Hegel’s System of Ethical Life (1802/3) and First Philosophy of Spirit (Part III of the System of Speculative Philosophy 1803/04) is the earliest surviving work in which spirit is prised from natural embeddedness and made to show itself as a self-moving ethical whole; its distinctive stake is to exhibit, in a rigorously economical manuscript logic, how Sittlichkeit arises from the reciprocal “subsumptions” of intuition and concept and then consolidates itself in institutions, classes, and government until, through negativity and formation, it attains the people’s speech, tool-world, possession, and family as objective media of freedom. The volume’s scholarly contribution is twofold: it supplies an integral textual basis for Hegel’s Jena social theory and an editorial frame that discloses the composition sequence and the architectonic context in which these dense fragments interlock and displace one another.
The outer framing is unusually explicit. The editors present two manuscripts—the System der Sittlichkeit and the First Philosophy of Spirit—and carefully place them among Jena-period designs that had not yet stabilized into the later triadic canon. The contents list itself already stages the argument’s grammar and momentum: interpretation, translation of the ethical manuscript, then translation of the spirit manuscript with its own introduction and appendices, including the Rosenkranz report on early Jena material. The editorial preface states that these are the earliest surviving versions of Hegel’s social theory and that both are incomplete; some portions of the later manuscript are missing and are supplemented, as far as possible, by secondary reports and fragments. The stated aim is to make evident the relations among the parts and to supply, through a lengthy interpretive essay, the most continuous line into the manuscripts’ compressed argumentation.
The composition sequence matters for how the work should be read. The System of Ethical Life is a fair copy written in the winter of 1802 or spring 1803; it follows immediately upon the Natural Law essay and is broadly contemporaneous with the redaction of the paper on the German constitution. While Rosenkranz handled a lecture version more free in tone, the extant text is stark and stripped of pedagogic connective tissue—no textbook scaffolding, little concession to an external reader, and very few marginal amplifications. The most plausible reconstruction given the Jena circumstances is that Hegel was compelled to produce his own “text” for dictated courses, and that the ethical manuscript was drafted as one segment of a planned encyclopaedic compendium whose publication kept receding as the theoretical architecture shifted under his hands. Hence the manuscript’s end dissolves into headings and lists, signaling a juncture where oral development would have carried the structure forward.
The systematic context the interpretation reconstructs is decisive. In Hegel’s earliest Jena outline, philosophy appears in a fourfold design—Logic (the Idea as such), Philosophy of Nature (the realization of the Idea as body), Ethical Nature as real spirit, and Religion as the resumption into the unity of the Idea—before the mature triad of Logic, Nature, and Spirit crystallizes toward the end of 1803. On this older plan, the System of Ethical Life occupies the third station: ethical nature as real spirit, distinguished in level and function from religion, which is treated as the culminating synthesis. This placement explains why the manuscript presupposes an introductory logic and a nature-philosophy and why its own “introduction” begins in medias res, with a programmatic sentence that assigns ethical science the task of rendering intuition adequate to concept because the Idea is the identity of both. The interpretive essay reconstructs this context with care and marks when and how the quadripartite scheme gives way to the later triad as Hegel redoes everything “in order,” delaying publication and leaving this treatise effectively by the wayside as a form no longer adequate to the new sequence—even while much of its content persists through recasting.
Within the ethical manuscript, the method is announced by a handful of terms that do the real work: intuition, concept, relation, subsumption, and Potenz. Their sense is not psychological but architectonic: intuition, in these pages, is a synthetic whole—an immediate universality as a living shape—while concept is the determinative activity that articulates the whole into its distinct parts; relation names the categorical matrices—substance/accident, causality/dependence, and community—within which ethical life first shows itself in natural necessity; and subsumption is not a one-sided classification but a reciprocal weaving in which each side is taken up under the other, then brought to a middle that is neither mere addition nor compromise but a concrete totality. The interpretive analysis insists that this reciprocity proceeds by levels or Potenzen, a graduated sequence in which the real and the ideal exchange precedence until an identity that is lived, not surmised, is won.
