System of Ethical Life

[p. 313]

|313| conscience, and only something inner, not inner and outer at once; something subjective, not objective at once; immediately, in what the criminal apparently injures externally and as something alien to him, he has likewise ideally injured and sublated himself; in so far the external deed is at the same time an inner one; the crime committed against what is alien is likewise committed against himself. But the consciousness of this his own annihilation is something subjective, inner; or the bad conscience; it is in so far incomplete and must also present itself externally as avenging justice; because it is something inner and incomplete, it drives towards its totality; it betrays, reveals, and works through itself until it sees the ideal counteraction or reversal externally threatening its reality, and facing it as its enemy; then it [begins] to be satisfied, because it beholds in it the beginning of its reality; it produces an attack upon itself so that it may defend itself, and through resistance against the attack it calms itself in the fact that it defends the most universal demand, indifference and totality, namely life, of which conscience itself is a determinacy, against the threatened negation. Through victory in this posited struggle that drive of conscience repeats itself, and its reconciliation lies solely in the danger of death, and ceases with it; but through every victory, when it occurs, the fear, the ideal being-annihilated, grows greater; it presses into the living strength, and so brings on weakness, and thus the reality of avenging justice; and if the enemy does not at once appear externally, and the reversal of the subsumption is not present as reality, it generates this itself.

a.

The first potency of the negation so determined is the formal one, according to the subsumption of the concept under intuition; annihilation for itself, without being related to anything else or presupposing a determinate lack; rather it presupposes a completely indeterminate, universal one, directed at nothing singular, but turned against the abstraction of what has been formed. This is natural annihilation

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