The sublation of crime is, to this extent, retribution, insofar as it is, according to the concept, a violation of the violation, and, according to existence, the crime has a determinate, qualitative and quantitative extent, and thus so too does its negation, as existence. This identity, resting on the concept, is however not the equality in the specific character, but in the in itself existing character of the violation — according to its value.

Since, in the ordinary science, the definition of a determination — here, of punishment — is supposed to be taken from the general representation of the psychological experience of consciousness, this would indeed show that the general feeling of peoples and individuals, in the case of crime, is and has been that it deserves punishment, and that it should happen to the criminal as he has done. It is not apparent how these sciences, which have the source of their determinations in general representation, could at another time adopt propositions that contradict such a likewise so-called general fact of consciousness. — A main difficulty, however, has been brought into the representation of retribution by the determination of equality; the justice of the determinations of punishment according to their qualitative and quantitative character is, in any case, something later than the substantial matter itself. Even if one had to look for other principles for this further determination than for the universal of punishment, the latter still remains what it is. But the concept itself must in general contain the fundamental principle for the particular as well. This determination of the concept is, however, precisely that connection of necessity whereby the crime, as the will that is null in itself, thus contains within itself its own annihilation — which appears as punishment. It is the inner identity that, in external existence, is reflected for the understanding as equality. The qualitative and quantitative character of the crime and of its sublation now falls into the sphere of externality; in this sphere, no absolute determination is possible in any case (compare § 49); this remains, in the field of finitude, only a demand which the understanding has to delimit ever further — which is of the highest importance — but which proceeds into infinity and admits only an approximation, one that is perennial. — If one not only overlooks this nature of finitude, but also stops entirely at the abstract, specific equality, then not only does an insurmountable difficulty arise in determining punishments (all the more so when psychology further brings in the magnitude of the sensuous impulses, and, connected with this — as one prefers — either the all the greater strength of the evil will, or else the all the lesser strength and freedom of the will in general), but it also becomes very easy to present the retribution of punishment (as theft for theft, robbery for robbery, eye for eye, tooth for tooth — in which case one can go so far as to imagine the perpetrator as one-eyed or toothless) as an absurdity — one, however, with which the concept has nothing to do, but which is owed solely to that specific equality that has been brought in. Value, as the inner equality of things that are, in their existence, specifically quite different from one another, is a determination that already occurs with contracts (see above), likewise in the civil suit against crime (§ 95), and by means of which the representation is raised out of the immediate character of the thing into the universal. In the case of crime, in which the infinite character of the deed is the fundamental determination, the merely externally specific disappears all the more, and equality remains only the fundamental rule for the essential, for what the criminal has deserved, but not for the outward, specific shape of this recompense. Only with respect to the latter are theft, robbery, and fines, imprisonment, and so on simply unequal; but with respect to their value, their universal property of being violations, they are comparable. It is then, as noted, the business of the understanding to seek the approximation to the equality of this their value. If the connection, existing in itself, of the crime and its annihilation, and then the thought of value and of the comparability of both according to value, is not grasped, it can come to the point that one (Klein, Grunds. des peinl. Rechts, § 9) sees in an actual punishment only an arbitrary connection of an evil with an unlawful act.