The System of Ethical Life unfolds accordingly in three movements: first, Absolute Ethical Life on the Basis of Relation; then The Negative or Freedom or Transgression; and finally Ethical Life proper as constitution and government. The table of contents indicates the inner articulations with unusual clarity—Feeling and Thought in the first part; the unheaded but pivotal second part; and, in the last, the constitution at rest (System, at rest) and the moving constitution (Government), with the tripartite “systems” of universal government: need, justice, discipline. Each title is a marker of logical pressure: relation stresses dependence and natural reciprocity; negativity names the conversion by which the formally opposite is turned upon its author and freedom is exhibited as determinate form; ethical life names the achieved, objectified universality in which classes, offices, and institutions show the same structure that was previously only implicated in natural life.
From the first page of the translation proper, Hegel constrains the reader to think ethical genesis from the side of relation. The First Level is Feeling as subsumption of Concept under Intuition: the living singular confronts the ordered world as a totality of necessities, and yet, in need and satisfaction, it practically subordinates that order to its inwardness. The interpretation traces the example to paradigm: hunger and thirst are not bare sensations but the primitive ethical field in which natural determinacy is idealized as a task; the cycle of need–labor–satisfaction compels the subject to become an agent; enjoyment yields room to preparation; possession and tool arise as objectified middles that carry desire beyond immediacy and decouple work from consumption. This is the real concept of feeling, visible to science though not recognized in the agent’s first-person form: it is by taking possession, storing, and fabricating that the individual learns the objectivity of the object and begins to inhabit a world in which his own subsistence depends on a rule he did not set. The tool is the symbol of this equality of inner purpose and outward rule: it is the totality of labor and possession, permitting use without loss and exemplifying an ideality lodged in the very practice of work.
The Second Level: of Infinity and Ideality in Form or in Relation reverses the order: now intuition is subsumed under concept. What was at first an engulfing natural whole becomes a traversable structure articulated by work, exchange, and rule; the subject learns to superintend the process rather than merely to undergo it. Hegel’s headings show the alternation—first the subsumption of the concept under intuition, then intuition under concept, then the level of indifference of (a) and (b). In this “middle,” the earlier instabilities—need versus satisfaction, labor versus enjoyment, possession as holding versus spending—are pacified in the mediations that will later reappear in right and economy. The interpretation articulates how family, property, and the organization of labor fill this level: the family is “the supreme totality of which nature is capable” because, in raising the children, the strong serve what is only formal and so demonstrate the identity of inner and outer as the essence of ethical being—a demonstration that must at first remain feeling or float above as thought. The family therefore constitutes the natural ethical middle in which singular life is preserved and prepared for universality.
Negativity now enters as the hinge. The second part—The Negative or Freedom or Transgression—exhibits freedom first as a fixed negative that turns immediately against life, and then as the conversion of subsumptions that institutes objective right. Hegel’s dense sentences here are exact: pure freedom “makes the ideal, merely superficial determinacy into the essence; thus it negates reality in its determinacy and fixes the negation.” A reaction is necessary because such fixation only injures life without elevation; restoration must therefore be real, yet can only be formal in actuality. Hence the conversion: the doer is posited under the same indifferent character he posited—what he negated must be equally really negated in him—so that crime and avenging justice are bound by absolute necessity as opposite subsumptions, the one constituting itself as intuition and negating the universal, the other, as universal and objective, subsuming the negation that made itself intuitive. Conscience is noted, but only as the ideal, merely inner reversal; the ethical point is the real conversion that returns the negation upon the negator. In this way negativity is not a lingering void but an institutionally anchored equality.
The third movement, Ethical Life, brings the constitution to rest and then to motion. As system, at rest, it displays ethical objectivity through classes that bear determinate virtues and thereby express in durable social shapes what the individual can only enact momentarily. Classes are not aggregates defined by shared traits; they are complexes of institutions, objectively formed patterns of action and judgment. Slaves are explicitly said to be no class, since they have no structured relation to each other as slaves nor to the larger whole except through a master; by contrast, the noble, the bourgeois, and the peasant are ethical shapes because they lodge virtue in an order that others can recognize and in which each is answerable for what it embodies. The military nobility carries wisdom and bravery; their “immediate activity in the people” is “not work, but something organic in itself and absolute,” supplying the living image of ethical being for the rest and rooting political authority in an absolute activity that is not reducible to economic contribution. Bourgeois existence is the sphere of independence and right, but its virtue is too intellectual: citizenship is held abstractly; impersonal justice replaces the earlier binding honor; family prosperity becomes the subjective focus, and sacrifice becomes either impersonal (taxes) or accidental (charity). The peasantry retains a natural totality: collaborating with, not abstracting from, natural processes, it remains capable of real virtue but without reflective wisdom. The interpretive analysis is frank in its attributions: wisdom belongs to the nobility, is absent from the bourgeois and the peasants, and is politically decisive because government is the function of wisdom.
