subsisting-alongside-one-another of both in peace; the other the negative, the excluding of one by the other, and both relations are absolutely necessary. For the second we have grasped the rational relation as a subduing taken up into its concept, or as the absolute formal virtue that is courage. Through this second side of the relation, the necessity of war is posited for the shape and individuality of the ethical totality — a war which, because in it lies the free possibility that not merely individual determinacies but the entirety of them, as life, is annihilated, and indeed for the Absolute itself, or for the people, thereby preserves the ethical health of peoples in their indifference toward determinacies and toward the habituation and fixation of the same — just as the movement of the winds preserves lakes from the putrefaction which a lasting calm would produce in them, as a lasting, or even an eternal, peace would in peoples.
With the negative of infinity just now considered — since the shape of the ethical totality, and its individuality as a singular being turned outward, and this its movement, is determined as courage — the other side is immediately conjoined; namely, the subsistence of opposition; the one is infinity, negative, just as the other; the first is the negation of the negation, opposition against opposition; the second is negation and opposition itself in its subsistence as determinacies, or manifold reality. These realities in their pure inner formlessness and simplicity — that is, the feelings — are, in the practical sphere, feelings that reconstitute themselves out of difference and, out of the sublatedness of undifferentiated self-feeling, pass through an annihilation of intuitions and restore themselves; physical needs and enjoyments which, posited again for themselves within the totality, obey, in their infinite entanglements, one necessity, and form the system of universal mutual dependence with regard to physical needs, and of labor and accumulation for the same — which, as a science, constitutes the system of so-called political economy. Since this system of reality lies entirely within negativity and infinity, it follows for its relation to the positive totality that it must be treated by the latter in an entirely negative manner, and must remain subject to its dominion; what is by its nature negative must remain negative, and must not become something fixed. In order to prevent it from constituting itself for itself and becoming an independent power, it is not enough to set up the propositions that everyone has the right to live, that in a people the universal must see to it that every citizen has his livelihood, and that a perfect security and ease of acquisition should be present; this last, thought as an absolute principle, would rather

Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.