System of Ethical Life

[p. 286]

|286| no causality, for it is in itself the indifference of the particular; and one with the particular, for which particularity is thereby mere external form, not the inner essence, being-subject.

In that the object subsumes labour under itself, it is real in the relation (as previously annihilated, posited as mere abstraction of an object), for as subsuming it is identity of the universal and particular, the latter in abstraction against the subject; hence labour, too, is a real or living labour, and its livingness is to be cognised as totality, but each moment itself as a living labour of its own, as a particular object.

For the subsuming living object and living labour, intuition is subsumed under the concept, then the concept under intuition; and then the identity of both.

αα) the living object subsumed under the concept is the plant, bound to the element, or to the pure quantity of the earth, and producing itself against the element of air in an infinitely manifold (through the concept) production of its own whole individuality and totality; each part of the plant is itself an individual, a complete plant; it maintains itself against its inorganic nature only [by] producing itself wholly at each point of contact, or (dies off at the stem); it is given over to producing (to the absolute concept, that of being the opposite of itself). Because it thus stands under the power of the element, labour, too, is directed chiefly against the element, and is mechanical, but it leaves it to the element to compel the plant to produce; labour cannot have, or can have but little, of the plant’s specific livingness; it is the more living through the fact that it wholly alters only the external form of the element, does not destroy it chemically, and that this is an inorganic nature which itself is only in relation to the living; and lets this have its way.

ββ the concept of the living subsumed under intuition is the animal; for since this subsumption is itself one-sided, not in turn subsuming intuition under the concept in the same way, livingness is an empirically real one, infinitely dispersed, and presenting itself in the most manifold forms;

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