182. The concrete person, who as particular is an end to himself, is a totality of wants and a mixture of necessity and caprice. As such he is one of the principles of the civic community. But the particular person is essentially connected with others. Hence each establishes and satisfies himself by means of others, and so must call in the assistance of the form of universality. This universality is the other principle of the civic community.
Addition.— The civic community is the realm of difference, intermediate between the family and the state, although its construction followed in point of time the construction of the state. It, as the difference, must presuppose the state. On the self-dependent state it must rely for its subsistence. Further, the creation of the civic community belongs to the modern world which alone has permitted every element of the idea to receive its due. When the state is represented as a union of different persons, that is, a unity which is merely a community, it is only the civic community which is meant. Many modern teachers of political science have not been able to develop any other view of the state. In this society every one is an end to himself; all others are for him nothing. And yet without coming into relation with others he cannot realize his ends. Hence to each particular person others are a means to the attainment of his end. But the particular purpose gives itself through reference to others the form of universality, and in satisfying itself accomplishes at the same time the well-being of others. Since particularity is bound up with the conditioning universal, the joint whole is the ground of adjustment or mediation, upon which all individualities, all talents, all accidents of birth or fortune disport themselves. Here the fountains of all the passions are let loose, being merely governed by the sun of reason. Particularity limited by universality is the only standard to which the particular person conforms in promoting his well-being.
183. The self-seeking end is conditioned in its realization by the universal. Hence is formed a system of mutual dependence, a system which interweaves the subsistence, happiness, and rights of the individual with the subsistence, happiness, and right of all. The general right and wellbeing form the basis of the individual’s right and wellbeing, which only by this connection receives actuality and security. This system we may in the first instance call the external state, the state which satisfies one’s needs, and meets the requirements of the understanding.
184. When the idea is thus at variance with itself, it imparts to the phases of the peculiarly individual life, i.e., to particularity, the right to develop and publish themselves on all sides, and to universality it concedes the right to evince itself as the foundation and necessary form, overruling power and final end of the particular. In this system the ethical order is lost in its own extremes. It is a system characterized by external appearance and constituted by the abstract side of the reality of the idea. In it the idea is found only as relative totality, and inner necessity.
Addition.— The direct unity of the family is here broken up into a multiplicity, and the ethical is lost in its extremes. Reality is at this stage externality, involving the dissolution of the conception, the liberation and independence of its realized elements. Although in the civic community particular and universal fall apart, they are none the less mutually connected and conditioned. While the one seems to be just the opposite of the other, and is supposed to be able to exist only by keeping the other at arm’s length, each nevertheless has the other as a condition. Thus most people, for example, regard the payment of taxes as injuring their particularity, and as opposing and crippling their plans. True as this may seem to be, the particular purpose cannot be carried out apart from the universal. A land, in which no taxes were paid, would not be allowed to distinguish itself for the strength of its individuals. In the same way it might appear as if it would be better for the universal to draw to itself the resources of the individual, and become a society such as was delineated by Plato in his “Republic.” But this, too, is only a mere appearance, since both elements exist only through and for each other, and are wrapped up in each other. When I promote my end, I promote the universal, and the universal in turn promotes my end.
185. When independent particularity gives free rein to the satisfaction of want, caprice, and subjective liking, it destroys in its extravagance both itself and its substantive conception. On the other hand the satisfaction whether of necessary or of contingent want is contingent, since it contains no inherent limit, and is wholly dependent on external chance, caprice, and the power of the universal. In these conflicts and complexities the civic community affords a spectacle of excess, misery, and physical and social corruption.
Note.— The independent development of particularity (compare §124, note), is the element which was revealed in the ancient states as an inflow of immorality causing ultimately their decay. These states, founded as they were partly upon a patriarchal and religious principle, partly upon a spiritual though simple ethical life, and originating in general in native intuitions, could not withstand the disunion and infinite reflection involved in self-consciousness. Hence, so soon as reflection arose, the state succumbed, first in sentiment and then in fact. Its as yet simple principle lacked the truly infinite power implied in a unity, which permits the opposition to reason to explode with all its force. In this way it would rise superior to the opposition, preserve itself in it, and take it into itself.
Plato in his “Republic” represents the substantive ethical life in its ideal beauty and truth. But with the principle of independent particularity, which broke in upon Grreek ethical life at his time, he could do nothing except to oppose to it his “Republic,” which is simply substantive. Hence he excluded even the earliest form of subjectivity, as it exists in private property (§46, note) and the family, and also in its more expanded form as private liberty and choice of profession. It is this defect, which prevents the large and substantive truth of the “Republic” from being understood, and gives rise to the generally accepted view that it is a mere dream of abstract thought, or what we are used to calling an ideal. In the merely substantive form of the actual spirit, as it appears in Plato, the principle of self-dependent and in itself infinite personality of the individual, the principle of subjective freedom does not receive its due. This principle on its inner side issues in the Christian religion, and on its outer side in the Roman world, where it was combined with abstract universality. It is historically later than the Greek world. So, too, the philosophic reflection, which fathoms the depth of this principle, is later than the substantive idea found in Greek thought.
