System of Ethical Life

[p. 290]

|290| but the totality of labour is the perfect individuality and thus equality of the opposed, wherein the relation is posited and sublated, enters, appearing in time, at every moment and turns over into the opposite, according to the above; the universal interaction and culture of human beings; their absolute equality is here, too, in the inner, and according to the whole potency in which we are, the relation is constant only in the singular. A recognising that is mutual, or the highest individuality and external difference. Here, in these potencies, from the first to the third, things go apart, or the unification of feeling sublates itself; but precisely thereby so do desire and the need corresponding to it, and each is an equal, self-standing being. That the relation is also one of such love and feeling is external form, which does not concern its essence, which is the universality in which they stand.

c

The first two potencies are relative identities; the absolute identity is something subjective, outside them; but since this potency is itself totality, the rational, which lies hidden in the representation of the formal potencies, must come forth as such and be real. This rational is that which steps into the middle, and is of the nature of the subjective and objective, or the mediating of both.

This middle likewise exists under the form of the three potencies

α) the concept subsumed under intuition; belongs therefore wholly to nature, because the difference according to which the intelligent is, is not present in it as subsumption of intuition under the concept, and it is thus absolute indifference, not according to the naturalness occurring in the formal potencies, which cannot free itself from difference. At the same time this middle is not the formal identity which hitherto appeared as feeling, but a real absolute identity, a real absolute feeling, which is absolute middle, for itself, in this whole side of reality, exists as individual. Such a middle is the child; it is the highest individual natural feeling, a feeling of such a totality of the living

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