System of Ethical Life

[p. 307]

|307| particular, opposed, or an inner one; namely one which is subsumed under the intuition of particularity, individuality as such, and thus appears as nature; not as an identity subjugating an opposition, or as ethical nature, in which that opposition will likewise be sublated, but in such a way that particularity and individuality become the subsumed.

This indifference of the relation of lordship and bondage, in which, therefore, personality and the abstraction of life are absolutely one and the same, and this relation only the external, appearing, is the family: in it the totality of nature and everything hitherto is united; the whole particularity hitherto is in it transposed into the universal; it is the identity α) of external needs, β) of the sexual relation, the natural difference posited in the individuals themselves, and γ) of the relation of parents to children, or of natural reason come forth, but being as nature.

α) on account of the absolute natural being-one of the man, the woman and the child, in which the opposition of personality and of the subject ceases, surplus is not the property of one; for the indifference is not formal according to right; hence all contract concerning property, service and the like also falls away; for all this is grounded on the presupposition of one’s own personality; rather, surplus, labour, property is absolutely common, in and for itself, and at the death of one there is no transition from one to a stranger, but only the share of the deceased in the common property ceases.

The difference is the superficial one of lordship; the man is the lord and administrator; not owner in opposition to the other members of the family; as administrator he has only the semblance of free disposal. Labour is likewise divided according to the nature of each member; but its product is common; each, precisely through this division, works out a surplus, but not as his property; the transition is no exchange, but it is immediately, in and for itself, common.

β. The relation of sex, of the woman to the man, is likewise made indifferent after its own fashion; that they are one according to the determinacy of personality, i.e. according to

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