, which is the subsisting finite; and the reflection of indifference possible within it can all the less be taken for something absolute. Just as little can the system of acquisition and possession itself, the wealth of a people, and, within this system, in turn a single power \u2014 be it agriculture, or manufactures and factories, or trade \u2014 be made into something unconditioned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    But a single power becomes positive to an even greater degree when it and its principle so far forget their conditionedness that they encroach upon others and subjugate them to themselves. Just as the principle of mechanics has forced its way into chemistry and natural science, and that of chemistry, in turn, quite particularly into the latter, so this has been the case, at various times, with various principles in the philosophy of the ethical; but in modern times, within the inner economy<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    of natural right, this external justice \u2014 the formal infinity, reflected within the subsisting finite, that constitutes the principle of civil right \u2014 has acquired a peculiar supremacy over the right of the state and the right of nations. The form of such a subordinate relation as the contract has forced its way into the absolute majesty of the ethical totality, and, for example, the absolute universality of the monarchical center-point, and the being-one of the particular within it, has come to be conceived \u2014 now, following the contract of authorization, as a relation between a supreme official of the state and the abstractum of the state; now, following the relation of the ordinary contract in general, as a matter between two determinate parties, each of whom needs the other, as a relation of mutual performance \u2014 and through such relations, which lie wholly within the finite, the Idea and absolute majesty have been immediately annihilated; just as it is also inherently contradictory when, for the right of nations, the relation of the civil contract \u2014 which pertains immediately to the singularity and dependence of subjects \u2014 is made to determine the relation of absolutely independent and free peoples, who are ethical totalities. So too could the right of the state as such relate itself purely to the single individual, and, as a perfected police, seek to permeate entirely the being of the individual, and thereby annihilate civil freedom \u2014 which would be the harshest despotism; as when Fichte wants all the doing and being of the individual as such to be supervised, known, and determined by the universal opposed to it, and by abstraction. The moral principle, too, could force its way into the system of absolute ethical life, and seek to place itself at the head of public right as well as of private right, and of the right of nations as well; which would be just as much the greatest weakness as the deepest despotism, and the complete loss of the Idea of an ethical organization, since the moral principle, like that of civil right, exists only within the finite and the single.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Just as, in science, such a fixing and isolating of the individual principles and their systems, and their encroachment upon one another, is prevented solely by philosophy \u2014 inasmuch as the part does not recognize its own limit, but must rather have the tendency to constitute itself as a whole and an absolute, while philosophy stands, in the Idea of the whole, above the parts, and thereby both holds each within its limit and, through the very sublimity of the Idea, prevents the part from proliferating endlessly in its own subdivision into infinite minuteness \u2014 so, in actuality, this limiting and idealizing of the powers presents itself as the history of the ethical totality, in which, over time, fixed within its absolute equilibrium, it oscillates up and down between the opposed powers,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    now reminding constitutional right of its determinacy through a slight preponderance of civil right, now making breaches and cracks in the latter through the preponderance of the former, and thus, on the one hand, renewing each system for a time through a more vigorous indwelling, while at the same time reminding all of them, in their separation, of their temporality and dependence \u2013 and, on the other hand, destroying their rank overgrowth and their self-organizing by confounding them all at once in individual moments, presenting them drawn together into itself, and, reborn out of this unity, letting them go forth again with the memory of this dependence and with the feeling of their weakness when they wish to be for themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    This character of the positivity of the legal sciences concerns the form through which a power isolates and posits itself as absolute; and from this side, just like religion or whatever else, every philosophical science too can be perverted and contaminated. But we must also consider positivity from the side of matter. For although both what we previously called positive and what we now regard as matter are both something particular, we previously considered the external connection of the form of universality with particularity and determinacy, whereas now we consider the particular as such.