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
These are the main features of the Platonic Republic, which has as
its essential the suppression of the principle of individuality; and
it would appear as though the Idea demanded this, and as if this were
the very point on which Philosophy is opposed to the ordinary way
of looking at things, which gives importance to the individual, and
thus in the state, as also in actualized mind, looks on the rights of
property, and the protection of persons and their possessions, as the
basis of everything that is. Therein, however, lies the very limit
of the Platonic Idea—to emerge only as abstract idea. But, in fact,
the true Idea is nothing else than this, that every moment should
perfectly realize and embody itself, and make itself independent,
while at the same time, in its independence, it is for mind a thing
sublated. In conformity with this Idea, individuality must fully
realize itself, must have its sphere and domain in the state, and yet
be resolved in it. The element of the state is the family, that is,
the family is the natural unreasoning state; this element must, as
such, be present. Then the Idea of the state constituted by reason
has to realize all the moments of its Notion in such a way that they
become classes, and the moral substance divides itself into portions,
as the bodily substance is separated into intestines and organs, each
of which lives on in a particular way of its own, yet all of which
together form only one life. The state in general, the whole, must
finally pervade all. But in exactly the same way the formal principle
of justice, as abstract universality of personality with individual
Being as its existent content, must pervade the whole; one class,
nevertheless, specially belongs to it. There must, then, also be a
class in which property is held immediately and permanently, the
possession of the body and the possession of a piece of land alike;
and in the next place, a class where acquisition is continually going
on, and possession is not immediate, as in the other, but property is
ever fluctuating and changing. These two classes the nation gives up
as a part of itself to the principle of individuality, and allows
rights to reign here, permitting the constant, the universal, the
implicit to be sought in this principle, which really is a principle of
variability. This principle must have its full and complete reality,
it must indeed appear in the shape of property. We have here for the
first time the true, actual mind, with each moment receiving its
complete independence, and the mind itself attaining to being-another
in perfect indifference of Being. Nature cannot effect this production
of independent life in her parts, except in the great system.[76] This
is, as we shall elsewhere see, the great advance of the modern world
beyond the ancient, that in it the objective attains to greater, yea,
to absolute independence, but for the very same reason returns with all
the greater difficulty into the unity of the Idea.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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