Part 23
§ 477. Such a particularity of impulse has thus ceased to be a mere datum: the reflective will now sees it as its own, because it closes with it and thus gives itself specific individuality and actuality. It is now on the standpoint of _choosing_ between inclinations, and is option or _choice_.
§ 478. Will as choice claims to be free, reflected into itself as the negativity of its merely immediate autonomy. However, as the content, in which its former universality concludes itself to actuality, is nothing but the content of the impulses and appetites, it is actual only as a subjective and contingent will. It realises itself in a particularity, which it regards at the same time as a nullity, and finds a satisfaction in what it has at the same time emerged from. As thus contradictory, it is the process of distracting and suspending one desire or enjoyment by another,—and one satisfaction, which is just as much no satisfaction, by another, without end. But the truth of the particular satisfactions is the universal, which under the name of _happiness_ the thinking will makes its aim.
(γ) Happiness(148).
§ 479. In this idea, which reflection and comparison have educed, of a universal satisfaction, the impulses, so far as their particularity goes, are reduced to a mere negative; and it is held that in part they are to be sacrificed to each other for the behoof that aim, partly sacrificed to that aim directly, either altogether or in part. Their mutual limitation, on one hand, proceeds from a mixture of qualitative and quantitative considerations: on the other hand, as happiness has its sole _affirmative_ contents in the springs of action, it is on them that the decision turns, and it is the subjective feeling and good pleasure which must have the casting vote as to where happiness is to be placed.
§ 480. Happiness is the mere abstract and merely imagined universality of things desired,—a universality which only ought to be. But the particularity of the satisfaction which just as much _is_ as it is abolished, and the abstract singleness, the option which gives or does not give itself (as it pleases) an aim in happiness, find their truth in the intrinsic _universality_ of the will, i.e. its very autonomy or freedom. In this way choice is will only as pure subjectivity, which is pure and concrete at once, by having for its contents and aim only that infinite mode of being—freedom itself. In this truth of its autonomy, where concept and object are one, the will is an _actually free will_.
Free Mind(149).
§ 481. Actual free will is the unity of theoretical and practical mind: a free will, which realises its own freedom of will now that the formalism, fortuitousness, and contractedness of the practical content up to this point have been superseded. By superseding the adjustments of means therein contained, the will is the _immediate individuality_ self-instituted,—an individuality, however, also purified of all that interferes with its universalism, i.e. with freedom itself. This universalism the will has as its object and aim, only so far as it thinks itself, knows this its concept, and is _will_ as free _intelligence_.
§ 482. The mind which knows itself as free and wills itself as this its object, i.e. which has its true being for characteristic and aim, is in the first instance the rational will in general, or _implicit_ Idea, and because implicit only the _notion_ of absolute mind. As _abstract_ Idea again, it is existent only in the _immediate_ will—it is the _existential_ side of reason,—the _single_ will as aware of this its universality constituting its contents and aim, and of which it is only the formal activity. If the will, therefore, in which the Idea thus appears is only finite, that will is also the act of developing the Idea, and of investing its self-unfolding content with an existence which, as realising the idea, is _actuality_. It is thus “Objective” Mind.
No Idea is so generally recognised as indefinite, ambiguous, and open to the greatest misconceptions (to which therefore it actually falls a victim) as the idea of Liberty: none in common currency with so little appreciation of its meaning. Remembering that free mind is _actual_ mind, we can see how misconceptions about it are of tremendous consequence in practice. When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the abstract concept of full-blown liberty, there is nothing like it in its uncontrollable strength, just because it is the very essence of mind, and that as its very actuality. Whole continents, Africa and the East, have never had this idea, and are without it still. The Greeks and Romans, Plato and Aristotle, even the Stoics, did not have it. On the contrary, they saw that it is only by birth (as e.g. an Athenian or Spartan citizen), or by strength of character, education, or philosophy (—the sage is free even as a slave and in chains) that the human being is actually free. It was through Christianity that this idea came into the world. According to Christianity, the individual _as such_ has an infinite value as the object and aim of divine love, destined as mind to live in absolute relationship with God himself, and have God’s mind dwelling in him: i.e. man is implicitly destined to supreme freedom. If, in religion as such, man is aware of this relationship to the absolute mind as his true being, he has also, even when he steps into the sphere of secular existence, the divine mind present with him, as the substance of the state of the family, &c. These institutions are due to the guidance of that spirit, and are constituted after its measure; whilst by their existence the moral temper comes to be indwelling in the individual, so that in this sphere of particular existence, of present sensation and volition, he is _actually_ free.
