System of Ethical Life

[p. 297]

|297| singular; or the singular is the first, not the ideal hovering above it, nor a multiplicity of particulars subsumed under it. This is found in the purely practical, real, mechanical relation of labour and of possession.

א The particular into which the universal is transposed becomes thereby ideal, and this ideality is a dividing of it; the whole object is not annihilated in general according to its determinacy, but this labour, which goes towards the object as a whole, divides itself within itself and becomes a singular labouring; and this singular labouring becomes precisely thereby more mechanical, because multiplicity is excluded from it, and so it itself becomes something more universal, more alien to wholeness. This kind of labouring, which thus divides itself, at the same time presupposes that the rest of the needs are obtained in another way, since these too must be worked up, through the labour of other human beings. But in this dulling of mechanical labour there lies immediately the possibility of separating oneself from it entirely; because labour is wholly quantitative, without multiplicity, and so its subsuming in intelligence sublates itself, something absolutely external, a thing, can be used by virtue of its self-sameness, and likewise in its labour as pure movement; it [depends] only on finding for it a likewise dead principle of movement; a self-differentiating force of nature, such as the movement of water, of the wind, of steam etc., and the tool passes over into the machine, in that the restlessness of the subjective, of the concept, is itself posited outside the subject.

ב. as the subject and its labour are here determined, so too is the product of labour determined; it is a singularised thing, and therefore pure quantity for the subject; since its quantity is not in relation to the totality of needs, but exceeds it, quantity in general and in abstraction, this possession has lost its meaning with respect to the practical feeling of the subject, is no longer need for it but surplus; its relation to use is therefore a universal one; and this universality thought in its reality, –

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