Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The Phenomenology of Spirit

Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) is one of the most influential texts in the history of modern philosophy. In it, Hegel proposed an arresting and novel picture of the relation of mind to world and of people to each other. Like Kant before him, Hegel offered up a systematic account of the nature of knowledge, the influence of society and history on claims to knowledge, and the social character of human agency itself. A bold new understanding of what, after Hegel, came to be called “subjectivity” arose from this work, and it was instrumental in the formation of later philosophies, such as existentialism, Marxism, and American pragmatism, each of which reacted to Hegel's radical claims in different ways. This edition offers a new translation, an introduction, and glossaries to assist readers’ understanding of this central text, and will be essential for scholars and students of Hegel.

Terry Pinkard is Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. He has published numerous books on German philosophy and on Hegel in particular, including Hegel's Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge, 1994), Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge, 2000), and German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge, 2002).

Cambridge Hegel Translations

General editor:

Michael Baur

The Phenomenology of Spirit Edited and translated by Terry Pinkard

Heidelberg Writings: Journal Publications Edited and translated by Brady Bowman and Allen Speight

Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline Part 1: Science of Logic Edited and translated by Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom

The Science of Logic Edited and translated by George di Giovanni

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The Phenomenology of Spirit

Translated and edited by

Terry Pinkard

Georgetown University, Washington DC

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doi: 10.1017/9781139050494

© Terry Pinkard 2018

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First published 2018

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data

Names: Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770–1831, author. | Pinkard, Terry P., editor.

Title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel : The phenomenology of spirit / Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel ; [edited by] Terry Pinkard, Georgetown University, Washington DC.

Other titles: Phänomenologie des Geistes. English

Description: New York : Cambridge University Press, 2017. | Series: The American Society of Missiology series ; No. 55 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017035387 | ISBN 9780521855792 (alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Spirit. | Consciousness. | Truth. | Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770–1831. Phänomenologie des Geistes.

Classification: LCC B2928.E5 P56 2017 | DDC 193–dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017035387

isbn 978-0-521-85579-2 Hardback

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To Susan

Acknowledgments

Since the draft of this translation had an online existence for a few years, I received many helpful tips and suggestions from too many people to mention. Thanks to all of you.

Several long discussions with Rolf-Peter Horstmann at the beginning of the project helped to put it in sharper focus, and I am grateful for his help.

Terence Moore of Cambridge University Press was a great help and discussant for the project. It was he who actually launched it. All who worked with him miss his lively talks and exuberance.

His successor, Hilary Gaskin, has been very helpful in shepherding this project through.

Michael Baur, the editor of the series, gave me some very helpful advice about the introduction and the first two chapters of the “Consciousness” section. I have also tried to incorporate his advice into the rest of the translation.

I would like to thank my copyeditor, Rose Bell, for her irreplaceable help in preparing the manuscript.

Introduction

Hegel's Path to the Phenomenology

The Voyage of Discovery

Hegel frequently described his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit to his students as his “voyage of discovery.” It was in that work, Hegel's first published version of his own systematic views, that Hegel, a virtually unknown, barely employed academic figure in Jena, became Hegel, the philosopher celebrated all over Europe. Nonetheless, however much of a voyage the book was for him, it was by no means an easy passage. Published in April of 1807, it was a work written hurriedly while Hegel was in extremely dire circumstances. He was thirty-seven when the Phenomenology appeared, and during its composition he had no tenable job, no real prospects, and an illegitimate child on the way. He did indeed have a teaching position at the university at Jena, but the salary for that position was not merely meager, it was nothing at all (Hegel was a private lecturer at the university). He had been supporting himself in a condition rapidly approximating to a state of penury on the basis of a small inheritance he had obtained when his father died in 1799. In 1806, the minister of the government which ran the university, Johann Wolfgang Goethe himself, managed to procure a 100 Thaler per year salary for the beleaguered Hegel, but that really amounted to a minor honorarium, not a sum that even the poorest student could live on. To survive, Hegel needed some type of employment, and, if it was to be in a university, he was going to have to produce a book of some importance. However, not only were positions at universities few and far between, they were becoming even scarcer because of the Napoleonic wars in Germany at the time. The Phenomenology was a book born out of both despair and a steadfast confidence on Hegel's own part that his audience – whom he envisaged to be no less than the people of modern Europe itself – needed this book.

Hegel did not originally set out to be a philosopher.¹ When he graduated from Tübingen's famous Theological Seminary in 1793, his career path had supposedly already been set for him. He was supposed, and in one sense even obligated, to become a Lutheran pastor in the duchy of Württemberg. He rejected that option while he was at Tübingen, and quite fortunately for him, at least as far as he was concerned, the number of positions available for pastors were about as few as those for university professors, ensuring that the matter would never really come to a head. At the Seminary, he had struck up a close friendship and shared a room with two other students who had equally decided against the destiny chosen for them of becoming pastors: Friedrich Hölderlin, who was to become one of Germany's greatest poets, and F. W. J. Schelling, who was also to become one of Germany's greatest philosophers. Each of the three Tübingen friends had a great impact on the others, and the development of their own views and talents after leaving the Seminary around 1793 were intertwined with each other for a number of years. After a short stay in Bern, where Hegel tried, unsuccessfully, to work up some more popular manuscripts for publication, he moved in 1797 to Frankfurt to be near Hölderlin, who already had a position as a private tutor there and who had managed to procure for Hegel a position as a private tutor at another household.² Under Hölderlin's influence in Frankfurt, Hegel came to believe that his early conceptions of what was needed in philosophy were severely misguided, and it was there that he began to entertain the idea of seeking a position as a university professor of philosophy.

After leaving the Seminary, Schelling himself had gone on to become the boy-wonder of German philosophy. He staged a meteoric rise in German intellectual life, and in 1798, at the age of twenty-four, he became a professor at the celebrated university at Jena. Shortly thereafter he became the successor there to the famous post-Kantian philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who was forced to leave Jena after having trumped-up charges of atheism leveled against him. Schelling managed to arrange for Hegel to leave Frankfurt and come to Jena in 1801, where, at the age of thirty-one, Hegel decided to see if he could make his mark as a philosopher. Hegel's position at Jena was an unpaid one (although he was allowed to charge a pittance for admission to his lectures, which was the accepted practice at the time), and his financial support was almost entirely due to his small inheritance. He was at first taken by the intellectual world to be simply a disciple of Schelling, and his first few published monographs were widely taken to be mere variations if not simple iterations on the Schellingian program in philosophy. When Schelling left Jena to assume a position in Würzburg in 1803 (as scandalous and utterly false rumors having to do with his marriage to the talented Caroline Michaelis Böhmer Schlegel circulated around Jena), Hegel was left with nothing much to rely upon for support. Worse, the university around him had begun to collapse, and not merely Schelling but almost all the other intellectual luminaries at Jena at the time rapidly departed, leaving Hegel virtually alone there.

The Intellectual, Political, and Social Ferment of the Time

Two major developments during this period should be kept in mind. First, there was the French Revolution of 1789 which had upended all conventional thought in Europe. While at Tübingen, Schelling, Hegel, and Hölderlin had in fact all been excited by the prospects in France. (Hegel was a nineteen-year-old Seminary student studying philosophy when the Revolution happened, and some of his compatriots and friends at the time in Tübingen actually went to fight on the side of the Revolution. While still at Tübingen, Schelling even translated the “Marseillaise” into German.) The reactionary German powers had tried to suppress the revolution in France but had at great cost been defeated several times. Throughout this period, the fear of a French-style revolution and the institution of a Jacobin reign of terror was never far from the minds of the ruling German powers, and the rise to power on the part of Napoleon in 1799, followed by his coronation as Emperor of the French in 1804, did nothing to allay those fears. In 1806, as Hegel was finishing up his work on the Phenomenology, the Prussians and their allies once more tried to teach the French a lesson, and in response Napoleon sent his armies into German territory to meet up with them. It was in fact at Jena on October 14 that the decisive battle took place, and Napoleon and his army delivered a crippling blow to the Prussian army, sending the whole Prussian force into wild retreat in a matter of only about thirty minutes. Hegel was later to claim that he finished the writing of the book under the sound of the cannon fire of the battle itself, and that rather boastful claim became itself part of the Hegel legend.

The second thing that must be kept in mind was the intellectual upheaval brought about by Immanuel Kant's writings. Starting with the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, Kant had effectively revolutionized philosophy and repositioned the philosophical faculty as the leading edge of what was turning out to be a complete reform of the German, and later the entire European, and even still later, the entire worldwide university system. Kant's closely related claims that “freedom” was the watchword of his system and that the meaning of the movement known as the “Enlightenment” was that of learning to “think for oneself” had galvanized an entire generation of intellectuals. Kant's related claims – that nothing could count as morally or politically legitimate except that which issued from the autonomous, self-determining wills of individuals, and that the wills of such individuals were autonomous to the degree that they followed rationally self-determined laws – together articulated a widely felt experience in European youth at the time. In his three Critiques (of pure reason, practical reason, and of the power of judgment), Kant had effectively undercut all prior metaphysics and managed to transform completely the theory of knowledge, philosophy of science, moral philosophy, the theory of agency in general, political thought, aesthetics, and even the philosophy of biology. Moreover, it did not by any means go unnoticed that the revolution in philosophy brought on by Kant's insistence on freedom as the linchpin of his system and the new revolution in politics and social institutions in France might be more than casually linked. At one point, Wilhelm von Humboldt was asked by some of the leading revolutionaries to give some talks explaining Kant, and Kant's writings began appearing in French. Even Napoleon got into the act. (He did not like Kant, not at all.)³ In particular, Kant had seemed to many to resolve many of the culturally unsettling debates of the day. Kant had held that all we can know of nature is in effect what physics and the other natural sciences can teach us, but that this kind of knowledge was restricted to the world as we had to experience it, and we could not without pain of contradiction extend that to the world as it might exist independently of the subjective conditions of human experience. In practical matters, on the other hand, we had to assume that we were in possession of a kind of radical freedom. In effect, Kant had provided, so many thought, a framework for endorsing all of modern science while at the same time holding onto many traditional, even Christian doctrines about human freedom and the irreducibility of faith in religious matters.

Along with the French Revolution and the Kantian revolution in philosophy, there was also the revolution in the nature of the university going on at Jena. By the time of the end of the eighteenth century, many people had concluded that universities in general were outmoded institutions which were run by dull professors teaching outmoded orthodoxy and useless knowledge, and which were populated by students who devoted most of their energies to getting inebriated. Better, so many thought, to abolish them altogether and substitute various technical institutes in their place. It is a long story, but in the 1790s, Jena, under the far-sighted leadership of Goethe, was in the process of changing all of that. The university at Jena had provided a new model of the university that focused not on the teaching of orthodoxy but on bringing young minds into contact through lectures and seminars given by leading researchers. The image of the professor as stodgy, dry as dust, and out of touch was replaced with the image of the professor as hero, as the individual who was following out Kant's injunction to “think for oneself” and who was laying out the blueprint for the emerging modern world itself. Kant himself had pushed this development further with his last book, The Conflict of the Faculties (1798), in which he argued that the traditional subordination of all the faculties to the faculty of theology had effectively been ended by the advent of the Kantian critical philosophy. The philosophical faculty had now proved itself to be autonomous of the theological faculty and had shown that its research depended not on any revelation given from the outside but only on the free, critical use of reason itself. Indeed, on Kant's account, it was the philosophical faculty and not the theological (or the medical or law) faculties that had to provide the core and the unity of the new emerging university based on the rejection of orthodoxy and on the unity of teaching and research. (The “philosophical” faculty in this period was not simply identical with what would now be called in American universities the “philosophy department.” It also included what are now called the natural sciences along with other “humanities” departments. This distinction among sciences, humanities, and the like came later on in the development of the modern university. In terms of the American university, the “philosophical” faculty eventually became something like the “college of arts and sciences” that is virtually universal now among American institutions of higher learning.)

Although it was widely felt that Kant had laid out the outline of the new program in culture and philosophy, he had not provided all the links to it, and what was still outstanding, so many believed, was some way to bring his three Critiques (along with his other writings) into some kind of unity. If the philosophical faculty was to be the guiding light of the new university, and philosophy per se was to be the unifying discipline among all the other elements of the philosophical faculty, then it was considered to be crucially important for the whole project of modern life that the Kantian system – known as the critical philosophy, the term Kant used to describe it – be itself brought into order. The watchword became that of following not the letter but the “spirit” of Kant, and at Jena there was a succession of celebrated attempts to provide the requisite systematization of Kantian philosophy, with each new attempt becoming bolder than the earlier one.⁴ First, Karl Leonhard Reinhold became a professor at Jena in 1787 and attracted hundreds of new students to the university to hear him lecture on his own version of the Kantian program. When Reinhold left Jena for a better-paying position at Kiel, he was succeeded in 1794 by the brilliant and charismatic Fichte, who radicalized the Kantian program even further and took it into new territory. Fichte energized a new generation of students and helped to push what was now being called “post-Kantian” philosophy into an even faster line of development.

However, not everyone in German intellectual circles was enthused by the new Kantian turn in philosophy and by the idea of a university training the new elite in terms of critical thought. To many, this seemed disturbingly close to importing the French Revolution into Germany. To many of the same people, it amounted not merely to the lowering of the importance of the theological faculty but even to the rejection of the Christian religion altogether. Leading figures of the time such as Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi made public arguments to the effect that Kant's philosophy, like all doctrines coming from the Enlightenment that claimed to rely on human reason alone to discover the truths about the world and to erect schemes for how we ought to live collectively and individually, were each and every one inherently destabilizing and self-defeating systems of ideas. Jacobi, an insightful intellect and a key figure in many German circles (and himself not a reactionary conservative wanting to hold back all the forces of change) argued that all such “critical” philosophy ultimately leads to a form of fatalism and atheism. His watchword for this result was “Spinoza,” both the secret hero of many of the new thinkers and the bête noire of the anti-Enlightenment crowd. Baruch Spinoza had famously claimed that there was only one substance, which meant that God could not exist “outside” of (that is, was not transcendent to) the world, and this meant that there could not be a personal God. All such Enlightenment thinkers, so Jacobi argued, are ultimately pushed to such Spinozism, and, so Jacobi also claimed, Kant was no exception.

In addition to the straightforward suspicion about the potentially anti-religious and “revolutionary” tendencies of the new movement, there was also the new movement growing out of other people at Jena which called itself “Romanticism.” Inspired by Fichte's lectures and the way he was working out the implications of Kant's own stress on freedom – some would say his “radicalization” of the Kantian program – they began to articulate an alternative direction for post-Kantian philosophy that stressed the need for a “fragmentary” and more aesthetic rather than systematic approach to the same problems. In his third Critique, Kant himself had noted, almost in passing, that the experience of the beautiful gives us a sense of what the underlying unity of nature and freedom might be, of something that would be itself neither “nature” nor “freedom.” The Romantics of Jena took that seriously and tried to show that it was through diverse acts of imagination, especially those involved in art of all sorts, that we get at what the “whole” of reality is really like, and not through the further systematization of Kantian philosophy, as Reinhold and Fichte had tried to do. In particular, they objected to what they saw as the overly abstract nature of systematic philosophy and to its pretensions to encompass all that ultimately mattered in life. We orient ourselves in the world through a kind of pre-reflective grasp of the whole, and this pre-reflective grasp is never susceptible to full systematization and articulation; we get a better sense of it from the poets and musicians rather than the systematic philosophers. It was in the hands of Hegel's old friend, Schelling, that this version of Romanticism became unified with a magisterial systematic philosophy; the unity of Romanticism and system propelled Schelling into the first ranks of intellectuals in Germany.

Some of the Controversies Surrounding the Publication

It was against this background that Hegel began composing his Phenomenology, most likely around the beginning of 1806. Hegel had been intensely working on working out and publishing his own system virtually since the day he arrived in Jena. To that end, he constructed several more or less complete and publishable drafts of his proposed system over the next five years, only to put each of them aside as he came to see that they were, at least in his mind, fatally flawed. This required no small amount of courage on his own part. He desperately needed a job, and to land an academic position he desperately needed a book, and he in fact wrote, for all practical purposes, four or five such books, only to put them off to one side as he once again began from scratch on a better presentation.⁵ Given the way all his possibilities for any funding were running out, what turned out to be the Phenomenology of Spirit was in effect his last chance at producing the book he needed. It also turned out to be his single most brilliant piece.

Hegel contracted with a publisher in Bamberg to bring the book out, and the publisher promised to pay Hegel for the manuscript only when the book was half finished. As both Hegel and his publisher discovered, there is no clear line to be drawn when one is writing a completely original book as to when it is “half finished.” The publisher kept demanding the final manuscript, Hegel kept replying that it was not yet half done, and the book seemed only to be growing and not to be coming to a conclusion. At one point, the exasperated publisher threatened to renege on the contract, and Hegel had to get his good friend, Immanuel Niethammer, to vouch for him and promise to buy up the entire run at his own expense if Hegel did not get the manuscript to the publisher at a set deadline. During this hectic and heady process of composition, Hegel could not even settle on a title for his work, and so he kept changing it until the moment of publication. The book finally appeared with the imposing title, System of Science: First Part: The Phenomenology of Spirit, but in the meantime Hegel had supplied some other titles, and the printer, so it seems, became somewhat confused and stuck some of the other titles between the “Preface” and the “Introduction.” In some editions, that other title was “Science of the Experience of Consciousness”, while in others it was “Science of the Phenomenology of Spirit.”⁶ Even the order in which he made those changes remains disputed among scholars today, and even the circumstances surrounding the dispute with the publisher make a difference to the interpretation of the book.

As if there were not already a number of difficulties with the book, there is even a dispute about the table of contents. According to Hegel's own instructions, there are two ways of organizing the table of contents. All editions since the 1832 reprint have included both of them simultaneously. Although the issue at stake is one of interest primarily to Hegel scholars, there are some real problems with figuring out just what the system is in this “system.” Is, for example, the chapter on “Reason” really part V of the work (coming after part IV: “The Truth of Self-Certainty” and therefore falling under part B: “Self-Consciousness”)? Or is it really part C of the work, something that is not a sub-chapter under “Self-Consciousness” at all but a separate and independent chapter itself? Those issues are not settled with this edition, which keeps both tables of contents.

What is a “Phenomenology”?

Strangely enough, ever since the publication of the book itself the community of Hegel scholars have disputed not merely what key chapters of the book might mean but also the very idea of what the book is supposed to have as its subject matter. The book has been taken by different interpreters to be that of a “coming of age” novel (a Bildungsroman). Likewise, some have called it a new version of the divine comedy, while others have said, no, it is a tragedy, while still others have claimed that it is both, a tragicomedy. Not unsurprisingly it has also been called a work in epistemology, and a philosophy of history, or perhaps an extended piece of social philosophy. It has also been labeled as a treatise in Christian theology and as an extended announcement of the death of God. Any quick overview of interpretive literature will add to the list of new ideas about what the book is supposedly about.

In light of the diversity of the various interpretations, it worthwhile at least to keep the words of the titles in mind. Hegel claims over and over again that his book is a “Wissenschaft,” a “science,” something which raises special issues for contemporary readers that were not there in Hegel's own time. In calling for philosophy to be a “science,” it might seem as if Hegel is proposing to make philosophy into something like physics or biology, but nothing like that is the case. The use of the term, Wissenschaft, encompasses more than what we currently mean by “science.” In the usage of Hegel's time, it means something like the systematic, rigorous pursuit of knowledge. For example, during the same period, theology was also turning itself into a Wissenschaft, a “science,” but, to put it anachronistically, nobody at that time thought that it meant that theologians were eager to don lab coats and fire up their propane burners. (It is also easy to forget that such relatively loose talk of “science” was once more common in English. In the early establishment of law schools as parts of the university in the United States in the late nineteenth century, people freely talked of the establishment of “legal science.” However, few law professors nowadays speak of themselves as practicing scientists.)

Most clearly, the book is a “phenomenology” of something called “Geist” (which introduces yet another ambiguity, since in English Geist can be equally well and equally badly rendered as either “mind” or “spirit”). The term “phenomenology” was in various uses at the time, but since it was being used in a variety of ways by different people, there is (of course) a dispute about what exactly the “phenomenology” in the title refers to. There is a dispute about from where and why Hegel adopted the term. One obvious candidate for its meaning comes from Kant himself, who in his 1786 book, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (a book with which Hegel was deeply familiar), had spoken of “phenomenology” as a part of physics concerned with the science of “true motion” as opposed to only “apparent motion,” and thus as having to do not with “the transformation of mere appearance (Schein) into truth, but of appearance (Erscheinung) into experience (Erfahrung),” that is, into something from which we could learn.⁷ In light of that, one of Hegel's alternative titles of the book, “Science of the Experience (Erfahrung) of Consciousness,” is perhaps indicative of what Hegel intended.⁸

A “phenomenology” in physics also has to do with how the various theoretical formulations are to be related to experiment, that is, how the formulations and theoretical entities are to be related to the way they appear in our experience of them.⁹ As Hegel picked up the term and put it to his use, his work thus focused on the way in which a theoretical term, “Geist,” would be said to appear to us. “Geist” would be the essence hidden behind experience, and the phenomenology would be the “science” itself of how that essence makes its appearance, until at the end of the book, we supposedly would have comprehended just what “Geist” really was (which turns out not to be an essence hidden behind appearance – but that is getting ahead of the story). This shift in the book from its original aim of being “the science of the experience of consciousness” into that of the “phenomenology of spirit” had to do with several crucial events intervening as Hegel was composing the book which caused him to change the aim of the book in such a broad fashion.¹⁰

Moreover, in even calling his book a “science,” Hegel was clearly taking sides in the post-Kantian controversy about what was needed to complete the movement Kant had started – and what was therefore required if one was to give some orienting sense to the new form of the university that was beginning to take shape (and the new society it was supposed to be an important part of) – namely, whether what was needed was more systematicity in philosophy or, as many of the early Jena Romantics had argued, almost no systematicity at all and much more aesthetically oriented, fragmentary approaches. As Hegel began his work, he thought of it as the basic introduction to his entire proposed system, and one of the reasons for the exponential growth of the manuscript as he was writing it had to do with the issues of how one was to manage an introduction that would both do justice to all the competing sides in the post-Kantian debate while at the same time vigorously defending his own highly original approach and to do this without presupposing what it was in fact supposed to be proving. Famously, Hegel claims in his “Preface” (written after the work was completed) that “this path to science is itself already science.” That is, making the case for pursuing systematic philosophy – instead of, for example, writing in Romantic fragments – can itself only be a sui generis form of systematic philosophy that is supposed to make such a case for itself without begging any of the questions at issue, such as whether systematic philosophy was in fact the right way to proceed at all.

One of the other striking features of the book was Hegel's stated view of it in his “Preface” that the volume was not merely needed for philosophy to assume its rightful place in the emerging modern university, but that this university and the philosophy within it were necessary for modern Europeans to become culturally educated about who they had come to be as a people who were now called on and calling for themselves to become “free” and to “think for themselves.” The stakes, as Hegel saw them, were not merely narrowly academic but cultural and historical in the broadest sense.

To that end, Hegel crafted a book with a highly unorthodox structure. Since so many things about the book remain in dispute, even an overview of the main set of conclusions that purposely ignores the details of the case Hegel made for them is itself going to be a contested matter. Keeping that in mind, one can read the following as a kind of short synopsis of Hegel's Phenomenology that is best read as an invitation to think over the structure of the book for oneself.

A Brief Overview of the Book

Hegel begins his book with a preface, in which he states at the outset that nothing of real importance can be stated in a preface to a work of philosophy, after which he goes on in a lengthy and subtle manner to outline the key elements of his views. The “Preface” was written after the book was completed. He follows it with a short introduction, which almost certainly was written at the outset of composing the book, when Hegel still thought of his work as a much smaller book to be called the “Science of the Experience of Consciousness” which was to serve as an introduction to forthcoming volumes on logic, metaphysics, the philosophy of nature, and the philosophy of Geist.

Consciousness

Hegel actually begins the “Science of the Experience of Consciousness” with the conceit that he is beginning the discussion with something relatively banal, absolutely certain, and obviously true, and thus under the heading of “Consciousness” he begins with a section called simply, “Sensuous-Certainty.” At the very least, it straightforwardly claims, we can be absolutely certain that we are aware of worldly items right here, right now, and when we are thus aware of some singular something-or-other right here, right now, our awareness is itself self-contained, such that it warrants me in confidently asserting that I know this: I am certain of this, and I express this certainty not by simply reporting on it as an inner psychological state but instead by just simply being certain and by holding myself to that certainty. I thus know that I am immediately aware of simple, singular items. However, as I reflect on what it is I am doing in terms of how I actually state that certainty, various tensions and contradictions arise. As the argument develops, it turns out that if it is really to be knowledge, then it will have to be knowledge of something ineffable. Unfortunately, nothing ineffable can serve as a premise in any kind of inference, so if it really is knowledge I have, it is not knowledge that is going anywhere else. As Hegel develops the chapter, the contradictions involved in my saying that I am directly aware and truly certain of this, here, now begin to pile up. But if it is true that my certainty, when it expresses itself, is fully self-contradictory, then I cannot really be said to know this, here, now, at all, or not at least in the way I thought I had known it. If that is the case, what was I really doing when I claimed such certainty? It seems that my “certainty” has parted company with the “truth” of what it is that I was so certain of doing. The certainty of being aware of this, here, now, does not go away as much as it becomes untenable: I am certain of this, but I am not (cannot be) certain of this. And it turns out that what I was doing (the truth of the matter) is much different from what it was I was so certain of doing. In being certain of my awareness of this, here, and now, what I was in fact doing was perceiving individual objects as exemplifying general properties. The reader breathes a sigh of relief: Certainty and truth seem to merge back together.

That unity of certainty and truth, however, does not last. In making perceptual claims, it turns out (so Hegel argues) that what I am really doing is perceiving things in a wider context – I am driven to that when once again my expressions of this new type of certainty start contradicting each other. But when I bring in that wider context of what I am doing, I end up digging myself into a pit of increasing contradictions. In short, although I started out with confidence, once again, I found that I had stopped making any sense. Once that wider context is taken into account, we have gone beyond the experience of a simple perceptual world into one involving time, regularities of appearance, natural laws, and non-visible postulated matters such as non-perceptual forces that explain why this has suddenly become so confusing; but as we further try to explain what it would be to explain such things and get out of the morass, we find ourselves instead tying ourselves into even deeper conceptual knots. The reasons we give for things appearing the way they do seem to invoke more and more invisible objects, and the reasons themselves start spreading out to infinity.

However, once the concept of infinity has been introduced, it is very clear that we are no longer even remotely in the same area in which we started. Infinity, or what Kant called the “unconditioned,” brings with it an emerging set of new contradictions. The infinite is always full, but it can always have one more thing added to it. It can have things taken from it but remain the same size. There can be two different sets each of which has an infinite number of members, but when those two sets are combined, the resulting set has the same number of members (infinity). It is thus not even clear that infinity is a real concept at all. Nor is it ever presently real, since the infinite is that which can never be traversed.

Once the concept of infinity enters our thoughts, it becomes clear that we are in deeper waters. It is a central thesis of the kind of idealism that Hegel advances that the infinite is real (actual, in his terms) only in our thought of it. It can never itself be touched, felt, or perceived, but only conceived. In thinking this perplexing thought, consciousness finds itself pushed to a consciousness of what it is really doing. It no longer simply has its purposes before itself but now has purposes as purposes; it no longer merely responds to truths but responds to them as truths; it no longer responds to reasons but to reasons as reasons. In doing so, consciousness becomes consciousness of consciousness, that is, self-consciousness. That self-consciousness has turned out to be what we were really doing all along. At first, though, we did not know that, and, so it seems, it was just that blind spot that landed us in such trouble in the first three sections of “Consciousness.” If we had never started thinking about what we were really doing, we might have thought we were making sense. However, it turned out that we were not making sense, and as we reflected on it further, we found the bounds of our consciousness pushed further than we had originally anticipated.

Self-Consciousness

Hegel follows his chapter on “Consciousness” with a new chapter under the heading “Self-Consciousness,” and begins it with a section titled, “The Truth of Self-Certainty.” What we are certain about, so it seems, is not the individual things of the perceptual world but ourselves and especially ourselves as inhabiting a natural status. In that context, we are certain that we are experiencing a natural world in which we live, and that we know we are alive. How do we know this? It is not, so it seems, through any observation or inference from data but simply by the activity of living itself. Living things have something like this concept of infinity built into their lives since they seem to be both the cause and effect of themselves. What an animal does, it does because of its nature, which is determined by its species. However, the particular animal is what it is by virtue of what it does. Life itself seems to have this “chicken/egg” feature. We explain the particular organs by reference to the animal itself (and by reference to its species), but the animal is itself constituted and explained by its organs. Life has a kind of purposiveness to it that has no obvious reference to a designer, but it is only in self-conscious life that this whole of life becomes a problem to itself. Only in self-conscious life is the species aware of itself as the species it is. The self-conscious subject has a knowledge from the inside of what it is to live a life of this genus, specifically, the self-conscious life of a rational animal.

In being certain of myself as myself, I am doing something, and it is by doing this that I really am certain of my being alive. However, this certainty also has its truth in something else. A self-consciousness is, or exists, for a self-consciousness, so Hegel says. I am conscious of myself only in a kind of second-person form, that of my consciousness of being known by another embodied consciousness and by my awareness of that other's knowing me while knowing that I am aware of their knowing me. Right at the outset, self-consciousness is already a two-in-one. The truth of my own certainty of my life as such a life is my being known by another self-consciousness and vice versa. The second-person unity is as real as the first-person separateness. Together, such second-person relations build up into a first-person singular and plural relation, the I that is a We, and the We that is an I, which, so Hegel says, is identical to Geist, spirit, itself. Geist just is self-conscious life in its individual and social formations.

That seems to settle it, but it does not. If self-consciousness requires recognition by another self-conscious person, then the other person has to have the authority to bestow that recognition. If all authority is recognized authority, then yet another type of infinite regress gets started, and it seems it can be stopped only by one of the members of the recognitional complex simply having authority, full stop. That itself seems to have no answer, and the way the regress is imagined to have been stopped is that one of them simply claims authority and forces the other to submit to it. In one of the most famous of all the turns in Hegel's system, one becomes the master, the other the slave. Very roughly, the turn-around goes this way: The master demands recognition from the slave while also refusing recognition of the slave as even having the status to confer such recognition at all. This in turn sets up a contradiction: The master requires recognition from somebody else who by the master's own doing cannot be authorized to bestow such recognition. The slave, on the other hand, in working for the master acquires a more fully developed self-consciousness, and, as it were, becomes the true hero of this story, rather than the conquering, domineering master.

This chapter on mastery and servitude, which brings out all the tensions inherent in human authority, has been one of the most commented upon and influential pieces of writing in the history of philosophy. The self-certainty the master seemed to uphold in dominating the slave turns out, as did the previous versions of “consciousness,” to be untrue. What the master thought he was doing, what he was so certain about, and what keeps him in power depends on a setup that makes no sense since it is deeply contradictory. What we thought had resolved the problems of “consciousness” has turned out to generate a different but equally difficult set of problems.

Hegel follows up on the decisive conceptual failure of the relations of pure domination with some short sections on stoicism and skepticism, presented as philosophies that grabbed the attention of the ancient world as the great slave societies of antiquity (Greece and in particular Rome) dominated the world of their day. This has puzzled many commentators since it seems to leave an ahistorical or only vaguely historical chapter on mastery and servitude to discuss a particular period in history. If one takes the titles in the table of contents seriously (where the parts on stoicism, etc. follow the passages on mastery and servitude), it seems to be clearly a move from the failure of the aim of self-sufficiency (which the master thinks he has achieved in enslaving the other) to another aim, that of freedom.

These contrasting strivings for freedom (stoicism and skepticism) themselves turn out to be attempts at a solution to the problems at which mastery failed. The stoic seeks the essence of appearance in his or her own thought as answering to a higher essence (the reason of the cosmos), whereas the skeptic turns reason against itself to assert his own freedom from everything. Neither works, and it is followed by a section on what Hegel calls “The Unhappy Consciousness,” itself the outcome of the failed aims of self-sufficiency through mastery and the failures of both stoicism and skepticism to achieve freedom. Hegel seems there to be discussing the religions of late antiquity and early medieval Christianity as despairing attempts at getting a grip on the unchanging essence behind the flow of appearance, only to finally come to terms with it by understanding their own role and activity in the process. At the conclusion of the chapter, the unchanging essence turns out to be reason itself. Once again, at the end of a section, it looks like the big problem that was driving the earlier sections has finally been resolved by dissolving the inadequate solutions that preceded the resolution.

Reason

The next large chapter is in fact called “Reason,” and its place in the structure of the book has also animated many different and conflicting interpretations. The chapter begins with what seem like obvious references to the emerging debates about “idealism” between 1781 and 1806. It then rehashes some of the material discussed in the earlier chapter in “Consciousness” on “Force and the Understanding,” and the various conceptual knots encountered in trying to give an account of accounts, an explanation of explanations. When we postulate laws of nature, are we merely stating regularities of appearance (in which case, how are we explaining anything?), or are we stating necessary grounds, and if the latter, what is the relation between ground and grounded? If they are the same, there is no explanation. If they are really radically different, then the ground will fail to connect to the grounded in the right way. These are all problems with a view of reason that sees itself as somehow merely regularizing appearances (as found in empirical observation), and inevitably, this idea of “observing reason” runs into its own set of contradictions. Even worse, in those areas where “observing reason” does best, namely, the modes of explanation that work relatively well in physics, they all run into treacherously deep conceptual difficulties when it comes to biology. Hegel discusses a number of spurious attempts in his own day to discover laws of organic development that would mirror the law-likeness of physics. All fail, undone by their own self-contradictions and facile abstractness.

The idea that one might do the same thing in the human sciences is then effectively lampooned by Hegel in his mock-serious discussion of the “sciences” of physiognomy and phrenology. (It is not that Hegel thought there were no human sciences. He thought, for example, that Adam Smith's economics offered a good model for developing laws of economic exchange and growth. Hegel thought that the attempt to understand human history and social life in the terms in which we correlate independent things was metaphysically limited.)

The chapter on “Reason” suddenly and rather surprisingly switches gears, and Hegel provides an account of how rational self-consciousness actualizes itself. It is one thing to disparage the ways in which pseudo-sciences like phrenology try to explain human life, but it is another to construct an adequate account. Hegel's own developmental account of Geist thus resurfaces in the section on reason. Human action is not to be explained, as “observing reason” would have it, as if it were a matter of two independent things being correlated with each other or linked causally to each other. From “observing reason,” the picture that one gets of human agency is that of a material “thing” that moves, and one wishes therefore to explain the movement. To use an example taken from Ludwig Wittgenstein, the issue looks like it is explaining the difference between an arm raising (something somebody is doing) and an arm rising (merely a physical event). Since what is being explained is, from the viewpoint of “observing reason” the same in both cases (an arm going up), the difference between the arm raising and the arm rising must lie in some “inner” psychological state that effectively causes the bodily movement. Hegel rejects that picture in favor of, again very roughly put, a more developmental view of agency. Agents start with purposes, they then engage in the process of actualizing the purpose, and they thereby get underway, and at various points they have succeeded, failed, changed their minds or been prevented. (One can think of a very general doing, such as making dinner, as an activity including many other purposive activities within itself, which can finally succeed or fail in various ways and which can also be simply interrupted.)

The “Reason” chapter then concludes with a discussion of various ways in which rational self-conscious agents form a purpose to become what they as agents really are. Their essence is that of “rational self-consciousness,” but that essence somehow seems to be hidden from them, so that the issue for them is to find out what is actually involved in it. Working one's way through this section is an affair of great interpretive complexity, but Hegel runs through what seem to be various literary examples of what it is to develop one's rational self-consciousness under the spell of a picture of what rational self-consciousness really is, and the characters in this account all attempt to become a realization of that picture only to find at the end that in succeeding in actualizing that picture of themselves, they have in fact failed to accomplish what it was they had taken themselves to have been doing. Crucially, though, for the figures discussed, it is not that they fail to achieve, say, some distant ideal, but rather that in achieving something like their ideal, they turn out to be forced to realize that it was in fact the very ideal itself which was false. The picture they took themselves to be actualizing turned out to be deeply self-contradictory in itself.

The various figures discussed include a kind of Faustian Don Juan figure who resolves only to increase his own pleasure and power, only to find that he has really thereby subjected himself to a necessity that he disavows; next, a figure who internalizes the necessity of a certain kind of fate and acts so as to bring others under that banner, only to find that in proclaiming his own heart to be the real pulse of a universal humanity, he has instead become a kind of raving madman cursing at the world for its lack of appreciation for his inspired leadership as he finds himself surrounded by other madmen doing the same thing; and, finally, a figure who rather preciously proclaims his own virtue in the face of the wicked ways of the existing world, and who proclaims that despite the self-seeking nature of the ways of the world, the true essence behind all the various and mere semblances of his world is really a pristine order of virtue to which he and he alone attends, but who ends up himself being just one more individual trying to get his own way in the world, becoming at best a comic figure like Don Quixote, and certainly not the knight of virtue as he had originally painted himself.

The Disputed Turn from Reason to Geist

At this point, so it seems, Hegel thought he had concluded the book. There is good evidence to believe that having finished this chapter, he then completed the book with a chapter titled “C: Science,” thus completing the “A: Consciousness” and “B: Self-Consciousness” chapters. (If that is true, then “Reason” would have been a sub-chapter of “Self-Consciousness.”) Hegel sent the completed manuscript off to the printer.¹¹ It was also at this point that Hegel entered into his dispute with the printer, apparently telling him that the book was not in fact complete, and in the argument back and forth Hegel almost scuttled the entire contract to publish the book at all. The printer was in fact so angry with Hegel's prevarications that Hegel's friend Immanuel Niethammer had to promise to pick up all the costs of the print run if Hegel defaulted on producing what he now claimed was the missing chapter or chapters of the whole book. What prompted this? Eckart Förster has convincingly argued that after having been introduced to Goethe's Metamorphosis of Plants by a friend while he was teaching the history of philosophy, Hegel came to one of his defining insights; namely, first, that the history of philosophy could be understood as a developing set of shapes of the same thing instead of just a procession of competing philosophical systems, and, second, that this insight could be extended to all of human history itself. With that in hand, Hegel saw the failures of the shapes exhibited in the “science of the experience of consciousness” showed that the supposed essence hidden behind appearance was in fact not hidden at all but was actually itself working its own way out in history as it shape-shifted itself in time. The form of self-conscious life was reshaping itself in time, in a way very, very roughly analogous to the way in which the development of plants was understood in Goethe's system.

Thus, in the original scheme, the section on the actualization of rational self-consciousness through itself was supposed to culminate in “Science,” which was to provide the immediate transition into a book on logic and metaphysics. In the new scheme, Hegel realized he had to add an entirely new section to the chapter on “Reason,” so that the transition to Geist would be appropriate. The new section was called, “Individuality, Which, to Itself, is Real in and for Itself.” In it, Hegel spoke of the culmination of a kind of individualism, which he called the “spiritual kingdom of animals” (“geistige Tierreich”), and the meaning of the chapter and its title have been debated ever since.

