104. Crime and revenging justice represent the visible outer form of the development of the will as occurring, first of all, in the distinction between the universal will and the individual will, which exists independently in opposition to the universal. Next, by rising above the opposition, the universal will is turned back into itself and has become an independent reality. Thus right, when maintained against the independent private will, has validity, being realized through its own necessity.
This result is also arrived at by the development of the conception of will on the side of its inner character. The actualization of the will according to its conception proceeds in this way. Its first form is the abstract and simple phase it assumes in abstract right. This first form must be in the next place set aside and passed beyond (§21) in order that the will may become involved in the opposition of the abstract universal will and the independent particular will. Then by the removal of this opposition, i.e., by the negation of a negation, it becomes an actualized will, free not only abstractly and potentially, but actually, as is necessary in a negativity which is able to refer itself to itself. Whereas in abstract right the will was itself mere personality, it now has its personality as its object. The subjectivity which is its own object is infinite, and freedom in its infinite subjectivity constitutes the principle of morality.
Note.—Let us for the sake of a closer inspection turn back to the elements, through which the conception of freedom progresses from the first abstract phase of the will to that phase, in which it refers itself to itself, the phase of the self-determining subject. Thus property being an external object, we have in it the phase of the abstract “mine;” in exchange we have the common “mine,” the “mine” brought into existence by two wills; in wrong the will which belongs to the province of right, the will in its abstract, direct, and intrinsic existence, is made contingent by means of the particular will which is itself contingent. In morality this whole phase of will is so far transcended that its contingency is turned back into itself and made one with itself, and thus becomes a self-referring, infinite contingency of the will, or in a word subjectivity.
Addition.— To truth it belongs that the conception should exist, and that its reality should correspond to the conception. In right the will exists in an external object. But as it must have its existence in itself, in an internal thing, it must become its own object; it must pass into subjectivity and have itself over against itself. This relation to itself is affirmative, a relation brought about by the will only through the transcendence of its direct existence. When its firsthand existence is transcended in crime, the way is open, through punishment, the negation of a negation, to affirmation, that is, to morality.