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    And in this regard we must above all take up, against formalism, the cause of that which, in respect of its matter, can be posited as positive; for formalism tears apart intuition and its identity of the universal and the particular, sets the abstractions of the universal and the particular over against one another, and whatever it can exclude from that emptiness, yet subsume under the abstraction of particularity, counts for it as positive \u2013 without considering that through this opposition the universal becomes just as much a positive as the particular; for it becomes positive, as was shown above, through the form of opposition in which it is present within that abstraction. But the real is simply an identity of the universal and the particular, and for that reason that abstraction, and the positing of one of the opposites arising through abstraction \u2013 the universal \u2013 as something existing in itself, cannot take place. In general, if formal thinking is consistent, then, in comprehending the particular as positive, it must have absolutely no content at all; in the pure reason of formal thinking every plurality and distinguishability must utterly fall away, and it is quite impossible to see how it should arrive even at the most meager plurality of rubrics and chapters; just as those who comprehend the essence of the organism as the abstraction of a life-force must actually regard the limbs and the brain and the heart and all the viscera as something particular, contingent, and positive, and must leave them out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    Because, like everything living, so too the ethical is simply an<\/em> identity of the universal and the particular, it is an individuality and a shape; it carries particularity, necessity, relation \u2013 that is, relative identity \u2013 within itself, but rendered indifferent, assimilated, and thereby it is free within it; and this, which from the standpoint of reflection can be regarded as particularity, is not something positive or opposed as against the living individual, which is thereby bound up with contingency and necessity, yet living; this side is its inorganic nature, but organized in itself within the shape and individuality. Thus, to name the most general instance, the determinate climate of a people, and its period of time within the formation of the universal human race, belongs to necessity, and of the far-flung chain of these only one link falls to its present; which is to be comprehended, on the one side, out of geography, on the other out of history. But into this link the ethical individuality has organized itself, and its determinacy does not pertain to it as such, but to necessity; for the ethical vitality of a people consists precisely in this, that it has a shape in which determinacy is present, yet not as something positive (in our previous use of this word), but absolutely united with universality, and animated by it. And this side is also very important for this reason, that it teaches us to recognize how philosophy teaches us to honor necessity, both because it is a whole, and only limited insight clings to singularity and despises it as a contingency \u2013 and also because it sublates the view of singularity and contingency in such a way as to show of it that it does not impede life in itself, but rather that life, while letting it subsist as it is according to necessity, at the same time also wrests it from that necessity, pervades it, and animates it. Just as little as the element of water, to which a part of the animal world is organized, and the element of air, to which another part is organized, is, because they are individual elements, something positive or dead for the fish in the one case and for the bird in the other, just as little is this form of ethical life, in which it organizes itself within this climate and this period of a particular and of the universal culture, something positive within that same life. As in the nature of the polyp there is just as much the totality of life as in the nature of the nightingale and the lion, so the world spirit has, in every shape, its more dull or more developed but absolute self-feeling, and in every people, under every whole of customs and laws, its essence, and enjoyment of itself. \u2013 Outwardly the stage is justified in just the same way, insofar as this outward side belongs to necessity as such; for even in this abstraction of necessity, singularity is once again simply sublated through the Idea; this singularity of the stage<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    of the polyp and of the nightingale and of the lion is a power of a whole, and within this context it is honored. Above the individual stages hovers the Idea of totality, which, however, is reflected back out of its whole scattered-abroad image, and beholds and recognizes itself therein; and this totality of the extended image is the justification of the individual as something subsisting. It is therefore the formal standpoint that brings to an individuality the form of particularity, and sublates the vitality in which particularity is real; but the empirical standpoint, which, where the reality of a determinate stage is posited, demands a higher one \u2013 that higher stage, too, in its developed reality, and empirically, is present just as much; the higher development of the life of the plant is in the polyp, the higher development of the polyp in the insect, and so on. It is only empirical unreason that wishes to see in the polyp the empirical presentation of the higher stage of the insect; the polyp, were it not a polyp, would remain nothing but this determinate dead piece of matter standing to me in an empirical relation, which is dead and matter precisely by my positing it as an empty possibility of being something else \u2013 an emptiness which is death; if it is taken