The overall contours of the chapter develop out of Hegel's critique of treating human activity from the standpoint of “observing reason,” which is led by its own logic to view such activity from the “outside,” from a third-person viewpoint, instead of taking the purposiveness of life and especially of human self-consciousness into account. In this chapter, Hegel draws out the logic of the kind of “monological” view of self-consciousness that develops out of this “observing reason” approach. Such an approach acknowledges the social facts of human self-conscious life, such as birth, nurturing, learning a language, and so on, but it holds that once self-conscious life is formed, it is then self-sufficient unto itself for its tasks, even if as a matter of contingent fact, it always ends up depending on others. For the “monological” view, such facts of dependency are not taken to be essential to the metaphysics of purposive self-conscious life any more than, say, facial hair on men is essential. Put into practice, this leads to a monological view of purposiveness itself, and we imagine what a society based on such subjects each viewing themselves completely monologically would look like. The kind of second-person recognition which was essential to the chapter on “self-consciousness” is thereby for these actors sidelined, moved into being regarded “merely” as a natural biological feature of self-conscious life, or simply submerged from our notice. Thus, in the world that sees itself fully monologically, everybody claims to be working only out of their own singular interest concerning what really matters (“die Sache selbst”) and to be essentially unconcerned with what others think. Thus, it presents a semi-comical scene in which everybody keeps busily making loud public pronouncements, all while claiming that the public's reaction to their pronouncements is fully irrelevant. Hegel speaks of this as a kind of dual self-deception and a deception of others. Such a view of course collapses under its own weight – that of affirming the essentiality of the other while insistently denying the essentiality of the other – and discloses that in fact what really matters, the real thing at stake, is Geist itself as “the doing of each and all, the essence that is the essence of all essence, that is spiritual essence.” He follows that with two highly compressed sections whose purpose is to argue on the basis of some curated examples that appeal to pure practical reason itself as if it were essentially independent of the “doing of each and all,” for its meaning is in fact empty. He has now set the stage for his new discussion.

Spirit

With that, Hegel makes the transition into a new and even longer chapter, titled “Spirit”, and his book becomes something different from what he had set out to do. No longer restricted to the “science of the experience of consciousness,” it is now fully the “phenomenology of spirit.”¹² The book had started out as an inquiry into what was the true essence behind appearance, that is, into what Kant had already dubbed the thing in itself. Under the pressure of its own developmental logic, the book had instead metamorphosed into a larger enterprise, asking what the being-in-itself (Hegel's successor concept to the thing in itself) of spirit itself really was.

In turning to spirit as the topic of a separate section, Hegel returns to the discussion of life that was briefly sketched in “Self-Consciousness” and then more fully developed in “Observing Reason.” The items that fall under the concept of spirit as concepts are the statements of the ways in which that way of life can flourish (or, in Hegel's updated version of Aristotle's conception of Eudaimonia, “be satisfied”). Judgments about spirit are thus both fact-stating and evaluative as are all judgments about species and genera. Just as the magnolia tree flourishes only in certain environments and only in certain ways, self-conscious life flourishes only in certain contexts and certain ways. Stating the facts about magnolia trees is also stating the conditions under which they flourish and under which they do not. What is unique about spirit among all the life forms on the planet is for Hegel that it is aware of itself as a life form, and it thus measures itself by its concept and tries to adequate itself to that concept. That much he had argued in the chapters on “Self-Consciousness” and “Reason.” However, now he takes that view further. In actualizing itself in terms of its concept, “spirit” sets itself up for changes in itself that it brings on itself as it shifts its concept of itself. Its concept of itself is not an ideal against which it measures itself but a statement of its true form, to which it tries to shape itself, and in its true form, spirit stands in a unity of I/You relations and I/We relations. If spirit were to shape the real flesh-and-blood lives of individuals into their true form, they would become what they really were: free and equal, united in friendship in the personal sphere and justice in the wider social and political sphere. Spirit as it is in itself would be equal and adequate to spirit as it appeared. If spirit does in fact require the kind of actual and not merely hypothetical recognition for which he had argued in “Self-Consciousness,” then the inquiry into the essence of spirit would have to turn to real history, not hypothetical accounts of how this might have happened.

So, Hegel argued, the existence of something that could be genuinely called “true spirit” was in fact the case for a brief period in the development of the ancient Greek shape of life, in which free and equal men (but notably not slaves and not women) met each other as free and equal in the polis, and the overall social order embodied the second-person virtue of justice. The Greeks knew what they were doing, so their self-certainty matched up with the truth of their lives. Unfortunately, that very shape of true spirit carried a deep contradiction within itself. It produced reflective individuals driven to an ideal of glory that turned out to be incompatible with the intensely communal shape of life that sustained it. Famously, Hegel turned to Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone to show how the Greeks themselves came to an awareness of this contradiction. In the play, Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus, is faced with the fact that as a Greek, she has an unconditional ethical requirement to perform certain burial rites on her brother, who has died in battle with another brother over who had the right to claim the rulership of the realm. She also had an unconditional ethical requirement as a Greek and as a young woman to obey the orders coming from her uncle Creon – who had taken over the city after the brothers’ death – not to perform those rites. Moreover, she had in addition an equally unconditional ethical requirement not to take it upon herself to decide what her unconditional requirements were. Thus, whatever she did was unconditionally wrong. Still, out of her own desire for glory, which also seems to have been forced on her and which was supposed to be outside of the feminine domain, she buries her brother and accepts her fate and her punishment. Hegel's analysis of Antigone has been both praised and disputed, and his portrait of Antigone has been the object of much feminist interpretation. For Hegel, Antigone is the foreshadowing of the kind of self-conscious individuality that the Greek world created and which undid the Greek world that created it.

The Greeks as a form of true spirit could not hold themselves together, and they fell into submission to the Roman Empire, which Hegel treats in just a few, overly condensed paragraphs in the Phenomenology. The result of the Greek denouement and the Roman takeover followed by its own spectacular downfall is the topic of a new section, “Spirit Alienated from Itself,” in which Hegel argues that in light of the Greek and Roman failure, European life took its concept to be more narrow than it had in “true spirit.” It comes to think that the essence of self-consciousness is not to find itself essentially in any particular social order at all but to be only an individual point of view on the world that has to accommodate itself to the external facts of life. It cannot ever fully inhabit that life, and so living a self-conscious life becomes a matter for it of standing back and judging whether it can reflectively identify with its given world since spirit alienated from itself can never be immediately at one with it as the Greeks had been. In alienated spirit, self-certainty and truth separate again. The concept of self-conscious life as simply a point of view on the world does not imply any determinate conduct or virtue. Whatever standards there are come from outside of what it is to be a self-conscious, living human.

If the world of “true spirit” was dyadic – embodying the ways in which friendship and justice expressed the essentially relational structure of self-conscious lives in a community with each other – that of self-alienated spirit was essentially monadic, expressing the mediated relation of self to others via something like a system of rules. In the world of self-alienated spirit, justice becomes a matter of social rules and not the virtue of justice it had been for the Greeks.

In a series of different historically arranged sections, Hegel traces out the way in which self-alienated spirit is compelled to empty itself further. It progresses through the conflicted struggles of aristocrats versus the commoners of early modern Europe, who find at the end of the struggle that they have turned out to be the same as each other while vehemently asserting their differences. As a result, the aristocratic and high bourgeois world, in gradually comprehending its own emptiness, comprehended even more the vanity of its own vanity, and it thereby undermined what slim authority remained to it. In light of that comprehension of the vanity of its own vanity, the progress of self-alienated spirit moved into the stages of the European Enlightenment, where the alienated self comes to believe that in the application of its own special powers of insight (based on “observing reason” and its logical cousins), it could see through the mere semblances of the world all the way to its core, and trusts that it and it alone can drill deeply into the real essence behind the appearing world. The Enlightenment finds itself at odds with the movements of emotionalist religions that formed its contemporaries and its enemies, who thought that armed only with the power and purity of their own hearts, they and they alone could peer into the true and divine essence of the appearing world. Even if the Enlightenment always ends up winning the argument (which is to be expected, since the emotionalist religions disdain all argument), both were still playing by something like the same rules: monologically conceived, monadically structured, certain of their own powers to peer beyond the veils of appearance.

Self-alienated spirit culminates at first in the full alienation of spirit that sees itself as really only a point of view on the world and sees the facts of the world as putting no real normative constraints on itself. It thereby comes to think that self-conscious life alone determines the rules of the game it plays, and it thinks of itself thereby as absolute freedom. Hegel contentiously interpreted the transition in the French Revolution from its constitutionalist beginning to the Jacobin Terror as the logical result of this self-imposed exemption from any normative constraint except those which it brought on itself. Bounded only by itself, it thus found itself outfitted only with the principle of utility at best to constrain it, and, through the use of the guillotine, it proceeded rationally and calmly and under the pretense of judicial thoroughness to eliminate all those deemed a threat to itself.

The chaos and meaninglessness of the deaths left in its wake led this phase of self-alienated spirit's development to push for some kind of brake, some set of ends that would provide firm limits to the progress of such self-destructive collective self-determination, and it found that in the German philosophy of Kant and his successors. (This is not merely wishful thinking on Hegel's part. Various key figures in the revolutionary government after the fall of Robespierre did indeed for a short while turn to Kant for something like that.) The idea of “morality” as a system of rules dictated by the very structure of practical reason itself looked like it was itself fashioned, as it were, to provide the theoretical structure for the modern life that the French Revolution brought about in practice.

However, the Kantian insistence that moral action should always be done out of the motive not of personal happiness but out of duty, coupled with Kant's equal insistence that we could also not be expected to renounce our happiness and become moral drudges, led to a series of conceptual knots that “morality” on its own seemed unable to untie. In particular, so Hegel rather contentiously argued, it led to a kind of moralistic dissembling about what one's real motives are, and the postulation of all kinds of extraneous matters to make the otherwise self-contradictory moralistic system work. Inevitably, such a monological point of view leads – so Hegel equally contentiously argues – to a kind of ethics of conviction, where it is always ultimately the individual's own judgment call as to what his or her conscience requires, and the monadic and monological conception of self-conscious life inevitably point in the direction of an ever-more contracted sense of subjectivity and what it really implies.

The end-point of that logic is the Romantic version of an older idea of “beautiful souls,” those whose inward purity and rigor contrasts sharply with the messiness of the world around it. Rather than being the high point of post-revolutionary life, however, the arrival of the beautiful soul on the scene signals its complete breakdown. An inner life so radically cut off from others might think of itself as indeed beautiful and pure, but ultimately there is nothing to it, and, left to itself, its initial glow quickly dies like a burning ember, it fades out like a bell rung only once, and finally evaporates into thin air. It is alone, friendless, and without justice.

In his staging of the breakdown of the “beautiful soul” as a way of living, Hegel imagines a confrontation between two beautiful souls, with each accusing the other of hypocrisy (of not really being in reality so pure) and even of radical evil, since it accuses the other of putting self-love in place of the moral law. One of them comes to understand this about both of them, and he confesses, avowing his own radical evil, but the other, stiff-necked and rigoristic, refuses to conciliate. That is an impossible position, Hegel says, and such a stance either consumes itself in its own self-absorption, or eventually its own isolated life is too much to bear, its hard heart breaks, and the two reconcile. With that, the purely monological, monadic form collapses, and the I/You dyadic form is recaptured. Intriguingly, Hegel then asserts that in such a two-in-one of forgiveness and reconciliation, God actually appears in their midst.

Religion

That launches Hegel into the penultimate chapter, titled “Religion.” When Hegel first began thinking about a possible system of philosophy, he thought that religion would in fact have to be the end-point since the finale of such a system is a full comprehension of infinity itself, and at his early stage of philosophical development, he thought that infinity simply escaped all attempts at conceptualizing it and had to be left to a kind of religious intuition, a position he was never comfortable to inhabit. He radically changed his mind by the time he got to writing the Phenomenology, where he came to the notorious and difficult to interpret Hegelian claim that ultimately the claims of conceptual thought trump the more representationalist imaginings of religion. Religion can only go so far and must cede way (in some sense) to philosophy.

Hegel takes religion to be one of the most basic ways in which self-conscious life tries to make sense of things and in doing so to make sense of itself. It is in religion that the infinite is first grasped incompletely as some kind of supersensible essence, as the real truth behind the semblances of the phenomenal world. As religion progressively develops, this conception undermines itself and is replaced by a more sophisticated religious comprehension and practice. The Hegelian “phenomenology” of religion takes it to progress from a kind of Zoroastrian “religion of light” – where light is taken as the perfect symbolic representation of what infinity would, as it were, look like – to religions that represent the supersensible as some kind of life itself (as abstracted plants or animals) and in its final, fully symbolic form up to something like ancient Egyptian religion, where the abstracted animal forms and human forms are combined.

Out of that type of natural religion comes the ancient Greek religion with its representations of the gods of Olympus as having an almost fully human form. The crucial thing about Greek religion was its being the religion of “true spirit,” which meant that in it, beauty was considered to be at one with truth. The beautiful Greek gods were the truth of what we mortals in our daily activities are really doing. This idea in turn leads Hegel into a discussion of the nature of Greek sculpture, epic, tragedy, and comedy, which form the outlines of his later much more elaborated and nuanced lectures on the philosophy of art in Berlin in the 1820s. Alas, that will have to be left aside in this short overview.

Greek religion fades out as Greek life fades out. It was essentially an aesthetic solution to a set of real problems, and as the real problems mounted up, it was clear that another merely aesthetic solution to the real problems would be inadequate. It was into that conceptual space that the “revealed religion” (i.e. Christianity) stepped. Nonetheless, it was with Greek religion that the “essence” that was supposedly behind appearance turned out not to be an inert substance but an activity of gods, a subject. In Greek portrayal, that is, the gods were not conceived as a supersensible substance. They instead take on human form, and in Christianity, the divine takes on human form directly and not just in aesthetic imagination. Hegel supplies a long discussion of how early Christianity first gave itself something like a Neoplatonic interpretation of itself, but this self-interpretation was transformed in the workings of the Christian religious community into a kind of communal second-person address, with the members of the community addressing each other as members of the religious community, united as fellow communicants and not united only monadically by a set of rules. This community establishes a universal self-consciousness, an I that is a We, and a We that is an I out of the communal ties that are at basis second-personal. The “appearing God” mentioned at the end of the section on beautiful souls turns out to be the God of Christianity. God is present among us as Geist.

But what does that mean? Hegel's thoughts on religion were in his day the most divisive of all his views. He was interpreted by those who knew him and those who followed him as lying somewhere on the line between pure atheism and orthodox Lutheran Christianity. That divisiveness among Hegel scholars continues today, and it is no place for an introduction to settle that issue. Here, the reader is on his or her own.

The conclusion of the book, “Absolute Knowing,” draws the conclusions from the preceding. It seems that even with this religious denouement, we still end up speaking of Geist in mutually exclusive ways, or, that is, in “infinite judgments,” that is to say, that judgments have an unconditional and not merely conditional content. In paragraph 794 of the Phenomenology, he announces, somewhat symphonically, the conclusion of the book:

The unification of both aspects [of the mutually exclusive judgments] has not yet been shown; that unification wraps up this series of shapes of spirit, for in it spirit arrives at the point where it knows itself not only as it is in itself, or according to its absolute content, and not only as it is for itself according to its contentless form, or according to the aspect of self-consciousness. Rather, it knows itself as it is in and for itself.

That is, at that point in the book, in terms of content, it knows what it is to be a self-conscious life, which involves having the form of self-consciousness in all our activities. What had been an inquiry into the essence behind appearance has turned out as a “phenomenology” to show that Geist is in fact not the hidden essence behind appearance but actually is its series of appearances as it has shape-shifted itself in its history up to this point. A phenomenology itself thus turns out to be a way of examining the contingencies of Geist's appearances in history with an account of how its concept of itself has so shaped itself that in having completed this inquiry, it is now in a position to know that its self-certainty (its knowledge of what it is doing) is equal to its truth (what it is really doing). Knowing that, Hegel concludes, it is now ready for another kind of philosophical work, which involves producing the “system” that Hegel worked out in lectures and publications in Berlin.

Hegel concludes the book with a cryptic reference to Geist ascending to its own Golgotha and then taking up a position on a throne. He ends with some misquoted lines from a poem by Friedrich Schiller. But why end with lines from a poem? Why lines from this particular poem? And is the misquotation deliberate or intentional? These are matters Hegel himself never explicitly cleared up, and they continue to inform the various conflicting interpretations the book has received.

Conclusion

There is, of course, much more to Hegel's Phenomenology than a synopsis of its most general set of conclusions can provide. Generations of readers have discovered in its intricate set of chapters inspiration which has set them off in many different directions, and there is no reason to doubt that the book will continue to inspire as well as perplex its readership for some time yet to come. Hegel's book is rich in details and almost none of them are extraneous, and it is those details which are, alas, exactly the kind of thing that an introductory overview of the contents necessarily has to leave out. Even more unfortunately, their omission throws into question whether the overview can really provide a genuine view. But perhaps that is no reason to worry. The book's own brilliance, apart from the translation here, will surely inspire the kind of readership that will one day also come to see this very synopsis as itself deficient in novel ways or maybe even seriously misleading. Wherever you are and whoever you are when you are reading this introduction, keep in mind that there has been a lot of water under the bridge since it was written and since Hegel wrote the book. Be encouraged by that. I also hope this encourages people to turn to the book to help firm up their own thoughts about where “spirit” as self-conscious life is going. To be sure, all the readings and interpretations of the work will be contentious, but really good books of philosophy always provoke that kind of reaction. A work that celebrates dialectic would hardly be expected to do anything different.

¹ For the more detailed account of Hegel's life, see T. P. Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

² Hegel was not entirely unsuccessful in his literary career while in Bern. While there, he translated into German and provided a commentary on a political pamphlet by the French-speaking Jean-Jacques Cart. The pamphlet was a quasi-revolutionary indictment of the Bernese aristocracy (one of whom Hegel was working for as a private tutor for the children). The translation and commentary were published anonymously, and not even Hegel's own family in Berlin many years later knew that this came from his own pen.

³ See the discussion in F. Fehér, “Practical Reason in the Revolution: Kant's Dialogue with the French Revolution,” in Fehér, ed., The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1990), 201–18.

⁴ For accounts of this development, see T. P. Pinkard, German Philosophy, 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); F. C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987); Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); D. Henrich and D. S. Pacini, Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2003); E. Förster, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012); and P. W. Franks, All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2005).

⁵ See Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography, for an account of these various preliminary drafts of the “system.”

⁶ See F. Nicolin, L. Sziborsky, and H. Schneider, Auf Hegels Spuren: Beiträge zur Hegel-Forschung (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1996).

⁷ I. Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. M. J. Gregor (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 119 (AA 555).

⁸ The phrase “science of the experience of consciousness” is also used by Hegel in the “Introduction” to characterize what his book is. It seems that this was the original title of the book, but as Hegel developed the book in writing it, he changed it to The Phenomenology of Spirit.

⁹ This distinguishes Hegelian phenomenology from the sense in which Edmund Husserl created a twentieth-century philosophical movement also called “phenomenology.” Husserl spurned the idea of such theoretical entities.

¹⁰ See Förster, Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy.

¹¹ This argument is made by Förster in Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy.

¹² It should be noted that not only are there interpretive difficulties in fixing what role exactly the next chapter, “Spirit,” is supposed to play: The different tables of contents that have appeared in different editions only complicate it. Is the original book only three sections – consciousness, self-consciousness, science? Or is “Reason” a separate chapter or a newly added subsection of self-consciousness? If “Reason” is “C,” then it is a new and separate section. If it is “(AA),” then it is a subsection of “B: Self-Consciousness.”

¹³ Robert Brandom, “Freedom and Constraint by Norms,” American Philosophical Quarterly 16, no. 3 (1979).

¹⁴ See Philippians 2:6–8 for the passage. In Luther's 1545 Bible, it goes: “welcher, ob er wohl in göttlicher Gestalt war, hielt er's nicht für einen Raub, Gott gleich sein, (7) sondern entäußerte sich selbst und nahm Knechtsgestalt an, ward gleich wie ein andrer Mensch und an Gebärden als ein Mensch erfunden; (8) er erniedrigte sich selbst und ward gehorsam bis zum Tode, ja zum Tode am Kreuz.” The King James Version goes: “Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God:/ But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men:/ 8 And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.” (Some other German translations since Hegel's time use verzichten, or “relinquishment,” for the translation of Entäußerung. Hegel himself uses verzichten in other contexts in the Phenomenology.)

¹⁵ Eduard Gans, Naturrecht und Universalrechtsgeschichte (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), 58.

Translator's Note

Although Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is undoubtedly a canonical work and deserves the high reputation in the history of philosophy which it has always had, even Hegel's staunchest admirers have to admit that it is not, at least on a first reading, a clearly written book. Indeed, even those who defend what one philosopher has called its “ferocious idiom,” surely must acknowledge that whatever other virtues that idiom possesses, its initial density is almost unrivaled.¹³ In translating such a densely written book, the translator (especially if he is otherwise favorably disposed to the book's contents) is thus always under the temptation to make the author more easy-going in the translation than he was in the original. However, in the case of the Phenomenology, giving in to the temptation to make Hegel's text more easy-going inevitably means that more of the translator's interpretation of the text will be introduced than is otherwise desirable. To be sure, all translations are interpretations of a sort, but that is still no excuse to transform the normal amount of interpretive give and take into a license of sorts to make the book mean what the translator wishes it meant. Like many of Hegel's other translators, I too have often been tempted to take Hegel by the hand and tell him that, no, this is the way he should have said it. I hope that in all instances I will have resisted that temptation. Now I, like others, have my own interpretation of this book, but I hope that the current translation will make it easy for all the others who differ on crucial interpretive matters to be able to use this text to point out where they differ and why they differ without the translation itself making it unnecessarily more difficult for them to make their case.

One of the suppositions I have used in undertaking the translation is that Hegel is serious about his terminology, and that his claims to make philosophy into a “science” (a Wissenschaft, the systematic pursuit of knowledge) are fleshed out in his choice of terms. A reader of the original German sees certain phrases and key terms appear regularly on the page; that often indicates that there is something like an argument or at least a line of thought that is being developed or that comparisons between this stage of the narration and some other stage are being suggested. As far as possible, the English reader should be able to do the same thing and make up his or her own mind about whether there really is a distinct line of thought being put on display or whether Hegel is switching meanings or whether something else altogether is going on.

For example, there is Hegel's usage of “an sich” and “für sich” (“in itself” and “for itself”). The term, “an sich,” is of course best known to anglophone philosophers in Kant's use of it in the term, “Ding an sich,” the “thing in itself.”

“Für sich,” on the other hand, has an ordinary German usage where it often means something like “on its own” or “apart from,” or even “on its own account.” Jean-Paul Sartre also famously picked up the Hegelian terms “in itself” and “for itself” to use in his own ontology of subjectivity and freedom in Being and Nothingness, and, although his use of those terms could be said to be very generally “Hegelian,” he also gave those Hegelian terms a life outside of their more restricted purely Hegelian context. His usage should not be confused with Hegel's own use of those terms. Hegel usually uses “für sich” in a fairly technical sense to call attention to a type of self-relation, especially the kind that human agents have to themselves; but sometimes he uses it in its more ordinary sense (and sometimes in both senses at once), and he is almost always playing on both senses even when he employs it in his more technical usage. As I see it, the job of the Hegel-translator is not to resolve the interpretive issues about what Hegel meant by, for example, “für sich,” but only to make Hegel's somewhat technical terms apparent to the reader and, within the idea of keeping the flow of the original text intact, to let the reader do as much of the interpreting as possible. Unfortunately, in the case of “für sich,” the obvious connections between “on its own” and “for itself” cannot be made entirely clearly in the English; thus, I have rendered “für sich” as “for-itself” in almost all cases. However, where I have switched the translation to its more colloquial sense of “on its own,” I have indicated this in a footnote. For “an sich,” earlier translators toyed with “inherent” or “implicit” as a translation, and “explicit” as a translation of “für sich.” Many interpreters, though (myself included) think the distinction between “in itself” and “for itself” does not map well at all into that between “implicit” and “explicit.” By leaving “an sich” and “für sich” literally as “in itself” and “for itself,” this translation invites the reader to decide for him or herself whether “explicit,” for example, is the best way to render Hegel's use of “für sich.” Another, more colloquial way of rendering “an sich” would be “on its own” (which is roughly how Kant's Ding an sich is to be taken: the thing on its own apart from the conditions under which we can experience it). If one took that route, then the distinction between “für sich” (on its own) and “an sich” (on its own) would be rendered invisible. Yet another more vernacular meaning of “an sich” would be the term “as such.” (One can easily see that although one might make a case for rendering “Ansichsein” as “being as such” and “Fürsichsein” as “being on its own,” neither of those two ways of talking would make Hegel's thought any more perspicuous.)

Keeping Hegel's terminology visible also means that I have to be relatively rigorous in distinguishing Hegel's uses of “an sich” from “in sich,” although both could be equally well rendered as “in itself.” To do so, I have often translated “in sich” as “within itself.” However, since neither that distinction between “in” and “within”, nor the distinction between “for itself” and “in itself” are parts of ordinary English conversation (except perhaps among dyed-in-the-wool Hegelians and Sartreans), this makes the text a bit less colloquial than one might otherwise like it to be, but it makes Hegel's line of thought, I hope, a little more easy to pick out.

Likewise, in many cases, I have chosen to translate Hegel's deliberately odd German into deliberately odd English in order to preserve the sense of the text; Hegel sometimes speaks of things like “das Ansichseiende” (“the existing in-itself”), instead of “that which exists in itself” or “what exists in-itself.” To bring out Hegel's intent, I sometimes also use the idiom of “the in-itself,” which sounds just about as odd in English as it does in German. Hegel also uses “an ihm selbst” and “an ihr selbst,” which themselves could both be rendered as “in itself.” This is again a matter of interpretation, but since Hegel sometimes uses both “an sich” and “an ihm selbst” in the same sentence, I take it that he wants us to keep those separate, as I think they are. I have therefore consistently rendered “an ihm selbst” and “an ihr selbst” as “in its own self.” Readers can decide for themselves how much of a difference they think there is.

For a number of Hegel's other usages, especially his use of “aufheben,” there simply is no good single-word translation. “Aufheben” is an ordinary German word used by Hegel in a technical way, and it has no single counterpart in English; to translate the word differently in each context in which it is used would make it impossible for the English reader to be able to make out how that term figures in the ongoing argument; or it would involve an impossibly large set of footnotes. As Hegel himself notes in some other works, the German term carries two senses in different contexts, namely, “to cancel” (as in canceling one's insurance policy) and to save or preserve (as in “save a place for me”). Hegel tells his German readers that he intends to use the word in both senses, although in the context in which he usually employs the term, he most often clearly means “cancel” or “negate,” whereas in other cases he clearly means something more like “preserve.”

To render “aufheben” into English, Hegel's translators in the nineteenth century opted to revive an older term in English, “sublate,” which for all practical purposes had died out of English usage by the middle of the nineteenth century. Starting its semantic life in English (having been imported from the Latin) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it meant “to remove” or “to take away,” and it came to be used in discussions of logic, such that even an authority like Sir William Hamilton used it in the mid-nineteenth century in his writings on logic and knowledge to mean “negate.” When Hegel's first translators adopted the older term to translate Hegel's use of “aufheben,” they simply stipulated that it was intended to carry both of its German meanings. Although many have suspected that their motives for using this term were a little suspect (one cannot avoid the suspicion that they thought it was supposed to indicate just how esoterically profound Hegel really was), it has nonetheless stuck, and there is no other very good alternative. The most obvious alternative is that of “supersede,” but that avoids the idea of “preserving”; and in many contexts, it is in fact misleading. One way of understanding Hegel's usage here is to think of “sublation” as figuring in the kind of philosophical conversation in which one might say to an interlocutor, “Your claim, X, is, as you have phrased it, not right; but if we reformulate it as, say, X*, we can preserve the main point of your idea without having to buy into all of its problems.” This is a typical move in a philosophical argument, and it is roughly equivalent to saying, “We take your point and deny it, but because there is something to it, we preserve it in a changed format in our ongoing discussion.” There is no single word in English to capture that sense, and since there is no ideal way of translating “aufheben” in any reasonably short way, I have decided to stick with “sublate” in the text and let the reader use his or her own best judgment as to what other term might in that context be substituted (that is, whether in this or that context, Hegel simply means “negate,” or whether in this or that context he only means “preserve” or whether he consistently means both at once).

There is also a third sense of “aufheben,” where it means to “raise up,” and many interpreters of Hegel have thought that this simply also had to be at work in Hegel's usage. That may well be, but Hegel himself only speaks of there being two meanings of the word, even if he does not deny that there are more than he points out. Whether the third meaning, “to raise up,” is also at work is something the reader will have to decide for him or herself as they run across the various occurrences of “sublate” in the text.

Likewise, Hegel uses “Wesen” to mean both “essence” and sometimes in its more ordinary sense of “creature,” or “being.” No single word is going to translate that term perfectly. I have opted to leave it at “essence” in some cases where “being” would be arguably as good a translation, and I have indicated in footnotes where although the German term is “Wesen,” I have rendered it as “creature” or “being” instead of “essence.”

A key Hegelian concept is the German term, Bildung, which means education, culture, having a mind of one's own, a skill in judgment; and it also carries the sense that this is the result of a type of formation of character, the result of an educative formative activity. This is a key term in Hegel, since the whole book can be interpreted (and has been) as a study of the Bildung of consciousness. I often render it as “cultural formation,” which is not ideal and which represents a compromise with all the different senses packed into the German term. Where I render it otherwise, I note the original in a footnote.

Hegel uses “Ruhe” and its cognates to mean not just “peaceful,” or “calm,” but to contrast it with movement, Bewegung. As any reader of Hegel knows, there is something that is always in “movement” in the Phenomenology and something at rest. Even though it is somewhat awkward, I have tried to use versions of “at rest” for all those uses of “Ruhe” and its cognates, in order for the reader to see where there is a contrast being drawn between “movement” and being “at rest.” Sometimes, I even render “ruhende” as “motionless.” (Some think it is only the “concepts” or “thought” that are moving; others think it is things themselves that are in motion. Again, the purpose of a translator is not to resolve that issue.)

One of the ongoing difficulties over which Hegel interpreters like to argue is how to translate Hegel's use of “Wirklichkeit” and its cognates. The term is ordinary German for “reality,” but if one renders it as “reality,” then one runs into two obvious difficulties: First, one would then have no good way of distinguishing Hegel's use of Wirklichkeit/reality from his use of Realität/reality; second, Hegel uses “Wirklichkeit” in a technical sense that plays on its supposed etymology from “wirken,” to have an effect, and he uses it in a way that is supposed to bring to mind what is usually rendered in English as “actuality” when translating Aristotle or Aquinas. What is actual, one might say, is what is at work in reality, a sense captured nicely by Jean Hyppolite's decision to translate “Wirklichkeit” in French as “effectivité.” I have nonetheless rendered it here as “actual” and “actuality” in order to keep that link to Aristotelian thought (and to previous translations of Hegel), even though in many places the more ordinary “real,” “reality,” and the like would make the text flow better. That decision unfortunately also means that I have to resort to the rather clumsy “non-actual” to render “unwirklich” rather than the more easy-going, “unreal.” In all cases, however, where “actual” and “actuality” appear in the text, the reader might ask him or herself whether “real” wouldn't be better there, as long as one keeps in mind the extra meaning of “effectivity.”

There is also the obvious problem of rendering “Erkennen” and “Wissen,” both of which mean (in English) “knowledge” (or “knowing”). This is one example where I have chosen not always to mark the different occurrences of “Wissen” and its cognates and “Erkennen” and its cognates by different terms. I have always rendered “Wissen” (and its cognates) as “knowledge” or as “knowing,” and so on; and when “Erkennen,” “Erkenntnis,” and their cognates occur, I generally translate it as “cognition,” “cognizing,” and so on.

The term “Entäußerung” and its cognates, require special mention. This was the term that Luther used for his translation of Kenosis, the act of God “humbling” himself (as the King James translators had it) or of “emptying” himself (as some more modern translators have rendered it), so that, for Christians, God became flesh.¹⁴ In choosing to use Entäußerung, Hegel is likely assuming his readers’ knowledge of Luther's translation of the Bible. Rather than use “objectify,” “externalize,” “realize,” or “alienate” (three popular translations of that term), I have opted for the more theologically evocative, “relinquishing.” In more ordinary German, Entäußerung means “to renounce,” “to divest,” or “to give up.” One reason for doing this is so that the other uses of “renounce” in the text (where it translates, for example, “verzichten”) are kept separate from the occurrences of the more theologically freighted, “Entäußerung.” There are of course disputes about just how much Hegel meant for this term to be used in its religious sense at all; the translator's goal cannot be to settle that dispute but only to make it as clear as possible where the term occurs, what its background associations are, and to let the readers decide for themselves.

Hegel's use of the ordinary German term, “Sittlichkeit,” which could easily be rendered as “morals” or “morality” (as Kant's translators usually render Kant's use of the same term) presents another conundrum. If one renders it “morality,” then one has no way of making the Hegelian distinction between Sittlichkeit and Moralität (morality). In other places, Hegel explicitly says that Sittlichkeit and Moralität basically mean the same thing in ordinary German, but he is insisting on using them in different senses to mark what for him is a crucial conceptual distinction. The term, “Sittlichkeit,” draws heavily on the term, “Sitte,” which can be rendered as the “mores” of a time, and that might suggest that one adopt a new usage in English, “moresness.” The inadvisability of that choice speaks for itself. Instead, I have chosen the now established term of art, “ethical life,” which has been used by other translators of Hegel as a rendering of “Sittlichkeit.”

There is another issue all too familiar to interpreters of Hegel: How to translate “Vorstellung”? The term colloquially means “idea,” and in some contexts it even means something like “imagine.” It makes its appearance in German Idealism in Kant's use of it, where Norman Kemp Smith rendered it in his translation of the first Critique as “representation” (following Kant's own Latin rendition of it as “repraesentatio”). However, whereas in the first Critique Kant claimed that there were two types of “representations,” namely, intuitions and concepts, Hegel typically contrasts “representation” (Vorstellung) with “concept” (Begriff). Moreover, in his practical philosophy, when Kant talks about freedom consisting of acting in terms of our conception (or idea) of law, he typically uses “Vorstellung” for the word that English readers are familiar with in that context as “idea” or “conception.” I have tended to render it as “representation” and in many cases as “representational thought” where I think Hegel is trying to contrast “representational thinking” with “conceptual thinking.” I also think that it makes Hegel's text flow more easily (although “flowing easily” is clearly a relative term when applied to any part of the Phenomenology). In a very few places I have rendered it as “imagine,” but since I think that this might be a matter of possible dispute, I have always indicated where I have done that in a footnote. Likewise, I have on the whole rendered “Anschauung” as “intuition” to keep the similarities and differences between Hegel's use of this word and, to anglophone readers, Kant's use of the word (where Kant uses it to distinguish that type of “representation” from that of “concepts”).

To keep the relation to the Kantian vocabulary, I have also translated “der Verstand” as “the understanding,” the classic translation of what Kant regarded as one of the basic faculties of the mind. In many ways, “intellect” (or maybe even “ordinary understanding”) would be a better rendering of this phrase, and I have occasionally used that and indicated in a footnote that it translates “Verstand.”

A related problem has to do with Hegel's use of “Bewußtsein” (“consciousness”). Much hinges on the distinctions he makes between “consciousness,” “self-consciousness,” and “spirit.” But when he uses very ordinary German terms such as “zum Bewußtsein kommen”, or “mit Bewußtsein,” which would ordinarily simply be translated as “aware of” or “consciously”, he is often trying to make a point about what is going on in light of those distinctions. I have therefore often translated those phrases more literally than they would otherwise be rendered as “coming to consciousness” and “with consciousness.” That makes the text a bit more awkward than it would otherwise be, but it at least lets the reader note those types of occurrences.

There is also the problem of “In-sich-gehen” and “In-sich-sein”: Hegel makes frequent use of these terms near the end of the book. I have rendered “in-sich-gehen” as “taking-the-inward-turn” instead of the more literal and wooden “going-into-oneself” or “going-into-the-self.” However, even if one likes that as a solution, it raises another problem: What to do with “In-sich-sein”? To keep the link between the two, I have rendered it as “inwardly-turned-being.” I realize that this sounds a bit odd, but then so does “In-sich-sein.” It also makes more perspicuous the distinction between “an sich” and “in sich” as that between “in itself” and “within itself.”

Likewise, one of Hegel's key terms is that of consciousness or self-consciousness being “bei sich.” The term carries lots of different connotations, but I have rendered it as “being at one with oneself.” The term is crucial since in other works, Hegel goes so far as to claim that freedom itself consists in being “bei sich in an other.” I have usually indicated its presence in a footnote.

There is also the matter of translating “die Sache selbst.” Every writer on Hegel in English has his or her own idea about how to render this, and they all disagree, sometimes vehemently, with each other. There simply is no single English word, nor, for that matter, a single phrase which adequately translates the German term with all the nuances that Hegel plays with (especially in the chapter, “The Spiritual Kingdom of Animals”). Some of the renderings run from “the thing that matters,” “the point of it all,” “the heart of the matter,” “the crux of the matter,” to simply “what is at stake,” “the Thing itself.” It could probably be rendered slightly more accurately as “the nitty-gritty”, but that is not perfect and it is far too colloquial to serve in this context. Almost all the proposed translations also obscure the obvious relations in the text between a mere “Sache” (a “thing,” or “fact”) and “die Sache selbst” (the “thing itself”), and they also obscure the distinction and connection between two German terms, a “Sache” (as a “thing”) and a “Ding ”(as a more “thingy” thing). For all that matter, perhaps “thing” in the sense of hipster sixties lingo (as in, “Do your own thing”) might work, but it too is not only far from perfect, it is just simply out of place here. Eduard Gans, a law professor, Hegelian, and close friend of Hegel said that the term, “Sache,” means both a thing outside of oneself and “the substantial essence.”¹⁵ Since there is no simple English translation of the term, “Sache selbst,” the “crux of the matter” will have to do.

In the case of a few words that no longer appear in most contemporary German dictionaries (such as “Selbstwesen”), I consulted the older nineteenth-century Grimms’ Deutsches Wörterbuch for a meaning. I have noted those occurrences in the footnotes.

I have decided to keep the independent paragraph numbering that was introduced by A. V. Miller in his translation. There is no such numbering system (or anything like it) in the original German text, but the system has proven itself to be useful for marking the place in the text for class discussions and for reference, and thus I have retained it. Unfortunately, Miller added and subtracted paragraphs in his English version that were not there in the German edition, so my numbering scheme, which follows the paragraph markings of the critical edition in German, is slightly different from the older Miller translation.

The pagination in margins refers to the text of the Gesammelte Werke by page number. For the translation, I used the 1807 edition of the Phänomenologie des Geistes and checked it against the critical edition published by Felix Meiner Verlag in 1999 as volume two in their six-volume critical edition of Hegel's works. That is page-for-page identical with the critical edition edited by Wolfgang Bonsiepen and Reinhard Heede in Hegel's Gesammelte Werke, also published by Felix Meiner. I also consulted the Jubilee edition of Hegel's Phenomenology edited by Hermann Glockner as volume two of that series (1927). I consulted the past translations in English, and I consulted Jean Hyppolite's translation into French (along with the newer one in French by Gwendoline Jarczyk and Pierre-Jean Labarrière).

