System of Ethical Life

[p. 287]

|287| for the form, or the absolute concept, is not itself in turn unity, universality; it is thus an individuality without intelligence; not, as with the plant, each unity of the individual itself a multitude of such, but indifference in more extended difference and distinction.

Labour against the animal is thus directed less at its inorganic nature than at the organic nature itself, because the objective is not an external element but the indifference of individuality. The subsuming is determined as a subduing of the particularity of the animal for the kind of use that is appropriate to its nature; at times more negative, a subjugating, at times more positive, as a trust of the animal; at times also, as against the plant, elemental, for those animals which are destined to be annihilated in eating, so that merely their natural producing is determined.

If the use of plants is very simple, and if labour for them is to be exhibited as a need of the subject, or as it is present in subjective form, then this is inorganic, or little organised and individualised, nourishment, thus no nourishment of a higher difference of the individual, the human or the animal; a weak irritability, a feeble going-out, an annihilating which, because of the weak individuality of the plant, is itself a weak one – and then, for pleasure, there are sensuous enjoyments which are finer than annihilating because the plant is not annihilated (smelling, seeing); or this is the potency of the enjoyment of plants, like the potency towards the animal, its taming; it concerns the senses, for the senses are the animal potency in man, an individuality of feeling which, as sense, is an individual, not like an arm etc., but a complete organisation. The eating of the plant is, as enjoyment, subsumption of the concept under intuition as feeling; labour for the plant, on the other hand, is subsumption of intuition under the concept. Thus the cultivation of plants, their taming, is subsumption of the concept under intuition on the side of labour; as³⁾ enjoyment, the reverse, for the enjoyment of the singular senses is a singularising of it.

3) Alongside and further down in the margin: NB. Enjoyment and labour are the reverse of one another with regard to subsumption.

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