System of Ethical Life

[p. 332]

|332| In relation to the negative, and to sacrifice, it sacrifices from its earnings both for the universal according to a concept, to the people in levies according to the equality of justice, and in particular for the poor and suffering. But it may give up neither its whole possession nor life, for singularity is fixed in it, and so the person and life are not only something infinite but something absolute; it therefore cannot be brave; any more than it is able to run through the whole series of the virtues, or to organise itself as virtue only for the moment; for virtue is itself, for the moment, without purpose and relation to any totality other than the one it has within itself; the empirical totality of existence sets its determinate limit to disinterestedness and sacrifice, and must stand under the dominion of the understanding.

c. trust is in the identity of the first and the difference of the second; so that that identity of absolute ethical life is an enveloped intuition, not at the same time taken up into the concept and developed, and therefore this intuition in the form of its intellectuality lies outside it. For the robust solidity of intuition, which lacks cognition and form, and thus equally lacks the means to the acting of the understanding, this same intuition, developed, is a power against which it is different, but at the same time mistrustful, because the singularity in which this power comes to it can seem to cheat it of the whole, and the identity of the absolute intuition and of the form, as a singular means, cannot be evident to it; it is not through the understanding, for through this it fears, as is only fair, to be deceived, that it is to be set in motion, but through the wholeness of trust and of necessity, through an external impulsion likewise directed at the whole. As elemental as its ethical intuition is, so too is its labour; it does not come from the understanding, nor is it in the isolation of rectitude; rather it is whole and robust, and is not directed at the annihilation and death of the object, but lets nature do and bring forth what is useful. Likewise

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