If to be aware of the idea—to be aware, i.e. that men are aware of freedom as their essence, aim, and object—is matter of _speculation_, still this very idea itself is the actuality of men—not something which they _have_, as men, but which they _are_. Christianity in its adherents has realised an ever-present sense that they are not and cannot be slaves; if they are made slaves, if the decision as regards their property rests with an arbitrary will, not with laws or courts of justice, they would find the very substance of their life outraged. This will to liberty is no longer an _impulse_ which demands its satisfaction, but the permanent character—the spiritual consciousness grown into a non-impulsive nature. But this freedom, which the content and aim of freedom has, is itself only a notion—a principle of the mind and heart, intended to develope into an objective phase, into legal, moral, religious, and not less into scientific actuality.
SECTION II. MIND OBJECTIVE.
§ 483. The objective Mind is the absolute Idea, but only existing _in posse_: and as it is thus on the territory of finitude, its actual rationality retains the aspect of external apparency. The free will finds itself immediately confronted by differences which arise from the circumstance that freedom is its _inward_ function and aim, and is in relation to an external and already subsisting objectivity, which splits up into different heads: viz. anthropological data (i.e. private and personal needs), external things of nature which exist for consciousness, and the ties of relation between individual wills which are conscious of their own diversity and particularity. These aspects constitute the external material for the embodiment of the will.
§ 484. But the purposive action of this will is to realise its concept, Liberty, in these externally-objective aspects, making the latter a world moulded by the former, which in it is thus at home with itself, locked together with it: the concept accordingly perfected to the Idea. Liberty, shaped into the actuality of a world, receives the _form of Necessity_ the deeper substantial nexus of which is the system or organisation of the principles of liberty, whilst its phenomenal nexus is power or authority, and the sentiment of obedience awakened in consciousness.
§ 485. This unity of the rational will with the single will (this being the peculiar and immediate medium in which the former is actualised) constitutes the simple actuality of liberty. As it (and its content) belongs to thought, and is the virtual _universal_, the content has its right and true character only in the form of universality. When invested with this character for the intelligent consciousness, or instituted as an authoritative power, it is a _Law_(150). When, on the other hand, the content is freed from the mixedness and fortuitousness, attaching to it in the practical feeling and in impulse, and is set and grafted in the individual will, not in the form of impulse, but in its universality, so as to become its habit, temper and character, it exists as manner and custom, or _Usage_(151).
§ 486. This “reality,” in general, where free will has _existence_, is the _Law_ (Right),—the term being taken in a comprehensive sense not merely as the limited juristic law, but as the actual body of all the conditions of freedom. These conditions, in relation to the _subjective_ will, where they, being universal, ought to have and can only have their existence, are its _Duties_; whereas as its temper and habit they are _Manners_. What is a right is also a duty, and what is a duty, is also a right. For a mode of existence is a right, only as a consequence of the free substantial will: and the same content of fact, when referred to the will distinguished as subjective and individual, is a duty. It is the same content which the subjective consciousness recognises as a duty, and brings into existence in these several wills. The finitude of the objective will thus creates the semblance of a distinction between rights and duties.
In the phenomenal range right and duty are _correlata_, at least in the sense that to a right on my part corresponds a duty in some one else. But, in the light of the concept, my right to a thing is not merely possession, but as possession by a _person_ it is _property_, or legal possession, and it is a _duty_ to possess things as _property_, i.e. to be as a person. Translated into the phenomenal relationship, viz. relation to another person—this grows into the duty of some one _else_ to respect _my_ right. In the morality of the conscience, duty in general is in me—a free subject—at the same time a right of my subjective will or disposition. But in this individualist moral sphere, there arises the division between what is only inward purpose (disposition or intention), which only has its being in me and is merely subjective duty, and the actualisation of that purpose: and with this division a contingency and imperfection which makes the inadequacy of mere individualistic morality. In social ethics these two parts have reached their truth, their absolute unity; although even right and duty return to one another and combine by means of certain adjustments and under the guise of necessity. The rights of the father of the family over its members are equally duties towards them; just as the children’s duty of obedience is their right to be educated to the liberty of manhood. The penal judicature of a government, its rights of administration, &c., are no less its duties to punish, to administer, &c.; as the services of the members of the State in dues, military services, &c., are duties and yet their right to the protection of their private property and of the general substantial life in which they have their root. All the aims of society and the State are the private aim of the individuals. But the set of adjustments, by which their duties come back to them as the exercise and enjoyment of right, produces an appearance of diversity: and this diversity is increased by the variety of shapes which value assumes in the course of exchange, though it remains intrinsically the same. Still it holds fundamentally good that he who has no rights has no duties and _vice versa_.
