System of Ethical Life

[p. 301]

|301| γ) but the individually related object loses this relation, and δ) there steps into its place an object related to desire, really determined.

The inner essence of this real interchange is, as has been shown, the concept that remains equal to itself; but this concept real in intelligences, and indeed in needy ones, which relate themselves at the same time to a surplus and to a lacking need; each undertakes the transformation of the individual, ideally-objectively related, into something subjectively related, related to need. Such is exchange; the realisation of the ideal relation. Property appears in reality through the plurality of the persons engaged in exchange, as mutually recognising one another; value in the reality of things; and in each of them as surplus; the concept as moving itself, annihilating itself in its opposite, taking up the other, opposed, into the place of what was previously possessed; and indeed determined in such a way that the previous is something ideal, that which now enters something real; for the first potency is that of intuition; the present one that of the concept; that ideal one which here is by nature the first, the ideal in the practical before enjoyment.

The interchange is, in its externality, a twofold one, or rather a repetition of itself; for the universal object, the surplus, and then the particular object of need, is according to its matter one object, but its two forms are necessarily repetitions of it. But the concept, the essence, is the transformation itself, and since its absolute is the identity of the opposed, the question is how this pure identity, infinity as such, is to be presented in reality.

The transition in exchange is a manifold, divided, drawn-out series of the singular moments of the whole; it can be in one moment, in One present, through simultaneous transfer of the possession of each party to the other; but if the object is a manifold one, then so is the transition, and the opposite demanded is a manifold one, and the opposite at the same time is not, until it is whole, not at the beginning, not in the course, or it is only as a leap. Thereby exchange itself becomes something uncertain, on account of these empirical conditions, which appear as gradualness of performance, postponement of the whole

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