The Phenomenology of Spirit

Contents

Preface

Introduction

A.Consciousness

I.Sensuous-Certainty; or the “This” and Meaning Something

II.Perceiving; or the Thing and Illusion

III.Force and the Understanding; Appearance and the Supersensible World

B.Self-Consciousness

IV.The Truth of Self-Certainty

A.Self-Sufficiency and Non-Self-Sufficiency of Self-Consciousness; Mastery and Servitude

B.Freedom of Self-Consciousness; Stoicism, Skepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness

C.(AA) Reason

V.The Certainty and Truth of Reason

A.Observing Reason

a.Observation of Nature

b.Observation of Self-Consciousness in its Purity and in its Relation to External Actuality: Logical and Psychological Laws

c.Observation of the Relation of Self-Consciousness to its Immediate Actuality: Physiognomy and Phrenology

B.The Actualization of Rational Self-Consciousness through Itself

a.Pleasure and Necessity

b.The Law of the Heart, and the Insanity of Self-Conceit

c.Virtue and the Way of the World

C.Individuality, Which, to Itself, is Real in and for Itself

a.The Spiritual Kingdom of Animals and Deception; or the Crux of the Matter (die Sache selbst)

b.Law-Giving Reason

c.Reason as Testing Laws

(BB) Spirit

VI.Spirit

A.True Spirit, Ethical Life

a.The Ethical World, the Human and Divine Law, Man and Woman

b.Ethical Action, Human and Divine Knowing, Guilt and Fate

c.The State of Legality

B.Spirit Alienated from Itself: Cultural Formation

I.The World of Self-Alienated Spirit

a.Cultural Formation and its Realm of Actuality

b.Faith and Pure Insight

II.The Enlightenment

a.The Struggle of the Enlightenment with Superstition

b.The Truth of the Enlightenment

III.Absolute Freedom and Terror

C.Spirit Certain of Itself: Morality

a.The Moral Worldview

b.Dissemblance

c.Conscience; the Beautiful Soul, Evil, and its Forgiveness

(CC) Religion

VII.Religion

A.Natural Religion

a.The Luminous Essence

b.Plants and Animals

c.The Artisan

B.The Art-Religion

a.The Abstract Work of Art

b.The Living Work of Art

c.The Spiritual Work of Art

C.Revealed Religion

(DD) Absolute Knowing

VIII.Absolute Knowing

Preface

1. In the preface to a philosophical work, it is customary for the author to give an explanation – namely, an explanation of his purpose in writing the book, his motivations behind it, and the relations it bears to other previous or contemporary treatments of the same topics – but for a philosophical work, this seems not only superfluous, but in light of the nature of the subject matter, even inappropriate and counterproductive. For whatever it might be suitable to say about philosophy in a preface – for instance, to give some historical instruction about the biases and the standpoint of the text, or some talk about the general content and the results together with a set of scattered assertions and assurances about the truth – none of these can count as the way to present philosophical truth. – Moreover, because philosophy essentially is in the element of universality, which encompasses the particular within itself, it might seem that even more so than in the other sciences, in philosophy what is indeed salient about its subject matter,¹ even its perfect essence, would be expressed in the goal of the work and in its final results, and that the way the project is in fact carried out would be what is inessential. In contrast, if a person were to have only a general notion² of, for example, anatomy, or, to put it roughly, if he were to have an acquaintance with the parts of the body taken in accordance with their lifeless existence, nobody would thereby think that he has come into full possession of the salient subject matter of that science, which is to say, its content. One would think that in addition he would have to go to the trouble to pay attention to the particularities of the science. – Furthermore, that kind of an aggregation of little bits and pieces of information has no real right to be called science, and a conversation about its purpose and other such generalities would be in no way distinct from the ordinary historical and uncomprehending way in which the content, or these nerves and muscles, and so forth, is itself discussed. In the case of philosophy, on the other hand, 10this would give rise to the following incongruity, namely, that if philosophy were indeed to make use of such a method, then it would have shown itself to be incapable of grasping the truth.

2. Determining the relation that a philosophical work professes to bear vis-à-vis other efforts at dealing with the same object also introduces an extraneous interest, and it thereby only renders obscure what is supposed to be at stake in taking cognizance³ of the truth. The more that conventional opinion holds that the opposition between the true and the false is itself fixed and set, the more that it customarily expects to find itself in either agreement or in contradiction with any given philosophical system, and, if so, then in any explanation of such a system, the more it will only see the one or the other. It does not comprehend the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive development of truth as much as it sees only contradiction in that diversity. The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter. Likewise, through the fruit, the blossom itself may be declared to be a false existence of the plant, since the fruit emerges as the blossom's truth as it comes to replace the blossom itself. These forms are not only distinguished from each other, but, as incompatible with each other, they also supplant each other. However, at the same time their fluid nature makes them into moments of an organic unity in which they are not only not in conflict with each other, but rather, one is equally as necessary as the other, and it is this equal necessity which alone constitutes the life of the whole. However, in part, contradiction with regard to a philosophical system does not usually comprehend itself in this way, and, in part, the consciousness which apprehends the contradiction generally neither knows how to free the contradiction from its one-sidedness, nor how to sustain it as free-standing. Nor, when it seems to be in the shape of a struggle against itself, does it generally take cognizance⁴ of the moments as reciprocally necessary.

3. Those who demand both such explanations and their satisfactions may well look as if they are really in pursuit of what is essential. Where else could the inner core of a philosophical work be better expressed than in its purposes and results, and how else could this be more determinately discerned⁵ than by differentiating it from all the other things that this age brings out in the same sphere? However much that sort of doing is supposed to count for more than just the beginning of cognition, or if it is supposed to count as actual cognition itself, still it is in fact to be reckoned as being little more than a contrivance for avoiding what is really at stake, or as an attempt to combine the semblance of both seriousness and effort while actually sparing oneself of either seriousness or effort. – This is so because the subject matter is not exhausted in its aims; rather, it is exhaustively treated when it is worked out. Nor is the result which is reached the actual whole itself; rather, the whole is the result together with the way the result comes to be. The aim for itself is the lifeless 11universal in the way that the tendency of the work itself is a mere drive that still lacks actuality; the unadorned result is just the corpse that has left the tendency behind. – Likewise, differentiatedness is instead the limit of the thing at stake. It is where the thing which is at stake ceases, or it is what that thing is not. To trouble oneself with such purposes or results, or to make distinctions and pass judgments on one or the other is thus an easier task than it might seem to be. Instead of occupying itself with what is at stake, this kind of doing has always thereby gone one step beyond it. Instead of dwelling on the thing at issue and forgetting itself in it, that sort of knowing is always grasping at something else. It instead remains in being at one with itself as it is at one with the matter at issue and gives itself over to it.⁶ – The easiest thing of all is to pass judgment on what is substantial and meaningful. It is much more difficult to get a real grip on it, and what is the most difficult of all is both to grasp what unites each of them and to give a full exposition of what that is.

4. The beginning both of cultural education and of working one's way out of the immediacy of substantial life must always be done by acquainting oneself with universal principles and points of view. Having done that, one can then work oneself up to the thought of what is at stake and, of no less importance, to giving reasons for supporting or refuting one's thoughts on those matters. One must grasp the subject matter's concrete and rich fullness according to its determinateness, and one must know both how to provide an orderly account of it and to render a serious judgment about it. However, the commencement of cultural education will first of all also have to carve out some space for the seriousness of a fulfilled life, which in turn leads one to the experience of the crux of the matter,⁷ so that even when the seriousness of the concept does go into the depths of the crux of the matter, this kind of acquaintance and judgment will still retain its proper place in conversation.

5. The true shape in which truth exists can only be the scientific system of that truth. To participate in the collaborative effort at bringing philosophy nearer to the form of science – to bring it nearer to the goal where it can lay aside the title of love of knowing and be actual knowing – is the task I have set for myself. The inner necessity that knowing should be science lies in the nature of knowing, and the satisfactory explanation for this inner necessity is solely the exposition of philosophy itself. However, external necessity, insofar as this is grasped in a universal manner and insofar as personal contingencies and individual motivations are set aside, is the same as the internal necessity which takes on the shape in which time presents⁸ the existence of its moments. To demonstrate that it is now time for philosophy to be elevated into science would therefore be the only 12true justification of any attempt that has this as its aim, because it would demonstrate the necessity of that aim, and, at the same time, it would be the realization of the aim itself.

6. In positing that the true shape of truth lies in its scientific rigor – or, what is the same thing, in asserting that truth has the element of its existence solely in concepts – I do know that this seems to contradict an idea⁹ (along with all that follows from it), whose pretentiousness is matched only by its pervasiveness in the convictions of the present age. It thus does not seem completely gratuitous to offer an explanation of this contradiction even though at this stage such an explanation can amount to little more than the same kind of dogmatic assurance which it opposes. However much, that is to say, the true exists only in what, or rather exists only as what, is at one time called intuition and at another time called either the immediate knowing of the absolute, or religion, or being – not at the center of the divine love, but the being of divine love itself – still, if that is taken as the point of departure, what is at the same time demanded in the exposition of philosophy is going to be instead the very opposite of the form of the concept. The absolute is not supposed to be conceptually grasped¹⁰ but rather to be felt and intuited. It is not the concept but the feeling and intuition of the absolute which are supposed to govern what is said of it.

7. If such a requirement is grasped in its more general context, and if its appearance is viewed from the stage at which self-conscious spirit is presently located, then spirit has gone beyond the substantial life which it had otherwise been leading in the element of thought – it has gone beyond this immediacy of faith, beyond the satisfaction and security of the certainty that consciousness had about its reconciliation with the essence, and it has gone beyond the universal present, or, the inner as well as the outer of that essence. Spirit has not only gone beyond that to the opposite extreme of a reflection of itself into itself which is utterly devoid of substance; it has gone beyond that extreme too. Not only has its essential life been lost to it, it is conscious of this, and of the finitude that is its content. Turning itself away from such left-over dregs, spirit, while both confessing to being mired in wickedness and reviling itself for being so, now demands from philosophy not knowledge of what spirit is; rather, it demands that it again attain the substantiality and the solidity of what is, and that it is through philosophy that it attain this. To meet these needs, philosophy is not supposed so much to unlock substance's secret and elevate this to self-consciousness – not so much to bring 13chaotic consciousness back both to a well-thought-out order and to the simplicity of the concept, but, instead, to take what thought has torn asunder and then to stir it all together into a smooth mélange, to suppress the concept that makes those distinctions, and then to fabricate the feeling of the essence. What it wants from philosophy is not so much insight as edification. The beautiful, the holy, the eternal, religion, and love itself are all the bait required to awaken the craving to bite. What is supposed to sustain and extend the wealth of that substance is not the concept, but ecstasy, not the cold forward march of the necessity of the subject matter, but instead a kind of inflamed inspiration.

8. Corresponding to this requirement is a laborious and almost petulant zeal to save mankind from its absorption in the sensuous, the vulgar, and the singular. It wishes to direct people's eyes to the stars, as if they had totally forgotten the divine and, as if they were like worms, each and all on the verge of finding satisfaction in mere dirt and water. There was a time when people had a heaven adorned with a comprehensive wealth of thoughts and images. The meaning of all existence lay in the thread of light by which it was bound to heaven and instead of lingering in this present, people's view followed that thread upwards towards the divine essence; their view directed itself, if one may put it this way, to an other-worldly present. It was only under duress that spirit's eyes had to be turned back to what is earthly and to be kept fixed there, and a long time was needed to introduce clarity into the dullness and confusion lying in the meaning of things in this world, a kind of clarity which only heavenly things used to have; a long time was needed both to draw attention to the present as such, an attention that was called experience, and to make it interesting and to make it matter. – Now it seems that there is the need for the opposite, that our sense of things is so deeply rooted in the earthly that an equal power is required to elevate it above all that. Spirit has shown itself to be so impoverished that it seems to yearn for its refreshment only in the meager feeling of divinity, very much like the wanderer in the desert who longs for a simple drink of water. That it now takes so little to satisfy spirit's needs is the full measure of the magnitude of its loss.

9. All the same, this parsimony vis-à-vis what one receives, or this stinginess vis-à-vis what one gives, is inappropriate for science. Whoever seeks mere edification, who wants to surround the manifoldness of his existence and thought in a kind of fog, and who then demands an indeterminate enjoyment of this indeterminate divinity, may look wherever he pleases to find it, and he will quite easily find 14the resources to enable him both to get on his high horse and then to rant and rave. However, philosophy must keep up its guard against the desire to be edifying.

10. Even to a lesser extent must this kind of science-renouncing self-satisfaction claim that such enthusiasm and obscurantism is itself a bit higher than science. This prophetic prattle imagines that it resides at the center of things, indeed that it is profundity itself, and, viewing determinateness (the horos) with contempt, it intentionally stands aloof from both the concept and from necessity, which it holds to be a type of reflection at home in mere finitude. However, in the way that there is an empty breadth, there is also an empty depth, just as likewise there is an extension of substance which spills over into finite diversity without having the power to keep that diversity together – this is an intensity without content, which, although it makes out as if it were a sheer force without dispersion, is in fact no more than superficiality itself. The force of spirit is only as great as its expression, and its depth goes only as deep as it trusts itself to disperse itself and to lose itself in its explication of itself. – At the same time, if this substantial knowing, itself so totally devoid of the concept, pretends to have immersed the very ownness of the self in the essence and to philosophize in all holiness and truth, then what it is really doing is just concealing from itself the fact that instead of devoting itself to God, it has, by spurning all moderation and determinateness, instead simply given itself free rein within itself to the contingency of that content and then, within that content, given free rein to its own arbitrariness. – While abandoning themselves to the unbounded fermentation of the substance, the proponents of that view suppose that, by throwing a blanket over self-consciousness and by surrendering all understanding, they are God's very own, that they are those to whom God imparts wisdom in their sleep. What they in fact receive and what they give birth to in their sleep are, for that reason also only dreams.

11. Besides, it is not difficult to see that our own epoch is a time of birth and a transition to a new period. Spirit has broken with the previous world of its existence and its ways of thinking;¹¹ it is now of a mind to let them recede into the past and to immerse itself in its own work at reshaping itself. To be sure, spirit is never to be conceived as being at rest but rather as ever advancing. However, just as with a child, who after a long silent period of nourishment draws his first breath and shatters the gradualness of only quantitative growth – it makes a qualitative leap and is born – so too, in bringing itself to cultural maturity, spirit ripens slowly and quietly into its new shape, dissolving bit by bit the structure of its previous world, whose tottering condition is only intimated by its individual symptoms. 15The kind of frivolity and boredom which chips away at the established order and the indeterminate presentiment of what is yet unknown are all harbingers of imminent change. This gradual process of dissolution, which has not altered the physiognomy of the whole, is interrupted by the break of day, which in a flash and at a single stroke brings to view the structure of the new world.

12. Yet this newness is no more completely actual than is the newborn child, and it is essential to bear this in mind. Its immediacy, or its concept, is the first to come on the scene. However, just as little of a building is finished when its foundation has been laid, so too reaching the concept of the whole is equally as little as the whole itself. When we wish to see an oak with its powerful trunk, its spreading branches, and its mass of foliage, we are not satisfied if instead we are shown an acorn. In the same way, science, the crowning glory of a spiritual world, is not completed in its initial stages. The beginning of a new spirit is the outcome of a widespread revolution in the diversity of forms of cultural formation;¹² it is both the prize at the end of a winding path just as it is the prize won through much struggle and effort. It is the whole which has returned into itself from out of its succession and extension and has come to be the simple concept of itself. The actuality of this simple whole consists in those embodiments which, having become moments of the whole, again develop themselves anew and give themselves a figuration, but this time in their new element, in the new meaning which itself has come to be.

13. On the one hand, while the initial appearance of the new world is just the whole enshrouded in its simplicity, or its universal ground, still, on the other hand, the wealth of its bygone existence is in recollection still current for consciousness. In that newly appearing shape, consciousness misses both the dispersal and the particularization of content, but it misses even more the development of the form as a result of which the differences are securely determined and are put into the order of their fixed relationships. Without this development, science has no general intelligibility,¹³ and it seems to be the esoteric possession of only a few individuals – an esoteric possession, because at first science is only available in its concept, or in what is internal to it, and it is the possession of a few individuals, since its appearance in this not-yet fully unfurled form makes its existence into something wholly singular. Only what is completely determinate is at the same time exoteric, comprehensible, and capable of being learned and possessed by everybody. The intelligible form of science is the path offered to everyone and equally available for all. To achieve rational knowledge 16through our own intellect¹⁴ is the rightful demand of a consciousness which is approaching the status of science. This is so because the understanding is thinking, the pure I as such, and because what is intelligible is what is already familiar and common both to science and to the unscientific consciousness alike, and it is that through which unscientific consciousness is immediately enabled to enter into science.

14. At its debut, where science has been brought neither to completeness of detail nor to perfection of form, it is open to reproach. However, even if it is unjust to suppose that this reproach even touches on the essence of science, it would be just as unjust and inadmissible not to honor the demand for the further development of science. This opposition seems to be the principal knot which scientific culture is currently struggling to loosen and which it does not yet properly understand. One side sings the praises of the wealth of its material and its intelligibility; the other side at any rate spurns the former and insists on immediate rationality and divinity. Even if the first is reduced to silence, whether by the force of truth alone or just by the bluster of the other side, and even if it feels overwhelmed by the basics of the subject matter which is at stake, it is still, for all that, by no means satisfied about those demands, for although they are just, those demands have not been fulfilled. Only half of its silence is due to the other side's victory; the other half is due to the boredom and indifference which result from the continual awakening of expectations by promises never fulfilled.

15. When it comes to content, at times the other side certainly makes it easy for itself to have a vast breadth of such content at its disposal. It pulls quite a lot of material into its own domain, which is to be sure what is already familiar and well-ordered, and by principally trafficking in rare items and curiosities, it manages to put on the appearance of being in full possession of what knowing had already finished with but which at the same time had not yet been brought to order. It thereby seems to have subjected everything to the absolute Idea,¹⁵ and in turn, the absolute Idea itself therefore both seems to be recognized¹⁶ in everything and to have matured into a wide-ranging science. However, if the way it spreads itself out is examined more closely, it turns out not to have come about as a result of one and the same thing giving itself diverse shapes but rather as a result of the shapeless repetition 17of one and the same thing which is only externally applied to diverse material and which contains only the tedious semblance of diversity. The Idea, which is true enough for itself, in fact remains ensnared in its origin as long as its development consists in nothing but the repetition of the same old formula. Having the knowing subject apply the one unmoved form to whatever just happens to be present and then externally dipping the material into this motionless element contributes as much to fulfilling what is demanded as does a collection of purely arbitrary impressions about the content. Rather, when what is demanded is for the shapes to originate their richness and determine their differences from out of themselves, this other view instead consists in only a monochrome formalism which only arrives at the differences in its material because the material itself has already been prepared for it and is something well known.

16. In so doing, this formalism asserts that this monotony and abstract universality is the absolute, and it assures us that any dissatisfaction with such universality is only an incapacity to master the absolute standpoint and keep a firm grip on it. However much there was once a time when the empty possibility of imagining¹⁷ things differently was sufficient to refute a view,¹⁸ and however much the general thought, the same mere possibility, had also at that time the entirely positive value of actual cognition, nonetheless nowadays we see the universal Idea¹⁹ in this form of non-actuality get all value attributed to it, and we see that what counts as the speculative way of considering things turns out to be the dissolution of the distinct and the determinate, or, instead turns out to be simply the casting of what is distinct and determinate into the abyss of the void, an act lacking all development or having no justification in its own self at all. In that mode, to examine any existence in the way in which it is in the absolute consists in nothing more than saying it is in fact being spoken of as, say, a “something,” whereas in the absolute, in the A = A, there is no such “something,” for in the absolute, everything is one. To oppose this one bit of knowledge, namely, that in the absolute everything is the same, to the knowing which makes distinctions and which has been either fulfilled or is seeking and demanding to be fulfilled – that is, to pass off its absolute as the night in which, as one says, all cows are black – is an utterly vacuous naiveté in cognition. – The formalism which has been indicted and scorned by the philosophy of recent times and which has been generated again in it will not disappear from science even though its inadequacy is well known and felt. It will not disappear until the knowing of absolute actuality has become completely clear about its own nature. – Taking into consideration that working 18out any general idea²⁰ is made easier by first having it right before us, it is worth indicating here at least very roughly what those ideas are. At the same time, we should also take this opportunity to rid ourselves of a few forms which are only impediments to philosophical cognition.

17. In my view, which must be justified by the exposition of the system itself, everything hangs on grasping and expressing the true not just as substance but just as much as subject. At the same time, it is to be noted that substantiality comprises within itself the universal, or, it comprises not only the immediacy of knowing but also the immediacy of being, or, immediacy for knowing. – However much taking God to be the one substance shocked the age in which this was expressed, still that was in part because of an instinctive awareness that in such a view self-consciousness only perishes and is not preserved. However, in part, the opposite view, which itself clings to thinking as thinking, or, which holds fast to universality, is exactly the same simplicity, or, it is itself undifferentiated, unmoved substantiality. But, thirdly, if thinking only unifies the being of substance with itself and grasps immediacy, or intuition grasped as thinking, then there is the issue about whether this intellectual intuition does not then itself relapse into inert simplicity and thereby present actuality itself in a fully non-actual mode.

18. Furthermore, the living substance is the being that is in truth subject, or, what amounts to the same thing, it is in truth actual only insofar as it is the movement of self-positing, or, that it is the mediation of itself and its becoming-other-to-itself. As subject, it is pure, simple negativity, and, as a result, it is the estrangement of what is simple, or, it is the doubling which posits oppositions and which is again the negation of this indifferent diversity and its opposition. That is, it is only this self-restoring sameness, the reflective turn into itself in its otherness. – The true is not an original unity as such, or, not an immediate unity as such. It is the coming-to-be of itself, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal and has its end for its beginning, and which is actual only through this accomplishment and its end.

19. The life of God and divine cognition might thus be expressed as a game love plays with itself. If this Idea²¹ lacks the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labor of the negative, then it lowers itself into edification, even into triteness. In itself that life is indeed an unalloyed sameness and unity with itself, since in such a life there is neither anything serious in this otherness and alienation, nor in overcoming this alienation. However, this 19in-itself is abstract universality, in which its nature, which is to be for itself, and the self-movement of the form are both left out of view. However much the form is said to be the same as the essence, still it is for that very reason a bald misunderstanding to suppose that cognition can be content with the in-itself, or, the essence, but can do without the form – that the absolute principle, or, the absolute intuition, can make do without working out the former or without the development of the latter. Precisely because the form is as essential to the essence as the essence is to itself, the essence must not be grasped and expressed as mere essence, which is to say, as immediate substance or as the pure self-intuition of the divine. Rather, it must likewise be grasped as form in the entire richness of the developed form, and only thereby is it grasped and expressed as the actual.

20. The true is the whole. However, the whole is only the essence completing itself through its own development. This much must be said of the absolute: It is essentially a result, and only at the end is it what it is in truth. Its nature consists just in this: to be actual, to be subject, or, to be the becoming-of-itself. As contradictory as it might seem, namely, that the absolute is to be comprehended essentially as a result, even a little reflection will put this mere semblance of contradiction in its rightful place. The beginning, the principle, or, the absolute as it is at first, or, as it is immediately expressed, is only the universal. But just as my saying “all animals” can hardly count as an expression of zoology, it is likewise obvious that the words, “absolute,” “divine,” “eternal,” and so on, do not express what is contained in them; – and it is only such words which in fact express intuition as the immediate. Whatever is more than such a word, even the mere transition to a proposition, is a becoming-other which must be redeemed, or, it is a mediation. However, it is this mediation which is rejected with such horror as if somebody, in making more of mediation than in claiming both that it itself is nothing absolute and that it in no way is in the absolute, would be abandoning absolute cognition altogether.

21. However, this abhorrence²² of mediation stems in fact from a lack of acquaintance with the nature of mediation and with the nature of absolute cognition itself. This is so because mediation is nothing but self-moving self-equality, or, it is a reflective turn into itself, the moment of the I existing-for-itself, pure negativity, or, simple coming-to-be. The I, or, coming-to-be, this mediating, is, on account of its simplicity, immediacy in the very process of coming-to-be and is the immediate itself. – Hence, reason is misunderstood if reflection is excluded from the truth and is not taken to be a positive moment of the absolute. 20Reflection is what makes truth into the result, but it is likewise what sublates the opposition between the result and its coming-to-be. This is so because this coming-to-be is just as simple and hence not different from the form of the true, which itself proves itself to be simple in its result. Coming-to-be is instead this very return into simplicity. – However much the embryo is indeed in itself a person, it is still not a person for itself; the embryo is a person for itself only as a culturally formed and educated rationality which has made itself into what it is in itself. This is for the first time its actuality. However, this result is itself simple immediacy, for it is self-conscious freedom which is at rest within itself, a freedom which has not set the opposition off to one side and left it only lying there but has been reconciled with it.

22. What has just been said can also be expressed by saying that reason is purposive doing. Both the exaltation of a nature supposedly above and beyond thinking, an exaltation which misconstrues thinking, and especially the banishment of external purposiveness have brought the form of purpose completely into disrepute. Yet, in the sense in which Aristotle also determines nature as purposive doing, purpose is the immediate, the motionless, which is self-moving, or, is subject. Its abstract power to move is being-for-itself, or, pure negativity. For that reason, the result is the same as the beginning because the beginning is purpose – that is, the actual is the same as its concept only because the immediate, as purpose, has the self, or, pure actuality, within itself. The purpose which has been worked out, or, existing actuality, is movement and unfolded coming-to-be. However, this very unrest is the self, and for that reason, it is the same as the former immediacy and simplicity of the beginning because it is the result which has returned into itself. – What has returned into itself is just the self, and the self is self-relating sameness and simplicity.

23. The need to represent the absolute as subject has helped itself to such propositions as “God is the eternal,” or “God is the moral order of the world,” or “God is love,” etc. In such propositions, the true is directly posited as subject, but it is not presented as the movement of reflection-taking-an-inward-turn. One proposition of that sort begins with the word “God.” On its own,²³ this is a meaningless sound, a mere name. It is only the predicate that says what the name is and is its fulfillment and its meaning. The empty beginning becomes actual knowledge only at the end of the proposition. 21To that extent, one cannot simply pass over in silence the reason why one cannot speak solely of the eternal, the moral order of the world, etc., or, as the ancients did, of pure concepts, of being, of the one, etc., or, of what the meaning is, without appending the meaningless sound as well. However, the use of this word only indicates that it is neither a being nor an essence nor a universal per se which is posited; what is posited is what is reflected into itself, a subject. Yet, at the same time, this is something only anticipated. The subject is accepted as a fixed point on which the predicates are attached for their support through a movement belonging to what it is that can be said to know this subject and which itself is also not to be viewed as belonging to the point itself, but it is solely through this movement that the content would be portrayed as the subject. Because of the way this movement is constituted, it cannot belong to the point, but after the point has been presupposed, this movement cannot be constituted in any other way, and it can only be external. Thus, not only is the former anticipation that the absolute is subject not the actuality of this concept, but it even makes that actuality impossible, for it posits the concept as a point wholly at rest, whereas the concept is self-movement.

24. Among the many consequences that follow from what has been said, this in particular can be underscored: It is only as a science or as a system that knowing is actual and can be given an exposition; and that any further so-called fundamental proposition or first principle of philosophy, if it is true, is for this reason alone also false just because it is a fundamental proposition or a principle. – It is consequently very easily refuted. Its refutation consists in demonstrating its defects; however, it is defective because it is only the universal, or, only a principle, or, it is only the beginning. If the refutation is thorough, then it is derived from and developed out of that fundamental proposition or principle itself – the refutation is not pulled off by bringing in counter-assertions and impressions external to the principle. Such a refutation would thus genuinely be the development of the fundamental proposition itself; it would even be the proper augmentation of the principle's own defectiveness if it were not to make the mistake of focusing solely on its negative aspect without taking note of its results and the advances it has made in their positive aspect. – Conversely, the genuinely positive working out of the beginning is at the same time just as much a negative posture towards its beginning; namely, a negative posture towards its one-sided form, which is to be at first only immediately, or, to be purpose. It may thereby be taken to be the refutation of what constitutes the ground of the system, 22but it is better taken as showing that the ground, or the principle, of the system is in fact only its beginning.

25. That the true is only actual as a system, or, that substance is essentially subject, is expressed in the representation that expresses the absolute as spirit – the most sublime concept and the one which belongs to modernity²⁴ and its religion. The spiritual alone is the actual; it is the essence, or, what exists-in-itself. – It is what is self-comporting, or, the determinate itself, or, otherness and being-for-itself – and, in this determinateness, to be the self-enduring in its being-external-to-itself²⁵ – or, it is in and for itself. – However, it is first of all this being-in-and-for-itself for us, or, in itself, which is to say, it is spiritual substance. It has to become this for itself – it must be knowing of the spiritual, and it must be knowing of itself as spirit. This means that it must be, to itself, an object, but it must likewise immediately be a mediated object, which is to say, it must be a sublated object reflected into itself. It is for itself solely for us insofar as its spiritual content is engendered by itself. Insofar as the object for itself is also for itself,²⁶ this self-engendering, the pure concept, is, to itself, the objective element in which it has its existence, and in this manner, it is, for itself in its existence, an object reflected into itself. Spirit knowing itself in that way as spirit is science. Science is its actuality, and science is the realm it builds for itself in its own proper element.

26. Pure self-knowing in absolute otherness, this ether as such, is the very ground and soil of science, or, knowing in its universality. The beginning of philosophy presupposes or demands that consciousness is situated in this element. However, this element itself has its culmination and its transparency only through the movement of its coming-to-be. It is pure spirituality, or, the universal in the mode of simple immediacy. Because it is the immediacy of spirit, because it is the substance of spirit, it is transfigured essentiality, reflection that is itself simple, or, is immediacy; it is being that is a reflective turn into itself. 23For its part, science requires that self-consciousness shall have elevated itself into this ether in order to be able to live with science and to live in science, and, for that matter, to be able to live at all. Conversely, the individual has the right to demand that science provide him at least with the ladder to reach this standpoint. The individual's right is based on his absolute self-sufficiency, which he knows he possesses in every shape of his knowing, for in every shape, whether recognized by science or not, and no matter what the content might be, the individual is at the same time the absolute form, or, he has immediate self-certainty; and, if one were to prefer this expression, he thereby has an unconditioned being. However much the standpoint of consciousness, which is to say, the standpoint of knowing objective things to be opposed to itself and knowing itself to be opposed to them, counts as the other to science – the other, in which consciousness is at one with itself,²⁷ counts instead as the loss of spirit – still, in comparison, the element of science possesses for consciousness an other-worldly remoteness in which consciousness is no longer in possession of itself. Each of these two parts seems to the other to be an inversion of the truth. For the natural consciousness to entrust itself immediately to science would be to make an attempt, induced by it knows not what, to walk upside down all of a sudden. The compulsion to accept this unaccustomed attitude and to transport oneself in that way would be, so it would seem, a violence imposed on it with neither any advance preparation nor with any necessity. – Science may be in its own self what it will, but in its relationship to immediate self-consciousness, it presents itself as an inversion of the latter, or, because immediate self-consciousness is the principle of actuality, by immediate self-consciousness existing for itself outside of science, science takes the form of non-actuality. Accordingly, science has to unite that element with itself or instead to show both that such an element belongs to itself and how it belongs to it. Lacking actuality, science is the in-itself, the purpose, which at the start is still something inner, at first not as spirit but only as spiritual substance. It has to express itself and become for itself, and this means nothing else than that it has to posit self-consciousness as being at one with itself.

27. This coming-to-be of science itself, or, of knowing, is what24 is presented in this phenomenology of spirit as the first part of the system of science. Knowing, as it is at first, or, as immediate spirit, is devoid of spirit, is sensuous consciousness. In order to become genuine knowing, or, in order to beget the element of science which is its pure concept, immediate spirit must laboriously travel down a long path. – As it is established in its content and in the shapes that appear in it, this coming-to-be appears a bit differently from the way a set of instructions on how to take unscientific consciousness up to and into science would appear; it also appears somewhat differently from the way laying the foundations for science would appear. – In any case, it is something very different from the inspiration which begins immediately, like a shot from a pistol, with absolute knowledge, and which has already finished with all the other standpoints simply by declaring that it will take no notice of them.

28. However, the task of leading the individual from his culturally immature standpoint up to and into science had to be taken in its universal sense, and the universal individual, the world spirit, had to be examined in the development of its cultural education. – With regard to the relationship between these two, each moment, as it achieves concrete form and its own figuration, appears in the universal individual. However, the particular individual is an incomplete spirit, a concrete shape whose entire existence falls into one determinateness and in which the other features are only present as intermingled traits. In any spirit that stands higher than another, the lower concrete existence has descended to the status of an insignificant moment; what was formerly at stake is now only a trace; its shape has been covered over and has become a simple shading of itself. The individual whose substance is spirit standing at the higher level runs through these past forms in the way that a person who takes up a higher science goes through those preparatory studies which he has long ago internalized in order to make their content current before him; he calls them to mind 25without having his interest linger upon them. In that way, each individual spirit also runs through the culturally formative stages of the universal spirit, but it runs through them as shapes which spirit has already laid aside, as stages on a path that has been worked out and leveled out in the same way that we see fragments of knowing, which in earlier ages occupied men of mature minds, now sink to the level of exercises, and even to that of games for children. In this pedagogical progression, we recognize the history of the cultural formation of the world sketched in silhouette. This past existence has already become an acquired possession of the universal spirit; it constitutes the substance of the individual, or, his inorganic nature. – In this respect, the cultural formation of the individual regarded from his own point of view consists in his acquiring all of this which is available, in his living off that inorganic nature and in his taking possession of it for himself. Likewise, this is nothing but the universal spirit itself, or, substance giving itself its self-consciousness, or, its coming-to-be and its reflective turn into itself.

29. Science of this culturally educative movement is the detail and the necessity of its shaping, as what has been diminished into a moment and a possession of spirit. The aim is spirit's insight into what knowing is. Impatience demands the impossible, which is to say, to achieve the end without the means. On the one hand, the length of the path has to be endured, for each moment is necessary – but on the other hand, one must linger at every stage on the way, for each stage is itself an entire individual shape, and it is viewed absolutely only insofar as its determinateness is viewed as a whole, or, as concrete, or, insofar as the whole is viewed in terms of the distinctiveness of this determination. – Both because the substance of the individual, the world spirit, has possessed the patience to pass through these forms over a long stretch of time and to take upon itself the prodigious labor of world history, and because it could not have reached 26consciousness about itself in any lesser way, the individual spirit itself cannot comprehend its own substance with anything less. At the same time, it has less trouble in doing so because in the meantime it has accomplished this in itself – the content is already actuality erased to possibility, immediacy which has been mastered. That content, which is already what has been thought,²⁸ is the possession of individuality. It is no longer existence which is to be converted into being-in-itself. Rather, it is just the in-itself which is to be converted into the form of being-for-itself. The way this is done is now to be more precisely determined.

30. In this movement, although the individual is spared the sublation of existence, what still remains is the representation of and the familiarity with the forms. The existence taken back into the substance is through that first negation at first only immediately transferred into the element of self. The element thus still has the same character of uncomprehended immediacy, or, of unmoved indifference as existence itself, or, it has only passed over into representational thought.²⁹ – As a result, it is at the same time familiar to us, or, it is the sort of thing that spirit has finished with, in which spirit has no more activity, and, as a result, in which spirit has no further interest. However much the activity, which is finished with existence, is itself the immediate, or, however much it is the existing mediation and thereby the movement only of the particular spirit which is not comprehending itself, still in contrast knowing is directed against the representational thought which has come about through this immediacy, is directed against this familiarity, and it is thus the doing of the universal self and the interest of thinking.

31. What is familiar and well known³⁰ as such is not really known³¹ for the very reason that it is familiar and well known. In the case of cognition, the most common form of self-deception and deception of others is when one presupposes 27something as well known and then makes one's peace with it. In that kind of back-and-forth chatter about various pros and cons, such knowing, without knowing how it happens to it, never really gets anywhere. Subject and object, God, nature, understanding, sensibility, etc., are, as is well known, all unquestioningly laid as foundation stones which constitute fixed points from which to start and to which to return. The movement proceeds here and there between those points, which themselves remain unmoved, and it thereby operates only upon the surface. Thus, for a person to grasp and to examine matters consists only in seeing whether he finds everything said by everybody else to match up with his own idea³² about the matter, or with whether it seems that way to him and whether or not it is something with which he is familiar.

32. As it used to be carried out, the analysis of a representation was indeed nothing but the sublation of the form of its familiarity.³³ To break up a representation into its original elements is to return to its moments, which at least do not have the form of a representation which one has simply stumbled across, but which instead constitute the immediate possession of the self. To be sure, this analysis would only arrive at thoughts which are themselves familiar and fixed, or it would arrive at motionless determinations. However, what is separated, the non-actual itself, is itself an essential moment, for the concrete is self-moving only because it divides itself and turns itself into the non-actual. The activity of separating is the force and labor of the understanding, the most astonishing and the greatest of all the powers, or rather, which is the absolute power. The circle, which, enclosed within itself, is at rest and which, as substance, sustains its moments, is the immediate and is, for that reason, an unsurprising relationship. However, the accidental, separated from its surroundings, attains an isolated freedom and its own proper existence only in its being bound to other actualities and only as existing in their context; as such, it is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thinking, of the pure I. Death, if that is what we wish to call that non-actuality, is the most fearful thing of all, and to keep and hold fast to what is dead requires only the greatest force. Powerless beauty detests the understanding because the understanding expects of her what she cannot do. However, the life of spirit is not a life that is fearing death and austerely saving itself from ruin; rather, it bears death calmly, and in death, it sustains itself. Spirit only wins its truth by finding its feet in its absolute disruption. Spirit is not this power which, as the positive, avoids looking at the negative, as is the case when we say of something that it is nothing, or that it is false, and then, being done with it, go off on our own way on to something else. No, spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face and lingering with it. This lingering is the magical power that converts it into being. – This power is the same as what in the preceding was called the subject, which, by giving 28existence to determinateness in its own element, sublates abstract immediacy, or, is only existing immediacy, and, as a result, is itself the true substance, is being, or, is the immediacy which does not have mediation external to itself but is itself this mediation.

33. That what is represented becomes a possession of pure self-consciousness, namely, this elevation to universality itself, is only one aspect of cultural formation and is not yet fully perfected cultural formation. – The course of studies of the ancient world is distinct from that of modern times in that the ancient course of studies consisted in a thoroughgoing cultivation of natural consciousness. Experimenting particularly with each part of its existence and philosophizing about everything it came across, the ancient course of studies fashioned itself into an altogether active universality. In contrast, in modern times, the individual finds the abstract form ready-made. The strenuous effort to grasp it and make it his own is more of an unmediated drive to bring the inner to the light of day; it is the truncated creation of the universal rather than the emergence of the universal from out of the concrete, from out of the diversity found in existence. Nowadays the task before us consists not so much in purifying the individual of the sensuously immediate and in making him into a thinking substance which has itself been subjected to thought;³⁴ it consists instead in doing the very opposite. It consists in actualizing and spiritually animating the universal through the sublation of fixed and determinate thoughts. However, it is much more difficult to set fixed thoughts into fluid motion than it is to bring sensuous existence into such fluidity. The reason for this lies in what was said before. The former determinations have the I, the power of the negative, or, pure actuality, as their substance and as the element of their existence, whereas sensuous determinations have their substance only in impotent abstract immediacy, or in being as such. Thoughts become fluid by pure thinking, this inner immediacy, recognizing³⁵ itself as a moment, or, by pure self-certainty abstracting itself from itself – it does not consist in only omitting itself, or, setting itself off to one side. Rather, it consists in giving up the fixity of its self-positing as well as the fixity of the purely concrete, which is the I itself in opposition to the differences of its content – as the fixity of differences which, posited as existing in the element of pure thinking, share that unconditionality of the I. Through this movement, pure thoughts become concepts, and are for the first time what they are in truth: self-moving movements, circles, which are what their substance is; namely, spiritual essentialities.

34. This movement of pure essentialities constitutes the nature of scientific rigor per se. As the connectedness of its content, this movement is both the necessity of that content and its growth into an organic whole. The path along which the concept of knowing is reached likewise itself becomes a necessary and complete coming-to-be, so that this preparation ceases 29to be a contingent philosophizing which just happens to fasten onto this and those objects, relations, or thoughts arising from an imperfect consciousness and having all the contingency such a consciousness brings in its train; or, it ceases to be the type of philosophizing which seeks to ground the truth in only clever argumentation about pros and cons or in inferences based on fully determinate thoughts and the consequences following from them. Instead, through the movement of the concept, this path will encompass the complete worldliness³⁶ of consciousness in its necessity.

