System of Ethical Life

[p. 319]

|319| dispute settled solely through death; in which subjugation is absolute, and precisely through the absoluteness of the negation its opposite, freedom, is absolutely asserted.

Something else, however, is inequality in the negation, and the one-sidedness of the struggle, which then is no struggle at all; this inequality, where the subsumption is posited absolutely on one side only, not wavering, and the middle is posited as possibility and for that very reason as the indifference of both, is oppression, and when it proceeds to absolute negation, murder. Oppression and murder are not to be confused with the relation of lordship, and with struggle; true unjust oppression is personal attack and injury in a manner through which all struggle is absolutely sublated, through which it is impossible for the other to be on his guard and thereby to posit the struggle. In itself, however, this impossibility cannot be proved and demonstrated (the Italians give as the ground of the lawfulness of assassination the immediacy of the declaration of war through the insult); only then is the impossibility to be regarded as actually present when there is no insult, and the murder takes place for absolutely nothing personal; thus for the sake of robbery. But even if an insult has preceded, so that personality and wholeness are at stake, the insult is wholly unequal to the total negation in relation to reality; honour is indeed injured, but honour is distinguishable from life, and in that the latter is staked in order [to restore] to the former its reality, which as injured honour is only ideal, the linking of the ideality of honour with its reality takes place solely through the injured determinacy being raised to the whole reality; and honour consists in this, that once a single determinacy has been negated, the totality of the determinacies, or life⁴⁾, is also to be spent on it; hence one’s own life must be staked, as that through which alone that negation of singularity is made into a whole, which is what it is meant to be.

4) Alongside and further down in the margin: 3 potencies a) murder b) revenge c) duel; the middle is the struggle, the wavering. Duel, personal insult in the singular.

This totality of negation must be presented under its three forms;

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