But on another side there is the other comedy; whose complications are without fate and without a true struggle, because the ethical nature is itself caught up in that very complication; the knots are tied here not in playful, but in opposites that are serious for this ethical drive, though comic for the spectator, and deliverance from them is sought in an affectation of character and absoluteness that finds itself constantly deceived and deposed. The ethical drive, (for it is not the conscious absolute ethical nature that is at play in this comedy) must, to put it briefly, transform what subsists into the formal and negative absoluteness of right, and thereby give its anxiety the opinion of firmness for its possession, raise its belongings through treaties and contracts and every conceivable clause to something secure and certain, deduce the systems concerning this from experience and reason, as though from certainty and necessity itself, and ground them with the most profound reasonings — but, like the subterranean spirits in the poet who saw the plantations they had laid out in the infernal wastes swept away by the next storm-wind, so too, through the next turning or even the uprising of the earth-spirit, whole and half sciences are washed away that had been proven from experience and reason, one system of right supplanted by another, here humanity taking the place of harshness, there at the same time the will of power taking the place of contractual security, and, in the domain of science as in actuality, the most rightfully acquired and most assured possessions of principles and rights laid waste — and either they suppose that it is their own endeavors, hovering above fate with reason and will, that toil away in such material, and that had brought forth such changes; or else they grow indignant at these changes as something unexpected and improper, and first call upon all the gods against such necessity, and then submit to it; in both cases the ethical drive, which seeks an absolute infinity in these finitudes, yields only the farce of its faith and its undying self-deception, which is darkest precisely where it is brightest, already in loss and wrong where it supposes itself to be resting in the arms of justice, reliability, and enjoyment itself.

Comedy separates the two zones of the ethical from one another in such a way that it lets each hold sway purely for itself, so that in the one the oppositions and the finite are an essence-less shadow, but in the other the absolute is a self-deception; but the true and absolute relation is that the one shines in earnest into the other, each stands in bodily relation to the other, and they are for one another, reciprocally, the serious fate; the absolute relation is thus set up in tragedy.

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