35. Furthermore, such an account constitutes the first part of science, since the existence of spirit as primary is nothing else but the immediate itself, or, the beginning, which is not yet its return into itself. Hence, the element of immediate existence is the determinateness though which this part of science renders itself distinct from the other parts. – The account of this difference leads directly to the discussion of a few of those idées fixes that usually turn up in these discussions.

36. The immediate existence of spirit, consciousness, has two moments, namely, knowing and the objectivity which is negative to knowing. While spirit develops itself in this element and explicates its moments therein, still this opposition corresponds to these moments, and they all come on the scene as shapes of consciousness. The science of this path is the science of the experience consciousness goes through.³⁷ Substance is considered in the way that it and its movement are the objects of consciousness. Consciousness knows and comprehends nothing but what is in its experience, for what is in experience is just spiritual substance, namely, as the object of its own self. However, spirit becomes the object, for it is this movement of becoming an other to itself, which is to say, of becoming an object to its own self and of sublating this otherness. And experience is the name of this very movement in which the immediate, the non-experienced, i.e., the abstract (whether the abstract is that of sensuous being or of “a simple” which has only been thought about) alienates itself and then comes round to itself from out of this alienation. It is only at that point that, as a property of consciousness, the immediate is exhibited in its actuality and in its truth.

37. The inequality which takes place in consciousness between the I and the substance which is its object is their difference, the negative itself. It can be viewed as the defect of the two, but it is their very soul or is what moves them. This is why certain ancients conceived of the void as what moved things in conceiving of what moves things as the negative, but they did not yet grasp this negative as the self. – However much this negative now initially appears as the inequality between the I and the object, still it is just as much the inequality of the substance with itself. What seems to take place outside of the substance, to be an activity directed against it, is its own doing, and substance shows that it is essentially subject. While substance has completely shown this, 30spirit has made its existence equal to its essence. Spirit is an object to itself in the way that it is, and the abstract element of immediacy and the separation between knowing and truth is overcome. Being is absolutely mediated – it is a substantial content which is just as much immediately the possession of the I, is self-like, or is the concept. With that, the phenomenology of spirit brings itself to its conclusion. What spirit prepares for itself in its phenomenology is the element of knowing. In this element, the moments of spirit unfold themselves into the form of simplicity which knows its object to be itself. They no longer fall apart into the opposition of being and knowing but instead remain in the simplicity of knowing itself, and they are the truth in the form of the truth, and their diversity is only a diversity of content. Their movement, which organizes itself in this element into a whole, is logic, or speculative philosophy.

38. Now because the system of spirit's experience embraces only the appearance of spirit, it seems to be the case that the advance from this system to the science of the true in the shape of the true is merely negative, and one might wish to be spared the negative (as the false) and demand instead to be taken without further ado straight to the truth. Why bother with the false at all? – What was mentioned above, namely, that perhaps we should have begun straight away with science, may be answered here by taking into consideration that aspect which has to do with the general make-up of the negative when it is regarded as the false. Ordinary ideas³⁸ on this subject especially obstruct the entrance to the truth. This will provide an opportunity to speak about mathematical cognition, which non-philosophical knowing looks upon as the ideal which philosophy must try to attain but towards which it has so far striven in vain.

39. The true and the false belong to those determinate thoughts that are regarded as motionless essences unto themselves, with one standing fixedly here and the other standing fixedly there, and each being isolated from the other and sharing no commonality. Against that view, it must be maintained that truth is not a stamped coin issued directly from the mint and ready for one's pocket. Nor is there “a” false, no more than there is “an” evil. To be sure, evil and falsehood are not as bad as the devil, since, if they are taken as the devil, they are made into particular subjects. However, as false and evil, they are only universals, even though they have an essentiality of their own vis-à-vis each other. – The false, for it is only the false which is being spoken of here, would be the other, the negative of substance which, as the content of knowing, is the true. However, the substance is itself essentially the negative, in part as the difference and the determination of the content, and in part as a simple differentiating, which is to say, as the self and knowing as such. To be sure, we can know falsely. For something to be known falsely means that knowing is unequal to its substance. Yet this very inequality is the differentiating per se, the essential moment. It is indeed out of this differentiation 31that its equality comes to be, and this equality, which has come to be, is truth. However, it is not truth in the sense that would just discard inequality, like discarding the slag from pure metal, nor even is it truth in the way that a finished vessel bears no trace of the instrument that shaped it. Rather, as the negative, inequality is still itself immediately present, just as the self in the true as such is itself present. For that reason, it cannot be said that the false constitutes a moment or even a constituent part of the true. Take the saying that “In every falsehood, there is something true” – in this expression both of them are regarded as oil and water, which cannot mix and are only externally combined. It is precisely for the sake of pointing out the significance of the moment of complete otherness that their expression must no longer be employed in the instances where their otherness has been sublated. Just as the expressions, “unity of subject and object” or of “the finite and infinite,” or of “being and thinking,” etc., have a certain type of clumsiness to them in that subject and object, etc., mean what they are outside of their unity, and therefore in their unity, they are not meant in the way that their expression states them, so too the false as the false is no longer a moment of truth.

40. The dogmatism of the way of thinking, in both the knowing of philosophy and the study of it, is nothing but the opinion that truth consists either in a proposition which is a fixed result or else in a proposition which is immediately known. To questions like, “When was Caesar born?”, “How many toise were there in a stadion and what did they amount to?”, etc., a neat and tidy answer is supposed to be given, just as it is likewise determinately true that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides of a right-angled triangle. However, the nature of such a so-called truth is different from the nature of philosophical truths.

41. With regard to historical truths, to take note of them very briefly, it is the case that insofar as they are examined in light of what is purely historical in them, it will be readily granted that they have to do with individual existence, with a contingent and arbitrary content, and with the non-necessary determinations of that individual existence. – However, even bare truths like those cited in the example do not exist without the movement of self-consciousness. In order to know any one of them, there has to be a good deal of comparison, books also have to be consulted, or, in some way or other, inquiry has to be carried out. Even in the case of immediate intuition, acquaintance with them is held to be of true value only when such acquaintance is linked to the reasons behind it, even though it is really just the unadorned result itself which is supposed to be at issue.

42. As for mathematical truths, one would hardly count as a geometer if one only knew Euclid's theorems by heart without knowing the proofs, or, so it might be expressed by way of contrast, 32without knowing them really deep down in one's heart. Likewise, if by measuring many right-angled triangles, one came to know that their sides are related in the well-known way, the knowing thus gained would be regarded as unsatisfactory. Nonetheless, the essentiality of the proof in the case of mathematical cognition does not yet have the significance and the nature of being a moment in the result itself; rather, in the result, the proof is over and done with and has vanished. As a result, the theorem is arguably one that is seen to be true. However, this added circumstance has nothing to do with its content but only with its relation to the subject. The movement of mathematical proof does not belong to the object but is a doing that is external to the item at hand. The nature of a right-angled triangle does not divide itself up in the manner exhibited in the mathematical construction which is necessary for the proof of the proposition expressing its ratio. The whole act of producing the result is a process and a means of cognition. – In philosophical cognition, the coming-to-be of existence as existence is also different from the coming-to-be of essence, or the inner nature of the thing at issue. However, in the first place, philosophical cognition contains both, whereas in contrast mathematical cognition exhibits only the coming-to-be of existence, i.e., the coming-to-be of the being of the nature of the thing at issue in cognition as such. Moreover, philosophical cognition also unites these two particular movements. The inward emergence, or the coming-to-be, of substance is an undivided transition into the external, or into existence, into being for another, and conversely, the coming-to-be of existence is its taking-itself-back into essence. In that way, the movement is the twofold process and coming-to-be of the whole, so that at the same time each posits the other, and, for that reason, each in itself also has both of them as two viewpoints. Together they make the whole by dissolving themselves and making themselves into moments of the whole.

43. In mathematical cognition, insight is an external doing vis-à-vis the item at issue. It follows that the true item at issue is thereby altered. The tools, the construction, and the proof thus do indeed contain true propositions. However, it must nonetheless be stated that the content is false. The triangle in the above example is taken apart, and its parts are then affixed onto other figures that the construction which is contained in the triangle permits to emerge. It is only at the end that the triangle which is really at issue is reinstated; it was lost to view during the course of the procedure and appeared only in fragments that belonged to other wholes. – Thus, we see here the negativity of the content making its entrance on to the scene, a negativity which would have to be called a falsity of the content just as much as, in the movement of the concept, one would have to speak of the disappearance of supposedly fixed thoughts.

44. But the genuine defectiveness of this kind of cognition has to do with cognition itself as much as it does with its material. – In the first place, as to what concerns cognition, no insight into the necessity of the construction is achieved. The necessity does not emerge 33from the concept of the theorem. Rather, it is imposed, and one is instructed to draw just these lines when an infinite number of others could have been drawn and to obey blindly the injunction without any more knowing on one's part other than the fond belief that this will serve the purpose of leading to the proof. This purposiveness also turns out later on to be only external because it is only afterwards, in the proof itself, that it first becomes evident. – Likewise, the proof itself takes a path that begins anywhere, without one knowing as yet what relation this beginning has to the result that is supposed to emerge. In the progress of the proof, it incorporates these determinations and relations and leaves others alone, but it does this without immediately seeing what necessity there is in the matter. It is an external purpose which controls this movement.

45. The convincingness³⁹ of this defective cognition is something of which mathematics is proud and which it brags about to philosophy, but it rests solely on the poverty of its purpose and the defectiveness of its material, and it is for that reason the kind of thing that philosophy must spurn. – Its purpose, or its concept, is magnitude. It is precisely this relationship which is non-essential and devoid of the concept. For that reason, the movement of knowing in mathematics takes place only on the surface; it does not touch on the thing that really matters, does not touch on the essence, or the concept, and hence it does not constitute any kind of comprehension of what is at stake. – The material that provides mathematics with this gratifying wealth of truths consists of space and numerical units. Space is the existence in which the concept inscribes its differences as it would in an empty, dead element in which the differences themselves are just as unmoved and lifeless. The actual is not something spatial as it is taken to be in mathematics; neither concrete sensuous intuition nor philosophy wastes any time with the kinds of non-actualities which are the things of mathematics. In such non-actual elements, there are then only non-actual truths, which is to say, fixed, dead propositions; one can call a halt to any of them, but the next begins anew on its own account without the first itself having moved on to another and without any necessary connection arising out of the nature of the thing at issue. – It is also on account of that principle and element – and what is formal in mathematical convincingness consists in this – that knowing advances along the line of equality. Precisely because it does not move itself, what is lifeless does not make it all the way to the differences of essence, nor to essential opposition, or to inequality, nor to the transition of one opposition into its opposite, nor to qualitative, immanent self-movement. For it is magnitude alone, the inessential difference, that mathematics deals with. It is the concept that divides⁴⁰ space into its dimensions and determines the combinations of space's dimensions and combinations within space's dimensions; mathematics 34abstracts from that. Mathematics does not consider, for example, the relation of line to surface, and when it compares the diameter of a circle with its circumference, it runs up against their incommensurability, which is to say, a ratio lying in the concept, or an infinite, which itself eludes mathematical determination.

46. Immanent, so-called pure mathematics also does not set time, as time, over and against space as the second material for its study. Applied mathematics, to be sure, deals with time in the way it deals with motion and other actual things, but it incorporates synthetic propositions, i.e., propositions about their ratios which are determined by their concept. It takes those synthetic propositions from experience, and it only applies its formulae to those presuppositions. That the so-called proofs of such propositions which applied mathematics frequently provides, such as those concerning the equilibrium of the lever, the relation of space and time in falling motion, etc., should be given and accepted as proofs, is itself only proof of how great the need for proof is for cognition, since even where it has no more proof, cognition still respects the empty semblance of proof and even thereby attains a kind of satisfaction. A critique of those proofs would be as odd as it would be instructive; in part it would cleanse mathematics of this kind of false polish, and in part it would point out both its limitations and thereby the necessity for another type of knowing. – As for time: One might presume that time, as the counterpart to space, would constitute the material of the other division of pure mathematics, but time is the existing concept itself. The principle of magnitude, or the principle of the conceptless difference, and the principle of equality, or that of abstract, lifeless unity, are incapable of dealing with that pure restlessness of life and its absolute difference. Only as something paralyzed, in fact, as the [quantitative] one, does this negativity thereby become the second material of this cognizing, which, itself being an external activity, reduces what is self-moving to “stuff” simply in order now to have in that “stuff” an indifferent, external, lifeless content.

47. In contrast, philosophy does not study inessential determinations but only those that are essential. The abstract or the non-actual is not its element and content; rather, its element and content is the actual, what is self-positing, what is alive within itself, or existence in its concept. It is the process which creates its own moments and passes through them all; it is the whole movement that constitutes the positive and its truth. This movement just as much includes within itself the negative, or what would be called “the false” if it were to be taken as something from which one might abstract. It is what disappears and which is instead itself to be taken as essential, but not as having the determination of something fixed, something cut off from the truth, which along the way is to be 35set aside (who knows where?) as something that lies outside of the truth, just as the truth also cannot be thought of as what is lifelessly positive and completely at rest. Appearance is both an emergence and a passing away which does not itself emerge and pass away but which instead is in itself and which constitutes the actuality and the living movement of truth. The truth is the bacchanalian revel where not a member is sober, because, in isolating himself from the revel, each member is just as immediately dissolved into it – the ecstasy is likewise transparently and simply motionless. Judged in the court of that movement, the individual shapes of spirit do not stably exist any more than do determinate thoughts, but they are also equally positive, necessary moments just as much as they are negative, disappearing moments. – In the whole of the movement, taken as being at rest, what distinguishes itself in it and what gives itself existence is preserved as the kind that remembers, as that whose existence is its knowing of itself, just as this self-knowing is no less immediate existence.

48. It might seem necessary to state at the outset the principal points concerning the method of this movement, or the method of science. However, its concept lies in what has already been said, and its genuine exposition belongs to logic, or is instead even logic itself, for the method is nothing but the structure of the whole in its pure essentiality. However, on the basis of what has been said up until now, we must be aware that the system of representations relating to philosophical method itself also belongs to an already vanished cultural shape. – However much this may perhaps sound somewhat boastful or revolutionary, and however much I take myself to be far from striking such a tone, still it is worthwhile to keep in mind that the scientific régime bequeathed by mathematics – a régime of explanations, classifications, axioms, a series of theorems along with their proofs, principles, and the consequences and inferences to be drawn from them – has in common opinion already come to be regarded as itself at the least out of date. Even though it has not been clearly seen just exactly why that régime is so unfit, little to no use at all is any longer made of it, and even though it is not condemned in itself, it is nonetheless not particularly well liked. And we must be prejudiced in favor of the excellent and believe that it can put itself to use and bring itself into favor. However, it is not difficult to see that the mode of setting forth a proposition, producing reasons for it, and then also refuting its opposite with an appeal to reason is not the form in which truth can emerge. Truth is the movement of itself in its own self, but the former method is that of a cognition which is external to its material. For that reason, such a method is peculiar to mathematics and must be left to mathematics, which, as noted, has for its principle the conceptless relationship of magnitude, and takes its material from dead space as well as from the equally lifeless numerical unit. In a freer36 style, that is to say, in a mélange of even more quirks and contingency, it may also endure in ordinary life, say, in a conversation or in the kind of historical instruction which satisfies curiosity more than it results in knowing, in the same way that, more or less, a preface does. In everyday life, consciousness has for its content little bits of knowledge, experiences, sensuous concretions, as well as thoughts, principles, and, in general, it has its content in whatever is present, or in what counts as a fixed, stable entity or essence. In part consciousness continues on this path, and in part it interrupts the whole context through a free, arbitrary choice about such content, in which it conducts itself as if it were an external determining and manipulation of that content. It leads the content back to some kind of certainty, even if it may be only the feeling of the moment, and its conviction is satisfied when it arrives at some familiar resting place.

49. However, let it be granted that the necessity of the concept has banished the slipshod style of those conversations which are composed out of only clever argumentation, and let it also be granted that it has also banished the inflexibility of scientific pomposity. Nonetheless, it does not follow, as we have already noted, that its place ought be swapped for the un-method that bases itself on either vague sentiments or on inspiration, nor does it follow that it should be swapped for the capriciousness of prophetic chatter. Both of these approaches despise not only the scientific rigor of the necessity of the concept; they despise scientific rigor altogether.

50. When triplicity⁴¹ was rediscovered by Kantian thought – rediscovered by instinct, since at that time the form was dead and deprived of the concept – and when it was then elevated to its absolute significance, the true form was set out in its true content, and the concept of science was thereby engendered – but there is almost no use in holding that the triadic form has any scientific rigor when we see it reduced to a lifeless schema, to a mere façade, and when scientific organization itself has been reduced to a tabular chart. – Although we spoke earlier in wholly general terms about this formalism, now we wish to state more precisely just what this approach is. This formalism takes itself to have comprehended and expressed the nature and life of a shape when it affirmed a determination of the schema to be a predicate of that life or shape. – The predicate may be that of subjectivity or objectivity, or it may be that of magnetism, electricity, or, for that matter, contraction or expansion, east or west, and so forth. All of them can be infinitely multiplied, since in this way of proceeding each determination or shape can be used as a form or moment of the schema for every other determination, and each moment can profitably perform the same service for the other – a circle of reciprocity whose result is that one neither learns from experience about the thing at issue, nor does one learn what one or the other of the reciprocal elements is. In such a way of proceeding, what partly happens is that sensuous determinations are picked up out of ordinary intuition, determinations which of course are supposed to mean something different from what they say, and what partly happens is that the pure determinations of thought, or what is meaningful in itself, such as subject, object, substance, cause, 37the universal, etc., are each used as uncritically and unquestioningly as they are used in everyday life, indeed, in the same way that expressions like “strong” and “weak” and “expansion” and “contraction” are used. In the former case, the metaphysics is thereby as unscientific as are those sensuous representations in the latter case.

51. Instead of being expressed according to the inner life and the self-movement of its existence, such a simple determinateness of intuition, which here just means sensuous knowing, is now expressed in terms of a superficial analogy, and this external and empty application of the formula is called construction. – It is the same case with that kind of formalism as it is with all others. How dull a man's head must be if he could not in a quarter of an hour come up with the theory that there are asthenic, sthenic, and indirectly asthenic diseases and then come up with just as many cures, and who could not in a short time be thereby transformed from an experienced man into a theoretical physician, since, after all, it was not so long ago that such a kind of instruction sufficed to do precisely that. However much the formalism of nature-philosophy teaches that understanding is electricity, that animals are nitrogen, or even that they are equivalent to south or north poles, and so forth, and however much it represents these matters as baldly as it is expressed here, and however much it concocts its brew with even more terminology, still, when an inexperienced person encounters this nature-philosophy, something like the following can occur. When that person encounters the kind of force which brings together the kinds of things which otherwise seem so far removed from each other, and when that person also then comes face to face with the violence suffered by what is sensuous and motionless as a result of this combination, or a combination which only confers the mere semblance of conceptual thought on all of this and which thus spares itself the main point, namely, expressing the concept itself, expressing what the sensuous representations mean – when that happens, then such an inexperienced person may very well be led to a kind of admiration, astonishment, or even a veneration for the profound geniuses who can pull off such a feat. He may also feel a certain delight at the vividness of such determinations, since they replace the abstract concept with something more intuitive and make it more pleasing. He may even congratulate himself for feeling a kinship of soul with such a splendid way of viewing things. The flair for displaying that sort of wisdom is as quickly acquired as it is easy to practice, but when it becomes familiar, its repetition becomes as intolerable as the repetition of any other bit of sleight of hand once one has seen through the trick. The instrument of this monotonous formalism is no more difficult to handle than the palette of a painter which contains only two colors, perhaps red and green, the former for coloring the surface when we require a historical piece, the latter when we require a landscape. – It would be difficult to decide which is thereby grander: The ease with which everything in heaven and earth, or even for that matter, everything under the earth, is bathed with that broth of color, or the fantasy about the excellence of this universal tool, since each underwrites the other. This method, which consists in taking the pair of determinations out of that universal schema and then plastering them onto everything in heaven and earth, onto all the natural and spiritual shapes and then organizing everything 38in this manner, produces nothing less than a “crystal clear report on the organism of the universe.” This “report” is like a tabular chart, which is itself a little bit like a skeleton with small bits of paper stuck all over it, or maybe a bit like the rows of sealed and labeled boxes in a grocer's stall. Either of these makes just as much sense as the other, and, as in the former case, where there are only bones with the flesh and blood stripped off of them, and as in the latter case, where something equally lifeless has been hidden away in those boxes, in this “report,” the living essence of what is at stake has been omitted or concealed. – It was previously noted that this style at the same time culminates in monochromatic, absolute painting, in being ashamed at the differences existing in the schema and thus looking on them as belonging to reflection. It thus submerges them into the void of the absolute, from out of which pure identity, a pure formless whiteness, is produced. The monochromatic nature of the schema and its lifeless determinations, together with this absolute identity and the transition from one to the other, are each and every one the result of the same lifeless intellect⁴² and external cognition.

52. The excellent not only cannot escape the fate of being deprived of life and spirit, of being flayed and then seeing its skin wrapped around lifeless knowing and that lifeless knowing's vanity. But even in this fate, one still takes cognizance⁴³ of the power excellence exercises over the heart, if not over the spirit; one also takes cognizance⁴⁴ of the constructive unfolding into universality and the determinateness of form in which its consummation consists, which alone makes it possible for this universality to be put to such superficial use.

53. Science may organize itself only through the proper life of the concept. The determinateness which was taken from the schema and externally stuck onto existence is in science the self-moving soul of the content which has been brought to fulfillment. On the one hand, the movement of “what is”⁴⁵ consists in becoming an other to itself and thus in coming to be its own immanent content; on the other hand, it takes this unfolding back into itself, or it takes its existence back into itself, which is to say, it makes itself into a moment, and it simplifies itself into determinateness. In that movement, negativity is differentiating and positing of existence; in this latter return into itself, negativity consists in the coming-to-be of determinate simplicity. In this way, the content shows that its determinateness is not first received from an other and then externally pinned onto it; rather, the content gives itself this determinateness, it bestows on itself the status of being a moment, and it gives itself a place in the whole. The understanding, which likes to put everything in its own little pigeon-hole, retains for itself the necessity and the concept of the content which constitutes the concrete, or actuality itself, the living movement of the subject matter which it puts in order, or rather, the understanding does not retain this for itself; it does not get to know⁴⁶ it, for if it were to have this insight, it would surely indicate that it had it. It has no cognizance at all of the need for such insight; if it did, it would refrain from schematizing, or at least it would know that it knows no more than what is made available through a table of contents. A table of contents is all that the understanding offers, but it does not supply the contents itself. – 39However much determinateness such as, for example, magnetism, is in itself concrete, or is actual, it is nonetheless downgraded to the status of something lifeless since it is only predicated of another existence, and no cognizance⁴⁷ is taken of the immanent life of this existence, nor of how it has its indigenous and distinctive self-production and exposition. The formal understanding leaves it to others to add this main point. – Instead of entering into the immanent content of the subject matter, the understanding always surveys the whole and stands above the individual existence of which it speaks, or, what amounts to the same thing, it does not see it at all. However, scientific cognition requires instead that it give itself over to the life of the object, or, what is the same thing, that it have the inner necessity of the object before it and that it express this inner necessity. Absorbing itself in its object, it forgets the former overview, which is only a reflection of knowing out of the content and back into itself. However, sunken into the material and advancing in that material's movement, knowing returns back into itself, but not before the fulfillment, or the content, takes itself back into itself, simplifies itself into determinateness, reduces itself to one aspect of an existence, and passes over into its higher truth. By this movement, the simple whole, surveying itself, emerges out of the wealth in which its reflection seemed to be lost.

54. As it was previously expressed, because substance is in its own self subject, all content is its own reflective turn into itself. The stable existence, or the substance of an existence, is its self-equality, for its inequality would be its dissolution. However, self-equality is pure abstraction, but this pure abstraction is thinking. When I say, “quality,” I say, “simple determinateness”; it is by way of its quality that one existent is distinguished from another or that it is even determined that it is an existent at all. It is for itself,⁴⁸ that is, it stably exists through this simplicity with regard to itself. However, by doing so, it is essentially thinking. – It is here that one conceptually grasps that being is thinking, and it is here that the insight which tries to steer clear of that ordinary, non-comprehending talk of the identity of thinking and being finds its place. – Now, as a result the stable being of existence is self-equality or the pure abstraction, is the abstraction of itself from itself, or it is itself its own inequality with itself and its own dissolution – its own inwardness and withdrawal into itself – its coming-to-be. – Since this is the nature of what exists, and to the extent that what exists has this nature for knowing, this knowing is not an activity that treats the content as alien. It is not a reflective turn into itself from out of the content. Science is not the former idealism which replaced the dogmatism of assertion with the dogmatism of assurance, or the dogmatism of self-certainty – but rather, while knowing sees the content 40return into its own inwardness, its activity is instead sunken into that content, for the activity is the immanent self of the content as having at the same time returned into itself, since this activity is pure self-equality in otherness. In this way, that activity is a kind of cunning which, while seeming to abstain from activity, is looking on to see just how determinateness and its concrete life takes itself to be engaged in its own self-preservation and its own particular interest and how it is actually doing the very opposite, or how it is doing what leads to its own dissolution and what makes itself into a moment of the whole.

55. However much in the foregoing the significance of the understanding was stated in terms of the self-consciousness of substance, still, at least on the basis of what has already been said, it now becomes clear what its meaning is, according to the determination of substance as existing. – Existence is quality, self-equal determinateness, or determinate simplicity, determinate thought, and this is the understanding which is appropriate to existence.⁴⁹ It was for that reason that Anaxagoras first took cognizance⁵⁰ of Nous as the essence. Those who succeeded him grasped the nature of existence more determinately as Eidos or Idea, which is to say, as determinate universality, as a kind. The term, “kind,” perhaps seems too ordinary and too petty for the Ideas which are all the rage nowadays, such as beauty, holiness, and the eternal. However, “Idea”⁵¹ means neither more nor less than “kind,” or “species.” Yet nowadays we often see that an expression which determinately designates a concept is scorned, and whereas another is preferred to it simply for the reason that it belongs to a foreign language and that it both shrouds the concept completely in a fog and thereby sounds more edifying. – Just for the reason that existence is determined as a “kind,” it is simple thought; Nous, simplicity, is substance. On account of its simplicity, or its self-equality, it appears to be fixed and enduring. However, this self-equality is just as much negativity, and that fixed existence thereby passes over into its own dissolution. Its determinateness at first seems to be only through its relating itself to an other, and its movement seems imposed upon it by an alien power. However, that it has its otherness in itself and that it is self-moving are contained in that simplicity of thinking itself, for this is the self-moving and self-distinguishing thought, the thought which is its own inwardness, which is the pure concept. In that way, the intelligibility of the understanding is a coming-to-be, and as this coming-to-be, it is rationality.

56. Logical necessity in general consists in the nature of what it is to be its concept in its being. This alone is the rational, the rhythm of the organic whole, and it is just as much the knowing of the content as that content itself is the concept and the essence – that is, it is this alone which is the speculative. – The concrete shape which sets itself into movement makes itself into simple determinateness, 41and it thereby elevates itself to logical form and is in its essentiality. Its concrete existence is only this movement, and it is immediately logical existence. It is therefore unnecessary to apply externally a formalism to the concrete content. That content is in its own self a transition into this formalism, but it ceases to be the latter external formalism because the form is the indigenous coming-to-be of the concrete content itself.

57. On the one hand, this nature of scientific method is inseparable from the content, and on the other hand, it determines its rhythm through itself, and it has, as has already been noted, its genuine exposition in speculative philosophy. – Although what is stated here expresses the concept, it cannot count for more than an anticipatory affirmation. Its truth does not lie in this narrative exposition. For that very reason, it is not in the least refuted by any assertion to the contrary that the movement instead conducts itself in this or that way, or by calling to mind common conceptions⁵² as if they were truths both settled and familiar, or if something new is also served up and combined with the assurance that it flows forth from the shrine of inward, divine intuition. – This kind of reception is usually the first reaction on the part of knowing when something unfamiliar appears to it. It usually resists it in order to save both its freedom and its own insight and its own authority against alien authority, since the shape in which anything is comprehended for the first time always appears as that of alien authority – it also stages its resistance in order to rid itself of any semblance of the kind of shame which supposedly lies in something's having been learned, just as in those cases where the unfamiliar is greeted with applause, the reaction is of the same sort as what in another sphere consisted of ultra-revolutionary speech and action.

58. What thus matters to the study of science is that one take the rigorous exertion of the concept upon oneself. This requires concentrated attention to the concept as such, to simple determinations, such as, for example, being-in-itself, being-for-itself, self-equality, and so on, for these are pure self-movements of the kind that one might even call souls were it not that their concept denotes something higher than that. The habit of marking progress in representational thought finds interruption by the concept irksome; likewise, so does formal thinking in the way it employs non-actual thoughts to argue cleverly for this or that thing. That habit should be called materialized thinking, a contingent consciousness which is sunken into what is material and which at the same time finds it exceedingly difficult to lift its own self out of this matter and to be at one with itself. In contrast, only clever argumentation amounts to freedom from content and to the vanity that stands above all content. This vanity is expected to make the effort to give up this freedom, and, instead of being the arbitrary principle moving the content, it is supposed to let this freedom 42descend into the content and move itself by its own nature, which is to say, to let it move itself by means of the self as its own self and then to observe this movement. This refusal both to insert one's own views into the immanent rhythm of the concept and to interfere arbitrarily with that rhythm by means of wisdom acquired elsewhere, or this abstinence, are all themselves an essential moment of attentiveness to the concept.

59. There are two aspects to merely clever argumentation that call for further notice and which are to be contrasted with conceptually comprehending thinking.⁵³ – On the one hand, merely clever argumentation conducts itself negatively towards the content apprehended; it knows how to refute it and reduce it to nothing. It says, “This is not the way it is”; this insight is the merely negative; it is final, and it does not itself go beyond itself to a new content. Rather, if it is again to have any content, something other from somewhere else has to be found. It is reflection into the empty I, the vanity of its own knowing. – What this vanity expresses is not only that this content is vain but also that this insight itself is vain, for it is the negative which catches no glimpse of the positive within itself. Because this reflection does not gain its negativity itself for its content, it is not immersed in the subject matter at all but is always above and beyond it, and thus it imagines that by asserting the void, it is going much further than the insight which was so rich in content. On the other hand, as was formerly pointed out, in comprehensive thinking, the negative belongs to the content itself and is the positive, both as its immanent movement and determination and as the totality of these. Taken as a result, it is the determinate negative which emerges out of this movement and is likewise thereby a positive content.

60. But in view of the fact that such thinking has a content, whether the content is that of representations, or of thoughts, or is a mixture of the two, there is another aspect to it which makes such conceptual comprehension so difficult for it. The peculiar nature of this aspect is closely connected with the essence of the Idea itself as it was described above, or rather it expresses how the Idea appears as the movement which is itself that of thinking comprehension.⁵⁴ – For just now in its negative conduct, which was previously discussed, clever argumentative thinking is itself the self into which the content returns, and so too, the self in its positive cognition is a represented subject to which the content is related as accident and predicate. This subject constitutes the basis in which the content is bound and on the basis of which the movement runs back and forth. Comprehending thinking conducts itself in quite a different way. While the concept is the object's own self, or the self which exhibits itself as the object's coming-to-be, it is not a motionless subject tranquilly supporting the accidents; rather, it is the self-moving concept which takes its determinations back into itself. In this movement, the 43motionless subject itself breaks down; it enters into the differences and the content and constitutes the determinateness, which is to say, the distinguished content as well as the content's movement, instead of continuing simply to confront that movement. The solid basis which merely clever argumentation had found in the motionless subject thus begins to totter, and it is only this movement itself which becomes the object. The subject, which brings its content to fulfillment, ceases to go beyond this content and cannot have still other predicates or accidents. As a result, the dispersal of the content is, to the contrary, bound together under the self, and the content is not the universal which, as free from the subject, could belong to many others. The content is thereby in fact no longer the predicate of the subject; rather, it is the substance, the essence, and it is the concept of what it is which is being spoken of. Since the nature of representational thinking consists in marking advances with accidents or predicates and then, because they are nothing more than predicates and accidents, going beyond them, it is impeded in its course by what in the proposition has the form of a predicate being the substance itself. It suffers, to picture it in this way, from a counter-punch. Starting from the subject as if this were an enduring ground, it on the contrary finds that by the predicate being the substance, the subject has passed over into the predicate and has thereby become sublated. And since in this way, what seems to be the predicate has now become self-sufficient, or has become the whole show itself, thinking cannot freely roam about but is instead detained by this weight. – At first, it is usually the subject as the objective fixed self which is made into the ground. The necessary movement advances from here to the multiplicity of determinations, or the predicates. It is here that the knowing I takes the place of that subject, and it is here that it is both the binding together of the predicates and the subject supporting them. However, while that former subject enters into the determinations themselves and is their soul, the second subject, which is to say, the knowing subject, finds that the former, which it was supposed to be over and done with, and which it wants to go beyond in order to return into itself, is still there in the predicate. Instead of being able to be what sets the predicate in motion, the subject, as merely clever argumentation over whether this or that predicate is supposed to be attached, has instead something to do with the self of the content. The subject is not supposed to be for itself, but it is supposed to be together with this content.

61. What has been said can be expressed formally in this way. The nature of judgment, or of the proposition per se, which includes the difference between subject and predicate within itself, is destroyed by the speculative judgment, and the identical proposition, which the former comes to be, contains the counter-stroke to those relations. – This conflict between the form of a proposition per se and the unity of the concept which destroys that form is similar to what occurs in the rhythm between meter and accent. Rhythm results from the oscillating midpoint and unification of both. In that way, in the philosophical proposition, the identity of subject and predicate 44does not abolish their difference, which is expressed in the form of the proposition. Instead, their unity emerges as a harmony. The form of the proposition is the appearance of the determinate sense, or the accent that differentiates its fulfillment. However, when the predicate expresses the substance and the subject itself falls under the universal, there is the unity in which that accent fades away.

62. Some examples will clarify what has been said. Take the proposition: “God is being.” The predicate is being; it has a substantial meaning in which the subject melts away. Here, “being” is not supposed to be a predicate. It is supposed to be the essence, but, as a result, “God” seems to cease to be what it was through its place in the proposition, namely, to be a fixed subject. – Thinking, instead of getting any further with the transition from subject to predicate, feels instead inhibited, since the subject has dropped out of the picture, and, because it misses the subject, it is thrown back to the thought of the subject. Or, since the predicate itself has been expressed as a subject, as being, as the essence which exhausts the nature of the subject, it finds the subject also to be immediately present in the predicate. Now, instead of having taken an inward turn into the predicate, and instead of having preserved the free status of only clever argumentation, it is still absorbed in the content, or at least the demand for it to be so absorbed is present. – In that way when it is said, “The actual is the universal,” the actual, as subject, vanishes into its predicate. The universal is not supposed to have only the meaning of a predicate such that the proposition would state that, “The actual is the universal”; rather, the universal ought to express the essence of the actual. – Thinking thus loses its fixed objective basis which it had in the subject, when, in the predicate, it was thrown back to the subject, and when, in the predicate, it returns not into itself but into the subject of the content.

63. For the most part, this unfamiliar impediment forms the basis for the complaints about the unintelligibility of philosophical literature even when the individual has otherwise met the conditions of cultural formation for understanding such philosophical writing. In what is said about this, we see the reason behind the specific reproach which is so often leveled against such writings, namely, that so much has to be read over and over again before it can be understood – a reproach which has to do with such definitive unreasonableness that, if it were justified, no rejoinder would be possible. – It is clear from the above what is at stake here. The philosophical proposition, because it is a proposition, evokes the common opinion about both the usual relationship between subject and predicate and the customary procedure of knowing. This procedure and common opinion about such a procedure destroys its philosophical content. Common opinion then learns from experience that it means something other than what it took itself to have meant, and this correction of its opinion compels knowing to come back to the proposition and now to grasp it in some other way.

4564. There is a difficulty which should be avoided, which consists in the commingling of the practices followed by speculation and those of merely clever argumentation, namely, when what is said of the subject at one time means its concept and then at another time means its predicate or its accident. – Each of those modes interferes with the other, and it is only the kind of philosophical exposition which rigorously excludes the ordinary relations among the parts of a proposition which would be able to achieve the goal of plasticity.

65. In fact, non-speculative thinking also has its rights, which are valid but which are ignored in the speculative proposition. The sublation of the form of the proposition must not only take place in an immediate manner through the mere content of the proposition. Rather, this oppositional movement must be given expression. It must not only be the internal impediment to thought, but rather this return into itself on the part of the concept must be shown. This movement, which constitutes what otherwise would have to be accomplished by proof, is the dialectical movement of the proposition itself. It alone is actual speculation, and it is only the expression of that movement which is a speculative account. As propositional, the speculative is only the internal impediment and the non-existing return of essence into itself. Hence, we often see philosophical accounts referring us to this inner intuition and thus sparing us the exposition of the dialectical movement of the proposition which we had demanded. – The proposition ought to express what the true is, but essentially “the true” is subject. As the latter, it is only the dialectical movement, this course of self-engendering, advancing, and then returning into itself. – In the case of cognition of other sorts, the proof constitutes this aspect of expressed inwardness. However, once dialectic has been separated from proof, the concept of philosophical demonstration has in fact been led astray.

66. On this point, it is worth remembering that the dialectical movement likewise has propositions for its parts or elements. Thus, the highlighted difficulty seems to recur continually and to be a difficulty in the nature of the subject matter. – This is similar to what happens in the case of ordinary proofs, namely, that the reasons it employs themselves need to be based again on other reasons, and so on, ad infinitum. However, this form of giving reasons and stating conditions belongs to that kind of proof which both differs from dialectical movement and which thereby belongs to external cognition. With regard to dialectical movement itself, its element is the pure concept; it thereby has a content that is out-and-out the subject in its own self. Therefore, there is no kind of content that comes forward which behaves as an underlying subject and which gets its significance by being attached to this as a predicate. Taken in its immediacy, that kind of proposition is only empty form. – Apart from the sensuously intuited or represented self, it is for the most part the name as a name, which denotes the pure subject, the empty, 46conceptless “one.” For this reason, it would, for example, be expedient to avoid the name, “God,” because this word is not immediately the concept but is rather at the same time the genuine name, the fixed point of rest of the underlying subject, whereas in contrast, e.g., “being,” or “the one,” “individuality,” “the subject,” etc., themselves immediately point to concepts. – Even when speculative truths are stated about that subject, their content lacks the immanent concept because that content is only present as a motionless subject, and in these circumstances, speculative truths easily take on the form of mere edification. – From this side, too, there is an obstacle based in the habit of grasping the speculative predicate according to the form of a proposition instead of grasping it as concept and essence. This obstacle can be increased or diminished depending on the way in which philosophical truths are rendered. The exposition which stays true to its insight into the nature of what is speculative must retain the dialectical form and must import nothing into it except what is both comprehended and is the concept.

