[p. 253]
|253| and determined through it. The pure concept of practical existence, the I, is the object of right.
§ 35
The moral mode of acting does not relate to the human being as abstract person, but to him according to the universal and necessary determinations of his particular existence. It is therefore not merely prohibitive, as the command of right properly is, which only commands that the freedom of the other be left untouched, but commands that one also show the other something positive. The precepts of morals go to the individual actuality.
§ 36
The drive of the human being toward his particular existence, as morals considers it, goes toward the correspondence of the external in general with his inner determinations, toward pleasure and happiness.
Explanation. The human being has drives, i.e. he has inner determinations in his nature or according to that side on which he is an actual being in general. These determinations are therefore something deficient, inasmuch as they are only something inner. They are drives inasmuch as they aim at sublating this deficiency, i.e. they demand their realization, the correspondence of the external with the inner. This correspondence is pleasure. A reflection as comparison between the inner and the external therefore precedes it, whether this derives from me or from fortune. Pleasure can now spring from the most manifold sources. It does not depend on the content, but concerns only the form, or it is the feeling of something merely formal, namely of the stated correspondence. The doctrine which has pleasure, or rather happiness, as its purpose has been called eudaemonism. In it, however, it is indeterminate wherein one is to seek pleasure or happiness.
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