[p. 308]
|308| possession, has been said in α. But the sexual relation gives the indifference a form of its own; for it is in itself a particular one. The particular as such, made into a universal, into the concept, can only become an empirically universal (in religion it becomes something else); the particularity becomes a constant, lasting, fixed one; the sexual relation restricts itself solely to these two individuals in relation to each other, and it endures for ever; thus it is marriage. Since this relation is founded on a particular being of individuals whose peculiarity is fixed even by nature, not by the arbitrary will of an abstraction, this relation seems to be a contract; but it would be a negative contract, which sublates precisely that presupposition on which the possibility of contract in general rests; namely personality, or being a subject, which in marriage annihilates itself, since the whole person gives itself as a whole. But what according to the relation of contract was supposed to become the property of the other could absolutely not come into his possession; it remains, since the relation is personal, the property of the person; just as in general no contract about personal services is possible in itself, since the product alone, not what is personal, can pass into the possession of the other. The bondsman can, as a whole of personality, become property, and so too the wife; but this relation is not marriage, nor is it a contract with the bondsman, but rather a contract about the bondsman or the wife with someone else; as among many peoples the wife is bought from her parents. With her herself, however, no contract is possible; for precisely in so far as she is to give herself freely in marriage, she gives up, together with herself, the possibility of contract, and so does the man; their contract would have as its content to make no contract, and would thus immediately sublate itself. Through a positive contract, however, each would make itself into a thing that is in possession, would posit its whole personality as a determinacy of itself to which it is at the same time absolutely bound; but as a free being it must regard itself as absolutely bound to no determinacy, but rather as the indifference of it; this determinacy would have to be regarded, as Kant does, as the sexual organs; but to posit oneself as an
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