67. The study of philosophy is hindered by the conduct of only clever argumentation, but it is hindered equally as much by the kind of acculturation which refuses to engage in such clever argumentation and which instead bases itself on widely accepted truths. The possessor of those widely accepted truths thinks he has no need to re-examine them; rather, he takes them to be fundamental, and he believes he is enabled not only to assert them but to be both judge and jury by means of them. In this regard, it is especially necessary to make philosophizing again into a serious business. In all the sciences and the arts, in all skills and crafts, the firm conviction prevails that in order to master them, one must spend a considerable amount of trouble in learning and practice. On the other hand, with regard to philosophy, there is a prejudice which in fact now seems to prevail, namely, that although anyone with eyes and fingers who acquires leather and a last is not for that reason in a position to make shoes, everybody nonetheless immediately understands how to philosophize and how to pass judgment on philosophy simply because he possesses the standard for doing so in his natural reason – as if he did not likewise possess in his own foot the standard for making a shoe. – It seems as if the possession of philosophy only consists in the lack of any specific kind of knowing and plan of study, and that as soon as one begins to acquire any such knowing and plan of study, philosophy itself ceases. Philosophy is quite often held to be a kind of formal knowledge, devoid of all content, but what is severely lacking in such a view is the insight that according to the content of any kind of knowledge and science, what counts as truth can only deserve the name of truth when philosophy has had a hand in its production. Other sciences may try as much as they like to get by without philosophy and to rely only on clever argumentation, but without philosophy, they are unable to possess any life, spirit, or truth in themselves.

68. With a view to genuine philosophy, we see the following. In lieu of the long course of cultural formation, a movement as rich as it is profound and through which spirit arrives at knowing, we now see the view that both the immediate revelation of the divine and the views of healthy common 47sense, neither of which are bothered or educated by any other type of knowing or by genuine philosophy, are supposed to be a complete equivalent for philosophy, and that they are as good a surrogate for philosophy as chicory is lauded as a surrogate for coffee. It is not pleasant to note how ignorance mixed with formless, tasteless crudity, which is itself incapable of concentrating its thoughts on an abstract proposition and even less so on the connections among many such propositions, assures itself at one time that it is itself freedom and is tolerance of thinking, and at another time it even assures itself of its own genius. Genius once was, as everyone knows, all the rage in poetry, just as it is nowadays also the rage in philosophy. However, instead of poetry, what was produced by this type of brilliance was, when it made any sense at all, only trivial prose, or, when it went beyond that, just loony chatter. Now in the same way natural philosophizing, which holds itself to be too good for the concept and which through this deficiency takes itself to be an intuitive and poetical thinking, trades in the arbitrary combinations of an imagination which is quite simply disorganized by its own thoughts – it trades in constructions that are neither fish nor fowl, neither poetry nor philosophy.

69. On the other hand, when it is flowing down the more peaceful riverbed of healthy common sense, natural philosophy dishes out at best a rhetoric of trivial truths. When it is reproached about the meaninglessness of what it offers, it assures us in reply that the sense and fulfillment of its meaning lies in its own heart and must in the same way also be present in the hearts of others; by using such phrases as the “heart's innocence,” “purity of conscience,” and so on, it supposes that it has spoken of final things against which nobody can object nor beyond which anything more can be demanded. However, what was supposed to happen there was not that the best was to be hidden away in inwardness; the best was supposed to be drawn up out of that deep well and brought up to the light of day. Such philosophizing could have long ago spared itself the trouble of bringing forth final truths of that sort. They were long since to be found, say, in the catechism, in popular proverbs, etc. – It is not difficult to grasp such truths in their indeterminateness and distortions, and it is often not difficult to point out that in those truths themselves, there is a consciousness of their very opposite. If their proponent takes the trouble to pull himself out of the disarray into which he has led himself, he will fall into new confusions and may very well make an outburst to the effect that such and such is settled and that anything else is sophistry – a slogan used by plain common sense against culturally mature reason, just as, for as long as anyone can remember the phrase, “day-dreaming” has summed up how those ignorant of philosophy have taken note of it. – While the proponent of common sense appeals to feeling, to an oracle dwelling within, he has nothing more to do with anyone who disagrees. He only has to explain that he has nothing more to say to anyone who does not find and feel the same thing in himself. – In other words, he tramples the roots of humanity underfoot. For the nature 48of humanity is to drive men to agreement with one another, and humanity's existence lies only in the commonality of consciousness that has been brought about. The anti-human, the only animalistic, consists in staying put in the sphere of feeling and in being able to communicate only through such feelings.

70. No matter how much a man asks for a royal road to science, no more convenient and comfortable way can be suggested to him than to put his trust in healthy common sense, and then for what else remains, to advance simply with the times and with philosophy, to read reviews of philosophical works, and perhaps even to go so far as to read the prefaces and the first paragraphs of the works themselves. After all, the preface provides the general principles on which everything turns, and the reviews provide both the historical memoranda and the critical assessment which, because it is a critical assessment, is on a higher plane than what it assesses. One can of course traverse this ordinary path in one's dressing-gown. However, if one is to take exaltation in the eternal, the holy, and the infinite, then one should take one's strides on that path when clad in the vestments of the high priest – a path which itself already has instead Immediate Being at its center, and which consists in the inspired resourcefulness of deep and original Ideas and of the lightning flashes of elevated thought. But in the same way that those depths do not reveal the wellspring of the essence, these sky-rockets are not yet the empyrean. True thoughts and scientific insight can only be won by the labor of the concept. Concepts alone can produce the universality of knowing, which is not the common indeterminateness and paltriness of plain common sense, but rather that of culturally mature and accomplished cognition. – It does not bring forth some uncommon universality of a reason whose talents have been ruined by the indolence and self-conceit of genius; rather, it brings forth this truth purified into its native form, which is capable of being the possession of all self-conscious reason.

71. While I have posited that science exists as a result of the self-movement of the concept, and while my way of looking at all the aspects of this diverges from current ideas⁵⁵ about the nature and shape of truth – all of which are in fact quite opposed to my own views (and not only the ones I have cited but others as well) – there does not seem to be much promise at all that an attempt to expound the system of science according to the characterization I have given of it will be received favorably. In the meantime, I can bear in mind that, for example, the excellence of Plato's philosophy has sometimes been said to lie in his scientifically valueless myths, and there have also been times, which have even been called times of religious enthusiasm,⁵⁶ in which the Aristotelian philosophy was esteemed for the sake of its speculative depth and when Plato's Parmenides, perhaps the greatest work of art of the ancient dialectic, has been taken to be the true disclosure and the positive expression of the divine life. There have even been times when there was a great deal of obscurity created by ecstasy, and this misunderstood ecstasy was in fact supposed to be nothing but the pure concept itself. – Furthermore, what is excellent about the philosophy of our time is that it has posited that its very value lies in scientific rigor itself. And even though 49others take a different view, it is only through its scientific rigor that the philosophy of our time has in fact begun to make itself felt. I can thereby also hope that this attempt to vindicate science's right to the concept and to expound science in this, its own distinctive element, will know how to force its way through the crowd by way of the inner truth of what is at stake. We must hold on to the conviction that it is the nature of truth to prevail when its time has come, and that it only appears when its time has come, and that it thus never appears too early nor does it appear for a public not yet ripe enough to receive it. We must also hold on to the conviction that the individual requires this effect in order to confirm for himself what is as yet for him still only his own solitary affair and in order for him to experience as universal what is initially only something particular to him. However, on these occasions, the public should often be distinguished from those who conduct themselves as its representatives and spokesmen. The public conducts itself in many respects quite differently from the latter, indeed in some ways even as opposed to them. However much the public will good-naturedly put the blame upon itself when a philosophical work does not quite appeal to it, still these representatives, so convinced of their own authority in the matter, will put all the blame instead on the authors. The work's effect on the public is more silent than the acts of these “dead burying their dead.”⁵⁷ However much the general level of insight is on the whole nowadays more highly cultivated, and the public's curiosity more wakeful, and however much its judgment more swiftly determined, still “the feet of them that shall carry thee out are already at the door,”⁵⁸ and thus such a matter needs to be distinguished from a more gradual effect which rectifies the attention extorted by those imposing assurances and their dismissive acts of censure. After a while, some are thus provided with a world of their own, whereas for some others, after a certain period of time, there is simply no posterity at all.

72. For the rest, at a time when the universality of spirit has grown so much stronger, and, as is fitting, when what is purely singular has correspondingly become even more a matter of indifference, and so too when the universality of spirit now both sticks to its entire breadth and claims all the cultural wealth it has built up, then the share in the total work of spirit which falls to the activity of any individual can only be very small. As the nature of science implies, the individual must thus all the more forget himself; namely, although he must become what he can and must do what he can, there is nonetheless even less which must be demanded of him, just as he in turn must both anticipate less for himself and may demand less for himself.

First Part Science of the Experience of Consciousness⁵⁹

¹ die Sache selbst.

² Vorstellung.

³ Erkenntnis.

⁴ zu erkennen.

⁵ erkannt.

⁶ bei sich selbst.

⁷ die Erfahrung der Sache selbst.

⁸ vorstellt.

⁹ Vorstellung.

¹⁰ begriffen.

¹¹ Vorstellens; “ways of thinking.”

¹² Bildungsformen.

¹³ Verständlichkeit.

¹⁴ Verstand.

¹⁵ absoluten Idee.

¹⁶ erkannt.

¹⁷ vorzustellen.

¹⁸ Vorstellung.

¹⁹ Idee.

²⁰ Vorstellung.

²¹ Idee.

²² Perhorreszieren.

²³ für sich.

²⁴ neuern Zeit.

²⁵ Außer-sich-sein in sich selbst Bleibende.

²⁶ insofern er aber auch für sich selbst für sich ist. Alternatively, this could be rendered, “insofar as the object on its own is also an object for itself.”

²⁷ bei sich selbst.

²⁸ Gedachtes.

²⁹ Vorstellung.

³⁰ Das Bekannte.

³¹ erkannt; “cognized.”

³² Vorstellung.

³³ Bekanntseins.

³⁴ gedachten.

³⁵ erkennt.

³⁶ Weltlichkeit. This might also be rendered as “secularity.”

³⁷ Wissenschaft der Erfahrung, die das Bewußtsein macht.

³⁸ Vorstellungen.

³⁹ Evidenz.

⁴⁰ entzweit.

⁴¹ Triplizität.

⁴² Verstand.

⁴³ erkennen.

⁴⁴ erkennen.

⁴⁵ Die Bewegung des Seienden.

⁴⁶ kennt.

⁴⁷ erkannt.

⁴⁸ es ist für sich selbst.

⁴⁹ der Verstand des Daseins.

⁵⁰ erkannte.

⁵¹ Idee.

⁵² Vorstellungen.

⁵³ begreifende Denken.

⁵⁴ denkendes Auffassen.

⁵⁵ Vorstellungen.

⁵⁶ Schwärmerei.

⁵⁷ See Matthew 8:22.

⁵⁸ Acts 5:9.

⁵⁹ In some of the original editions of the 1807 book, there is a separate page that says: First part, “Science of the Experience of Consciousness”. In some of the other editions, there is a separate page that says: Science of the Phenomenology of Spirit.

Introduction

5373. It is a natural supposition that in philosophy, before one gets down to dealing with what is at issue, namely, the actual cognition of what, in truth, is, it is first necessary to come to an understanding about cognition, which is regarded as the instrument by which one seizes hold of the absolute or as the means by which one catches sight of it. The concern seems justified, in part because there are various kinds of cognition, and among them there might be one rather than another that is better suited to achieving this final end, so there could be a wrong choice among them; and in part also because if cognition is a faculty of a determinate kind and scope, then without a more precise determination of its nature and limits, one ends up grasping clouds of error rather than the heaven of truth. This concern is even bound to be transformed into the conviction that the entire project of acquiring for consciousness through cognition what is in-itself is absurd in its very concept, and that between cognition and the absolute there lies a limit which completely separates the two. For if cognition is the instrument for seizing hold of the absolute essence, then it becomes immediately clear that the application of an instrument to a thing no longer leaves the thing as it is for itself,¹ but rather goes about forming and changing it. Or, if cognition is not an instrument of our activity but is to a certain extent a passive medium through which the light of the truth reaches us, then here too we do not obtain it as it is in itself but only as it is through and in this medium. In both cases, we make use of a means which immediately brings about the opposite of its goal; or rather, what is absurd is that we are making use of a means at all. It does indeed seem that this defect can be remedied through cognition of the way in which the instrument works, for such cognition makes it possible to subtract from within the result that part which, in the representation we obtain of the absolute through the instrument, belongs to the instrument; and so such cognition makes it possible to obtain the truth purely. However, this improvement would in fact only bring us back to where we were before. If we again subtract from a formed thing what the instrument has added to it, then the thing – here, the absolute – is again for us exactly as it was prior to this consequently superfluous effort. If the absolute is only to be brought just a bit closer to us through the instrument, without the instrument changing anything about the absolute, perhaps as is done to a bird through a lime twig, then the absolute would surely ridicule such a ruse if it were not in and for itself already with us and did not already want to be with us; for cognition would be a ruse in such a case, since through its manifold efforts it creates the impression of doing something altogether different from simply bringing about an immediate and therefore effortless 54relation. Or, if the testing of cognition which we suppose to be a medium made us acquainted with the law of its refraction, it would be just as useless to subtract this refraction from the result, for it is not the refraction of the ray but rather the ray itself through which the truth touches us that is cognition, and if this is subtracted, then all that would be indicated to us would be just pure direction or empty place.

74. Meanwhile, if the concern about falling into error sets up a mistrust of science, which itself, untroubled by such scruples, simply sets itself to work and actually cognizes, it is still difficult to see why on the contrary a mistrust of this mistrust should not be set up and why one should not be concerned that this fear of erring is already the error itself. In fact, this fear presupposes something, and in fact presupposes a great deal, as truth, and it bases its scruples and its conclusions on what itself ought to be tested in advance as to whether or not it is the truth. This fear presupposes representations of cognizing as an instrument and as a medium, and it also presupposes a difference between our own selves and this cognition; but above all it presupposes that the absolute stands on one side and that cognition stands on the other for itself, and separated from the absolute, though cognition is nevertheless something real; that is, it presupposes that cognition, which, by being outside of the absolute, is indeed also outside of the truth, is nevertheless truthful; an assumption through which that which calls itself the fear of error gives itself away to be known rather as the fear of truth.

75. This conclusion arises from the following: that the absolute alone is true, or the true alone is absolute. It is possible to reject this conclusion by making the following distinction: that a cognition which indeed does not cognize the absolute, as science wants, may nevertheless also be true; and that cognition in general, if indeed it is incapable of grasping the absolute, may nevertheless be capable of grasping other truth. But we shall eventually see that this sort of talking back and forth amounts to a murky difference between an absolute truth and some other kind of truth; and that the absolute, cognition, and so forth, are words which presuppose a meaning that, for one thing, is still to be attained.

76. Instead of fussing around with such useless representations and ways of talking about cognition as an instrument for getting hold of the absolute, or as a medium through which we catch sight of the truth, and so forth – relations which are implied by all these representations of a cognizing that is separated from the absolute and of an absolute that is separated from cognizing – instead of fussing around with excuses which create the incapacity of science by presupposing such relations and which thereby free one from the hard work of science while at the same time giving off the appearance of a serious and 55eager effort – that is, instead of fussing around with answers to all of this, it is possible to reject these outright as contingent and arbitrary representations, and to regard the affiliated use of words such as “absolute,” “cognition,” and also “objective” and “subjective,” and countless others, whose meaning is assumed to be generally known, as even a kind of deceit. For the pretense, for one thing, that their meaning is generally known, and for another thing, that one even has the concept of them, seems rather to be meant only to spare us the most important thing, namely to provide this concept. By contrast, one could with even more justification spare oneself the trouble of taking any notice at all of such representations and ways of talking which are meant to ward off science itself, for they constitute only an empty appearance of knowing which immediately vanishes in the face of the science which comes onto the scene. But science, insofar as it comes onto the scene, is itself an appearance; science's coming onto the scene is not yet science as it is carried out and unfolded in its truth. It makes no difference in this regard whether one thinks that science is an appearance because it comes onto the scene alongside a kind of knowing that is other than it, or whether one calls that other, untrue kind of knowing science's own appearing. But science must free itself from this surface appearance;² and it can do so only by turning itself against it. For with regard to a knowing that is not truthful, science cannot simply reject it as just a common view of things while giving out the assurance that it is itself a completely different kind of cognition and that that other knowing counts as absolutely nothing for science; nor can science appeal to some intimation, contained within that other knowing, of something better. Through such an assurance, science declares its being to be its power; but untrue knowing just as much appeals to the fact that it is, and it gives out the assurance that science counts as nothing to it; but one arid assurance is just as valid as another. Still less can science appeal to the better intimation which is supposed to be present in non-truthful cognition and which from within that cognition supposedly points towards science; for in that case, science, for one thing, would again be appealing just as much to something that just is; and for another thing, it would be appealing to itself as the mode in which it is in non-truthful cognition, that is to say, it would be appealing to a bad mode of its being and thus to its appearance rather than to the way it is in and for itself. It is for this reason that the exposition of knowing as it appears is to be undertaken here.

77. Now because this exposition has for its object only knowing as it appears, it does not itself seem to be the science which is free and self-moving within its own proper shape, but from this standpoint can instead be taken to be the path of natural consciousness pressing forward towards true knowing, or it can be taken to be the path of the soul wandering through the series of ways it takes shape, as if these were stations put forward in advance to it by its own nature, so that it purifies itself into spirit by arriving at a cognition of what it is in itself through the complete experience of its own self.

5678. Natural consciousness will prove to be only the concept of knowing, or it will prove to be not real knowing. But while it immediately regards itself rather as real knowing, this path has negative meaning for it, and what is the realization of the concept will count instead, to it, as the loss of itself, for on this path, it loses its truth. This path can accordingly be regarded as the path of doubt, or, more properly, as the path of despair; on this path, what happens is not what is customarily understood as doubt, a shaking of this or that supposed truth, followed by the disappearance again of the doubt, and then a return to the former truth so that in the end the thing at issue is taken as it was before. Rather, this path is the conscious insight into the untruth of knowing as it appears, a knowing for which that which is the most real is rather in truth only the unrealized concept. Thus this self-consummating skepticism is also not what earnest zeal for truth and science surely thinks it has prepared and equipped itself with so that it might be ready for truth and science; that is, it is not the project in science of not submitting oneself to the thoughts of others based on their authority but rather testing everything oneself and following only one's own conviction, or – better still – producing everything oneself and taking only one's own deed for the true. The series of the figurations of consciousness which consciousness traverses on this path is the full history of the cultivation of consciousness itself into science. That project represents cultivation in the simple mode of a project as immediately finished and done; but in contrast to this untruth, this path is the actual working out of the project. To be sure, following one's own conviction is more than submitting oneself to authority; but the converting of opinions which are held on authority into opinions which are held on the basis of one's own conviction does not necessarily involve a change in the content of those opinions, and does not necessarily make truth step into the place of error. The only difference between being stuck in a system of opinion and prejudice based on the authority of others and being stuck in one based on one's own conviction is the vanity which inheres in the latter mode. By contrast, the skepticism which is directed at the entire range of consciousness as it appears, makes spirit for the first time competent to test what truth is, by this kind of skepticism bringing about a despair regarding the so-called natural conceptions,³ thoughts, and opinions. It is a matter of indifference whether one calls them one's own or someone else's, and with which consciousness that goes straightaway into examining matters is still suffused and burdened, which thus in fact renders consciousness incapable of achieving what it wants to undertake.

79. The completeness of the forms of non-real consciousness will emerge through the very necessity of their progression and their interrelations. 57To make this comprehensible, it can be noted in general at the outset that the exposition of non-truthful consciousness in its untruth is not a merely negative movement. Such a one-sided view is what natural consciousness generally has of it; and a knowing which makes this one-sidedness into its essence is one of the shapes of incomplete consciousness which lies within the course of the path itself and which will serve itself up in that path. That is, such a one-sided view is the skepticism which sees in the result always only pure nothing and which abstracts from the fact that this nothing is determinately the nothing of that from which it results. However, only when taken as the nothing of that from which it is emerges is the nothing in fact the true result; thus it is itself a determinate nothing and it has a content. Skepticism which ends with the abstraction of nothingness or emptiness cannot progress any further from this point, but must instead wait to see whether something new will present itself and what it will be, in order that it can also toss it into the same empty abyss. By contrast, while the result is grasped as it is in truth, as determinate negation, a new form has thereby immediately arisen, and in the negation, the transition is made whereby the progression through the complete series of shapes comes about on its own accord.

80. However, to knowing, the goal is as necessarily fixed as is the series of the progression; the goal is the point at which knowing no longer needs to go beyond its own self, where knowing itself finds itself, and where the concept corresponds to the object and the object to the concept. The progression towards this goal is thus also unrelenting, and at no earlier station is satisfaction to be found. Whatever is limited to a natural life is not on its own capable of going beyond its immediate existence; but it is driven out beyond its immediate existence by an other, and this being torn out of itself is its death. But consciousness is for its own self its concept; as a result it is immediately the going beyond the restricted, and, since this restriction belongs to consciousness, consciousness is the going beyond of its own self; with the singular, the beyond is, to consciousness, simultaneously posited, even if the beyond is only posited as it is in spatial intuition alongside the limited. Consciousness therefore suffers this violence at its own hands and brings to ruin its own restricted satisfaction. With the feeling of this violence, anxiety over the truth might well withdraw and strive to hold on to what it is in danger of losing. But this anxiety can find no rest; even if it wants to remain in thoughtless indolence, thought spoils the thoughtlessness, and its unrest disturbs the indolence; or even if it fortifies itself with a sensibility which assures that everything is to be found good as the type it is, this assurance likewise suffers violence at the hands of reason which straightaway finds that something is not good precisely because it is that type of thing. That is, the fear of truth 58may conceal itself from itself and from others behind the pretense that it is precisely the ardent zeal for truth which makes it so difficult, and indeed impossible, to find any truth other than vanity's own truth of being always still cleverer than any thought that one gets either from oneself or from others. This vanity – which understands how to thwart every truth so that it retreats back into itself and which revels in this its own understanding (an understanding which always knows how to bring all thoughts to dissolution and how to find, in place of all content, only the arid I) – is a satisfaction which must be left to itself, for it flees from the universal and seeks only being-for-itself.

81. Just as these preliminary and general remarks about the manner and the necessity of the progression have been made, so too it might be useful to recall something about the method of the way it is carried out. This exposition, represented as the conduct of science in relation to knowing as it appears,⁴ and represented as the investigation and testing of the reality of cognition, seems incapable of taking place without some kind of presupposition which underlies it as a standard. For the testing consists in the application of an accepted standard, and in the resulting equality or inequality between the standard and what is tested lays the decision as to whether what is tested is correct or incorrect. The standard, likewise science itself if science were to be the standard, is thereby accepted as the essence, or as the in-itself. But here, at the point where science first comes on the scene, neither science itself nor anything else has justified itself as the essence or as the in-itself, and without something like that taking place, it seems that no examination can take place at all.

82. One can have a more determinate grasp of this contradiction and the removal of the contradiction if, first of all, one is reminded of the abstract determinations of knowing and truth as they come before consciousness. That is, consciousness distinguishes something from itself while at the same time it relates itself to it. Or, as it is expressed: This something is something for consciousness, and the determinate aspect of this relating, or of the being of something for a consciousness, is knowing. However, we distinguish this being-for-another from being-in-itself. That which is related to knowing is just as much distinguished from knowing and is posited as being also external to this relation. The aspect of this in-itself is called truth. Just what might genuinely be there in these determinations is of no further concern for us here, as our object is knowing as it appears, and hence its determinations are also at first taken up as they immediately present themselves, and thus the way that they have been grasped may well be the way that they present themselves.

83. If we then investigate the truth of knowing, it seems that we are investigating what knowing is in itself. Yet in this investigation, knowing is our object. It is for us, and the in-itself of knowing, which would result from the investigation, would be instead its being for us. What we would assert to be its essence would instead not 59be its truth but rather only our knowing of it. The essence or the standard would lie within us, and that which was supposed to be compared with the standard, and that about which a decision was supposed to be made on the basis of this comparison would not necessarily have to recognize⁵ the standard.

84. But the nature of the object which we are investigating goes beyond this division, or to this semblance of division and presupposition. Consciousness in its own self provides its own standard, and the investigation will thereby be a comparison of it with itself, for the difference which has just been made falls within consciousness. There is within consciousness one item for an other, or consciousness as such has within itself the determinateness of the moment of knowing; at the same time, this other is to consciousness not only for it, but also external to this relation, or in itself: the moment of truth. Therefore, in what consciousness declares within itself to be the in-itself, or the true, we have the standard which consciousness itself sets up to measure its knowing. If we designate knowing as the concept, but designate the essence, or the true, as what is⁶ or the object, then the examining consists in seeing whether the concept corresponds to the object. However, if we designate the essence, or the in-itself of the object, as the concept, and in contrast understand by object the concept insofar as it is object, or insofar as it is for an other, then the examining consists in our seeing whether the object corresponds to its concept. One clearly sees that both are the same, but what is essential throughout the whole investigation is to hold fast to this, that both of these moments, concept and object, being-for-an-other and being-in-itself, themselves fall within the knowing that we are investigating, and that we thus do not need to bring standards with us and in the investigation to apply our ideas and thoughts. By leaving these aside, we succeed in considering the matter at issue as it is in and for itself.

85. However, from this aspect not only will it be superfluous for us to add anything and not only because concept and object, the standard and what is to be examined, are present in consciousness itself. Rather, we are lifted above comparing the two and conducting a genuine examination such that, while consciousness examines its own self, the only thing that remains to us is purely to look on.⁷ This is so because consciousness is, on the one hand, consciousness of the object, and on the other hand, it is consciousness of its own self. It is consciousness of what, to it, is the true, as well as consciousness of its knowing of the true. While both are for the same consciousness, consciousness itself is their comparison. It is an issue for that consciousness whether or not its knowing of the object corresponds to the object. To be sure, for consciousness, the object seems to be such only in the manner that consciousness knows it; consciousness seems, as it were, to be incapable of getting behind the object to the object as it is in itself and not as the object is for consciousness. However, consciousness therefore also seems to be incapable in its own self of testing its knowing of the object. Yet precisely because consciousness knows of an object at all, there is already present the difference that something is, to consciousness, 60the in-itself, but another moment is knowing, or the being of the object for consciousness. It is upon this difference which is present that the testing depends. If, in this comparison, the two do not correspond to one another, then it seems as if consciousness must alter its knowing in order to make it adequate to the object. However, in knowing's alteration, the object itself is, to consciousness, also in fact altered; for the knowing which is present was essentially a knowing of the object; along with the knowing, the object also becomes something different, for it belonged essentially to this knowing. Thus to consciousness it comes to be the case that what, to it, was previously the in-itself, is not in itself, or that it was in itself only for consciousness. While it therefore finds on its object's part that its knowing does not correspond to the object, the object itself also does not endure. That is, the standard for the examination is altered when that for which it was supposed to be the standard itself fails the examination, and the examination is not only an examination of knowing but also an examination of the standard of knowing.

86. This dialectical movement which consciousness practices in its own self (as well as in its knowing and in its object), insofar as, for consciousness, the new, true object arises out of this movement, is properly what is called experience. In this respect, there is in the process just mentioned a moment to be highlighted more precisely, and this will cast a new light on the scientific aspects of the following exposition. Consciousness knows something, and this object is the essence, or the in-itself; but the object is also for consciousness the in-itself; and with this the double meaning of this truth comes on the scene. We see that consciousness now has two objects: One is the first in-itself, and the second is the being-for-it of this in-itself. The latter seems at first to be only the reflection of consciousness into itself, a representing not of an object but rather only of its knowing of that first object. But as was previously shown, the first object is, to consciousness, thereby altered. The first object ceases to be the in-itself and, to consciousness, becomes that which is only the in-itself for consciousness. However, this way there is this: the being-for-it of this in-itself, the true, which however means that this is the essence, or its object. This new object contains the nothingness of the first; it is what experience has learned about it.

87. In this exposition of the course of experience, there is a moment through which the exposition seems not to correspond with what is ordinarily understood by experience. The transition, namely, from the first object and the knowing of it to the other object about which one says that it has learned from experience, was specified in such a way that the knowing of the first object, or the being-for-consciousness of the first in-itself, is itself supposed to become the second object. By contrast, it ordinarily seems that we learn from experience about the 61untruth of our first concept in another object that we perhaps come across serendipitously and extrinsically so that the only thing left to us is the pure grasping of what is in and for itself. However, based on the point of view given above, the new object shows itself to have come to be through a reversal of consciousness itself. This observation of the matter is our addition, whereby the series of experiences traversed by consciousness is elevated into a scientific progression, and which is not there for the consciousness that we are observing. However, this is in fact also the same situation already discussed above concerning the relation of this exposition to skepticism, namely, that each and every result which emerges from a non-truthful knowing should not coalesce into an empty nothing, but rather must be necessarily grasped as the nothing of that of which it is the result, a result which contains the truth that the previous knowing has within itself. Here it presents itself as follows: While what at first appeared as the object degenerating for consciousness into a knowing of the object, and the in-itself becomes a being-for-consciousness of the in-itself, this latter is the new object. As a result, a new shape of consciousness comes on the scene for which the essence is something different from what was the essence for the preceding shape. It is this circumstance which guides the whole series of shapes of consciousness in their necessity. However, it is just this necessity itself, or the emergence of the new object, which presents itself to consciousness without consciousness knowing how this happens to it. It takes place for us, as it were, behind the back of consciousness. Through this there enters into the movement of consciousness a moment of the in-itself, or of being for us, which does not present itself for the consciousness which is itself comprehended in the experience itself. However, the content of what emerges to us is for consciousness, and we comprehend only what is formal in it, or its pure emergence. For consciousness, what has emerged is only as object; for us, what has emerged at the same time emerges as movement and coming-to-be.

88. Through this necessity, this path to science is itself already science, and according to its content it is thereby the science of the experience of consciousness.

89. The experience through which consciousness learns about itself can, according to its concept, comprehend within itself nothing less than the whole system of consciousness, or the whole realm of the truth of spirit, so that the moments of truth present themselves in this their proper determinateness, not as being abstract, pure moments, but rather in the way that they are for consciousness, or in the way that consciousness itself comes on the scene in its relation to them. In this way, the moments of the whole are shapes of consciousness. By consciousness carrying on towards its true existence, it will 62reach a point where it sets aside its semblance of being burdened with what is alien to it, which only is for it and is as other; a point where the appearance becomes equal to the essence so that its own exposition coincides at this very point with the genuine science of spirit. Finally, while itself grasping this, its own essence, consciousness will signify the nature of absolute knowing itself.

¹ für sich.

² Schein.

³ natürlichen Vorstellungen.

⁴ erscheinenden Wissen. It could also be rendered as “phenomenal knowing.”

⁵ anzuerkennen.

⁶ das Seiende.

⁷ reine Zusehen; “be simply an onlooker.”

A. Consciousness

I. Sensuous-Certainty;63 or the “This” and Meaning Something

90. Knowing which is initially our object, or immediately, can be nothing but immediate knowing, knowing of the immediate, or of what is. Likewise we ourselves have to conduct ourselves immediately, or receptively. We therefore are to alter nothing in the object as it presents itself, and we must keep our conceptualizing¹ of it apart from our apprehending of it.

91. The concrete content of sensuous-certainty permits itself to appear immediately as the richest cognition, indeed, as a knowing of an infinite wealth for which no limit is to be found, whether we venture out into the reaches of space and time as the place where that wealth extends itself, or when we take a piece out of this plenitude, divide it, and thereby delve into it. In addition, it appears as the most veritable, for it has not omitted anything from its object, but rather, has its object in its complete entirety before itself. However, this certainty in fact yields the most abstract and the very poorest truth. It expresses what it knows as this: It is; and its truth only contains the being of the item.² For its part, consciousness only is in this certainty as the pure I, or, within that certainty, the I is only as a pure This, and the object likewise is only as a pure This. I, this I, am certain of this item not because I, as consciousness, have thereby developed myself and have variously set my thoughts into motion. It is also not because I, as consciousness, am certain of this item for the reason that the item of which I am certain would be a rich relation in its own self according to a set of differentiated conditions or would be a multiple comportment to other items. Both have nothing to do with the truth of sensuous-certainty. In that certainty, neither I nor the item have the meaning of a multifaceted mediation, nor does I have the meaning of a multifaceted representing or thinking, nor does the item have the meaning of a multifaceted composition. Rather, the item is, and it is only because it is. For sensuous-certainty this is what is essential, and this pure being, or this simple immediacy constitutes its truth. Likewise, as a relation, certainty is an immediate, pure relation. Consciousness is I, nothing further, a pure this, and the singular individual³ knows a pure this, or he knows the singular.

92.64 However, if we take a look at it there is a good deal more in play in this pure being which constitutes the essence of this certainty and which declares it to be its truth. An actual sensuous-certainty is not only this pure immediacy but also an example of it. Among all the countless differences thereby popping up, we find in every case the chief difference, namely, that in that certainty both of the already noted “this's,” namely, a this as an I and a this as an object, precipitates all at once out of pure being. If we reflect on this difference, it turns out that neither the one nor the other is only immediately within sensuous-certainty; rather, both are mediated. I have certainty through an other, namely, the item, and this likewise is within certainty through an other, namely, through the I.

93. It is not only we who make this difference of essence and example, of immediacy and mediation. Rather, it is that we find this difference in sensuous-certainty itself, and it is to be taken up in the form it has in sensuous-certainty, not in the way we have just determined it to be. It is posited in sensuous-certainty as the simple, immediately existent, or as the essence, the object. However, it is posited as what is other than the inessential and the mediated, which is not in itself in sensuous-certainty but which instead is through an other, the I, a knowing that knows the object only for the reason that the object is but which itself can just as well be as not be. However, the object is; it is the true and the essence. The object is indifferent as to whether it is known or not. The object remains even when it is not known, but if the object does not exist, then there is no knowing.

94. The object is therefore to be considered in terms of whether, in sensuous-certainty itself, it is in fact the kind of essence which sensuous-certainty passes it off as being. That is, it is to be considered as to whether this, its concept, which is to be the essence, corresponds to the way it is present within that certainty. To that end, we need not reflect on the object and mull over what it might be in truth; we need only to consider it as sensuous-certainty has it in sensuous-certainty itself.

95. Therefore, sensuous-certainty itself is to be asked: What is the This? If we take it in the twofold shape of its being, as the now and the here, then the dialectic which it has in itself will take on a form as intelligible as the This itself. To the question: “What is the Now?”, we answer, for example, “The ‘now’ is the night.” In order to put the truth of this sensuous-certainty to the test, a simple experiment will suffice. We write down this truth. A truth cannot be lost by being written down any more than it can be lost by our preserving it, and if now, this midday, we look at this truth which has been written down, we will have to say that it has become rather stale.

96.65 The Now, which is the night, is preserved, i.e., it is treated as what it was passed off as being, namely, as an existent. However, it instead proves itself to be a non-existent. To be sure, the Now itself maintains itself but as what is not the night; likewise, it maintains itself vis-à-vis the day, which it now is, as what is also not the day, or it maintains itself as a negative as such. This self-maintaining Now is thus not an immediate Now but a mediated Now, for it is determined as an enduring and self-maintaining Now as a result of an other not existing, namely, the day or the night. Thereby it is just as simply as what it was before, Now, and in this simplicity, it is indifferent to what is still in play alongside it. As little as night and day are its being, it is just as much night and day. It is not affected at all by this, its otherness. Such a simple is through negation; it is neither this nor that, it is both a not-this and is just as indifferent to being this or that, and such a simple is what we call a universal. The universal is thus in fact the truth of sensuous-certainty.

97. We also express the sensuous as a universal, but what we say is: This, i.e., the universal this, or we say: it is, i.e., being as such. We thereby of course do not represent to ourselves the universal This or being as such, but we express the universal; or, in this sensuous-certainty we do not at all say what we mean. However, as we see, language is the more truthful. In language, we immediately refute what we mean to say, and since the universal is the truth of sensuous-certainty, and language only expresses this truth, it is, in that way, not possible at all that we could say what we mean about sensuous being.

98. The same case comes up in the other form of the This, namely, in the Here. For example, here is the tree. I turn around, this truth vanishes, and it has inverted itself into its contrary: Here there is not a tree but rather a house. The Here itself does not disappear, rather it endures in the disappearance of the house, the tree, etc., and it is indifferent to being a house, a tree. The This shows itself again to be a mediated simplicity, or as being universality.

99. While this sensuous-certainty has proved in its own self that the universal is the truth of its object, to it pure being therefore remains as its essence but not as immediate. Rather, it remains as that to which negation and mediation are essential, and it thereby does not continue to be what we mean by the term, “being.” Rather, what we mean is: Being with the determination such that it is the abstraction, or the purely universal; and what we mean to say, for which the truth of sensuous-certainty is not the universal, is all that remains apart from this empty or indifferent Now and Here.

100.66 If we compare the relation in which knowing and the object first came on the scene with the relations in which they come to stand in the result, then the relation has reversed itself. The object, which was supposed to be what was essential to sensuous-certainty, is now the inessential, since the universal, which the object has come to be, is no longer the kind of universal which the object was essentially supposed to be for sensuous-certainty. Rather, sensuous-certainty is now present in what is opposed to it, namely, in the knowing which previously was the inessential. Its truth is in the object as my object, or, in what I mean; the object is because I know it. Sensuous-certainty is, to be sure, thus driven out of the object, but it is not yet thereby sublated. Rather, it is only pushed back into the I, and it is still to be seen what experience will show us about sensuous-certainty's reality.

101. The force of its truth thus lies now in the I, in the immediacy of my seeing, hearing, etc. The disappearance of the singular Now and Here that we mean is deterred because I hold fast to them. Now is daytime because I see it; here is a tree for precisely the same reason. However, sensuous-certainty experiences in these relationships the same dialectic as it did within the preceding relationships. I, this, see the tree and assert the tree to be here. However, another I sees the house and asserts that there is no tree here but rather a house. Both truths have the same warrant, namely, the immediacy of seeing and the surety and assurance which both have about their knowing. However, one vanishes into the other.

102. In all this, what does not disappear is I as universal, whose seeing is neither a seeing of the tree nor of this house. Rather, it is a simple seeing, which is mediated by the negation of this house and so forth. It is therein just as simple and indifferent towards that which is still in play in the background vis-à-vis the house and the tree. I is only universal in the way that now, here, or this is universal. To be sure, I mean an individual I, but I can no more say what I mean by “now,” “here,” than I can say what I mean by “I.” While I say: “This here, this now, or a singular,” I say: “All this's, all heres, nows, singulars.” Likewise in that I say: “I, this singular I,” what I say is “All I's.” Each is what I say it is: I, this singular I. However much this demand is set before science as its touchstone (a demand which it would surely not last out), namely, that it deduce, construct, find a priori, or however one wishes to express it, a so-called “this thing” or “this person,” still it is reasonable that the demand should state which of the many things “this thing” or which of the “I's” “this I” means. But it is impossible to state this.

103. Sensuous-certainty therefore learns from experience that its essence is neither in the object nor in the I, and that the immediacy is an immediacy of neither one or the other of them, for in both, what I mean is instead what is inessential, 67and the object and I are universals in which the Now and the Here and the I that I mean do not endure, or are not. We thereby come to posit the whole of sensuous-certainty itself as its essence and no longer only as a moment of sensuous-certainty, as happened in both cases, in which at first the object opposed to the I and then the I itself were each supposed to be the reality of sensuous-certainty. It is thus only the whole of sensuous-certainty itself, which clings tenaciously in such sensuous-certainty to immediacy and which thereby excludes from itself all the opposition that took place in what preceded.

