System of Ethical Life

[p. 318]

c.

The indifference or totality of these two negations bears on the indifference of the determinacies, or life, and whole personality; and the reversal, which is posited as doubtful and is not one-sided, so that the relation would be wholly determinate and certain on one side, is likewise the loss of personality, through bondage or death. Because the negation can only be a determinacy, this determinacy must, so that the whole may be at stake, be intensified into a whole. But by being personal it is immediately the whole; for the determinacy belongs to the person, who is the indifference of the whole, and a particularity of the person that is negated is only an abstraction, for in the person it is absolutely taken up into indifference; what is living is injured. But because the abstraction of the injured particularity stands over against this indifference, the latter too is posited as ideal through the former, and what is injured is honour. Through honour the singular becomes a whole and something personal, and the apparent negation of something singular alone is the injury of the whole, and so there arises the struggle of the whole person against the whole person. There can be no question of the justice of the occasion of such a struggle; as soon as the struggle as such arises, justice is on both [sides], for the equality of danger is posited, and indeed of the freest danger, because the whole is at stake. The occasion, i.e. the determinacy which is posited as taken up into indifference and as personal, is absolutely nothing in and for itself, precisely because it is something only as personal; and as such anything posited in absolutely many ways can be taken; no exclusion and limit can be set in this regard. Force, or rather force posited as individualised, strength, decides the subsumption, and here, where the whole real personality is the subject, the relation of lordship and bondage must immediately arise; or, if absolute equality is presupposed, the impossibility of such a different relation, and thus the impossibility that one should be the indifferent and the other the different, then in the struggle, as absolute difference and mutual negation, indifference is to be preserved and the

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