System of Ethical Life

[p. 280]

|280| than the subsumption of intuition under the concept, whereby, therefore, intuition, the unity, remains the inner, while the multiplicity of the concept and its absolute movement come forth to the surface. In this subsumption, then, the intuition of ethical life, which is a people, becomes a manifold reality, or a singularity, a single human being, and thereby the absolute taking-back of nature into itself becomes something hovering above this singular one, or something formal, for the formal is precisely the unity which is not in itself absolute concept, or absolute movement. At the same time, precisely because this unity hovers above the singular one, he does not get out of it, he does not abstract from it, but it is in him, though hidden in him; and, in this contradiction, that this inner light does not absolutely flash together and become one with the universal light hovering above him, it appears as something driving him towards it, as drive, striving. Or, the identity of the particular (on whose side intuition has now stepped) and of the universal is thereby determined as an incomplete unification, or as a relation.

I. Absolute ethical life according to relation

Cross-reference: Natural ethical life: need, labour and enjoyment; in the Groundlines the system of needs, § 189 ff., on labour and the tool § 196–§ 198; on love, parents and children § 158 ff. and § 173 ff.

Just as in the foregoing, this must be divided; this absolute ethical life according to relation, – or natural ethical life, must be considered in such a way that the concept is subsumed under intuition, and in such a way that intuition is subsumed under the concept; in the former the unity, the universal, is the inner; in the latter it steps over against it and is again in relation with the concept or the particular. In both, ethical life is a drive, that is, the drive α) does not become absolutely one with the absolute unity, β) it goes towards the singular, γ) is satisfied in this singular; this singular satisfaction is itself totality; but δ. at the same time it goes beyond it, though this going-beyond is here something negative, indeterminate, in general.

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