System of Ethical Life

[p. 293]

|293| being-tied-together of appearing and passing away. Such a middle is thereby intelligent; it is subjective, or in the individuals of intelligence, but objectively universal in its corporeality, and that being-subjective is, [on account] of the immediacy of the nature of this essence, immediately as objectivity. This ideal rational middle is speech, the tool of reason, the child of intelligent beings. The substance of speech is, like the child, the most indeterminate, purest, most negative, most sexless, and, on account of its absolute softness and transparency, capable of all forms; its reality is completely taken up into ideality; and at the same time it is individual, it has form or a reality, it is a subject, something being for itself; it must thereby be distinguished from the formal concept of speech, for which objectivity as such is a speech; but this objectivity is only an abstraction; for the reality of the object is subjective in another way than it is subjective; objectivity is not itself absolute subjectivity.

The totality of speech in the form of the potencies

א. of nature, or of inner identity, the unconscious assuming of a body which passes away as quickly as it is, but which is a singular, has only the form of objectivity, does not carry itself in itself and upon itself, but appears in an alien reality and substance. Gesture, mien, and the totality of these, the affection of the eye, is not fixed objectivity or the abstraction of it, but it is volatilised, and an accident; a mobile, ideal play; but this ideality is only play in another, which is the subject, its substance; it expresses itself as feeling, and is addressed to feeling, or it is in the form of pure identity, of articulated, changing feeling, to be sure, but which is precisely whole in every moment, without the ideality of its objective, and without its own corporeality, to which nature cannot come forth.

ב. the intuition of speech subsumed under the concept; thus it has a body of its own, for its ideal nature is posited in the concept, and the concept is the fixed, its bearer; this body is an external matter, which, however, as such, in its substantial inwardness and being-for-itself, is wholly annihilated, without meaning, and ideal; but because the concept is the dominant, this body is something dead, which

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