System of Ethical Life

[p. 351]

|351| and this has changed; these remaining ones are necessarily in relation to that superfluous one, and this, which previously stood at a higher value, sinks. Through each singular kind of surplus being indifferentiated in the whole, and through having its place and value assigned to it by this taking-up into the whole, measured against the whole of universal need, it is as little the singular individual who determines the value both of his surplus and of his need, and can keep it independent outside the relation to everything else, as there is anything constant and secure in it.

In this system, therefore, that which governs appears as the unconscious, blind whole of needs and of the kinds of their satisfactions. But the universal must be able to take hold of this unconscious, blind fate and become a government. This whole does not lie beyond the possibility of cognition in the great relations considered in mass; the possibility of cognition, because value, the universal, must be reckoned up wholly atomistically, is capable only of degree in relation to the singular kinds which compose themselves in this way. But from the value of the kind itself it can be recognised how the surplus stands in relation to need, and this relation, or value, has its significance both on the side of whether the producing of such a surplus is the possibility of the totality of needs, whether a man can support himself from it; and also on the side of universality, whether this value of one kind of need is not disproportionate to the totality itself for which it is need. Both must be determined from intuition, from the whole of what a man necessarily needs, and this is to be recognised partly [from] crude nature, according to the different climates, partly [from] cultivated nature, what is on average deemed necessary for existence in a people. It happens of itself through nature that the right equilibrium partly maintains itself amid insignificant fluctuation, partly, when it is more strongly disturbed by external circumstances, restores itself through greater fluctuation. But precisely in the latter case the government must work against nature, which brings forth such a movement of preponderance through empirical contingencies acting more quickly – like barren years, or more slowly – like the rise of the same labour

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