Distribution.
§ 487. The free will is
A. itself at first immediate, and hence as a single being—the _person_: the existence which the person gives to its liberty is _property_. The _Right as_ right (law) is _formal, abstract right_.
B. When the will is reflected into self, so as to have its existence inside it, and to be thus at the same time characterised as a _particular_, it is the right of the _subjective_ will, _morality_ of the individual conscience.
C. When the free will is the substantial will, made actual in the subject and conformable to its concept and rendered a totality of necessity,—it is the ethics of actual life in family, civil society, and state.
Sub-Section A. Law.(152)
(a) Property.
§ 488. Mind, in the immediacy of its self-secured liberty, is an individual, but one that knows its individuality as an absolutely free will: it is a _person_, in whom the inward sense of this freedom, as in itself still abstract and empty, has its particularity and fulfilment not yet on its own part, but on an external _thing_. This thing, as something devoid of will, has no rights against the subjectivity of intelligence and volition, and is by that subjectivity made adjectival to it, the external sphere of its liberty;—_possession_.
§ 489. By the judgment of possession, at first in the outward appropriation, the thing acquires the predicate of “mine.” But this predicate, on its own account merely “practical,” has here the signification that I import my personal will into the thing. As so characterised, possession is _property_, which as possession is a _means_, but as existence of the personality is an _end_.
§ 490. In his property the person is brought into union with itself. But the thing is an abstractly external thing, and the I in it is abstractly external. The concrete return of me into me in the externality is that I, the infinite self-relation, am as a person the repulsion of me from myself, and have the existence of my personality in the _being of other persons_, in my relation to them and in my recognition by them, which is thus mutual.
§ 491. The thing is the _mean_ by which the extremes meet in one. These extremes are the persons who, in the knowledge of their identity as free, are simultaneously mutually independent. For them my will has its _definite recognisable existence_ in the thing by the immediate bodily act of taking possession, or by the formation of the thing or, it may be, by mere designation of it.
§ 492. The casual aspect of property is that I place my will in _this_ thing: so far my will is _arbitrary_, I can just as well put it in it as not,—just as well withdraw it as not. But so far as my will lies in a thing, it is only I who can withdraw it: it is only with my will that the thing can pass to another, whose property it similarly becomes only with his will:—_Contract_.
(b) Contract.
§ 493. The two wills and their agreement in the contract are as an _internal_ state of mind different from its realisation in the _performance_. The comparatively “ideal” utterance (of contract) in the _stipulation_ contains the actual surrender of a property by the one, its changing hands, and its acceptance by the other will. The contract is thus thoroughly binding: it does not need the performance of the one or the other to become so—otherwise we should have an infinite regress or infinite division of thing, labour, and time. The utterance in the stipulation is complete and exhaustive. The inwardness of the will which surrenders and the will which accepts the property is in the realm of ideation, and in that realm the word is deed and thing (§ 462)—the full and complete deed, since here the conscientiousness of the will does not come under consideration (as to whether the thing is meant in earnest or is a deception), and the will refers only to the external thing.
§ 494. Thus in the stipulation we have the _substantial_ being of the contract standing out in distinction from its real utterance in the performance, which is brought down to a mere sequel. In this way there is put into the thing or performance a distinction between its immediate specific _quality_ and its substantial being or _value_, meaning by value the quantitative terms into which that qualitative feature has been translated. One piece of property is thus made comparable with another, and may be made equivalent to a thing which is (in quality) wholly heterogeneous. It is thus treated in general as an abstract, universal thing or commodity.
§ 495. The contract, as an agreement which has a voluntary origin and deals with a casual commodity, involves at the same time the giving to this “accidental” will a positive fixity. This will may just as well not be conformable to law (right), and, in that case, produces a _wrong_: by which however the absolute law (right) is not superseded, but only a relationship originated of right to wrong.
(c) Right versus Wrong.
§ 496. Law (right) considered as the realisation of liberty in externals, breaks up into a multiplicity of relations to this external sphere and to other persons (§§ 491, 493 seqq.). In this way there are (1) several titles or grounds at law, of which (seeing that property both on the personal and the real side is exclusively individual) only one is the right, but which, because they face each other, each and all are invested with a _show_ of right, against which the former is defined as the intrinsically right.
