[p. 322]
|322| side is the right, or it is the indifferent, the subsuming side; it is therefore absolute, because absolute equality must present itself through the reversal, so that what was the subsumed is now the subsuming. But with the size of the body that is still living, the loss of the lost member diminishes, and with it also the right; and the right, or the indifference, becomes honour by the particularity of the action of the offended party being made into the indifference of the whole, into the affair of the whole, and is thereby equal on both sides; through honour the bad conscience, the drive to annihilate oneself, is sublated, for honour is the drive of subsuming; and the offended side, which wholly removes from itself the singularity of the deed, which as this singularity is not its own, is through honour completely in equal right, just as in the singular personal insult the one insulted is in equal right through protecting his life. This equality, before which the side of right and of necessary subsuming vanishes, is war; in it the difference of the relation of subsuming has vanished, and equality is what prevails; both are indifferences; the difference is the external, formal aspect of the struggle, not the inner, but something that is in absolute unrest, constantly passing over from one side to the other (Mars a deserter), and that leaves being subsumed wholly doubtful and only lets it be decided. It is decided either through complete subsumption of the one party, which in itself, as totality, is immortal, not through its extermination but through its subjection, and bondage; in which what decides is the higher, not the triviality of the first insult, but the greater or lesser strength of the totality, which through the struggle enters into equality, and into the testing of it, which beforehand, in the relationlessness of being side by side, was merely ideal, something thought, and submits itself to the decision as to which is truly the more indifferent, or the stronger; a decision which can thus end with the relation of lordship. – Or else it comes to no absolute decision which would concern the wholeness of the total individuals; rather they find themselves more or less equal, at least for the empirical moment incapable, even with the manifest superiority of the one, of carrying the reality of the constitution of the relation through to the end; the abstract preponderance of the one would indeed be present, but not the
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