As government, the constitution moves. “Government” is the organization of the inorganic by the absolute movement of the concept; yet because each class is itself an organism, the organizing occurs both between classes and within them. Hence the genuine “separation of powers” is not primarily the distribution among central organs but the inner government of each class as a class. Hegel distinguishes the Absolute Government (guardians of law—analogous to Plato’s rulers, but entered also via the priesthood and characterized by the practical indifference that comes with proximity to death and with age), the Universal Government (three “systems”: need, justice, discipline), and the Free Government (a heading that closes the section’s arc in outline). The analysis emphasizes that what many would call the constitution—the working of the central government—is in truth only the motion of a deeper resting concept: the class articulation and the wisdom that governs from within.
The system of need makes explicit what the first part implied in microcosm: value is the universal that relates to particular needs and possessions through the oscillation of supply and demand, so that the opposition of universal and particular is only formal because value is the possession as socially mediated. Here labor, exchange, and division of labor bind classes to one another; dependence is not merely natural but institutional. The system of justice converts this into right: war appears as punitive instrument externally; internally equality is abstract, everyone person before the law, and litigation runs across and against classes and their organs. The ideal of self-government—judicative composition by equity that satisfies the parties with their consent—reveals the direction, even if the code that would systematize all rights remains a regulative horizon. The fragmentary close suggests how discipline (Sitten as discipline and fetter) would complete universal government: education, socialization, and the hardening of habits that form the ethical disposition required by participation in the institutions.
These configurations in the System of Ethical Life are mirrored, displaced, and deepened in the First Philosophy of Spirit of 1803/04. The editorial introduction reports that much of the content and sequence is preserved while the method is recast; the fragment we have presents, under the rubric A. The Formal Concept of Consciousness, three levels—Speech, The Tool, Possession and the Family—followed by Transition to Real Existence: The Negative and Real Existence: The People. What the ethical manuscript treated as natural-ethical genesis now appears as the formal articulation of consciousness itself; the earlier mediations are transposed from the plane of “relation” into the explicit logic of spirit’s self-positing.
Spirit’s inorganic nature is no longer “nature” in general, but nature posited as suspended in language, memory, and tool; in this posited negativity, singular consciousness is the “absolute totality” as family, taken in its reality as possessor of the family goods. This totality must be freed from its differentiation and become absolutely universal spirit, which means the family—now explicitly “the inorganic nature of the spirit”—must be marked with universality and elevated. The path runs through the people’s speech. Only as the speech of a people is language the ideal existence of spirit; in it, the content of inward being comes outward as a universal that resounds the same in all consciousnesses. Barbarians, lacking this totality, “do not know how to say what they mean,” whereas a people’s speech is the work in which spirit expresses its essence; language, first present as a dead other, must be superseded as other and come to fruition in its concept. The next moments—labor and possession—are likewise transposed: what was earlier the tool as synthesis of labor and possession becomes, along with speech, the medium in which the formal concept of consciousness passes into real existence.
The transition through negativity is again pivotal. As earlier, the fixed negative must be converted; but the plane of exposition shifts from ethical relation to the very form of consciousness. The people (das Volk) is not a mere collection of individuals; it is the real existence of spirit as a self-sufficient universality that has speech as its immediate ideality, tools as its formed externality, possession and family as its singularity stabilized. Thus the elements that, in the System of Ethical Life, were painstakingly derived from feeling, need, labor, tool, and family now return as the formal ladder by which consciousness is educated into universality; Bildung is no longer an external discipline but the inner transformation by which speech, tool, and possession lose their immediacy and become transparently the work of spirit.