absolutely without an empirical relation for the sake of the higher presentation, then that is to be found, for it must be present according to absolute necessity. \u2013 Thus, for example, the feudal constitution may well appear as something wholly positive; but in the first place, from the side of necessity, it is not an absolute singular, but simply within the totality of necessity; inwardly, however, as against life itself, whether it is positive depends on whether the people has truly organized itself as an individuality within it, whether it fills out the shape of that system completely and pervades it livingly, whether the law of these relations is custom. If, then, the genius of a nation stands generally lower and is a weaker one, and the weakness of ethical life is at its harshest in barbarism and in formal culture, if they have had to let themselves be conquered by another, have had to lose their independence, and have thus preferred the misfortune and disgrace of the loss of self-sufficiency to struggle and death; if they have sunk so crudely into the reality of animal life that they do not even rise to the formal ideality, to the abstraction of a universal, and thus, in the determination of relations for physical need, can endure not the relation of right but only that of personality \u2013 or likewise, if the reality of the universal and of right has lost all faith and all truth, and they are no longer able to feel and enjoy the image of divinity within themselves, but must set it outside themselves, and must make do for it with a dull feeling, or with the wholly painful feeling of its distant remoteness and sublimity \u2013 then the feudal constitution and bondage have absolute truth, and this relation is the sole possible form of ethical life, and hence the necessary and just and ethical one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    From this individuality of the whole and the determinate character of a people, the whole system into which the absolute totality organizes itself is likewise to be recognized; it is to be recognized how all parts of the constitution and of legislation, all determinations of ethical relations, are simply determined through the whole, and form a structure in which no connection and no ornament was present for itself a priori, but each has come to be through the whole and is subject to it. In this sense Montesquieu grounded his immortal work on the intuition of the individuality and character of peoples, and, even if he did not raise himself to the most living Idea, he nonetheless simply did not deduce the individual institutions and laws from so-called reason, nor did he abstract them from experience and then elevate them into something universal, but comprehended both the higher relations of the parts of constitutional right and the lower determinations of civil relations, down to testaments, marriage laws, and so on, entirely and solely out of the character of the whole and its individuality \u2013 and thereby showed, in a manner intelligible to them, to the empirical theorists who fancy they have derived the contingencies of their systems of state and of laws from reason and drawn them out of common human understanding itself, or else out of universal experience, that the reason, and the common human understanding, and the experience from which determinate laws derive are not an a priori reason and common human understanding, nor an a priori experience that would be absolutely universal, but entirely and solely the living individuality of a people \u2013 an individuality whose highest determinacies are in turn to be comprehended out of a more universal necessity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    As was shown above with regard to science, that any individual power can be fixed and science can thereby become positive, so exactly the same must be asserted of the ethical individual, or of the people. For according to necessity, the totality, as the subsistence of determinacies thrown apart from one another, must present itself in it, and the individual link of the chain under which it is posited in the present must pass away, and another must enter in. As the individual grows in this way, one power emerging more strongly while another recedes, it happens that the parts which had organized themselves in the latter find themselves cast out and died off. This division, in which some part ripens toward a new life, while the other, which has fixed itself at the stage of a determinacy, remains behind and sees life flee from it, is possible only because the determinacy of a stage has been fixed and made formally absolute; the form of law, which has been given to the determinate custom, and which is the universality or the negatively absolute of identity, gives it the<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    appearance of something existing in itself; and if the mass of a people is great, then the part of it that organizes itself within that determinacy is great too; and the consciousness that stands over it in the law carries great weight over the unconscious part of the newly aspiring life. When custom and law were one, determinacy was nothing positive; but just as, with the growth of the individual, the whole does not advance uniformly, so law and custom separate, the living unity that binds the members together weakens, and there is no longer, in the present of the whole, any absolute connection and necessity. Here, then, the individual cannot be recognized out of itself, for its determinacy is without the life that explains and renders it comprehensible; and as the new custom likewise begins to take itself up into laws, an inner