System of Ethical Life

[p. 312]

|312| objective in such a way that it makes the ideal determinacy, which in necessity is only external and superficial, makes the negative, into the essence; it thus negates reality in its determinacy, but fixes this negation.

This negation, however, must be counteracted; since the sublation of the determinacy is only formal, the determinacy remains in existence; it is posited as ideal, but it remains in its real determinacy; and life has merely been injured in it, not raised higher; and for that reason this life must be restored. But the injury of life cannot be restored in its actuality (restoration through religion does not bear on actuality); this restoration, however, does bear on actuality, and this reconstruction can only be a formal one, because it bears on an actuality as such, on a being-fixed of the negation. It is therefore external equality; what negates makes itself the cause and posits itself as negative indifference, but for that very reason the proposition must be reversed upon it, and it must likewise be posited under the same determinacy of indifference as it posited; what it negated is likewise to be really negated in it, and it is to be subsumed just as it subsumed; and this reversal of the relation is absolute, for in what is determinate it is possible for reason to assert itself as indifference, and thus in a formal manner, only through the equal positing of the two opposites. With crime avenging justice stands absolutely in connection; it is absolute necessity which binds them, for the one is the opposite of the other; the one is the opposite subsumption of the other. Crime, as negative vitality, as the concept constituting itself into intuition, subsumes the universal, objective, ideal; conversely, avenging justice, as something universal and objective, in turn subsumes that negation which constitutes itself into intuition.

It is to be remarked here that what is being spoken of is the real counteraction or reversal, and that the ideal, immediate one is indeed contained according to the abstract necessity of the concept in general, but in this form of ideality is only an abstraction and something incomplete. This ideal reversal is

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