[p. 235]
|235| cannot be grasped according to what it is in truth, but remains cunningly reflected into itself. – The inner source of crime is the coercion of right; – need and so on – are external causes belonging to animal need; but crime as such is directed against the person as such and its knowing of it; for the criminal is intelligence; his inner justification is this: coercion, the restoring of his singular will to power, to counting, to being-recognised; he wills to be something (like Herostratus), not exactly famous, but that he has carried out his will in defiance of the universal will. – The accomplished crime is the will that knows itself as singular, being for itself, come to existence; [in defiance of] the power of the other will that knows itself as universal. But this crime is the enlivening, the activating – the rousing to activity – of the universal will. The universal will is active; the recognised activity is universal, not singular, i.e. it is a sublating of the singular. Punishment is this turning over; it is retribution as of the universal will; its essence rests not on a contract, nor on the deterring of others, nor on the improvement of the criminal, – but its essence concept is this transition, inversion; of the violated universal being-recognised; it is revenge, but as justice, i.e. to restore the being-recognised that is in itself and (externally) violated. To the criminal happens the same as he has done, insofar as he had constituted himself as power against one; another, the universal as its power – and indeed the universal as such – not the singular, as in revenge; revenge can be just, but here it is justice. – α) the violated one is recognised in himself; everything takes place in the element of being-recognised, of right; – dolus: crime has this significance, that the violator previously recognised the violated (the thief most of all), that the criminal knew what he did – not determinately the range and so on [, but] determinateness in general, that it is forbidden – or precisely in this, that he violated a person, one that is
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