contradiction of the laws among themselves must simply emerge. Just as previously in history only one side of the view was in question, and what is necessary was at the same time free, so here, by contrast, necessity is no longer one with freedom, and so far falls entirely to pure history; what has no truly living ground in the present has its ground in a past, that is, a time is to be sought in which the determinacy fixed in law, but now dead, was living custom and in agreement with the rest of legislation. But the effect of the purely historical explanation of laws and institutions reaches no further than precisely for this purpose of cognition; it will overstep its proper determination and truth if, through it, the law that had truth only in a past life is meant to be justified for the present; on the contrary, this historical cognition of the law, which knows how to point out its ground solely in lost customs and a life that has died off, proves precisely that it now, in the living present, lacks understanding and meaning, even though, through the form of law, and through the fact that parts of the whole still have an interest in it and tie their existence to it, it still has power and force.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    But for the proper distinction between what is dead and has no truth, and what is still living, a distinction must be recalled which can escape the formal view, and which must prevent what is in itself negative from being taken for living law, and thus the dominance of laws that are in themselves negative from being taken for the animation of the organization. For laws that withdraw individual determinacies and parts from the supreme rule of the whole, exclude its power from them, and constitute exceptions of the individual from the universal, are in themselves something negative, and signs of an incipient death which becomes ever more threatening to life the more the negative and the exceptions multiply, and the more these laws, which tend toward this dissolution, become too powerful for the true laws which constitute the unity of the whole. To the positive and the died-off, then, must be reckoned not only that which belongs wholly to a past<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    and no longer has any living present, and possesses only an uncomprehending and, because it is without inner meaning, shameless power, but also that is without genuinely positive truth which fixes the negative, the dissolution and separation from the ethical totality; the former is the history of a past life, the latter, however, the determinate representation of the present death. Thus in a dissolved people \u2013 as, for instance, indeed in the German \u2013 the laws can appear to have truth, if one does not distinguish whether they are laws of the negative and of separation, or laws of the truly positive and of unity. Immediately with the fact that the laws organizing a whole have meaning only for a past, and refer to a shape and individuality that has long since been shed as a dead husk, that they have interest only for parts, and thereby set up not a living relation toward the whole but a power and dominion foreign to it, and that that in which a living bond and inner unity presents itself no longer has, as a means for its end, the very least fitness, so that this means has neither understanding nor truth \u2013 for the truth of a means lies in its being adequate to the end \u2013 through which innermost untruth of the whole it then also follows that in the science of philosophy in general, in ethical life, and likewise in religion, little truth can still be present \u2013 immediately with this the dissolution determines and consolidates itself and posits itself in a system of the negative, thereby giving itself the formal semblance both of cognition and of laws, whose inner essence is nothing; when the cognition and science of such a people expresses itself in saying that reason knows and cognizes nothing, and is only in empty freedom, as a flight, in nothing and in its semblance, then the content and essence of negative legislation is that there is no law, no unity, no whole; that first untruth, then, is the one that is unconscious and unselfconscious in being so, this second, however, is the one that arrogates to itself the form, and thereby consolidates itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    It is therefore not philosophy that takes the particular to be a positive because it is a particular; but only insofar as it has won, outside the absolute connection of the whole, self-sufficiency as a separate part. Absolute totality checks itself as necessity in each of its powers, brings itself forth upon it as totality, both repeating there the preceding powers and anticipating the ones that follow, but one of them is the greatest power, in whose color and determinacy the totality appears, without, however, being anything restrictive for life, any more than water is for the fish, or air for the bird. It is at the same time necessary that individuality advance, metamorphose itself, and that what belongs to the ruling power weaken and<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    die off, so that all the stages of necessity may appear in it as such; but the misfortune of the period of transition, that this consolidating of the new formation has not purified itself absolutely of the past, is that in which the positive consists. And nature, although within a determinate shape it proceeds with a uniform, yet not mechanically uniform, but rather uniformly accelerated motion, nonetheless also enjoys a new shape which it has won; as it leaps into