The manuscripts also register, in a nascent key, moments familiar from Hegel’s later works. The general preface singles out first versions of the “life and death struggle,” lordship and bondage, and the theory of civil society with its class structure; basic economic analyses appear that anticipate themes later radicalized by others. Yet the interpretive gain here is not merely anticipation but direct observation of how “spirit”—the central notion of Hegel’s philosophy—evolves into view. The System of Ethical Life shows spirit as the equilibrium and motion of an ethical organism; the First Philosophy of Spirit shows how the same content is re-inscribed as the formal articulation of consciousness and then projected outward into the real existence of a people. The displacement is subtle: what in the first appeared as the universal subsuming the particular in justice becomes, in the second, language as the universal form in which everyone’s meaning becomes communicable; what appeared as tool mediating labor and possession becomes the formed externality in which concept becomes thing without losing itself; what appeared as family as the supreme totality of nature becomes the singularity through which universality takes root and from which it must be elevated into ethical universality.
The treatment of negativity as freedom is especially instructive across the two texts. In the ethical manuscript’s second part, murder is analyzed as the fixed negative—freedom turned against life—that forces the conversion through avenging justice; restoration in actuality must be formal and symmetrical, reversing the subsumption the transgressor asserted. This logic is unflinching: the point is not moral edification but the real assertion of indifference as equality in determinacy. In the later text, the same negative appears within consciousness; conscience is recognized but declared insufficient as merely inner reversal. In both, the negative is neither sheer destruction nor transient passage; it is the catalyst that institutes equality and makes way for universal form—law in the one case, speech and formed externality in the other.
A final framing contrast, emphasized by the interpretation and felt everywhere in the manuscripts, is the relation between Sittlichkeit and religion. On the early fourfold plan, religion is not a department within ethical life but the culminating synthesis of theoretical and practical cognition; the ethical organism culminates in government and law, whereas the absolute unity of inner and outer is grasped as absolute only in religious experience—though the later development will move that absolute mode to philosophy itself. The ethical manuscripts, therefore, repeatedly note that matters stand “differently” in religion. This difference is operative even in the class-ethics: bravery, wisdom, independence—virtues distributed across shapes—attain their highest indifference only in an activity that is no longer “work,” and which shows the same elevation of particularity that religion enacts as reconciliation. The editorial apparatus helps the reader keep these planes apart while tracking their points of contact.
What becomes evident, as one follows the reciprocal subsumptions from the first feeling of need to the speech of a people, is that Hegel’s wager at Jena is strictly methodological. He refuses explanatory prologues and substitutes a sequence of necessities in which each part is overcome by the next because the earlier form reveals its limit precisely by fulfilling its own demand. The analytic of feeling calls forth labor; labor throws up possession and tools; these, generalized, require systems of need and justice; the family, as nature’s supreme ethical totality, both grounds and restricts the ascent; negativity externalizes as transgression and internalizes as conscience; conversion installs equality and right; classes objectify virtue; government organizes the inorganic; and all of this, transposed, reappears as the formal concept of consciousness that must become real as the people by means of speech, tool, possession, and family. The parts merge into—and are displaced by—other parts under the same law: every achieved totality is the middle that both stabilizes and forces a further passage.
The distinctive contribution of this volume is to render that law legible at origin. Because the System of Ethical Life is a fair copy without didactic padding, its problems stand without commentary, and because the First Philosophy of Spirit both repeats and transposes, one can watch Hegel shift exposition from natural-ethical relation to the formal grammar of spirit. The general preface is right to claim that, taken together, these texts illuminate the later Phenomenology and Philosophy of Right: the “life and death struggle” and lordship–bondage are visibly prefigured; the class structure of civil society is already drawn; and the logical heart—spirit as the identity of intuition and concept articulated through negativity—is everywhere at work. The editor’s introduction supplies the composition history and the necessary contextual warrants—why there is no introduction, why the endings list headings, why the fourfold becomes a triad, why religion is said to be “different,” why classes are shapes and slaves no class—and without this outer frame the reader would miss the very movement the manuscripts intend to exhibit.
If one wants the shortest clarifying word at the end, it is this. The manuscripts teach that spirit does not begin as a concept applied to life, nor as an ineffable unity behind it; it first appears as the equilibrium of a living order that learns to make its own necessities into means. When that equilibrium takes speech as its universal medium, tool as its formed externality, possession and family as its singular substantiality, and government as its movement, the people becomes the real existence of freedom. The early Jena manuscripts let us see that genesis without retrospective smoothing, which is why their density and compression are not a hindrance but the very medium of their philosophical truth.
Simon Gros 
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