104. This pure immediacy therefore no longer has any concern with the otherness of the Here as a tree, which is a Here that is a non-tree, nor with the otherness of Now as daytime, which passes over into a Now that is night, nor with another I, for which something other is the object. Its truth is preserved as a self-consistent relation which makes no difference of essentiality and non-essentiality between the I and the object, and into which therefore no difference at all can force its entry. I, this I, assert therefore that here is a tree, and it is not the case that I turn around so that the Here would become for me not a tree, or that I myself at another time take the Here not to be a tree, the now not to be the daytime, etc. Rather, I am pure intuiting, and I stick with, namely, that “Now is daytime,” or else I also stick with “Here is a tree.” I also do not compare the Here and the Now themselves with each other; rather, I cling tenaciously to an immediate relation: “Now it is daytime.”

105. Since this certainty itself thereby no longer wishes to step forward when we draw its attention to a Now that is night, or to an I for which it is night, we step up to it and let ourselves point to the Now that is asserted. We must let ourselves point to it, for the truth of this immediate relation is the truth of this I which limits itself to a Now or to a Here. If we were afterwards to take up this truth or to stand at a distance from it, it would have no meaning at all, for we would sublate the immediacy that is essential to it. Thus, we must enter into the same point of time or space, point it out to ourselves, i.e., allow ourselves to be made into the same I as that is a knowing with certainty. Let us see, therefore, how what is immediate, which is pointed out to us, is composed.

106. The Now is pointed out, this Now. Now: It has already ceased to be as it was pointed out; the Now that is is an other than that pointed out, and we see that the Now is just this Now as it no longer is. The Now is, as it has been pointed out to us, what has been. This is its truth; it does not have the truth of being. It is nonetheless true that it has been. However, what has been is in fact no essence; it is not, and the issue at stake had to do with what is, with being.

107.68 In this pointing out, we therefore see only a movement and the following course of the movement. (1) I point out the Now, and it is asserted to be the true. However, I point to it as something that has been and thus sublate the first truth, and (2) I assert the Now as the second truth, that it has been, that it is sublated. (3) However, what has been is not; I sublate that second truth, that it has been, or, its having-been-sublated,⁴ and, in doing that, I negate the negation of the Now and so turn back to the first assertion, namely, that Now is. The Now and the pointing out of the Now are therefore composed in such a way that neither the Now nor the pointing out of the now are what is immediately simple. Rather, they are a movement which has various moments in it; this is posited, but instead it is an other which is posited, or the This is sublated, and this otherness, or the sublation of the first, is itself again sublated and in that way returns back to the first. However, as reflected into itself, this “first” is not wholly and precisely the same as what it was initially, namely, an immediate. Rather, it is just something reflected into itself, or a simple which remains in otherness what it is, namely, a Now which is absolutely many Nows, and this is the genuine Now, or the now as the simple daytime that has many Nows within it (that is, hours). Such a Now, an hour, is equally many minutes, and it is this Now which is equally many Nows, etc. – Pointing out is thus itself the movement that declares what the Now in truth is, namely, a result, or a plurality of Nows taken together; and pointing out is the experience that the Now is a universal.

108. The Here that has been pointed out and to which I cling is likewise a this here, which is in fact not this here but is rather an in-front-of and behind, or an above and below, or a right and a left. The above is likewise this multifaceted otherness in the above, below, and so forth. The Here, which is supposed to be pointed out, vanishes into another Here, but that one likewise vanishes. What is pointed out, held onto, and which endures is a negative This, which only is as the heres are taken as they are supposed to be, but which, in being so taken, have sublated themselves; it is a simple summary of many Heres. The Here that is meant would be the [geometric] point.⁵ However, the point is not, but rather, as the point is demonstrated as existing,⁶ the demonstrating points to itself as showing itself to be not immediate knowing but instead a movement from out of the many Heres which were meant into the universal Here, which is a simple plurality of Heres in the way that the daytime is a simple plurality of Nows.

109. It is clear both that the dialectic of sensuous-certainty is nothing but the simple history of its movement (that is, its experience) and that sensuous-certainty itself is nothing but just this history. For that reason, natural consciousness also proceeds to this result, what is the true in sensuous-certainty, to keep pressing ever 69forward. It learns from experience about it, but then it likewise forgets it again, and then it starts the whole movement all over again right from the beginning. It is thus a bit astonishing when, in the face of this experience, it is set up as a philosophical assertion, or as a universal experience, or even as the outcome of skepticism, that the reality, or the being, of external things as this, or as sensuous, is to have absolute truth for consciousness. Such an assertion does not at the same time know what it is saying; it does not know that it is saying the opposite of what it wants to say. The truth of the sensuous This for consciousness is supposed to be a universal experience, but instead it is the opposite which is a universal experience. Each consciousness again itself sublates such a truth as, for example, here is a tree, or now is midday, and declares the opposite: Here is not a tree, but rather a house; and likewise it again straightaway sublates the assertion which sublated the first assertion as itself being only again an assertion of a sensuous This. What in truth has been experienced in all of sensuous-certainty is only what we have seen, namely, the this as a universal, or the very opposite of what that assertion assured us was the universal experience. – With this appeal to universal experience, we may be permitted to anticipate some concerns in the practical sphere. In this respect, what one can say to those who make assertions about the truth and reality of sensuous objects is that they should be sent back to the most elementary school of wisdom, namely, to the old Eleusinian secrets of Ceres and Bacchus, and that they have yet to learn the secret of the eating of bread and the drinking of wine. This is so because the person who has been initiated into these secrets not only comes to doubt the being of sensuous things, but rather arrives at despair about them. In part he brings about their nothingness, and in part he sees them do it to themselves. Nor are the animals excluded from this wisdom. Instead they prove themselves to be the most deeply initiated into it, for they do not stand still in the face of sensuous things, as if those things existed in themselves. Despairing of the reality of those things and in the total certainty of the nullity of those things, they without any further ado simply help themselves to them and devour them. Just like the animals, all of nature celebrates these revealed mysteries which teach the truth about sensuous things.

110. However, those who set up such assertions, in line with the previous remarks, also immediately say the opposite of what they mean, a phenomenon that is perhaps best able to bring them to reflect on the nature of sensuous-certainty. They speak of the existence of external objects, which, to put it more precisely, can be determined to be actual, absolutely singularly individual, wholly personal, individual things, each of which is absolutely unlike the others. 70This existence is said to have absolute certainty and truth. They mean this piece of paper on which I am writing (or rather have written) this. But they do not say what they mean. However much they actually wanted to say what they mean about this piece of paper, and however much they wanted to say it, still it would be impossible because the sensuous This, which is what is meant, is inaccessible to the language which belongs to consciousness, or to what is in itself universal. In the actual attempt to say it, it itself would thereby rot away. Those who began a description would not be able to complete it, but instead they would have to leave it to others, who would themselves finally have to confess to speaking about a thing that is not. They therefore do mean this piece of paper, which is here totally other than the one mentioned above, but they speak of actual things, external or sensuous objects, absolutely singular entities, etc. That is to say, they say of them only what is universal. Thus, what is called the unsayable is nothing other than the untrue, the irrational, what is the merely fancied.⁷ – If nothing more is said of a thing than that it is an actual thing, an external object, then it is only expressed as the most universal of all, and what is thereby expressed is its sameness with everything rather than its distinctiveness. If I say: “A singular thing,” then instead I say something entirely universal about it, for everything is a singular thing. Likewise, this thing is anything one pleases. To characterize it more precisely: As this piece of paper, every and each bit of paper is a “this piece of paper,” and I have only spoken, as usual, of the universal. However, if I wish to lend a helping hand to speech, which itself has the divine nature of immediately inverting the meaning, then of making it into something else, and in that way of not letting the meaning get into words at all, then by my pointing out this piece of paper, I thus learn from experience what the truth of sensuous-certainty in fact is. I point it out as a Here, which is a Here of other Heres, or which in its own self is a simple ensemble of many Heres, which is to say, is a universal. In that way, I receive it as it is in truth, and instead of knowing what is immediate, I perceive.

II. Perceiving; 71or the Thing and Illusion

111. Immediate certainty does not take hold of the truth, for its truth is the universal, but it does want to take hold of the This. On the other hand, perception takes what, to perception, is the existent⁸ as universal. As universality is perception's principle per se, its moments, which are immediately self-differentiating within it, are also universal, namely, I, a universal, and the object, a universal. That principle has emerged for us, and our taking up of perception is thus no longer a phenomenal taking up, as it was in sensuous-certainty, but is rather a necessary taking up. In the emergence of the principle, both moments, which in their phenomenal appearance only fall out of that appearance, have at the same time come to be. One of them is the very movement of pointing out, and the other is the same movement but as the simple. The former is perceiving, the latter is the object. According to its essence, the object is the same as the movement; the movement is the unfolding and difference of the moments, and the object is those moments as jointly grasped together. For us, or in itself, the universal is, as the principle, the essence of perceiving, and in contrast to this abstraction, both of the distinguished moments, namely, the perceiving and the perceived, are the inessential. However, because both are in fact the universal, or the essence, both are essential. But while they are related to each other as opposites, only one of them in the relation can be the essential, and the difference between the essential and the inessential must be shared between them. One of them, the object, determined as the simple, is the essence, indifferent as to whether it is perceived; however, as the movement, perceiving is what is not constant, which can be or also not be, and it is the inessential.

112. This object is now to be more precisely determined, and this determination is itself to be briefly developed from the results which have arisen. (At this point in the exposition, a more thorough development is not appropriate.) Since the object's principle, the universal, is in its simplicity a mediated simplicity, the object must express this on its own as its nature, and it thereby shows itself to be a thing of many properties. The wealth of sensuous knowing belongs to perception, not to immediate certainty, in which the object was only ancillary, for only the former (perception) has negation (the difference, or multiplicity) in its essence.

113.72 The This is therefore posited as not-this, or as sublated, and thereby as not nothing but as a determinate nothing, or as a nothing of a specific content, namely, of the This. The sensuous is thereby itself still present but not as it is supposed to be in immediate certainty, or as the singular that was meant, but instead as the universal, or as that which is determined to be a property. The sublation exhibits its truly doubled meaning, something which we already have seen in the negative; it is now a negating and at the same time a preserving. The nothing, as the nothing of the This, preserves immediacy and is itself sensuous, but is, however, a universal immediacy. – However, being is a universal as a result of its having mediation, or the negative, in its own self; while it expresses this in its immediacy, it is a differentiated, determinate property. Thereby many such properties are posited at the same time, and each one is the negative of the other. While they are expressed in the simplicity of the universal, these determinatenesses, which are really only properties through the addition of a determination yet to come, relate themselves to themselves, are indifferent to each other, and each is both on its own⁹ and is free-standing from the others. However, the simple self-equal universality is again distinguished from these, its determinations, and is free-standing. It is the pure relating-itself-to-itself, or the medium in which these determinations permeate each other in that universality as a simple unity without making contact with each other, for it is just through participation in this universality that each is on its own¹⁰ indifferent to the others. – As it has turned out, this abstract universal medium, which can be called thinghood itself, or the pure essence, is none other than the Here and Now, namely, as a simple togetherness of the many. However, the many are in their determinateness themselves simply universal. This salt is a simple Here and is at the same time manifold; it is white and also tart, also cubically shaped, also of a particular weight, etc. All of these many properties are in one simple Here in which they also permeate each other. None has a different Here from the others. Rather, each is everywhere in the same Here as are the others. At the same time, without being separated by way of the various Heres, they do not affect one another in this permeation; the white does not affect or alter the cubic shape, neither of them affects or alters the tartness, etc. Rather, since each itself is a simple relating-itself-to-itself, it leaves the others at rest and relates itself to them only through the indifferent Also. This Also is therefore the pure universal itself, or the medium, the thinghood keeping them together in that way.

114. As it has turned out, in this relationship, it is only the character 73of positive universality which is at first observed and developed. However, an aspect arises which must also be taken into consideration: If the many determinate properties were to be utterly indifferent and were for all intents and purposes related only to themselves, then they would still not be determinate properties, for they are determinate properties only insofar as they both differentiate themselves from each other and relate themselves to each other as opposites. However, according to this opposition, they could not be together in the simple unity of their medium which is as essential to them as is negation. Insofar as their difference within that unity does not amount to an indifferent difference but rather to an excluding difference, which itself amounts to a difference which negates others, so this difference thus falls outside of this simple medium. This simple medium is not only an Also, an indifferent unity; it is also a One, an excluding unity. – The One is the moment of negation, as it itself relates itself to itself in a simple way and excludes others and by which thinghood is determined as thing. As determinateness, the negation is in the property which is immediately at one with the immediacy of being, which, through the unity with negation, is universality. However, as One and as set free from this unity with its opposite, it is in and for itself.

115. In these moments taken all together, the thing, as the truth of perception, reaches its culmination, or at least insofar as it is necessary to develop that here. It is (α) the indifferent passive universality, the Also of the many properties, or rather, matters; (ß) likewise the negation as simple, or the One, the excluding of opposed properties; and (γ) the many properties themselves, the relation of the two first moments: The negation as it relates itself to the indifferent element and extends itself therein as a set of difference; the point of singular individuality in the medium of stable existence radiating out into multiplicity. According to the aspect in which these differences belong to the indifferent medium, the differences are themselves universal; each relates itself only to itself, and they do not affect each other. However, according to the aspect, in terms of which they belong to the negative unity, they at the same time exclude each other, but necessarily have this opposed relation to the properties, which are at a distance from their Also. The sensuous universality, or the immediate unity of being and the negative, is in that way the property insofar as the One and the pure universality are developed out of that unity, insofar both as they are differentiated from each other and as the unity merges them with each other. This relation of that unity to those pure essential moments finally brings the thing to its culmination.

116. Now, this is the way that the thing of perception is constituted, and consciousness is determined as perceiving consciousness insofar as this thing is its object. It only has to take the object¹¹ and to conduct itself as pure apprehension, and what thereby emerges for it is the true. If in this taking, it itself were to do something, it would alter the truth by adding or omitting something. While 74the object is the true and the universal, like unto itself, and while consciousness, to itself, is what is alterable and inessential, it can happen to consciousness that it apprehends the object incorrectly and deludes itself. The one who is perceiving is aware of the possibility of illusion, for in universality, which is the principle, otherness itself is immediately for him, but as nullity, as what is sublated. His criterion of truth is thus self-equality, and his conduct is to be grasped as self-equality. At the same time, while what is diverse is for the perceiver, the perceiver is a relating of the diverse moments of his comprehending to each other.¹² If an inequality differentiates itself in this comparison, then the relating is not an untruth of the object, for the object is what is equal to itself. It is an untruth of perceiving itself.

117. Let us now see what consciousness learns from experience in its actual perceiving. This experience is already contained for us in the development just given of the object and in the conduct of consciousness towards the object, and the experience will only be the development of the contradictions present in that development. – The object that I take up presents itself as purely One. I am also cognizant of the property in it, which is universal, but as a result, I go beyond that singularity. The first being of the objective essence as a One was thus not its true being. Since the object is what is true, the untruth falls within me, and the apprehending was incorrect. On account of the universality of the property, I must instead take the objective essence as a community anyway. I now further perceive the property as determinate, as opposed to an other, and as excluding it. I thus in fact did not apprehend the objective essence correctly when I determined it as a community with others, or as continuity, and, according to the determinateness of the property, I must in fact break up the continuity into pieces and posit the objective essence as an excluding One. In the broken-up One, I find many such properties, which do not affect each other but which instead are indifferent to each other. I did not perceive the object correctly when I grasped it as something which excludes. Rather, just as it previously was, it is only continuity in general, so that now it is a universal communal medium in which there are many properties as sensuous universalities, each existing on its own,¹³ and, which as determinate, excludes the others. The simple and true which I however perceive is thereby also not a universal medium but rather a singular property for itself. However, in that way it is neither a property nor a determinate being, for it is now neither in a One nor in relation to others. But it is a property only in the One and is only determinate in relation to others. As this pure relating-itself-to-itself, it remains 75only sensuous being per se, since it no longer has in its own self the character of negativity, and consciousness, for which a sensuous being now is, amounts only to meaning something, which is to say, it has entirely gone beyond perceiving and has taken an inward turn back into itself. Yet sensuous being and meaning something each themselves pass over into perceiving. I am thus thrown back to the beginning and pulled back into the same cycle which sublates itself both in each moment and as a whole.

118. Consciousness therefore necessarily runs through that cycle again, but not in the same way it did at first. It has learned from experience about perceiving, namely, that its result and its truth are its dissolution, or that perceiving is the reflective turn into itself from out of the true. For consciousness, it has thereby been determined just how its perceiving is essentially composed, namely, it is not a simple, pure comprehending,¹⁴ but rather in its comprehending has at the same time taken a reflective turn into itself from out of the true. This return of consciousness into itself, which immediately blends itself into that pure comprehending¹⁵ – for it has been shown to be essential to perceiving – alters the true. At the same time, consciousness takes cognizance¹⁶ of this aspect as its own, it takes it upon itself, and, as a result, it purely receives the true object. – Thereby, now there is present in perceiving, just as happened with sensuous-certainty, the aspect of consciousness which had been forced back into itself. However, this is not as it was initially as it took place in sensuous-certainty, as if the truth of perceiving were to be subsumed within the sphere of sensuous-certainty. Instead, consciousness take cognizance¹⁷ that the untruth, which comes to the fore here, falls within consciousness. However, through this taking-cognizance,¹⁸ consciousness is capable of sublating the untruth. Consciousness differentiates its grasping the true from the untruth of its perceiving, it corrects its perceiving, and insofar as it itself undertakes this correction, the truth, as the truth of perceiving, falls without further ado into consciousness. The conduct of consciousness, which is now to be scrutinized, is so constituted that it is no longer merely perceiving but is conscious of its reflective turn into itself, and it separates this reflective turn into itself from simple apprehension itself.

119. At first, I view the thing as one, and I have to hold fast to it in this true determination. If in the movement of perceiving, there is something which comes up which contradicts that perceiving, then this is to be cognized as my reflection. Now, in perception various properties turn up that seem to be properties of things, yet the thing is One, and we ourselves are conscious of this diversity through which it ceases to be One as falling within us. The thing is therefore in fact only white as it is brought to our eyes, it is also tart on our tongues, and also cubical to our feel, etc. We do not take the entire diversity of these aspects from the thing but from ourselves. To us, they come undone from each other in this way because the eye is quite distinct from the tongue, and so on. We are thus the universal medium 76within which such moments dissociate themselves from each other, and in which each is on its own.¹⁹ Thereby, since we regard this determinateness (that we are the universal medium) as our reflection, we preserve the self-equality and the truth of the thing, namely, its being One.

120. However, the diverse aspects which consciousness takes upon itself are determinate in that each is regarded as existing for itself within the universal medium. White is only in contrast to black, etc., and the thing is One precisely as a result of its being contrasted with others. However, it does not exclude others from itself insofar as it is One, for to be One is to be the universal relating-itself-to-itself, and as a result of its being One, it is instead the same as all others. Rather, it is through its determinateness that it excludes others. The things themselves are thus determinate in and for themselves; they have properties whereby they are differentiated from others. As the property is the thing's own property, or a determinateness in its own self, it has multiple properties. For, in the first place, the thing is the true, it is in itself, and what is in its own self is in its own self its own essence, not on account of others. Second, the determinate properties thus are not only on account of other things and are for other things but are on their own. However, they are determinate properties in the thing only while there are many of them and each is differentiated from the other. Third, while they are in that way within thinghood, they are in and for themselves and are indifferent to each other. Therefore, in truth it is the thing itself which is white and also cubical, also tart, etc., or the thing is the Also, which to say, it is the universal medium in which the many properties stably exist externally to each other, and where none makes contact with the other, and none is sublated. Taken in that way, the thing is taken to be the true.

121. Now, in this perceiving, consciousness is at the same time conscious that it also reflects itself into itself and that in perceiving, the moment opposed to the Also crops up. However, this moment is the unity of the thing with itself which excludes difference from itself. It is accordingly the unity that consciousness has to take upon itself, for the thing itself is the stable existence of many various and independent properties. It is therefore said of the thing: It is white, also cubical, and also tart, etc. However, insofar as it is white, it is not cubical, and insofar as it is cubical and also white, it is not tart, etc. The positing-into-a-one²⁰ of these properties belongs only to consciousness, which thus has to avoid letting them fall into a One in the thing. To that end, consciousness brings into play the Insofar whereby it keeps the properties apart from each other and it keeps the thing as the Also. Quite rightly, consciousness takes upon itself the Oneness in such a way so that what was called a property is now represented as a free-standing matter. In this way, the thing is elevated into being a genuine Also, while it becomes a collection of matters and, instead of being a One, it becomes merely an enclosing surface.

122. 77If we look back at what consciousness previously took upon itself and look at what it now takes upon itself, or look at what it had previously ascribed to the thing and what it now ascribes to itself, it turns out that it alternately makes itself, as well as the thing, into both a pure One without multiplicity and into an Also dissolved into self-sufficient matters. Through the comparison, consciousness thus finds that not only its “taking the true”²¹ has in itself the diversity of [the act of] comprehending²² and that of returning-into-itself, but it also finds that the true itself, the thing, instead shows itself to be in this doubled fashion. Therefore, what is present is the experience of the thing which exhibits itself in a determinate way for the comprehending consciousness²³ but at the same time takes itself in terms of the way in which it offers itself and is reflected itself back into itself, or in its own self it has an opposed truth.

123. Consciousness has thus also outside of this second way of conducting itself in perceiving, namely, to take the thing as the true, the thing as self-equal, but to take itself to be the unequal, to be what is returning back into itself from out of equality; and the object now is, to consciousness, this whole movement which previously was shared between consciousness and the thing. The thing is One, reflected into itself; it is for itself, but it is also for an other, namely, it is an other for itself as it is for an other. The thing thereby is for itself and also for an other, a doubly diverse being, but it is also One. However, its oneness contradicts its diversity; consciousness would thereby have to take this positing-into-a-one upon itself again and keep it apart from the thing. It would therefore have to say that the thing, insofar as it is for itself is not for others. Yet, as consciousness has learned from experience, oneness also corresponds to the thing itself; the thing is essentially reflected into itself. The Also, or the indifferent difference, falls just as much into the thing as it does into oneness, but since both are different, it does not fall into the same thing but rather into different things. The contradiction, which is per se in the objective essence, is distributed into two objects. The thing therefore is in and for itself, self-equal, but this unity with itself is disturbed through other things. In that way, the unity of the thing is preserved and, at the same time, that otherness, which is external to the thing just as it is to consciousness, is preserved.

124. Now, to be sure, although the contradiction in the objective essence is shared among various things, the difference will for that very reason reach as far as the isolated singularly individual thing itself. The various things are therefore posited as each existing for itself, and the conflict falls into each of them reciprocally such that each is different not from itself but only from others. However, each is thereby itself determined as something different and has the essential difference from others in it,²⁴ but at the same time not in such a way that this would be an opposition in its own 79self. Rather, it is for itself simple determinateness, which constitutes its essential character and differentiates it from others. Since diversity is in it, the same difference necessarily is as an actual difference of multiple constitutions in it. Yet because the determinateness constitutes the essence of the thing, whereby it distinguishes itself from others and is for itself, this otherwise multiple constitution is the inessential. Within its unity, the thing thereby has in itself the doubled Insofar, but with unequal values. As a result, its being-posited-in-opposition does not therefore become an actual opposition of the thing itself. Rather, insofar as this thing comes into opposition through its absolute difference, it has that opposition vis-à-vis another thing external to itself. However, the other multiplicity is also, to be sure, necessarily in the thing such that it cannot be kept away from the thing, but it is inessential to it.

125. This determinateness, which constitutes the essential character of the thing and which differentiates it from all others, is now determined in such a way that the thing thereby is in opposition to others but is supposed to preserve itself for itself in that opposition. However, it is only a thing, or a One existing for itself insofar as it does not stand in this relation to others, for instead in this relation, the connection to others is posited, and the connection to others is the cessation of being-for-itself. Directly through the absolute kind²⁵ and its opposition, it relates itself²⁶ to others and essentially it is only this relating. However, the relationship is the negation of its self-sufficiency, and the thing instead perishes through its essential property.

126. The necessity of the experience for consciousness is that the thing perishes through the very determinateness which constitutes both its essence and its being-for-itself. According to its simple concept, this experience can be briefly looked at in this way. The thing is posited as being-for-itself, or as the absolute negation of all otherness. Thus, it is posited as the absolute negation relating only itself to itself, but negation relating itself to itself is just the sublation of itself, or it has its essence in an other.

127. As the object has shown itself to be, the determination of the object in fact contains nothing else. The object is supposed to have an essential property which constitutes its simple being-for-itself, but in this simplicity, it is also supposed to have diversity in its own self, which in turn is indeed supposed to be necessary but which is indeed not supposed to constitute its essential determinateness. However, this is only a verbal difference; something which is inessential but which at the same time is nonetheless supposed to be necessary is something which is 79self-sublating. That is, it is what was just called the negation of itself.

128. The last Insofar which separated being-for-itself and being-for-others thereby falls by the wayside. Instead, the object is in one and same respect the opposite of itself; it is for itself insofar as it is for others, and it is for others insofar as it for itself. It is for itself, reflected into itself, One. However, this for itself reflected into itself, Oneness, is posited as existing in a unity with its opposite, with being for an other, and for that reason is posited only as what is sublated. Or, this being-for-itself is just as inessential as that which alone was supposed to be inessential, namely, the relationship to an other.

129. The object is thereby sublated in its pure determinateness, or in the various determinatenesses which were supposed to constitute its essentiality, in the same way as it had been sublated in its sensuous being. From out of sensuous being, it becomes a universal, but since it emerged from out of the sensuous, this universal is essentially conditioned by the sensuous and is thus not truly self-equal. Rather, it is a universality affected with an opposition, which for that reason is separated into the extremes of singularity and universality, of the One of properties and of the Also of the free-standing matters. These pure determinatenesses seem to express essentiality itself, but they are only a being-for-itself which is burdened with being for an other. But while both are essentially in one unity, unconditioned absolute universality itself is now present, and for the first time consciousness truly enters into the realm of the understanding.

130. Sensuous singularity therefore does indeed vanish in the dialectical movement of immediate certainty and becomes universality, but it becomes only sensuous universality. Meaning-something has vanished, and perceiving takes the object as it is in itself, or as a universal as such. Singularity emerges in the object as true singularity, as the being-in-itself of the One, or as being-reflected into itself. However, it [the One] is still a conditioned being-for-itself, alongside which another being-for-itself comes into view, a universality opposed to singularity and conditioned by singularity. However, both of these contradictory extremes are not only alongside each other but rather are in one unity, or, what amounts to the same thing, that which is common to both. Being-for-itself is burdened altogether with an opposition, which is to say that it is at the same time not a being-for-itself. The sophistry of perceiving seeks to save these moments from their contradictions, to cling tenaciously to them by distinguishing various points of view and by invoking the Also and the Insofar, as well as finally seeking to take hold of the true by distinguishing the inessential from an essence which is opposed to the universal. Yet these expedients, instead of warding off illusion in the [act of] 80comprehending,²⁷ turn out to be null and void, and the true, which is supposed to be won through this logic of perceiving, turns out to be in one and the same regard the very opposite and thereby to have as its essence the universality completely devoid of difference and determination.

131. These empty abstractions of singularity and of the universality opposed to it, as well as the empty abstraction of essence which is bound up with an inessential, or an inessential which is nonetheless at the same time necessary, are the powers whose play is the perceptual understanding, often called healthy common sense. That healthy common sense which takes itself to be solid, real consciousness, is, in perceiving, only the play of these abstractions, and that common sense is the poorest exactly at the point where it means to be the richest. While it is pushed around by these empty essences and is thus thrown out of the arms of one abstraction into the arms of another, and, through its own sophistry, alternately goes to all the trouble of tenaciously clinging to one of them and asserting it to be true, only then to turn around and assert its opposite to be true, and then to set itself against the truth, it says that philosophy only deals with thought-things.²⁸ In fact, philosophy also deals with such thought-things, and at the same time it is cognizant²⁹ of them in their determinateness and for that reason is master over them,³⁰ whereas the perceiving understanding takes them to be the true, and such thoughts send it on its way from one error to another. Perceptual understanding does not amount to the awareness that it is those kinds of simple essentialities which are governing in it; rather, it always supposes that it is dealing with entirely solid material and content, just as sensuous-certainty does not know that the empty abstraction of pure being is its essence. However, the essentialities are in fact that in which the perceptual understanding runs hither and thither through all material and content; they are the cohesiveness of and what rules that material and content, and they alone are what the sensuous, as essence, is for consciousness. They alone are what determines the relation between consciousness and the sensible, and they are alone that in which the movement of perceiving as well as that of its truth runs its course. This course, a constant alternation between determining the truth and sublating this determining, genuinely constitutes the everyday and constant life and drive both of perceiving and of the consciousness which supposes that its own movement takes place within the truth. Within that life, consciousness incessantly presses forward to the result in which it sublates all these essential essentialities or determinations. However, in each singular moment, it is conscious only of this one determinateness of the true and then again of its contrary. It no doubt suspects their inessentiality and in order to save them from the danger threatening them, it passes over into sophistry where it asserts as true what it had just asserted as untrue. Just where the nature of these untrue essences really wants to push this understanding is to bring together all those thoughts 81of that universality and singularity, of the Also and the One, of that essentiality that is necessarily bound up with an inessentiality and of an inessentiality that is nonetheless necessary – that is, to push it to bring together the thoughts of these non-essences and thereby to sublate them. In contrast, the understanding strives to avoid this by basing its support on the Insofar and the various considerations, or by taking upon itself one thought in order to keep the other thoughts separated from it and to preserve it as the true thought. However, the nature of these abstractions bring them together in and for themselves; common sense is the prey of these abstractions which, in all their spinning circularities, bring it to such grief. While healthy common sense wants to bestow truth on them, sometimes by their untruth onto itself, sometimes by calling the semblance of unreliable things an illusion, and sometimes by separating the essential from the necessary but nonetheless inessential, and by clinging to the former as their truth in the face of the latter, in doing so, it does not secure their truth for them, but it does manage to bestow untruth on itself.

III. Force 82and the Understanding; Appearance and the Supersensible World

132. In the dialectic of sensuous-certainty, hearing and seeing are bygones for consciousness, and, as perceiving, consciousness has arrived at thoughts, which it brings together only in the unconditioned universal. This unconditioned would now itself again be nothing but the extreme of being-for-itself set off to one side were it to be taken to be a motionless simple essence, in which case the non-essence would confront the unconditioned. However, related to the non-essence, it would be itself non-essential, and consciousness would have not gotten out of the illusion of perceiving. Yet that universal has turned out to be such that it has returned into itself from out of such conditioned being-for-itself. – This unconditioned universal, which is henceforth the true object of consciousness, is still an object of consciousness; consciousness has not yet grasped its concept as concept. Both are essentially to be distinguished from each other. To consciousness, the object has returned into itself from out of its relations to an other and has thereby come to be in itself concept. However, consciousness is not yet for itself the concept, and it thus does not yet recognize³¹ itself in that reflected object. For us, this object has come to be through the movement of consciousness so that this consciousness is interwoven in the coming-to-be of the object, and the reflection is the same on both sides, or is only one reflection. However, because in this movement consciousness only had the objective essence and not consciousness as such as its content, the result for consciousness is to be posited in its objective meaning. Consciousness itself is still withdrawing from what has come to be so that to consciousness the essence is what has come to be as objective.

133. The understanding has thereby sublated its own untruth and the untruth of the object, and what to it as a result has come to be is the concept of the true as the true existing in itself, which is not yet the concept, or which lacks the being-for-itself of consciousness, and which the understanding without knowing itself to be doing so, allows to go its own way. This, the true, works out its essence for itself so that consciousness has no part in its free realization but instead only watches it and purely grasps it. First of all, we therefore have to 83step into its place and to be the concept that works out what is contained in the result. In this fully worked-out object, which presents itself to consciousness as an existing result, consciousness first becomes, to itself, a comprehending consciousness.³²

134. The result was the unconditioned universal, at first in the negative and abstract sense that consciousness negated its one-sided concepts and abstracted them, that is to say, it gave them up. However, the result has in itself the positive meaning that therein the unity of being-for-itself and being-for-an-other, or the absolute opposition is immediately posited as the same essence. It seems at first only to concern the form of the moments with regard to each other; however, being-for-itself and being-for-others are just as much the content itself because the opposition in its truth can have no other nature than that which has turned up in the result, namely, that the content, which was held to be true in perceiving, in fact only belongs to the form, and it dissolves into the form's unity. This content is at the same time universal; there can be no other content which through its particular composition would withdraw from returning into this unconditioned universal. Such a content would be some kind of determinate mode of being for itself and mode of relating itself to others. Yet to be for itself and to relate itself to others, full stop, constitutes its nature and essence, whose truth lies in its being the unconditioned universal, and the result is absolutely universal.

135. However, because this unconditioned universal is an object for consciousness, the difference of form and content emerges in it, and, in the shape of content, the moments have the look in which they first presented themselves: On the one hand, to be a universal medium of many stably existing matters, and, on the other hand, to be a One reflected into itself, in which this self-sufficiency is eradicated. The former is the dissolution of the self-sufficiency of the thing, or, the passivity that is being for an other, whereas the latter, however, is being for itself. It remains to be seen how these moments will display themselves in that unconditioned universality which is their essence. In the first place, it becomes clear that as a result of their existing only within that unconditioned universality they no longer diverge from each other at all;³³ rather, in themselves they are essentially self-sublating aspects, and what is posited is only that transition of each of them into each other.

136. The one moment therefore appears as the essence set off to one side, as the universal medium, or as the stable existence of self-sufficient matters. However, the self-sufficiency of these matters is nothing but the medium, or, this universal is, to all intents and purposes, the multiplicity of such distinct universals. The universal is in its own self in undivided unity with this multiplicity, which means, however, that these matters are each where the other is; they reciprocally permeate each other – without, however, touching each other because, on the other side of the coin, the many distinct matters are likewise self-sufficient. 84At the same time, their pure porousness, or their sublation, is thereby also posited. This sublation, or the reduction of this diversity to pure being-for-itself, is again nothing but the medium itself, and this medium is the self-sufficiency of the differences. Or, those differences which are posited as self-sufficient immediately pass over into their unity, and their unity immediately passes over into an unfolding,³⁴ and this unfolding immediately passes back into the reduction. This movement is, however, what is called force. One moment of this, namely, the force as the propagation of the self-sufficient matters in their being, is their expression. However, the force as the disappearance of the self-sufficient matters is the force driven out of its expression back into itself, or the genuine force. However, the force, first driven back into itself, must express itself, and, second, in the expression, the force is just as much the force existing within itself as it is the expression in this inwardly-turned-being. – While in that way we preserve both moments in their immediate unity, the concept of force really belongs to the understanding. The understanding is itself really the concept, and it supports the different moments as different, for on their own, they are not supposed to be different. The difference thereby is only in thought. – That is, in the foregoing what was posited was in fact only the concept of force and not its reality. However, the force is in fact the unconditioned universal, which is in itself just what it is for an other. That is, it is what has the difference in itself – for the difference is nothing but being-for-others. – Because the force is said to be in its truth, it must be set entirely free from thoughts and must be posited as the substance of these differences, which means at one time that the substance, as this whole force, essentially is enduring in and for itself, and it then means that its differences endure as substantial, or as moments enduring for themselves. The force as such, or as driven back into itself, is thereby for itself as an excluding One for which the unfolding of the matters is another stably existing essence. In that way two distinct self-sufficient aspects are posited. However, the force is also the whole, or it remains what it is according to its concept. This is to say that these differences remain pure forms, superficial vanishing moments. At the same time, the differences between the genuine force driven back into itself and the unfolding of the self-sufficient matters would not be at all if they were not to have a stable existence, or the force would not be if it did not exist in these opposing ways. However, their existing in these opposing ways means nothing but that both moments are themselves at the same time self-sufficient. – This movement of the two moments as stably-existing-rendering-themselves-self-sufficient³⁵ and then as “again sublating themselves” is what is now up for examination. – In general it is clear that this movement is nothing but the movement of perceiving itself in which both aspects, namely, the perceiver and, at the same time, the perceived, as the apprehending of the true are at one time One and are not differentiated from each other, 85but at another time each aspect is just as well reflected into itself, or is for itself. Here both of these aspects are moments of force; they are as much in a unity as this unity (which appears as the mediating middle with regard to the extremes being for themselves) is forever falling apart into these very extremes (which are as a result of this falling apart). – The movement, which previously turned out to be the self-defeating contradictory concept, therefore here has objective form and is a movement of force, the result of which is the emergence of the unconditioned-universal as the un-objective, or as the inner of things.

137. While in the way it has been determined, force is represented as such, or as reflected into itself, force is one aspect of its own concept, but as a substantialized extreme, namely, as the extreme posited under the determinateness of the One. The stable existence of the unfolded matters is thereby excluded from force, and it is an other than force. While it is necessary that force itself is supposed to be this stable existence, or while it is necessary that force express itself, its expression is represented so that this other approaches it and solicits it. However, while force indeed necessarily expresses itself, in its own self it has what was posited as another essence. The assertion must be retracted that force is posited as a One, and that its essence, which is to express itself, is posited as an other joining it from the outside. Instead, force is itself this universal medium of the stable existence of the moments as matters or force has expressed itself, and instead what is supposed to be the soliciting other is force. Force therefore now exists as the medium of the unfolded matters. However, it has without more ado essentially the form of the sublatedness of the stably existing matters, or it is essentially One; this being-one³⁶ is thereby now an other than force, since force is posited as the medium of the matters, and force has this, its essence, external to itself. However, while force must necessarily be what it is not yet posited as being, this other joins it in that way and solicits it to a reflective turn into itself, or the other sublates its expression. However, force itself really is itself this being-reflected-into-itself, or the sublatedness of the expression. The oneness vanishes in the way it appeared, namely, as an other. Force is itself this other; force is force driven into itself.

138. What came on the scene as an other, which solicited force to expression as well as solicited it to return into itself, is, as it immediately turns out, itself force, for the other shows itself to be a universal medium as well as a One, and it does this in such a way that each of these shapes emerges at the same time only as a vanishing moment. Hence, as a result of an other existing for it and it existing for an other, force has in no way come out from its concept. At the same time, there are two forces present, and the concept of both is, to be sure, the same; however, the concept has gone out from its unity and entered into duality. Instead of the opposition remaining entirely and essentially for just a moment, it seems to have withdrawn from the unity's dominion over it through its estrangement into entirely self-sufficient forces. 86What is at stake in this self-sufficiency needs to be viewed more precisely. First of all, the second force emerges as the soliciting force, in fact according to its content, as a universal medium, as facing off with what is determined to be the solicited force. However, while the former, the second force, is essentially the flux of both moments and is itself force, it is in fact likewise only the universal medium as a result of its being solicited to that end and likewise is also a negative unity, or it solicits the recession of force as a result of its being solicited. This difference, which came to pass between both forces such that one of them was supposed to be the soliciting and the other the solicited force, is thereby transformed into the same reciprocal exchange of determinatenesses.

139. The play of both forces thereby consists in this oppositional determinateness on both parts, or in their being-for-each-other within both this determination and the absolute immediate flux of the determinations – within a transition, as a result of which alone these determinations are that in which the forces seem to make their appearance self-sufficiently. The one which is soliciting is, for example, posited as a universal medium and, in contrast, the solicited one as the force driven back. However, the former is a universal medium itself only as a result of the other being the force that is driven back; or, the latter is instead the one that is soliciting for the former and is what makes the former into a medium in the first place. The former only has its determinateness through the other, and it is soliciting only insofar as it is solicited by the other. It immediately loses as well this determinateness given to it, for this determinateness passes over into the other, or, instead, it has already passed over into that other. What is alien and is soliciting the force emerges as a universal medium but only as a result of its having been solicited by the other force; which is to say that the force posits it in that way and is instead itself essentially the universal medium. It posits what is soliciting in such a way for the reason that this other determination is essential to it, which is to say, because it is instead the other determination itself.

