System of Ethical Life

[p. 331]

|331| feeling, without subjectivity; just as little does it have relation to possession and acquisition; rather with labour itself its purpose ceases, and its product. This war is not war of families against families, but of peoples against peoples, and thereby hatred itself is made indifferent, free of all personality; death goes into the universal just as it comes out of the universal, and is without anger, which at times creates itself just as it also sublates itself; the firearm is the invention of universal, indifferent, impersonal death; and what drives is national honour, not the injury of a singular individual; rather the injury which is the occasion of the war comes, wholly in the indifference of honour, to every individual.

b. relative ethical life, which relates itself to relations, and does not freely organise itself and move in them, but lets the determinacy which is in them subsist, while bringing it to equality with the opposite one, namely to a superficial, partial equality, which is only in the concept. This form of ethical life thus creates right, and is rectitude. Where it acts or becomes real, it holds [fast] to right, that each should receive his own, and indeed not according to written laws; rather it takes the whole of the case and pronounces according to equity when right has not decided; otherwise it must keep to right; in equity, however, it mitigates the objective element of right according to pressing needs, for empirical circumstances of necessity, for an ignorance called pardonable, for a subjective trust; its totality is the empirical existence of the singular individual, whose preservation in itself and others it takes to heart. Rectitude provides for the family according to the estate it has; likewise for fellow citizens; it relieves singular need; it grows angry at bad action. The universal, the absolute of ethical life, and how this would have to exist in its reality and reality be subjected to it, is for rectitude a thought; its highest flight is to have all manner of thoughts about this; but its reason at the same time is that it sees how the empirical condition would be altered, and this lies too close to its heart for it to let anything happen to it; its reason is therefore to see that absolute ethical life must remain a thought.

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