§ 497. Now so long as (compared against this show) the one intrinsically right, still presumed identical with the several titles, is affirmed, willed, and recognised, the only diversity lies in this, that the special thing is subsumed under the one law or right by the _particular_ will of _these_ several persons. This is naïve, non-malicious wrong. Such wrong in the several claimants is a simple _negative judgment_, expressing the _civil suit_. To settle it there is required a third judgment, which, as the judgment of the intrinsically right, is disinterested, and a power of giving the one right existence as against that semblance.
§ 498. But (2) if the semblance of right is willed as such _against_ right intrinsical by the particular will, which thus becomes _wicked_, then the external _recognition_ of right is separated from the right’s true value; and while the former only is respected, the latter is violated. This gives the wrong of _fraud_—the infinite judgment as identical (§ 173),—where the nominal relation is retained, but the sterling value is let slip.
§ 499. (3) Finally, the particular will sets itself in opposition to the intrinsic right by negating that right itself as well as its recognition or semblance. [Here there is a negatively infinite judgment (§ 173) in which there is denied the class as a whole, and not merely the particular mode—in this case the apparent recognition.] Thus the will is violently wicked, and commits a _crime_.
§ 500. As an outrage on right, such an action is essentially and actually null. In it the agent, as a volitional and intelligent being, sets up a law—a law however which is nominal and recognised by him only—a universal which holds good _for him_, and under which he has at the same time subsumed himself by his action. To display the nullity of such an act, to carry out simultaneously this nominal law and the intrinsic right, in the first instance by means of a subjective individual will, is the work of _Revenge_. But, revenge, starting from the interest of an immediate particular personality, is at the same time only a new outrage; and so on without end. This progression, like the last, abolishes itself in a third judgment, which is disinterested—_punishment_.
§ 501. The instrumentality by which authority is given to intrinsic right is (α) that a particular will, that of the judge, being conformable to the right, has an interest to turn against the crime (—which in the first instance, in revenge, is a matter of chance), and (β) that an executive power (also in the first instance casual) negates the negation of right that was created by the criminal. This negation of right has its existence in the will of the criminal; and consequently revenge or punishment directs itself against the person or property of the criminal and exercises _coercion_ upon him. It is in this legal sphere that coercion in general has possible scope,—compulsion against the thing, in seizing and maintaining it against another’s seizure: for in this sphere the will has its existence immediately in externals as such, or in corporeity, and can be seized only in this quarter. But more than _possible_ compulsion is not, so long as I can withdraw myself as free from every mode of existence, even from the range of all existence, i.e. from life. It is legal only as abolishing a first and original compulsion.
§ 502. A distinction has thus emerged between the law (right) and the subjective will. The “reality” of right, which the personal will in the first instance gives itself in immediate wise, is seen to be due to the instrumentality of the subjective will,—whose influence as on one hand it gives existence to the essential right, so may on the other cut itself off from and oppose itself to it. Conversely, the claim of the subjective will to be in this abstraction a power over the law of right is null and empty of itself: it gets truth and reality essentially only so far as that will in itself realises the reasonable will. As such it is _morality_(153) proper.
The phrase “Law of Nature,” or Natural Right(154), in use for the philosophy of law involves the ambiguity that it may mean either right as something existing ready-formed in nature, or right as governed by the nature of things, i.e. by the notion. The former used to be the common meaning, accompanied with the fiction of a _state of nature_, in which the law of nature should hold sway; whereas the social and political state rather required and implied a restriction of liberty and a sacrifice of natural rights. The real fact is that the whole law and its every article are based on free personality alone,—on self-determination or autonomy, which is the very contrary of determination by nature. The law of nature—strictly so called—is for that reason the predominance of the strong and the reign of force, and a state of nature a state of violence and wrong, of which nothing truer can be said than that one ought to depart from it. The social state, on the other hand, is the condition in which alone right has its actuality: what is to be restricted and sacrificed is just the wilfulness and violence of the state of nature.
Sub-Section B. The Morality Of Conscience(155).
§ 503. The free individual, who, in mere law, counts only as a _person_, is now characterised as a _subject_, a will reflected into itself so that, be its affection what it may, it is distinguished (as existing in it) as _its own_ from the existence of freedom in an external thing. Because the affection of the will is thus inwardised, the will is at the same time made a particular, and there arise further particularisations of it and relations of these to one another. This affection is partly the essential and implicit will, the reason of the will, the essential basis of law and moral life: partly it is the existent volition, which is before us and throws itself into actual deeds, and thus comes into relationship with the former. The subjective will is _morally_ free, so far as these features are its inward institution, its own, and willed by it. Its utterance in deed with this freedom is an _action_, in the externality of which it only admits as its own, and allows to be imputed to it, so much as it has consciously willed.