Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume 2 (of 3)Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy
Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume 2 (of 3)
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy -- History
a. I will now indicate more fully the main features, in so far as
they possess philosophic interest. Though Plato represents what the
state is in its truth, yet this state has a limit, which we shall learn
to know, namely, that the individual—in formal justice—is not opposed
to this universality, as in the dead constitution of the ideal states
founded on the theory of legal right. The content is but the whole;
the nature of the individual, no doubt, but as reflecting itself into
the universal, not unbending, or as having absolute validity; so that
practically the state and the individual are the same in essence.
Because Plato thus takes his start from that justice which implies
that the just man exists only as a moral member of the state, in
dealing with his subject in greater detail, in order to show how this
reality of the substantial mind is produced, he in the first place
opens up before us the organism of the moral commonwealth, _i.e._ the
differences which lie in the Notion of moral substance. Through the
development of these moments it becomes living and existing, but these
moments are not independent, for they are held in unity. Plato regards
these moments of the moral organism under three aspects, first, as
they exist in the state as classes; secondly, as virtues, or moments
in morality; thirdly, as moments of the individual subject, in the
empirical actions of the will. Plato does not preach the morality of
reflection, he shows how traditional morality has a living movement in
itself; he demonstrates its functions, its inward organism. For it is
inner systematization, as in organic life, and not solid, dead unity,
like that of metals, which comes to pass by means of the different
functions of the organs which go to make up this living, self-moving
unity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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