System of Ethical Life

[p. 304]

|304| Surplus posited in indifference, as universal and as possibility of all needs, is money; just as is labour which goes towards surplus and, mechanically uniform, at the same time towards the possibility of universal exchange and of the acquisition of all necessities. As money is the universal, their abstraction, and mediates them all, so trade is this mediation posited as activity, which exchanges surplus for surplus.

β. but the intuition of this totality, though of it as singularity, is the individual as the indifference of all determinacies, and how it presents itself as such, as totality.

א. formally, in simplicity, or intuition, the individual is indifference of all determinacies, and as such something formally living; and is recognised as such; as previously only as possessing singular things, so here as being for itself in the whole; but because the individual as such is absolutely one with life, not merely in relation with it, it cannot be said of life, as of the other things with which it is only in relation, that the individual possesses it; this has sense only insofar as the individual is not such a one, but an absolutely whole system, and thus its singularity and life are posited, like a thing, as something particular. The recognising of this formal being-alive is, like recognising and empirical intuition in general, a formal ideality; life is the highest indifference of the singular, but it is at the same time absolutely something formal, insofar as it is the empty unity of the singular determinacies, and no totality and wholeness reconstructing itself out of difference is thereby posited. As the absolutely formal, it is for that very reason also absolute subjectivity, or the absolute concept, and the individual considered under this absolute abstraction is the person. The life of the individual is the abstraction of his intuition heightened to the utmost; but the person is his pure concept, and indeed this concept is the absolute concept itself. In this recognising of life, or in thinking the other as absolute concept, he is as a free being, as possibility of being the opposite of himself with respect to a determinacy; and in the singular as such there is nothing which could not be regarded as

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