it, so it lingers within it. As the bomb makes a lurch toward its culmination and then rests a moment at it; or as heated metal does not soften like wax but leaps at once into flux, and lingers upon it; for appearance is the transition into the absolutely opposite, hence infinite, and this stepping-forth of the opposite out of infinity, or out of its nothing, is a leap, and the existence of the shape in its newly born power is at first for itself alone, before it becomes conscious of its relation to something foreign; so, too, growing individuality has both the joyfulness of that leap and a duration of enjoyment of its new form, until it gradually opens itself to the negative, and, even in its downfall, is likewise sudden and breaking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Now when the philosophy of ethical life teaches us to comprehend this necessity and to recognize the coherence of its content, as well as the determinacy of that content, as absolutely bound up with spirit and as its living body, and sets itself against formalism, which regards whatever it can subsume under the concept of particularity as contingent and as dead, the philosophy of ethical life at the same time recognizes that this vitality of individuality in general, whatever its shape may be, is a formal vitality; for the limitedness of that which belongs to necessity, although absolutely taken up into indifference, is only a part of necessity, not the absolute total necessity itself, and hence always a non-correspondence of absolute spirit and its shape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    For this absolute shape, however, it cannot flee to the shapelessness of cosmopolitanism, nor to the emptiness of the rights of humanity, and the like emptiness of a federation of peoples and of the world republic, since these abstractions and formalities contain the very opposite of ethical vitality, and are by their essence protestant and revolutionary against individuality; rather, it must, for the high Idea of absolute ethical life, also recognize the most beautiful shape; and since the absolute Idea is in itself absolute intuition, with its construction the purest and freest individuality is at once likewise determined, in which spirit beholds itself perfectly objectively in its shape, and, wholly without any return to itself out of intuition, recognizes instead the intuition itself immediately as itself, and precisely thereby is absolute spirit and perfect ethical life \u2013 which, at the same time, in the manner set forth above, wards off its entanglement<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    with the negative \u2013 for what we have hitherto called positive is, as has emerged from the matter itself, considered in itself the negative \u2013 sets it over against itself as objective and as fate, and, by consciously conceding to it a power and a realm through the sacrifice of a part of itself, keeps its own life purified thereby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    ON THE SCIENTIFIC WAYS OF TREATING NATURAL RIGHT, ITS PLACE IN PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY, AND ITS RELATION TO THE POSITIVE SCIENCES OF RIGHT. First published 1802\/1803 in the “Kritisches Journal der Philosophie” (ed. Hegel and Schelling), vol. 2, issues 2 and 3. German text after: G.W.F. Hegel, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4 (Jenaer Kritische Schriften), Hamburg 1968. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":"[{\"id\":\"01437738-0f61-4849-a196-1b3258ce9724\",\"content\":\"Fichte prides himself somewhat (in the Introduction to his Natural Right) on the simplicity of his insight into the ground of this latter incommensurability, namely, that the curved is, in earnest, not straight. The superficiality of this ground is self-evident, and is also immediately refuted by the first incommensurability, that of the diameter and the side of the square \u2014 both of which are straight \u2014 as well as by the quadrature of the parabola. As for the aid that, in the same place, is sought from sound common sense against mathematical infinity \u2014 namely, that a polygon of infinitely many sides cannot, precisely because it is a polygon of infinitely many sides, be measured \u2014 this same aid would, on the one hand, have to be available also against the infinite progress in which the absolute Idea is supposed to realize itself; and on the other hand, nothing at all is thereby determined about the main point \u2014 positive infinity, which is not an infinite quantity but identity \u2014 namely, whether this is to be posited; which amounts to saying that nothing is determined about commensurability or incommensurability at all.\"}]"},"class_list":["post-901250","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/grundlinien.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/901250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/grundlinien.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/grundlinien.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grundlinien.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grundlinien.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=901250"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/grundlinien.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/901250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":901276,"href":"https:\/\/grundlinien.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/901250\/revisions\/901276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/grundlinien.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=901250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}