System of Ethical Life

[p. 300]

|300| Through the new difference the relation of the subject to its labour is sublated, but because infinity, right as such, must remain, there steps into the place of that ideal relation of surplus, according to the concept, the opposite one, the real one, the relation to use and need; the separation is stronger, but precisely therefore so is the drive towards unification; as the magnet holds its poles apart without their having a drive, but, when cut in pieces, this identity sublated, electricity is stronger separation, real opposition, drive towards unification. What is sublated here is the being-one with the object through one’s own labour, one’s own individual determination of it (magnetism); what takes its place is real difference, being-sublated of the identity of subject and object; and thereby real annihilation of the opposed, or a difference which has relation to need. – In this whole potency (a. and b.) thoroughgoing ideality first begins, and the true potencies of practical intelligence; with surplus labour it ceases, in need and labour, to belong to need and labour. The relation to an object which it acquires for need and use, which is posited here, namely one which it has not itself worked up for its own use, in which it does not annihilate its own labour, is the beginning of rightful, formally ethical enjoyment and possession.

The absolute, the ineradicable, of both potencies is the absolute concept, the infinite itself, right; in the first resting, or subsisting in its opposition, and therefore inwardly concealed and hidden; in the second in movement, the accident sublating itself through the accident, passing through nothing, and so right coming forth, standing over against, as causality.

This pure infinity of right, its inseparability, reflected in the thing, in the particular itself, is its equality with others, and the abstraction of this equality of a thing with others, the concrete unity and right, is value, or rather value itself is equality as abstraction, the ideal measure; but the actually found, empirical measure is price.

In the sublation of the individual relation there remain α) right β) right appearing in determinate things in the form of equality, or value;

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