140. For the completion of the insight into the concept of this movement, attention can be drawn to the following. The differences themselves show themselves to be within a duplicated difference, at one time as differences of content, while the one extreme is the force reflected into itself, and the other extreme is the medium of the matters; at another time as differences of form, while one solicits, the other is solicited, and the former is active, whereas the latter is passive. According to the difference of content, they are as such, or for us, differentiated. However, according to the difference of form they are self-sufficient in their relation to each other, separating themselves off from each other and opposing themselves to each other. That, according to both aspects, the extremes are nothing in themselves, but rather (within that which their differentiated essence ought to stably exist) only vanishing moments, each an immediate transition into the 87opposite, becomes for the consciousness in perception the movement of force. However, for us (as noted above), there was also still this: In themselves the differences vanished as differences of content and of form and, on the side of form, according to the essence, the active, the soliciting force, or what-is-existing-for-itself, was the same as what, on the side of the content, was the force driven back into itself. The passive, solicited, or what is existing-for-an-other on the side of form, exhibits itself as the same as that which on the side of content turned out to be the universal medium of the many matters.

141. What results from all of this is that the concept of force becomes actual through its being doubled into two forces and evident how it becomes actual. These two forces exist as essences existing for themselves; but their existence lies in the kind of movement of each against the other so that their being is instead a pure being-posited through an other, which is to say, that the pure meaning of their being is instead that of vanishing. They are not like extremes which retain something fixed for themselves and transmit only an external property to each other in the mediating middle and in their contact. Rather, they are what they are only in this mediating middle and this contact. Immediately therein there is the force driven back into itself, or the being-for-itself of force, as there is the expression, or the soliciting as much as the solicited. These moments are thereby not distributed into two extremes which would only proffer an opposing tip. Rather, their essence is purely and simply this: Each is only through the other; what each is through the other is immediately no longer to be while it is the other. They thereby in fact have no substance of their own which would support and preserve them. The concept of force sustains itself instead as the essence in its actuality itself. The force as actual is purely and simply in the expression, which at the same time is nothing but a self-sublation. This actual force, represented as free-standing from its expression and as existing for itself, is the force driven back into itself; however, as it has turned out, this determinateness is in fact itself only a moment of expression. The truth of force remains therefore only the thought of force; and without pause, the moments of its actuality, its substances, and its movement collapse together into an undifferentiated unity, which is not the force driven back into itself since this is itself only one such moment. Rather, this unity is its concept as concept. The realization of force is therefore at the same time the loss of reality; it has instead become within that movement wholly other, namely, this universality, which the understanding at first, or immediately, cognizes as its essence, and which also proves itself to be its essence in what is supposed to be its reality, in the actual substances.

142. 88Insofar as we consider the first universal as the concept of the understanding, in which force does not yet exist for itself, so the second universal is now its essence as it exhibits itself in and for itself. Or, conversely, if we regard the first universal as the immediate, which is supposed to be an actual object for consciousness, then this second universal is determined as the negative of the sensuously objective force. It is force as it is in its true essence, as the object of the understanding. The former, the first universal, would be the force driven back into itself, or the force as substance; however, the second universal is the inner of things as the inner, which is the same as the concept as concept.

143. This genuine essence of things now has been determined as not existing immediately for consciousness. Rather, consciousness has a mediated relation to the inner, and, as the understanding, it looks into the true background of things by means of this mediating middle of the play of forces. The mediating middle, which merges together the two extremes (the understanding and the inner) is the developed being of force, which for the understanding is henceforth a vanishing. For that reason, it is called appearance, for being that is immediately in its own self a non-being is what is called semblance. However, it is not only a semblance but rather an appearance, a whole of semblances. This whole as a whole, or a universal, is what constitutes the inner, the play of forces as that play's reflective turn into itself.³⁷ Within that play, the essences of perception are so posited for consciousness in the objective mode as they are in themselves, namely, as moments immediately transforming themselves into their opposites, without rest and without being, the One immediately transforming itself into the universal and immediately transforming the essential into the inessential and vice versa. This play of forces is thus the developed negative. However, the truth of the play of forces is the positive, namely, the universal, the object existing in itself. – The being of that object for consciousness is mediated through the movement of appearance, in which the being of perception and what is sensuously objective have only a negative meaning, and out of which consciousness therefore reflects itself into itself as reflecting itself into the true. However, again as consciousness, it makes this, the true, into the objectively inner and distinguishes the reflection of things into themselves from its own reflection-into-self, just as into consciousness, the mediating movement is still as much an objective movement. This inner thus is to consciousness an extreme confronting it. However, for that reason it is, to consciousness, the true, because therein, as it does in the in-itself, it has the certainty of itself, or the moment of its being-for-itself. However, it is not yet conscious of this ground, for being-for-itself, which is supposed to have the inner in its own self, would be nothing but the negative movement. But to consciousness, this negative movement is still the objectively 89vanishing appearance, not yet its own being-for-itself. The inner is to consciousness undeniably the concept, but consciousness is not yet acquainted with the nature of the concept.

144. In this inner true, as the absolutely universal which is purified of the opposition of universal and singular and which has come to be for the understanding, is disclosed for the first time and henceforth a supersensible world as the true world over and above the sensuous world (as the appearing world). That is, over and above the vanishing this-worldliness,³⁸ there is disclosed an enduring other-worldly beyond,³⁹ an in-itself which is the first and for that reason incomplete appearance of reason, or the pure element in which the truth has its essence.

145. With that, our object is henceforth the syllogism, which has, for its extreme terms, the inner of things and the understanding, and, for its middle term, appearance. However, the movement of this syllogism yields the further determination of what the understanding, through the middle term, beholds in this inner. It also yields what it learns from experience about this relation of syllogistic closure.⁴⁰

146. The inner is still a pure other-worldly beyond for consciousness, for consciousness does not encounter itself within it. The inner is empty, for it is only the nothingness of appearance and, positively, the simple universal. This way of being the inner meets with immediate agreement among those who say that the inner of things is not to be known;⁴¹ however, the ground for this assertion should be understood in a different way. There is certainly no acquaintance with the inner, in the way that it is immediately here, but this is not because reason would be too short-sighted, or restricted, or whatever else one wants to call it. Why this is so is not something especially well known to us here, for we have not yet gone very deeply into the matter. Rather, it has to do with the simple nature of what is at stake,⁴² because in the void, nothing is known, or, to speak about it in another way, because it is defined⁴³ as the very other-worldly beyond of consciousness. – The result is of course the same as if a blind person were to be set amidst the wealth of the supersensible world – if that world has such wealth, whether it be its own distinctive content or whether it be consciousness itself that is this content – or if a person with sight were to be situated in total darkness, or if you please, situated in pure light (if the supersensible world were indeed to be something like that). In that pure light, the person with sight sees as little as he sees in total darkness, and he sees exactly as much as the blind person sees of the riches lying right in front of him. However much it were to be the case that there would be nothing more to the inner and the syllogistic closure with the inner through appearance, still there would be nothing more left to do except to stop short at appearances, which is to say, to perceive something which we know not to be true. Or, suppose we are nonetheless to take there to be something in the void after all; this is a void which came about as the void of objective things but which now must be taken both as emptiness 90in itself, or as the void of all spiritual relations, or even as the void of the differences of consciousness as consciousness – and if the void is taken as this complete void, which is also called the holy, nonetheless there is supposed to be something with which to fill it out, even if it is only filled out with daydreams, or with appearances which consciousness itself creates. If so, then consciousness would just have to rest content with being so badly treated, for it would deserve no better, while daydreams themselves are still better than its emptiness.

147. However, the inner, or the supersensible other-worldly beyond, has developed. It comes forth from out of appearance, and appearance is its mediation. That is, appearance is its essence and in fact its fulfillment. The supersensible is the sensuous and the perceived posited as they are in truth. However, the truth of the sensuous and the perceived is to be appearance. The supersensible is therefore appearance as appearance. – However much it is thought that the supersensible is therefore the sensuous world, or the world as it is for immediate sensuous-certainty and perception, still this is an inverted understanding of the supersensible, for appearance is instead not the world of sensuous knowing and perceiving as an existing world. It is rather that world posited as sublated, or posited in truth as the inner. It is commonly said that the supersensible is not appearance; but “appearance” there is not understood to be appearance but rather to be the sensuous world as being itself real actuality.

148. Our object, the understanding, is situated in this very place: To itself, the inner has just come to be only as the universal which is still not the in-itself brought to fulfillment. The play of forces has just the negative meaning that it does not exist in itself and the positive meaning only of being what does the mediation, which is, however, external to the understanding. However, the understanding's relation to the inner through the mediation is the understanding's own movement through which the inner will, to the understanding, bring itself to fulfillment. – The play of forces is the immediate for the understanding, but the true, to the understanding, is only as the simple. However, we have seen that this play of forces has the following composition: The force which is solicited by another force likewise is soliciting this other force, which itself thereby becomes a soliciting force. What is present within this play is just the immediate flux, or the absolute exchange of determinateness which constitutes the sole content of what is coming on the scene: to be either a universal medium or a negative unity. In its determinate onset, it itself immediately ceases to be what it was as it came on the scene. Through its determinate onset, it solicits the other aspect, which thereby expresses itself. This is to say that the latter is now immediately what the first is supposed to be. The two sides, the relations of soliciting and the relations of the determinately opposed 91content are each on their own⁴⁴ absolute invertedness and confusion. However, both of these relations are again themselves the same; and the difference of form (namely, the solicited and the soliciting) is the same as the difference of content (the solicited as such, namely, the passive medium). In contrast, the soliciting is the active, negative unity, or the One. All differences between the particular forces, which are supposed to be present in this movement, thereby vanish, for the forces rest solely on those differences. Together with the differences vanishing, the difference of forces likewise collapses in the same way into one. There is therefore neither force, nor soliciting and being solicited, nor the determinateness of being a stably existing medium and a unity reflected into itself; there is neither something singularly for itself, nor are there various oppositions. Instead, what there is in this absolute flux is just the difference as the universal difference, or as the kind of difference into which the many oppositions have been reduced. This difference as universal difference is thus the simple in the play of force itself and it is the true in that play of forces. It is the law of force.

149. Through its relation to the simplicity of the inner, or the understanding, the absolutely fluctuating appearance comes to be the simple difference. The inner is at first only the universal in itself. However, this universal, in itself simple, is essentially just as absolutely the universal difference, for it is the result of the flux itself, or the flux is its essence. However, flux, posited as existing in the inner as it is in truth, is likewise incorporated into the inner as an absolutely universal motionless difference, as the self-consistent difference. Or negation is essentially a moment of the universal, and it, or mediation, is therefore within the universal the universal difference. It is expressed in law as the stable picture of unstable appearance. The supersensible world is thus a motionless realm of laws. It is to be sure, beyond the perceived world, for this perceived world exhibits the law only through constant change. However, those laws are just as much current in the perceived world and are its immediately motionless likeness.

150. This realm of laws is, to be sure, the truth of the understanding, which has its content in the difference that lies within the law. However, it is at the same time only the understanding's first truth and does not completely bring appearance to its fulfillment. The law is now current in appearance, but it is not the entire presence of appearance; under ever different circumstances, the law has an ever different actuality. As a result, there remains for appearance for itself an aspect which is not within the inner; that is, appearance is in truth not yet posited as appearance, as sublated being-for-itself. This defect in the law must in its own self be likewise brought into prominence. What seems to be lacking 92in it is that it admittedly has the difference in it, but it has it as universal, as an indeterminate difference. However, insofar as it is not the law per se but only one law, it has determinateness in it. As a result there are indeterminately many laws present. Yet this multiplicity is instead a defect; it contradicts the very principle of the understanding as the consciousness of the simple inner for which the true is the unity that is in itself universal. For that reason, it must instead let the many laws collapse together into one law. For example: The law according to which a stone falls and the law according to which the heavenly spheres move have been conceptually grasped as one law. However, in this collapse into each other, the laws lose their determinateness; the law becomes ever more superficial, and as a result, what is found is not really the unity of these determinate laws but rather one law, which omits their determinateness in the way that the one law, which unifies within itself the law of bodies falling to the earth and the law of heavenly movement, does not in fact express either of them. The unification of all laws into universal attraction expresses no further content than that of the mere concept of law itself, which is posited as existing therein. Universal attraction only says this: Everything has a constant difference with regard to everything else. In saying that, the understanding supposes that it has found a universal law which expresses universal actuality as such, but it has in fact only found the concept of law itself. Nonetheless, it has done so in such a way that it says at the same time that all actuality is in its own self lawful. For that reason, the expression of universal attraction has to that extent great importance as it is directed against the unthinking representation for which everything presents itself in the shape of contingency and for which determinateness has the form of sensuous self-sufficiency.

151. Universal attraction, or the pure concept of law, thereby stands over and against determinate laws. Insofar as this pure concept is regarded as the essence, or, the true inner, the determinateness itself of determinate laws still belongs to appearance, or rather it belongs to sensuous being. Yet the pure concept of law does not only go beyond the law, which, itself being a determinate law, stands over and against other determinate laws. Instead, it goes beyond the law as such. The determinateness that was talked about is itself really only a vanishing moment, which no longer comes into view here as an essentiality, for what is present here is only the law as the true. However, the concept of the law is turned against the law itself. That is, in the law, the difference itself is immediately grasped and incorporated into the universal, and as a result there is in the law a stable existence of the moments, whose relation the law expresses, as indifferent 93essentialities existing in themselves. However, these parts of the difference in the law are at the same time themselves determinate aspects. The pure concept of the law as universal attraction must be grasped in its true significance so that within it, as the absolutely simple, the differences, which are present in the law as such, themselves return again into the inner as simple unity. The simple unity is the inner necessity of the law.

152. As a result, the law is present in a doubled manner, at one time as a law in which the differences are expressed as self-sufficient moments, and at another time in the form of simple being-that-has-returned-into-itself.⁴⁵ This again can be called force, but not in such a way that it is the force driven back but rather so that it is the force as such, or the concept of force, which is itself an abstraction and which itself draws into itself the differences between what attracts and what is attracted. For example, simple electricity is in that way force. However, the expression of the difference belongs in the law, and this difference is positive and negative electricity. In the movement of falling, force is the simple, or gravity, for which the law is that the magnitudes of the distinct moments of the motion, or the time elapsed and the space traversed, relate themselves to each other as root and square. Electricity itself is not the difference in itself, or is not in its essence the doubled-essence of positive and negative electricity; thus, one is accustomed to saying that it has the law⁴⁶ of being that way, or that it has the property of expressing itself in that way. This property is, to be sure, essentially and solely the property of this force, or it is necessary to that force. However, necessity is an empty word here. The force must double itself in that way simply because it must. If, of course, positive electricity is posited, then negative electricity in itself is also necessary, for the positive is only as a relation to the negative. That is, the positive is in its own self the difference from itself in the same way that the negative is. However, that electricity divides itself as such in that way, is not in itself the necessary; as simple force electricity is indifferent vis-à-vis its law, which declares it to be positive and negative. If we call the former its concept and the latter its being, then its concept is indifferent to its being; it only has this property, which is just to say that its property is not in itself necessary to its being. – This indifference takes on another shape if it is said that it only belongs to the definition of electricity to be positive and negative, or that this is purely and simply its concept and essence. Its being would then mean its existence as such; however, the necessity of its existence does not lie in that definition; one either comes upon its existence, which is to say, it is not necessary at all; or it has its existence through other forces, which is to say that its necessity is external. However, by thereby locating necessity within the determinateness of being through others, we fall back again 94into the multiplicity of determinate laws, which we had just abandoned in order to consider the law as law. It is only with the law as law that its concept as concept is to be compared. However, in all these forms, necessity has still only shown itself to be an empty word.

153. The indifference of law and force, or of concept and being, is present in yet another way than that already indicated. In the law of motion, for example, it is necessary that motion be divided into time and space, or else then into distance and velocity. While motion is only the relation of those moments, motion, or the universal, is here divided in itself. However, these parts, time and space, or distance and velocity, do not now express in themselves this origination out of one universal. They are indifferent to each other. Space is represented as being able to be without time, time without space, and distance at least without velocity – in the same way that their magnitudes are indifferent to each other while they do not relate to each other as positive and negative and thus are not related to each other through their essence. Thus, there is of course the necessity of division but not the necessity of the parts as such for each other. However, for that reason, that first necessity is itself also just a sham, a false necessity. That is, motion itself is not represented as simple essence or as pure essence, but rather as already divided. Time and space are its self-sufficient parts, or essences in themselves, or distance and velocity are ways of being or of representational thinking, where any one of them can be just as well without the other. Motion is thus only their superficial relation, not their essence. Represented as simple essence, or as force, motion is indeed gravity, which does not, however, contain these differences at all within itself.

154. The difference is therefore in both cases no difference in itself. Either the universal, the force, is indifferent to the division which lies in the law, or the differences, the parts of the law, are indifferent to each other. However, the understanding has the concept of this difference in itself just in the law's being on the one hand the inner, or existing-in-itself, but at the same time differentiated in it. That this difference is thereby an inner difference is here in that the law is simple force, or, as the concept of the difference, is thus a difference of concepts. However, this inner difference still just falls within the understanding and is not yet posited in the item itself.⁴⁷ It is thus only its own necessity 95that the understanding expresses. It makes this distinction in such a way that it expresses at the same time that the difference is to be no difference in the item itself. This necessity, which only lies in the words used, is thus the recital of the moments that constitute the circle of necessity; they are, to be sure, distinguished, but at the same time their difference is expressed as being no difference of the item itself and thus it is itself again straightaway sublated. This movement is called explanation. A law is thus declared, and from this law, its universal in itself, or the ground, is distinguished as force. However, it is said of this difference that it is no difference at all, but rather, that the grounding reason⁴⁸ is instead entirely constituted in the same way as is the law. For example, the singular event of lightning is comprehended⁴⁹ as universal, and this universal is expressed as the law of electricity. The explanation then condenses the law into the force as the essence of the law. This force is then so constituted that when it expresses itself, opposed electricities come forth; these opposed electricities then again vanish into each other, which is to say, the force is composed exactly as is the law; it is said that both are not different at all. The differences are the pure universal expression (or the law) and the pure force. However, both have the same content, the same constitution; the difference as a difference of content, which is to say, in the item itself, is therefore also again withdrawn.

155. As it turns out, within this tautological movement, the understanding steadfastly insists on its object's motionless unity, and the movement only takes place in the understanding itself, not in the object. The movement is an explanation which not only explains nothing, but is, rather, so clear that as it makes a move to say something different from what has already been said, it says instead nothing at all and only repeats the same thing. Through this movement nothing new emerges about the item itself. Instead the movement only comes into view as a movement of the understanding. However, within that movement we cognize just what was missing in the law, namely, the absolute flux itself, for this movement, when we look at it more closely, is immediately the opposite of itself. It posits a difference, which is not only no difference for us but is a difference which it itself sublates as difference. This is the same flux that turned out to be the play of forces. Within that flux, there was the difference between the soliciting and the solicited, between the force expressing itself and the force driven back into itself, but they were differences that in truth were no differences at all and which for that reason were again also immediately sublated. What is present is not only the mere unity so that no difference would be posited; rather, it is this movement that undeniably makes a differentiation. However, because the difference is no difference at all, it is again sublated. – With explanation, therefore, the change and the flux, which were previously external to the inner and which existed only in appearance, have pushed their way into the supersensible itself. However, our consciousness has moved out of the inner as object over to the other side, into the understanding, and it is in the understanding that it has such flux.

156. 96In this way, this flux is not yet a flux of the thing itself. As a result of that, it exhibits itself as pure flux in that the content of the moments of the flux remains the same. However, while the concept, as the concept of the understanding, is the same as the inner of things, so this flux becomes the law of the inner for the understanding. The understanding thus learns from experience that what is the law of appearance itself is that differences come to be that are no differences at all, or it learns that like poles repel⁵⁰ themselves from each other and likewise that the differences are only such that they are in truth no differences at all, which is to say that they sublate themselves, or that unlike poles attract⁵¹ each other. – There is a second law, whose content is opposed to what was previously called law, that is to say, it is opposed to the enduring self-consistent⁵² difference. This is because this new law instead expresses the becoming-unequal of what is equal and the becoming-equal of the unequal. The concept asks of the thoughtless that he bring both laws together and become conscious of their opposition. – The second law is, of course, also a law, or a being in inner self-equality, but it is instead a self-equality of inequality, a constancy of inconstancy. – In the play of forces, this law turned out to be just this absolute transition and pure flux. Poles being alike,⁵³ i.e., force, fall apart into opposition, which at first seems to be a self-sufficient difference but which proves in fact to be really none at all, for it is this, poles being alike, which repels itself from itself, and what is repelled thus essentially attracts itself, since it is the same “pole being alike.” The distinction that is made, which is none at all, is therefore again sublated. The difference turns out to be a difference in the item itself, or it turns out to be the absolute difference, and this difference in the item itself is thus nothing other than that of “poles being alike,” which repelled themselves from themselves. Thus, this differentiating only posits an opposition that is none at all.

157. Through this principle, the first supersensible becomes the motionless realm of laws, the immediate likeness of the perceived world inverted into its opposite. The law was itself what is self-consistent just as are its differences. However, it is now posited that each of them is instead the opposite of itself. What is equal to itself instead repels itself from itself, and what is unequal to itself instead posits itself as what is equal to itself. In fact, it is only with this determination that the difference is an inner difference, or is a difference in itself, while what is equal to itself is unequal to itself, and what is unequal to itself is equal to itself. – This second supersensible world is in this way the inverted world, namely, while one aspect is already present in the first supersensible world, this is the inverted version of this first supersensible world. The inner as appearance is thereby brought to culmination. The first supersensible world 97was only the immediate elevation of the perceived world into the universal element, and it had its necessary counterpart in this perceived world, which still retained for itself the principle of flux and alteration. The first realm of laws did without that principle, but now it obtains it as the inverted world.

158. According to the laws, therefore, of this inverted world, like poles in the first world are each the unlike of itself, and the unlike in the first is just as unlike to itself, or it comes to be equal to itself. In determinate moments this will turn out to be such that what in the law of the first is sweet is, in this inverted in-itself, sour; what is black in the former is white in the latter. What in the law of the first world is the north pole in the magnet, is in its other supersensible in-itself, namely, in the earth, the south pole, whereas what was there the south pole is here the north pole. Likewise, what in the first law of electricity is the oxygen pole becomes in its other supersensible essence the hydrogen pole; and conversely, what is the hydrogen pole here becomes the oxygen pole there. In another sphere, according to the immediate law, revenge on an enemy is the highest satisfaction of injured individuality. However, this law states that I am to show the subject who does not treat me as an independent being⁵⁴ that I am the independent being,⁵⁵ and that it is instead I who sublates him as the independent being; through the principle of the other world, this law inverts itself into the opposite law: the recovery of myself as the independent being through the sublation of the alien independent being, which then inverts itself into self-destruction. However much this inversion, which is exhibited in the punishment of crime, is now made into law, it is still again also only the law of a world which has a supersensible world standing in inverted opposition to itself, in which what is despised in the former is honored, and what in the former is honored is despised. The punishment which, according the law of the former, dishonors a person and destroys him, is transformed in its inverted world into the pardon preserving his independent being and bringing honor to him.

159. Superficially viewed, this inverted world is the opposite of the first in that it has the latter external to itself, and repels that first world from itself as an inverted actuality. The one is appearance, the other is the in-itself. The one world is as it is for others, whereas the other is as it is for itself, so that, to use the previous examples, what tastes sweet is really, or inwardly in the thing itself, sour. Or what in appearance is the north pole in the actual magnet, would be, in the inner or essential being the south pole. Or what presents itself as the oxygen pole in electricity in its phenomenal appearance would be the hydrogen pole in non-phenomenal⁵⁶ electricity. Or an action, which in the realm of appearance is a crime, should be in its inwardness genuinely good, or a bad action having a good intention. Punishment would only be punishment in the realm of appearance; in itself or in another world it could be a benefit for the criminal. Yet such oppositions – of inner and outer, appearance 98and the supersensible – which have been taken as two kinds of actualities are no longer present here. The repelled differences do not distribute themselves anew to two kinds of substances that would support them and lend them a separate stable existence, in which case the understanding would again fall out of the inner back into its previous place. The one aspect, or substance, would be again the world of perception in which the one of those two laws would drive its essence, and, over and against that law, there would be an inner world, just the kind of sensible world like the first, but one which existed in the realm of representation. Unlike the sensuous world, that world could not be pointed out, seen, heard, or tasted, and yet it would be represented in the terms of such a sensuous world. But if the one posit is in fact something perceived and if its in-itself, as its inversion, is likewise sensuously represented, then the sourness, which would be the in-itself of the sweet thing, would be just as actual as the sweet thing, or it would be a sour thing. The black, which would be the in-itself of the white, would be the actual black. The north pole, which is the in-itself of the south pole, would be the north pole present in the same magnet. The oxygen pole, which is the in-itself of the hydrogen pole, would be the oxygen pole present in the same voltaic pile [battery]. However, the actual crime has its own invertedness and its in-itself as possibility in the intention as such, but not in a good intention, for the truth of intention is only the deed itself. The crime, according to its content, has its reflective turn into itself, or has its inversion in actual punishment, and this is the conciliation of the law with the actuality opposed to it in the crime. Finally, the actual punishment has in it its own inverted actuality in such a way so that it is a kind of actualization of the law, within which the activity, which the law has as punishment, sublates itself. From being active, the law again comes to be both at rest and in valid force, and both the movement of individuality against it and of it against individuality expires.

160. Therefore, from the representation of inversion, which constitutes the essence of one aspect of the supersensible world, the sensuous representation of the attachment of the differences in diverse elements of stable existence must be detached, and this absolute concept of difference is to be purely exhibited and grasped as inner difference, as the repulsion of the like pole (as the like pole) from itself, and as the sameness of the non-same (as the non-same).⁵⁷ It is to make one think through the pure flux, or the opposition within itself, the contradiction. For in the difference, which is an inner difference, what is opposed is not just one of two – otherwise, it would be an existent, not an opposite – but rather it is the opposite of an opposite, or the other is itself immediately present within it. To be sure, I put the opposite here, and I put the other of which it is the opposite there, and I therefore 99set the opposite off to one side, where it is in and for itself without the other. However, just for that reason, while I have here the opposite in and for itself, it is the opposite of itself, or it has in fact the other immediately in itself.⁵⁸ – In that way, the supersensible world, which is the inverted world, has at the same time enveloped the other world and has it in itself. It is for itself the inverted world, which is to say, it is the inversion of itself, and it is itself and its opposed world within one unity. Only in that way is it the difference as inner difference, or the difference in itself, or is the difference as infinity.

161. Through infinity, we see that the law has been perfected in its own self into necessity, and we see all moments of appearance incorporated into the inner. What is simple in law is infinity, and this means, according to how things have turned out. (α) There is a self-equal which is, however, the difference in itself; or it is the “like pole” which repels itself from itself, or which estranges itself. What was called simple force doubles itself, and through its infinity is law. (ß) The estranged, which constitutes the parts represented in the law, turns out to be what is stably existing; and, if the parts are considered without the concept of the inner difference, then space and time, or distance and velocity, which appear as moments of gravity, are just as much indifferent to one another and without any necessity for each other as they are for gravity itself, just as this simple gravity is indifferent to them, or the simple electricity is indifferent to the positive and negative. (γ) However, through this concept of inner difference, what is unlike and indifferent, space and time, etc., is a difference that is no difference, or only a difference of like poles, and its essence is unity; they are reciprocally spiritualized⁵⁹ as positive and negative. Their being is instead this: to posit itself as not-being and to sublate itself in the unity. Both of the distinguished poles stably exist, they are in themselves as opposites, which is to say, they are the opposites of themselves. They have their other in themselves and are only one unity.

162. This simple infinity, or the absolute concept, is to be called the simple essence of life, the soul of the world, the universal bloodstream, which is omnipresent, neither dulled nor interrupted by any difference, which is instead itself both every difference as well as their sublatedness. It is therefore pulsating within itself without setting itself in motion; it is trembling within itself without itself being agitated. It is itself self-equality, for the differences are tautological; they are differences that are none at all. This self-equal essence relates itself only to itself. It relates itself to itself so that this is an other essence to which the relation directs itself, and the relating to itself is in fact [the act of] estranging, or it is that very self-equality which is inner difference. These estranged items thus are in and for themselves, 100each an opposite of the other – of an other so that within that estrangement, expressing one moment is at the same time expressing the other. Or, it is not the opposite of an other, but rather it is only the pure opposite, and in that way it is thus in its own self the opposite of itself. That is, it is not an opposite at all but instead is purely for itself, a pure self-equal essence, which has no difference in it. Thus, we neither need to ask such questions nor need we regard the distress over such questions as philosophy, nor do we even need to hold that these questions are ones that philosophy cannot answer – [such as] how difference or otherness is supposed to come out of this pure essence. For the estrangement has already taken place, the difference has been excluded from what is self-equal and set to one side; what was supposed to be self-equality is thus already instead one of the estranged moments rather than being the absolute essence itself. “The self-equal estranges itself” means just that it, as already estranged, thereby sublates itself, and sublates itself as otherness. The unity, about which it is commonly said that difference cannot come out of it, is in fact itself only one moment of estrangement; it is the abstraction of simplicity, which stands in contrast to difference. However, while it is an abstraction, or while it is only one of the two opposites, it thus has already been said that the unity is itself what is doing the estranging, for if the unity is itself a negative, is an opposite, then it is posited as what has opposition in it. For that reason, the differences between estrangement and coming-to-be-self-equal are likewise only this movement of self-sublation, for while what is self-equal, which is supposed simply to estrange itself, or to become its opposite, is itself an abstraction, or is already itself the estranged, its estranging is in that way thereby a sublation of what it is and is therefore the sublation of its estrangement. Coming-to-be-self-equal is likewise an estrangement. What becomes self-equal thereby takes up a stance over and against the estrangement, which is to say, it thereby places itself off to one side; that is, it becomes instead an estrangement.⁶⁰

163. Infinity, or this absolute restlessness of pure self-movement which is such that whatever is determined in any manner, for example, as being, is instead the opposite of this determinateness. This infinity is, to be sure, already the soul of all that came before, but it was in the inner that it itself first freely emerged. Appearance, or the play of forces, already exhibits infinity itself, but infinity first freely emerges as explanation. As infinity is finally an object for consciousness, and consciousness is aware of it as what it is, so is consciousness self-consciousness. The explanation provided by the understanding at first constitutes only the description of what 101self-consciousness is. The understanding sublates the differences already present in the law, differences that have already become pure differences but which are still indifferent differences, and it posits them within a unity, that of force. However, this coming-to-be-equal is likewise immediately an estrangement, for it is only as a result of that estrangement that the understanding sublates the differences and posits the One of force by means of making a new difference between force and law, but which is at the same time no difference at all. With regard to this difference which is no difference, the understanding goes further and again sublates this difference while it allows force to be constituted in the same way as it does law. – However, this movement, or this necessity, is in this way still a necessity and a movement of the understanding, or as such it is not the understanding's object. Rather, within that movement, the understanding has for its objects positive and negative electricity, distance, velocity, force of attraction, and a thousand other things, objects which constitute the content of the moments of the movement. It is just for that reason that there is so much self-satisfaction in explanation, because the consciousness involved in it is, to put it this way, in an immediate conversation with itself, enjoying only itself. While it undeniably seems to be pursuing something else, it is really just consorting with itself.

164. In the opposite law as the inversion of the first law, or in the inner difference, infinity indeed becomes itself the object of the understanding, but again the understanding fails to notice it as such, while the understanding again distributes to two worlds, or to two substantial elements, the difference in itself, the self-repulsion of like poles and the self-attraction of what is unlike; for the understanding, the movement as it is here in experience, is an event, and like poles and the unlike are predicates whose essence is an existing substrate. What is an object in sensuous covering for the understanding is now there for us in its essential shape as the pure concept. This grasping of the difference as it is in truth, or the grasping of infinity as such, is for us, or in itself. The exposition of its concept belongs to science. However, consciousness as it immediately has this concept again comes on the scene as its own form or as a new shape of consciousness that does not recognize⁶¹ its essence in what has gone before but instead regards it as something wholly different. – While this concept of infinity is, to consciousness, the object, it is therefore consciousness of the difference as likewise immediately sublated; consciousness is for itself, it is a distinguishing of what is not distinct, or it is self-consciousness. I distinguish myself from myself, and in doing so, what is immediately for me is this: What is distinguished is not distinguished. I, the like pole, repel myself away from myself; but what is distinguished, what is posited as not the same as me, is, while it is differentiated, immediately no difference for me. Consciousness of an other, of an object as such, is indeed itself necessarily self-consciousness, being-reflected into itself, consciousness of 102its own self, in its otherness. The necessary advance from the previous shapes of consciousness, to whom their truth was a thing, or was something other than themselves, expresses just the following. Not only is consciousness of things only possible for a self-consciousness; rather, it is this self-consciousness alone which is the truth of those shapes. However, this truth is here only for us and not yet for consciousness. Self-consciousness has first come to be for itself but not yet as unity with consciousness itself.

165. We see that the understanding in truth experiences in the inner of appearance nothing but appearance itself, but not appearance in the way it is as the play of forces; rather, it experiences the play of forces within their absolutely universal moments and their movement; in fact, the understanding experiences only itself. Raised above perception, consciousness exhibits itself as merged with the supersensible world through the mediating middle of appearance through which it gazes into this background. The two extremes, the one of the purely inner, the other of the inner gazing into the purely inner, have now merged together, and just as they have vanished as extremes, the mediating middle, as something other than these extremes, has also vanished. The curtain is therefore lifted away from the inner, and what is present is the gazing of the inner into the inner, the gazing of the non-distinguished “like pole,” which repels itself from itself, positing itself as a distinguished inner, but for which there is present just as immediately the non-difference of both of them, self-consciousness. It turns out that behind the so-called curtain, which is supposed to hide what is inner, there is nothing to be seen if we ourselves do not go behind it, and one can see something behind the curtain only if there is something behind the curtain to be seen. However, at the same time it turns out that one cannot without any more fuss go straightway behind the curtain, for this knowing of the truth of the representation of appearance and of appearance's inner is itself only the result of a complex movement, through which the modes of consciousness that go from meaning something, then to perceiving, and then to the understanding itself all vanish. It likewise turns out that the cognition of what consciousness knows while knowing itself requires still further circumstances. The exposition of those circumstances lies in what follows.

¹ “conceptually comprehending.”

² Sache.

³ der Einzelne.

⁴ Gewesen-oder Aufgehobensein.

⁵ Punkt.

⁶ er als seiend aufgezeigt wird.

⁷ bloß Gemeinte.

⁸ das Seiende.

⁹ für sich.

¹⁰ für sich.

¹¹ There is a wordplay impossible to capture in English here. Hegel is taking the German word for perception, Wahrnehmung, which looks as if it is a compound of “true-taking,” to say that consciousness has its “take” on the object, which leads it to the “true.”

¹² Auffassens.

¹³ für sich.

¹⁴ Auffassen.

¹⁵ Auffassen.

¹⁶ erkennt.

¹⁷ erkennt.

¹⁸ Erkenntnis.

¹⁹ für sich.

²⁰ Das In-eins-setzen.

²¹ sein Nehmen des Wahren. Again, this is an untranslatable play on Wahrnehmen, perceiving or perception, as “taking” the “true.”

²² des Auffassens.

²³ auffassende Bewußtsein.

²⁴ an ihm.

²⁵ Charakter. Rendering it as the English “character” would be misleading here.

²⁶ verhält es sich.

²⁷ Auffassen.

²⁸ Gedankendingen.

²⁹ erkennt.

³⁰ Meister.

³¹ erkennt.

³² begreifenden Bewußtsein.

³³ auseinander liegen.

³⁴ Entfaltung.

³⁵ Sich-beständig-verselbstständigens.

³⁶ Einssein.

³⁷ Reflexion desselben in sich selbst.

³⁸ Diesseits.

³⁹ Jenseits.

⁴⁰ Zusammengeschlossenseins.

⁴¹ erkennen.

⁴² der Sache selbst.

⁴³ bestimmt.

⁴⁴ für sich.

⁴⁵ In-sich-Zurückgegangen-seins.

⁴⁶ sie habe das Gesetz.

⁴⁷ an der Sache selbst.

⁴⁸ der Grund.

⁴⁹ aufgefaßt.

⁵⁰ das Gleichnamige. Gleichnamige means the “like” of a charge in electricity, or the different poles of a magnet.

⁵¹ das Ungleichnamige.

⁵² gleichbleibenden.

⁵³ das Gleichnamige.

⁵⁴ Selbstwesen. Grimms Wörterbuch identifies this as equivalent to selbständiges Wesen. “Wesen” is here rendered as (a) being. Luther also uses the term in this way in his Table Talk.

⁵⁵ Wesen. Given the reference to Selbstwesen above, it could also be rendered as “independent essence.”

⁵⁶ nichterscheinenden.

⁵⁷ Gleichsein des Ungleichen als Ungleichen.

⁵⁸ an ihm selbst.

⁵⁹ begeistet.

⁶⁰ ein Entzweites.

⁶¹ erkennt.

B. Self-Consciousness

IV. The Truth of Self-Certainty

166. 103In the preceding kinds of certainty, the truth for consciousness is something other than consciousness itself. However, the concept of this truth vanishes in the experience of it. The way the object immediately was in itself, as sensuous-certainty's entity, perception's concrete thing, or the understanding's force, proves not to be the way it is in truth. Rather, this in-itself turns out to be a way in which the object is only for an other. The concept of the object is sublated in the actual object or the first immediate representation is sublated in experience, and, in the truth, certainty falls by the wayside. However, what has now emerged is something which did not happen in these previous relationships, namely, a certainty that is equal to its truth, for certainty is, to itself, its object, and consciousness is, to itself, the true. To be sure, there is also therein an otherness, but consciousness draws a distinction which for it is at the same time no distinction. If we call the movement of knowing concept, but call the object, knowing as motionless unity, or as the I, then we see that the object corresponds to the concept, not only for us but for knowing itself. – Or, to put it another way, if one calls concept what the object is in itself but calls the object what it is as an object, or what it is as for an other, it is clear that being-in-itself and being-for-an-other are here the same, for the in-itself is consciousness. However, consciousness is likewise that for which an other (the in-itself) is, and it is for consciousness that the object's in-itself and the object's being for an other are the same. The I is the content of the relation and the relating itself. It is in confronting an other that the I is itself. At the same time, it reaches out over and beyond this other, which, for the I, is likewise only itself.

167. Thus, with self-consciousness we have now entered into the native realm of truth. It must be seen how the shape of self-consciousness first makes its appearance. If we consider this new shape of knowing, knowing of itself, in relation to what has come before, knowing of an other, then the latter knowing has, to be sure, vanished. However, at the same time its moments have likewise been preserved, and the loss consists in this, that those moments are present here 104as they are in-themselves. The being of what was meant, along with the singularity and the universality opposed to that singularity in perception, as well as the empty inner of the understanding, no longer are as the essence. Rather, they are only as moments of self-consciousness. That is to say, they are as abstractions or differences which are at the same time nullities for consciousness itself, or they are no differences at all but purely vanishing essences. It thus seems that only the principal moment itself has disappeared, namely, simple self-sufficient stable existence for consciousness. However, self-consciousness is in fact the reflection out of the being of the sensuous and perceived world and is essentially the return from out of otherness. As self-consciousness, it is movement, but while self-consciousness only distinguishes itself from itself as itself, that difference as an otherness is, to itself, immediately sublated. There simply is no difference, and self-consciousness is only the motionless tautology of “I am I.” While, to itself, the difference does not also have the shape of being, it is not self-consciousness. Otherness thereby is for it as a being, or as a distinguished moment, but, for it, it is also the unity of itself with this difference as a second distinguished moment. With that first moment, self-consciousness is as consciousness, and the whole breadth of the sensuous world is preserved for it, but at the same time only as related to the second moment, the unity of self-consciousness with itself. The sensuous world is thereby for it a stable existence, which is, however, only appearance, or is the difference which in-itself has no being. But this opposition between its appearance and its truth has only the truth for its essence, namely, the unity of self-consciousness with itself. This unity must become essential to self-consciousness, which is to say, self-consciousness is desire, full stop.¹ As self-consciousness, consciousness henceforth has a doubled object: The first, the immediate object, the object of sensuous-certainty and perception, which, however, is marked for it with the character of the negative; the second, namely, itself, which is the true essence and which at the outset is present only in opposition to the first. Self-consciousness exhibits itself therein as the movement within which this opposition is sublated, and within which, to itself, the equality of itself with itself comes to be.

