System of Ethical Life

[p. 315]

|315| immediate opposite of itself, is real, because the product is absolutely no identity of the subjective and objective, but pure objectivity, formlessness.

b.

This devastation, subsumed under the concept, as a relation with difference and determinacy, is directly turned against the positive relation of difference. The devastation of nature, in so far as it is in determinacy, can only wrest away possession; it is presupposed that it is in the very same determinacy as is present, and thus lets it subsist; the indifference of possession, or right, does not concern it; it is only in particularity. But the ethical, by its nature of being intelligence, is at the same time objectively universal, and thus in an indifferent relation with an other; the annihilation of a particularity of it – and no annihilation other than that of an ethical being occurs here – is at the same time annihilation of the indifference, and positing of it as a negative; the positive element of this positing lies in the fact that the determinacy remains as such, and is only posited with negative determinacy. Such a letting-subsist of the determinacy, but annihilation of the indifference of recognition; it is an injury of right, whose appearance as a real annihilation of recognition is also a severing of the relation of the determinacy to the subject; for recognition recognises precisely this relation, which in itself is merely ideal, as a real one; through recognition it is a matter of indifference whether the subject has actually united the determinacy with itself inseparably, absolutely, or is only in relative relation with it, whether this union is posited only in the form of possibility; through recognition the relative relation itself becomes indifferent, its subjectivity at the same time objective. The real sublation of recognition also sublates that relation, and is robbery, or, in so far as it bears purely on the related object, theft. In this relation of the object to the subject which lies in property, the annihilation of the indifference, or of right, does indeed leave the determinacy as it is; this remains indifferent in the process; the robbed object remains what it is; but not the subject, which here in the particular is itself the indifference

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