Jena Philosophy of Spirit

[p. 269]

|269| owner, and maintains it not only because it possesses, but because it is its right; it knows itself as recognised in its particularity, and everywhere stamps it with its seal; – he does not enjoy, as the peasant does in his crudeness, his glass of beer or wine in order to raise himself to his universal dullness, partly to give in it a movement to his chatter and understanding, but in order to show himself with it, as with his coat and the finery of his wife and children, that he is as good as another, and has got so far – in it he enjoys himself, his worth and rectitude, this he has worked for and brought about himself – It is not the enjoyment of pleasure that he enjoys, but that he has this enjoyment, the imagined notion of himself.

c) this imagined notion of his worth, of his universal self in particularity, becomes immediate unity, in that counting and having come to mean the same, – the imagined notion of filling out his estate, of having raised his particularity into this universality, vanishes; – it is [not] the estate as such that counts for more, but the reality of the having, as such – the abstraction of right and of estate is fulfilled, and counts only so far as it is fulfilled. – Merchant estate. The labour of the merchant is pure exchange, neither natural nor artificial producing and forming – exchange is the movement, the spiritual, the middle, that which is freed from use and need as well as from labouring, from immediacy; this movement – the pure one, is here object, and doing – the object itself is dirempted into the particular, the article of trade, and the abstract, money¹⁶¹⁾ – a great invention – the thing of need has become a merely represented, unenjoyable one; – the object is thus here something that counts purely only according to its meaning, no longer in itself, i.e. for need – it is an utterly inward thing. The disposition of the merchant estate is thus this understanding of the unity of essence and thing – one is as real as one has money; – the imagined notion has vanished – meaning has immediate

161) In the margin: all needs are gathered together into this one

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