Addition.— Particularity, taken abstractly, is measureless in its excess, and the forms of excess are likewise measureless. A man’s appetites, which are not a closed circle like the instinct of the animal, are widened by picture-thought and reflection. He may carry appetite even to the spurious infinite. But on the other side privation and want are also measureless. The confusion, due to the collision of appetite and privation, can only be set to rights by the state. If the Platonic state excludes particularity, no hope can be held out to it, as it contradicts the infinite right of the idea to allow to particularity its freedom. In the Christian religion, the right of subjects and also the existence, which is self-referring and self-dependent, have received a marked expansion. And at the same time the whole is sufficiently strong to establish harmony between particularity and the ethical unity.
186. But the principle of particularity develops of its own accord into a totality, and thus goes over into universality. In this universality it has its truth and its right to positive realization. Since at the standpoint of dualism, which we now occupy (§184), the principles of particularity and universality are independent, their unity is not an ethical identity. It does not exist as freedom, but as a necessity. That is to say the particular has to raise itself to the form of universality, and in it it has to seek and find its subsistence.
187. Individuals in the civic community are private persons, who pursue their own interests. As these interests are occasioned by the universal, which appears as a means, they can be obtained only in so far as individuals in their desire, will, and conduct, conform to the universal, and become a link in the chain of the whole. The interest of the idea as such does not, it is true, lie in the consciousness of the citizens; yet it is not wholly wanting. It is found in the process, by means of which the individual, through necessity of nature and the caprice of his wants, seeks to raise his individual natural existence into formal freedom and the formal universality of knowing and willing. Thus, without departing from its particular nature, the individual’s character is enlarged.
Note.— The view that civilization is an external and degenerate form of life is allied to the idea that the natural condition of uncivilized peoples is one of unsophisticated innocence. So also the view that civilization is a mere means for the satisfaction of one’s needs, and for the enjoyment and comfort of one’s particular life, takes for granted that these selfish ends are absolute. Both theories manifest ignorance of the nature of spirit and the end of reason. Spirit is real only when by its own motion it divides itself, gives itself limit and finitude in the natural needs and the region of external necessity, and then, by moulding and shaping itself in them, overcomes them, and secures for itself an objective embodiment. The rational end, therefore, is neither the simplicity of nature nor the enjoyments resulting from civilization through the development of particularity. It rather works away from the condition of simple nature, in which there is either no self or a crude state of consciousness and will, and transcends the naive individuality, in which spirit is submerged. Its externality thus in the first instance receives the rationality, of which it is capable, namely, the form of universality characteristic of the understanding. Only in this way is spirit at home and with itself in this externality as such. Hence in it the freedom of spirit is realized. Spirit, becoming actualized in an element, which of itself was foreign to its free character, has to do only with what is produced by itself and bears its own impress.—In this way the form of universality comes into independent existence in thought, a form which is the only worthy element for the existence of the idea.
Culture or education is, as we may thus conclude, in its ultimate sense a liberation, and that of a high kind. Its task is to make possible the infinitely subjective substantiality of the ethical life. In the process we pass upwards from the direct and natural existence to what is spiritual and has the form of the universal.—In the individual agent this liberation involves a struggle against mere subjectivity, immediate desire, subjective vanity, and capricious liking. The hardness of the task is in part the cause of the disfavour under which it falls. None the less is it through the labour of education that the subjective will itself wins possession of the objectivity, in which alone it is able and worthy to be the embodiment of the idea.— At the same time the form of universality, into which particularity has moulded itself and worked itself up, gives rise to that general principle of the understanding, in accordance with which the particular passes upward into the true, independent existence of the individual. And since the particular gives to the universal its adequate content and unconditioned self-direction, it even in the ethical sphere is infinitely independent and free subjectivity. Education is thus proved to be an inherent element of the absolute, and is shown to have infinite value.
Addition.— We call those men educated or cultured, who can perform all that others do without exhibiting any oddities of behaviour. Uneducated men thrust their eccentricities upon your notice, and do not act according to the universal qualities of the object. It easily happens that the uneducated man wounds the feelings of others, since he lets himself go, and does not trouble himself about their sensibilities. Not that he desires to injure them at all, but his conduct is not in unison with his will. Education refines particularity, and enables it to conduct itself in harmony with the nature of the object. True originality, which creates its object, desires true culture, while untrue originality adopts insipidities, which are characteristic of a lack of culture.
188. The civic community contains three elements:
A. The recasting of want, and the satisfaction of the individual through his work, through the work of all others, and through the satisfaction of their wants. This is a system of wants.
B. Actualization of the general freedom required for this, i.e., the protection of property by the administration of justice.
C. Provision against possible mischances, and care for the particular interest as a common interest, by means of police and the corporation.