[p. 314]
|314| , or purposeless destruction, devastation. Thus nature is turned against the formation which intelligence imparts to it, as well as against its own producing of organised things; and just as the element, the objective, is subsumed under intuition and life, so the element in turn subsumes what is organised and individualised under itself and annihilates it; and this annihilation is devastation. Thus in the human race forming alternates with destroying; when forming has done harm long enough to inorganic nature and has determined its formlessness on all sides, the oppressed indeterminacy breaks loose, and the barbarism of destruction falls upon what has been formed, clears it away, and makes everything free and level and equal. Devastation appears in its greatest splendour in the Orient, and a Genghis Khan, a Tamerlane, as the brooms of God, sweep whole parts of the world completely clean. The northern barbarians who constantly attack the south are in the determinacy of the understanding; their poor enjoyment, which they have formed into a slight manifoldness, has a determinacy thereby, and their devastating is not indifferent, purely for the sake of devastating. The fanaticism of devastation, because it is an absolute element and assumes the form of nature, is invincible from without; for difference and the determinate succumb to indifference and indeterminacy; but it has, like negation in general, its negation within itself; the formless drives itself into indeterminacy until, because it is after all not absolutely formless, it expands like a water bubble until it bursts into infinitely small drops; it passes over from its pure unity into its opposite, the absolute formlessness of absolute multiplicity; and thereby becomes completely formal form, or absolute particularity, and with that the weakest. This progression of devastation to absolute devastation, and to the absolute transition into its opposite, is fury, which, because devastation is wholly in the concept, must infinitely intensify the pure, the opposite, until it is its opposite, and has thus annihilated itself; standing at the extreme, at absolute abstraction, it is the absolute drive without means; the absolute concept in its complete indeterminacy, the unrest of infinity, of the absolute concept, which is nothing but this, and in its annihilating of the opposites through each other annihilates itself, the being-real of absolute subjectivity; the absolute concept, the
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