168. For its part, the object, which for self-consciousness is the negative, has likewise for us, or in itself, returned into itself, just as consciousness, for its part, has done the same. Through this reflective turn into itself, the object has become life. What self-consciousness distinguishes from itself as existing also has in it, in as much as it is posited as existing, not merely the modes of sensuous-certainty and perception. Rather, it is being reflected into itself, and the object of immediate desire is what is living,² for the in-itself, or the universal result of the relations between the understanding and the inner of things, 105is the differentiating of that which is not to be distinguished, or it is the unity of what is differentiated. However, this unity is, as we saw, just as much its repelling itself from itself, and this concept estranges itself into the opposition between self-consciousness and life. The former is the unity for which the infinite unity of differences is, but the latter is only this unity itself such that this unity is not at the same time for itself. As self-sufficient as consciousness is, its object is in-itself just as self-sufficient. Self-consciousness, which is utterly for itself and which immediately marks its object with the character of the negative, or is initially desire, will instead thus learn from experience about this object's self-sufficiency.

169. The determination of life as it has resulted from the concept, or from the general results with which we enter this sphere, is sufficient to characterize it. (There is no further need to develop its nature any further out of those factors). Its cycle resolves itself into the following moments. The essence is infinity as the sublation of all differences, the pure movement rotating on its own axis, its own motionless being as absolutely restless infinity. It is to be characterized as self-sufficiency itself into which the differences of the movement have been dissolved. Moreover, it is to be characterized as the simple essence of time, which in this self-equality is the unalloyed shape of space. However, in this simple universal medium, the differences are just as much as differences, for this universal fluidity has its negative nature only as it is their sublating. However, it cannot sublate them if they have no stable existence. This very fluidity, as self-equal self-sufficiency, is their stable existence, or it is their substance in which they are thus differentiated members and parts, where each is existing-for-itself. The meaning of “Being” is no longer that of the abstraction of being, nor is it that of their pure essentiality, of the abstraction of universality; rather, their being is just that simple fluid substance of the pure movement within itself. However, the difference among these members with respect to each other consists, as difference, in no other determinateness at all other than that of the determinateness of the moments of infinity, or of the pure movement itself.

170. The self-sufficient members are for themselves. However, this being-for-itself is instead likewise immediately their reflection into unity, just as this unity is estrangement into self-sufficient shapes. The unity is estranged because it is absolutely negative unity, or infinite unity, and because the unity is stable existence, the difference also has self-sufficiency only in the unity. This self-sufficiency of the shape appears as something determinate, as for an other, for it is something estranged. The sublating of the estrangement likewise happens in this respect through an other. However, this sublating is just as much in its own self, for it is that very fluidity which is the substance of the self-sufficient shapes. This substance is, however, infinite, and for that reason, the 106shape, in its stable existence, is itself the estrangement, or the sublating of its being-for-itself.

171. If we distinguish more precisely the moments contained therein, we see that for the first moment, we have the stable existence of the self-sufficient shapes, or the suppression of what differentiating is in itself, namely, not to be in-itself and to have no stable existence. However, the second moment is the subjugation of that stable existence under the infinity of the differences. In the first moment, there is the stably existing shape; as existing-for-itself, or as the infinite substance in its determinateness, it comes on the scene as confronting the universal substance. It denies this fluidity and continuity with that substance and affirms itself as not having been dissolved within this universal but rather instead as preserving itself through both its separation from its inorganic nature and by its consuming this inorganic nature. Within the universal fluid medium, life in its motionless elaboration of itself into various shapes becomes the movement of those shapes, or life becomes life as a process. The simple universal fluidity is the in-itself, and the difference among the shapes is the other. However, through this difference this fluidity itself becomes the other, since it now is for the difference which is in and for itself and which is thus the infinite movement by which that peaceful medium is consumed. As such, it is life as living things. – However, this inversion is for that reason again invertedness in-itself. What is consumed is the essence, and as a result, individuality, in preserving itself at the expense of the universal and giving itself the feeling of its unity with itself, straightaway sublates its opposition to the other through which it is for itself. The unity with itself that it gives itself is just the fluidity of the differences, or it is the universal dissolution. However, the sublating of individual stable existence is, conversely, just as much its own engendering. Since there the essence of the individual shape, namely, universal life, and what is existing for itself are in themselves the simple substance, then while it places the other into itself,³ it sublates its simplicity, or its essence, i.e., it estranges that simplicity. This estrangement of the undifferentiated fluidity is the very positing of individuality. The simple substance of life is thus the estrangement of itself into shapes and is at the same time the dissolution of these stably existing differences. The dissolution of this estrangement is to the same extent itself an estrangement, or a division of itself into groupings. As a result, both aspects of the entire movement, which had been distinguished, collapse into one another. Namely, it is the shapes motionlessly elaborated in the universal medium of self-sufficiency and the process of life which collapse into one another. The latter, the process of life, is just as much a taking shape⁴ as it is the sublating of the shape, and the former, the taking shape, is 107just as much a sublating as it is a division into groupings. The fluid element is itself only the abstraction of essence, or it is only actual as a shape. That it divides itself into groupings is again an estranging of the expressed groups, or it is their dissolution. The whole cycle constitutes life. It is neither what is first expressed, namely, the immediate continuity and unmixed character of its essence, nor is it the stably existing shape and what is “the discrete” existing for itself, nor is it the pure process of all of this, nor again is it the simple gathering together of these moments. Rather, it is the whole developing itself, then dissolving its development, and, in this movement, being the simple self-sustaining whole.

172. While having departed from the first immediate unity, and through the moments of settling down into shapes and processes and therewith to unity, and thereby again having returned to the first simple substance, this reflected unity is a unity which is different from the first one. As opposed to that immediate unity, which was expressed as a being, this second is the universal unity which contains all those moments as sublated within itself. It is the simple genus, which in the movement of life itself does not exist for itself as this simple. Rather, in this result, life points towards something other than itself, namely, towards consciousness, for which life is as this unity, or as genus.

173. But this other life for which the genus as such is and which is the genus for itself, namely, self-consciousness, initially is, to itself, only as this simple essence and, to itself, is an object as the pure I. In its experience, which is now up for examination, this abstract object will, to itself, become enriched and will contain the development that we have seen in life.

174. The simple I is this genus, or the simple universal for which the differences are no differences at all as it is the negative essence of the shaped self-sufficient moments. Self-consciousness is therefore only certain of itself through the sublating of this other, which, to itself, exhibits itself as self-sufficient life. Self-consciousness is desire. Certain of the nullity of this other, it posits for itself this nullity as its truth, it destroys the self-sufficient object, and it as a result gives itself the certainty of itself as true certainty, as the sort of certainty which, to itself, has come to be in an objective manner.

175. However, in this satisfaction it learns from experience about the self-sufficiency of its object. Desire and the certainty of itself achieved in its satisfaction are conditioned by the object, for the certainty is through the sublating of this other. For this sublating even to be, there must be this other. Self-consciousness is thus unable through its negative relation to the object to sublate it, and for that reason it again, instead re-engenders the object as well as the desire. There is in fact an other than self-consciousness, the essence of desire, and it is through this experience that, to itself, 108this truth has itself come to be. However, at the same time self-consciousness likewise is absolutely for itself, and it is absolutely for itself only through sublating the object, and, to itself, it is this which must become its satisfaction, for self-consciousness is the truth. For the sake of the self-sufficiency of the object, self-consciousness can thus only arrive at satisfaction by this object itself effecting the negation in itself;⁵ and the object must in itself effect this negation of itself, for it is in itself the negative, and it must be for the other what it is. As the object is the negation in itself and at the same time is therein self-sufficient, it is consciousness. In life, which is the object of desire, the negation is either in an other, namely, in desire, or it is as determinateness confronting another indifferent shape, or it is as the inorganic universal nature of this life. However, this universal self-sufficient nature, in which the negation is as absolute, is the genus as such, or as self-consciousness. Self-consciousness attains its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness.

176. In these three moments the concept of self-consciousness is brought to completion: (a) the pure I without differences is its first immediate object. (b) However, this immediacy is itself absolute mediation; it is only as sublating the self-sufficient object, or it is desire. The satisfaction of desire is indeed the reflection of self-consciousness into itself, or it is the certainty which has become the truth. (c) But the truth of that certainty is instead the doubled reflection, the doubling of self-consciousness. There is an object for consciousness which in itself posits its otherness, or which posits the difference as a nullity and is therein a self-sufficient object. To be sure, the differentiated, only living shape also sublates its self-sufficiency in the process of life itself, but, along with its differences, it ceases to be what it is. However, the object of self-consciousness is just as self-sufficient in this negativity of itself, and it is thereby for itself the genus, the universal fluidity in the ownness of its isolation. It is living self-consciousness.

177. A self-consciousness is for a self-consciousness. Only thereby is there in fact self-consciousness, for it is only therein that the unity of itself in its otherness comes to be for it. The I, which is the object of its concept, is in fact not an object. But the object of desire is only self-sufficient, for it is the universal, inerasable substance, the fluid self-equal essence. While a self-consciousness is the object, the object is just as well an I as it is an object. – The concept of spirit is thereby present and available for us. What will later come to be for consciousness will be the experience of what spirit is, this absolute substance which constitutes the unity of its oppositions in their complete freedom and self-sufficiency, namely, in the oppositions of the various self-consciousnesses existing for themselves: The I that is we and the we that is I. Consciousness has its turning point 109in self-consciousness, as the concept of spirit, where, leaving behind the colorful semblance of the this-worldly sensuous, and leaving behind the empty night of the supersensible other-worldly beyond, it steps into the spiritual daylight of the present.

A. Self-Sufficiency and Non-Self-Sufficiency of Self-Consciousness; Mastery and Servitude

178. Self-consciousness is in and for itself while and as a result of its being in and for itself for an other; i.e., it is only as a recognized being.⁶ The concept of its unity in its doubling, of infinity realizing itself in self-consciousness, is that of a multi-sided and multi-meaning intertwining, such that, on the one hand, the moments within this intertwining must be strictly kept apart from each other, and on the other hand, they must also be taken and cognized at the same time as not distinguished, or they must be always taken and cognized in their opposed meanings. This twofold sense of what is distinguished lies in the essence of self-consciousness, which is to be infinitely or immediately the opposite of the determinateness in which it is posited. The elaboration of the concept of this spiritual unity in its doubling presents us with the movement of recognizing.

179. For self-consciousness, there is another self-consciousness; self-consciousness is outside of itself.⁷ This has a twofold meaning. First, it has lost itself, for it is to be found as an other essence. Second, it has thereby sublated that other, for it also does not see the other as the essence but rather sees itself in the other.

180. It must sublate its otherness. This is the sublation of that first two-sided ambiguity and is for that reason itself a second two-sided ambiguity. First, it must set out to sublate the other self-sufficient essence in order as a result to become certain of itself as the essence through having sublated the other. Second, it thereby sets out to sublate itself, for this other is itself.

181. This double-edged sense of the sublating of its double-edged sense of otherness is likewise a double-edged sense of a return into itself. This is so in the first place because it gets itself back through sublation, for it comes to be in equality with itself again through the sublation of its otherness. However, in the second place, it likewise gives the other self-consciousness back to itself, since it existed for itself in the other, but it sublates its being in the other, and it thus sets the other free again.

110182. In this way, this movement of self-consciousness in its relation to another self-consciousness has been represented as the doing of one self-consciousness, but this doing on the part of one self-consciousness has itself the twofold significance of being its own doing just as well as it is the other's doing, for the other is just as self-sufficient. The other is just as enclosed within himself, and there is nothing within him which is not there through himself. The first does not have the object before it in the way that the object only is initially for desire. Instead, it has an object existing for itself self-sufficiently. For that reason, it can do nothing on its own about that object if that object does not do in itself what the first self-consciousness does in it. The movement is thus straightforwardly the doubled movement of both self-consciousnesses. Each sees the other do the same as he does; each himself does what he demands of the other and for that reason also does what he does only insofar as the other does the same. A one-sided doing would be useless because what is supposed to happen can only be brought about through both of them bringing it about.

183. The doing thus carries not only a double-edged sense inasmuch as it is a doing directed as much towards itself as it is directed towards the other, but also inasmuch as it is just as much inseparably the doing of one as well as the doing of the other.

184. In this movement we see the process repeat itself which had been exhibited as the play of forces in consciousness. What existed for us in that process is here for the extremes themselves. The mediating middle is self-consciousness, which disintegrates into the extremes, and each extreme term is this exchange of its own determinateness and the absolute transition into what is its opposite. However, as consciousness, it does indeed get outside of itself,⁸ but in its being-outside-of-itself, it is at the same time kept back within itself. It is for itself, and its self-externality is for it. It is for consciousness that it immediately is and is not an other consciousness. Likewise, this other is only for itself as it sublates itself as existing-for-itself, and it is for itself only in the being-for-itself of the other. Each is the mediating middle to the other, through which each mediates itself with itself and integrates itself with itself. Each is, to itself, and in that of the other, an essence immediately existing for itself which at the same time is for itself in that way only through this mediation. They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing each other.

185. This pure concept of recognition, the pure concept of the doubling of self-consciousness in its unity, is itself now up for examination according to how its process appears for self-consciousness. It will first of all exhibit the aspect of inequality between both of them, or the mediating middle breaking apart into the extremes, which are, as extremes, opposed to each other, and of which one is only recognized while the other only recognizes.

186. Self-consciousness is at first simple being-for-itself, and it is self-equal through the exclusion from itself of all that is other, to itself, its essence and absolute object is the I, and within this immediacy, or within this being of its 111being-for-itself, it is a singular being.⁹ What is other for it, is, as an inessential object, designated by the character of the negative. However, the other is also a self-consciousness, and thus what comes on the scene here is an individual¹⁰ confronting an individual. In the way that they immediately make their appearance, they are for each other in the way ordinary objects do. They are self-sufficient shapes absorbed within the being of life – for the existing object has here been determined to be life – which for each other have not yet achieved the movement of absolute abstraction, they have not yet achieved the destruction of all immediate being and of being themselves only the purely negative being of self-equal consciousness, or they have not yet presented themselves to each other as pure being-for-itself, which is to say, as self-consciousness. Each is, to be sure, certain of itself but not of the other, and for that reason its own certainty of itself is still without truth, for its truth would be only if its own being-for-itself were, to itself, to have exhibited itself as a self-sufficient object, or, what is the same thing, that the object would have turned out to be this pure certainty of itself. However, according to the concept of recognition, this is not possible without the other being for it in the way it is for the other, without each in itself achieving this pure abstraction of being-for-itself, without each achieving this through its own activity and again through the activity of the other.

187. However, the exhibition of itself as the pure abstraction of self-consciousness consists in showing itself to be the pure negation of its objective mode, or in showing that it is fettered to no determinate existence, that it is not at all bound to the universal singularity of existence, that it is not shackled to life. This display is the doubled act, namely, both what the other does and what is done through oneself. To the extent that it is what is done by the other, each thus aims at the death of the other. However, the second aspect is also therein present, namely, what is done through oneself, for the former involves putting one's own life on the line. The relation of both self-consciousnesses is thus determined in such a way that it is through a life and death struggle that each proves its worth to itself, and that both prove their worth to each other.¹¹ – They must engage in this struggle, for each must elevate its self-certainty of existing for itself to truth, both in the other and in itself. And it is solely by staking one's life that freedom is proven to be the essence, namely, that as a result the essence for self-consciousness is proven to be not being, not the immediate way self-consciousness emerges, not its being absorbed within the expanse of life – but rather, it is that there is nothing present in it itself which could not be a vanishing moment for it, that self-consciousness is only pure being-for-itself. The individual who has not risked his life may admittedly be recognized as a person,¹² but he has not achieved the truth of being recognized as a self-sufficient self-consciousness. As each risks his own life, each must likewise aim at the death of the other, for that other no longer counts to him as himself. To himself, his essence exhibits itself as that of an other; he is external to himself,¹³ and he must sublate that being-external-to-himself. The other is a diversely entangled 112and existing consciousness; he must intuit his otherness as pure being-for-itself, or as absolute negation.

188. However, this trial by death likewise sublates the truth which was supposed to emerge from it, and, by doing so, completely sublates the certainty of itself. For just as life is the natural location of consciousness, self-sufficiency without absolute negativity, death is the natural negation of this same consciousness, negation without self-sufficiency, which thus endures without the significance of the recognition which was demanded. Through death, the certainty has been established that each has risked his life, and that each has cast a disdainful eye towards death both in himself and in the other. But this is not the case for those who passed the test in this struggle. They sublate their consciousness, which was posited in this alien essentiality which is natural existence, or they elevate themselves and, as extremes wanting to be for themselves, are themselves sublated. The essential moment thereby vanishes from the fluctuating interplay, namely, that of disintegrating into extremes of opposed determinatenesses, and the mediating middle collapses into a dead unity, which breaks down into dead extremes which are merely existents and not opposed. Neither gives back the other to itself nor does it receive itself from the other through consciousness. Rather, they only indifferently leave each other free-standing, like things. Their deed is abstract negation, not the negation of consciousness, which sublates so that it preserves and maintains what has been sublated and which thereby survives its having become sublated.

189. In this experience self-consciousness learns that life is as essential to it as is pure self-consciousness. In immediate self-consciousness, the simple I is the absolute object. However, for us, or in itself, this object is absolute mediation and has stably existing self-sufficiency as its essential moment. The dissolution of that simple unity is the result of the first experience. It is through that experience that a pure self-consciousness is posited, and a consciousness is posited which is not purely for itself but for an other, which is to say, is posited as an existing consciousness, or consciousness in the shape of thinghood. Both moments are essential – because they are initially not the same and are opposed, and because their reflection into unity has not yet resulted, they are as two opposed shapes of consciousness. One is self-sufficient; for it, its essence is being-for-itself. The other is non-self-sufficient; for it, life, or being for an other, is the essence. The former is the master, the latter is the servant.

190. The master is consciousness existing for itself. However, the master is no longer consciousness existing for itself only as the concept of such a consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness existing for itself which is mediated with itself through an other consciousness, namely, through an other whose essence includes its being synthetically combined with self-sufficient being, or with thinghood itself. 113The master relates himself to both of these moments, to a thing as such, the object of desire, and to the consciousness for which thinghood is essential; while (a) the master is, as the concept of self-consciousness, the immediate relation of being-for-itself, but (b) henceforth is at the same time as mediation, or as a being-for-itself that is for itself only through an other, the master in that way relates himself (a) immediately to both, and (b) mediately to each through the other. The master relates himself to the servant mediately through self-sufficient being, for it is on this very point that the servant is held fast. It is his chain, the one he could not ignore in the struggle, and for that reason he proved himself to be non-self-sufficient and to have his self-sufficiency in the shape of thinghood. However, the master is the power over this being, for he has proved in the struggle that to him it only counted as a negative. While he is the power over this being, this being, however, is the power over the other, so that the master thus has within this syllogism the other as subordinate to him. The master likewise relates himself to the thing mediately through the servant. The servant, as self-consciousness itself, relates himself negatively to the thing and sublates the thing. However, at the same time the thing is for him self-sufficient, and, for that reason, he cannot through his negating be over and done with it, cannot have eliminated it; or, the servant only processes it. On the other hand, to the master, the immediate relation comes to be through this mediation as the pure negation of the thing, or as the consumption of the thing. Where desire had failed, the master now succeeds in being over and done with the thing, and he achieves satisfaction in his consumption of it. On account of the thing's self-sufficiency, desire did not achieve this much, but the master, who has interposed the servant between the thing and himself, as a result only links up with the non-self-sufficiency of the thing and simply consumes it. He leaves the aspect of its self-sufficiency in the care of the servant, who works on the thing.

191. For the master, it is in these two moments that his recognition comes about through another consciousness, since the latter consciousness posits itself as inessential within those moments, first of all by working on the thing, and second of all by his dependence on a determinate existence. In both moments, he cannot achieve mastery over existence and achieve absolute negation. This moment of recognition is present here such that the other consciousness sublates itself as being-for-itself, and it thereby itself does what the first does to it. This is just as much the case for the other moment. What the second self-consciousness does is the first's own doing, for what the servant does is really the master's doing. The latter is only being-for-itself, the essence; he is the pure negative power for which the thing is nothing, and he is thus the pure essential doing in this relationship. However, the servant is not a pure but rather an inessential doing. However, what prevents this from being genuine recognition is the moment where what the master does with regard to the other, he also does with regard to himself, and where what the servant does with regard to himself, he also is supposed to do with regard to the other. As a result, a form of recognition has arisen that is one-sided and unequal.

192. The 114inessential consciousness is therein for the master the object which constitutes the truth of his certainty of himself. However, it is clear that this object does not correspond to its concept, but rather that the object in which the master has achieved his mastery has become, to the master, something entirely different from a self-sufficient consciousness. It is not a self-sufficient consciousness which is for him but above all a non-self-sufficient consciousness. His certainty is therefore not that of being-for-itself as the truth; instead, his truth is the inessential consciousness and the inessential doing of that inessential consciousness.

193. The truth of the self-sufficient consciousness is thus the servile consciousness. To be sure, this consciousness admittedly first appears external to itself¹⁴ and not as the truth of self-consciousness. However, in the way that mastery showed that its essence is the inversion of what mastery wants to be, so too in its consummation will servitude become instead the opposite of what it immediately is. As a consciousness forced back into itself, it will take the inward turn¹⁵ and convert itself into true self-sufficiency.

194. We only saw what servitude is in relation to mastery. However, servitude is self-consciousness, and thus what it is in and for itself is now up for examination. For servitude, the master is initially the essence. Therefore, to servitude, the truth is the self-sufficient consciousness existing for itself, a truth which for servitude is nonetheless not yet in servitude. Yet servitude has this truth of pure negativity and of being-for-itself in fact in servitude in its own self, for servitude has experienced this essence in servitude. This consciousness was not driven with anxiety about just this or that matter, nor did it have anxiety about just this or that moment; rather, it had anxiety about its entire essence. It felt the fear of death, the absolute master. In that feeling, it had inwardly fallen into dissolution, trembled in its depths, and all that was fixed within it had been shaken loose. However, this pure universal movement, this way in which all stable existence becomes absolutely fluid, is the simple essence of self-consciousness; it is absolute negativity, pure being-for-itself, which thereby is in this consciousness. This moment of pure being-for-itself is also for this consciousness, for, to itself, its object lies within the master. Furthermore, not only is there this universal dissolution as such, but, in his service, the servant also achieves this dissolution in actuality. In his service, he sublates all of the singular moments of his attachment to natural existence, and he works off his natural existence.

195. However, the feeling of absolute power as such, and in the particularities of service, is only dissolution in itself, and, although the fear of the lord is the beginning of wisdom, in that fear consciousness is what it is that is for it itself, but it is not being-for-itself.¹⁶ However, through work, this servile consciousness comes round to itself. In the moment corresponding to desire in the master's consciousness, the aspect of the non-essential relation to the thing seemed to fall to the lot of the servant, as the thing there retained its self-sufficiency. Desire has reserved to itself the 115pure negating of the object, and, as a result, it has reserved to itself that unmixed feeling for its own self.¹⁷ However, for that reason, this satisfaction is itself only a vanishing, for it lacks the objective aspect, or stable existence. In contrast, work is desire held in check, it is vanishing staved off, or: work cultivates and educates.¹⁸ The negative relation to the object becomes the form of the object; it becomes something that endures because it is just for the laborer himself that the object has self-sufficiency. This negative mediating middle, this formative doing, is at the same time singularity, or the pure being-for-itself of consciousness, which in the work external to it now enters into the element of lasting. Thus, by those means, the working consciousness comes to an intuition of self-sufficient being as its own self.

196. However, what the formative activity means is not only that the serving consciousness as pure being-for-itself becomes, to itself, an existing being within that formative activity. It also has the negative meaning of the first moment, that of fear. For in forming the thing, his own negativity, or his being-for-itself, only as a result becomes an object to himself in that he sublates the opposed existing form. However, this objective negative is precisely the alien essence before which he trembled, but now he destroys this alien negative and posits himself as such a negative within the element of continuance. He thereby becomes for himself an existing-being-for-itself. Being-for-itself in the master is to the servant an other, or it is only for him. In fear, being-for-itself is in its own self. In culturally formative activity,¹⁹ being-for-itself becomes for him his own being-for-itself, and he attains the consciousness that he himself is in and for himself. As a result, the form, by being posited as external, becomes to him not something other than himself, for his pure being-for-itself is that very form, which to him therein becomes the truth. Therefore, through this retrieval, he comes to acquire through himself a mind of his own, and he does this precisely in the work in which there had seemed to be only some outsider's mind. – For this reflection, the two moments of fear and service, as well as the moments of culturally formative activity are both necessary, and both are necessary in a universal way. Without the discipline of service and obedience, fear is mired in formality and does not diffuse itself over the conscious actuality of existence. Without culturally formative activity, fear remains inward and mute, and consciousness will not become for it [consciousness] itself.²⁰ If consciousness engages in formative activity without that first, absolute fear, then it has a mind of its own which is only vanity, for its form, or its negativity, is not negativity in itself, and his formative activity thus cannot to himself give him the consciousness of himself as consciousness of the essence. If he has not been tried and tested by absolute fear but only by a few anxieties, then the negative essence will have remained an externality to himself, and his substance will not have been infected all the way through by it. While not each and every one of the ways in which his natural consciousness was brought to fulfillment was shaken to the core, he is still attached in himself to determinate being. His having a mind of his own is then only stubbornness, a freedom that remains bogged down 116within the bounds of servility. To the servile consciousness, pure form can as little become the essence as can the pure form – when it is taken as extending itself beyond the singular individual – be a universal culturally formative activity, an absolute concept. Rather, the form is a skill which, while it has dominance over some things, has dominance over neither the universal power nor the entire objective essence.

B. Freedom of Self-Consciousness: Stoicism, Skepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness

197. On the one hand, to the self-sufficient self-consciousness, its essence is only the pure abstraction of the I. However, on the other hand, while this abstract I develops itself and gives itself differences, this differentiating does not become, to itself, an objective essence existing-in-itself. This self-consciousness thus does not become an I that is genuinely self-distinguished in its simplicity, or a self-consistent I²¹ within this absolute difference. In contrast, pressed back into itself and as the form of the culturally shaped thing, consciousness becomes in formative activity an object to itself, and, in the master, it intuits being-for-itself at the same time as consciousness. However, to the servile consciousness as such a servile consciousness, both of these moments come undone from each other – the moments of itself as the self-sufficient object, and this object as a consciousness and thereby its own essence. – However, while for us, or in itself, the form and the being-for-itself are the same, and while in the concept of self-sufficient consciousness, being-in-itself is consciousness, the aspect of being-in-itself, or thinghood, which received its form through labor, is no other substance but consciousness itself, and, for us, a new shape of self-consciousness has come to be, a consciousness that, to itself, is essence as infinity, or the pure movement of consciousness which thinks, or free self-consciousness. To think does not mean to think as an abstract I, but as an I which, at the same time, signifies being-in-itself, or it has the meaning of being an object to itself, or of conducting itself vis-à-vis the objective essence in such a way that its meaning is that of the being-for-itself of that consciousness for which it is. – To thinking, the object does not move itself according to representations or shapes but rather in concepts, which is to say, the object moves itself within a differentiated being-in-itself, which for consciousness is not anything immediately 117differentiated from it. What is represented, already shaped, what is an existent, has as such the form of being something other than consciousness. However, a concept is at the same time an existent – and this difference, insofar as it is in its own self, is consciousness’ determinate content. – However, in that this content is at the same time a conceptually grasped²² content, consciousness remains immediately self-aware of its unity with this determinate and distinguished existent, not as it would be in the case of representation, in which consciousness especially has to remind itself that this is its representation; rather, the concept is to me immediately my concept. Within thinking, I am free because I am not in an other, but rather I remain utterly at one with myself, and the object, which to me is the essence, is in undivided unity my being-for-myself; and my moving about in concepts is a movement within myself. – However, in this determination of the shape of self-consciousness, it is essential to hold fast to this: That this determination is thinking consciousness itself, or its object is the immediate unity of being-in-itself and being-for-itself. Consciousness, which to itself is that of a “like pole”²³ and which repels itself from itself, becomes, to itself, an element existing-in-itself. However, initially it is, to itself, this element only as the universal essence as such and not as this objective essence in the development and movement of its manifold being.

198. As it consciously appeared in the history of spirit, this freedom of self-consciousness has, as is well known, been called stoicism. Its principle is this: Consciousness is the thinking essence and something only has essentiality for consciousness, or is true and good for it, insofar as consciousness conducts itself therein as a thinking being.²⁴

199. The multiple self-differentiating spreading out, isolation, and complexity of life is the object with respect to which desire and labor are active. This multifarious doing has now been concentrated into the simple difference that is in the pure movement of thinking. There is no more essentiality to be found in the difference which has been posited as a determinate thing, or as consciousness of a determinate natural existence, or as a feeling, or as desire and its purpose, whether that purpose is posited by its own consciousness or by that of an alien consciousness. Rather, what has more essentiality is solely the difference that has been thought, or the difference which is not immediately differentiated from me. This consciousness is thereby negative with regard to the relationship of mastery and servitude. Its doing consists in neither being the master who has his truth in the servant nor in being the servant who has his truth in the will of the master and in serving him. Rather, it consists in being free within all the dependencies of his singular existence, whether on the throne or in fetters, and in maintaining the lifelessness which consistently withdraws from the movement of existence, withdraws from actual doing as well as from suffering, and withdraws into the simple essentiality of thought. Stubbornness 118is the freedom that hitches itself to a singular individuality standing within the bounds of servitude. However, stoicism is the freedom which always immediately leaves servitude and returns back into the pure universality of thought. As a universal form of the world-spirit, it can only come on the scene during a time of universal fear and servitude but which is also a time of universal cultural formation that has raised culturally formative activity all the way up to the heights of thinking.

200. Now, to be sure, it is true that for this self-consciousness the essence is neither something other than itself, nor is it the pure abstraction of the I. It is instead the I which has otherness in it, but as a difference which has been conceived²⁵ such that within its otherness, this I has immediately returned into itself, and its essence is at the same time only an abstract essence. The freedom of self-consciousness is indifferent with respect to natural existence and for that reason has likewise let go of natural existence, has let it be free-standing, and the reflection is a doubled reflection. Freedom in thought only has pure thoughts as its truth, a truth without any fulfillment in life, and thus it is also not living freedom itself but only the concept of freedom, and, initially it is, to itself, only thinking itself which is its essence. That is, it is the form as such which, in turning away from the self-sufficiency of things, has returned into itself. However, while individuality, as acting, is supposed to show itself to be living, or, as thinking, is supposed to grasp the living world as a system of thoughts, so too within the thoughts themselves there must be for the former expansion a content for what is good, and, for the latter expansion, a content for what is true. There would thereby be for all intents and purposes no other ingredient in what is for consciousness than the concept which is the essence. Yet in the way that the concept as an abstraction has here cut itself off from the manifoldness of things, the concept has in its own self no content; instead, it has a given content. Consciousness indeed abolishes the content as an alien being as it thinks it. However, the concept is a determinate concept, and it is this determinateness of the concept that is the alien which the concept has in it. For that reason, stoicism found itself in an embarrassing situation when it was asked, as the expression had it, for the criterion of truth per se, i.e., when it was in fact asked for a content of thought itself. To the question put to it, “What is good and true?”, its answer was once more that it was the abstract thinking devoid of all content itself, namely, that the true and the good is supposed to consist in rationality. However, this self-equality of thinking is only again the pure form in which nothing is determinate. The general terms, “true” and “good,” or “wisdom” and “virtue,” with which stoicism is stuck, are on the whole undeniably uplifting, but because they cannot in fact end up in any kind of expansion of content, they quickly start to become tiresome.

201. In the way it has determined itself as abstract freedom, this thinking consciousness is therefore only the incomplete negation of otherness. Having only pulled itself back into itself from out of existence, it has not in itself achieved itself as the absolute negation of this existence. 119To be sure, the content counts to it only as thought, but thereby also as determinate thought and at the same time determinateness as such determinateness.

202. Skepticism is the realization of that of which stoicism is only the concept – and it is the actual experience of what freedom of thought is. Skepticism is in itself the negative, and that is the way it must exhibit itself. With the reflection of self-consciousness into the simple thoughts of itself, self-sufficient existence, or the lasting determinateness confronting it, has in fact fallen outside of the infinity of thought. In skepticism, the whole inessentiality and non-self-sufficiency of this other comes to be for consciousness; thought becomes the thinking that annihilates the being of the manifoldly determinate world, and the negativity of free self-consciousness in the heart of these multifarious shapes of life becomes, to itself, real negativity. – It is clear that just as stoicism corresponds to the concept of self-sufficient consciousness (which appeared as a relationship between mastery and servitude), skepticism corresponds to the realization of the concept of self-sufficient consciousness as the negative direction (of desire and work) towards otherness. However much desire and work were not able to achieve the negation for self-consciousness, by contrast this polemical direction towards the manifold self-sufficiency of things meets with success because, within itself, as an already culminated and free self-consciousness, it turns against them. To put it more precisely, because this polemical orientation has thinking in its own self, or infinity, those self-sufficiencies, according to their differences, are therein only as vanishing magnitudes to it. The differences which in the pure thinking of itself are only the abstraction of differences become here all of the differences, and every differentiated being becomes a difference of self-consciousness.

203. Thereby what skepticism as such does, as well as its way of doing it, determines what skepticism is. It highlights the dialectical movement, which is sensuous-certainty, perception, and the understanding, as well as the inessentiality of what counts as determinate both within the relationship between mastery and servitude and for abstract thinking itself. At the same time, that relationship comprehends within itself a determinate manner in which ethical laws, as commands by the master, are also present. However, the determinations within abstract thinking are concepts of science in which contentless thinking expands itself and attaches the concept in an external manner only onto the being which, to itself, is self-sufficient and which constitutes its content. It holds only such determinate concepts to be valid even though they are also only pure abstractions.

204. The dialectical, as negative movement in the way that such movement immediately is, initially appears to consciousness as something to which consciousness must give way and which does not exist through consciousness itself. In contrast, as skepticism, it is a moment of self-consciousness, 120to which it does not simply happen that the true and the real for it vanishes without its knowing how this comes about. Rather, it is what, within the certainty of its freedom, lets this other, which is giving itself the appearance of being real, itself vanish. It not only lets the objective as such vanish but also its own conduct towards the object in which self-consciousness both counts as objective and is affirmatively asserted. It thus also allows its perceiving to vanish in the way that it reinforces what it is in danger of losing, namely, sophistry and the truth which it has itself determined and has itself established. Through that self-conscious negation, self-consciousness itself engenders for itself both the certainty of its own freedom and the experience of that freedom, and as a result it raises them to truth. What vanishes is the determinate, or the difference which, no matter what it is or from where it comes, is established as fixed and unchangeable. The difference has nothing lasting in it, and it must vanish for thinking because what is differentiated is just this: Not to be in its own self but rather to have its essentiality only in an other. However, thinking is the insight into this nature of what is differentiated; it is the negative essence as simple essence.

205. Throughout the changing flux of everything which would secure itself for it, skeptical self-consciousness thus experiences its own freedom, both as given to itself by itself and as sustained by itself to itself; it is this Ataraxia [indifference] of thought-thinking-itself,²⁶ the unchangeable and genuine certainty of its own self. This certainty does not emerge from an alien source whose multifarious development would have collapsed into itself, nor does it emerge as a result which would have its coming-to-be firmly behind it. Rather, consciousness itself is the absolute dialectical unrest, this mixture of sensuous representations and representational thought, whose differences collapse into each other and whose equality – for this equality is itself determinateness with respect to the unequal – likewise is again brought to dissolution. However, this consciousness, instead of being a self-equal consciousness, is in fact therein only an utterly contingent disarray, the vertigo of a perpetually self-creating disorder. This is what it is for itself, for it itself sustains and engenders this self-moving disarray. For that reason, it avows that it is an entirely contingent singularly individual consciousness – a consciousness which is empirical, which orients itself according to what has no reality for it, which obeys what is not essential for it, and which acts on and actualizes what has no truth for it. However, just in the way that, to itself, it counts as a singular individual, as contingent, and in fact, as both animal life and as forsaken self-consciousness, it also, on the contrary, makes itself again into universal self-equal self-consciousness, for it is the negativity of all singular individuality and all difference. From this self-equality, or from within itself, it instead falls back once again into that contingency and disarray, for this self-moving negativity has to do solely with what is singularly individual, and it occupies itself with what is contingent. This consciousness is thus the insensible claptrap 121that goes to and fro from the one extreme of self-equal self-consciousness to the other extreme of contingent, disordered, and disordering consciousness. It does not itself bring either of these two thoughts of itself into contact with each other. At one time, it has cognizance²⁷ of its freedom as an elevation above all the disarray and contingency of existence, and at another time it again just as much avows that it is backsliding into inessentiality and wandering aimlessly within it. It lets the inessential content in its thinking vanish, but it is therein the very consciousness of something inessential. It speaks about absolute disappearance, but that “speaking about” itself is, and this consciousness is the disappearance spoken about. It speaks about the nullity of seeing, hearing, and so on, and it itself sees, hears, and so on. It speaks about the nullity of ethical essentialities, and then it makes those essentialities themselves into the powers governing its actions. Its acts and its words always contradict each other, and it itself has the doubled contradictory consciousness of unchangeableness and equality combined with that of utter contingency and inequality with itself. However, it keeps its contradictions separated from each other, and it conducts itself in relation to them in the way it does in its purely negative movement itself. If equality is pointed out to it, it points out inequality, and if it is reproached with the latter (about which it had just spoken), it quickly shifts over into pointing out equality. Its talk is indeed like that of a squabble among stubborn children, one of whom says A when the other says B, and then says B when the other says A. By being in contradiction with himself, each of them purchases the delight of remaining in contradiction with each other.

206. In skepticism, consciousness experiences itself in truth as a self-contradictory consciousness. From out of this experience, there then arises a new shape which brings together the two thoughts which skepticism keeps asunder. Skepticism's thoughtlessness about itself has to vanish because it is in fact one consciousness that has these two modes in it. This new shape is thereby one that is for itself the doubled consciousness of itself as self-liberating, unchangeable, self-equal self-consciousness, and of itself as absolutely self-confusing, self-inverting – and it is the consciousness of its being this contradiction. – In stoicism, self-consciousness is the simple freedom of itself; in skepticism, it realizes itself and annihilates the other aspect of determinate existence, but on the contrary it doubles itself and is, to itself, now something twofold. The doubling, which was previously distributed between two singular individuals, the master and the servant, is thereby brought back into one singular individual. Although the doubling of self-consciousness within itself, which is essential in the concept of spirit, is thereby present, its unity is not yet present, and the unhappy consciousness is the consciousness of itself as a doubled, only contradictory creature.²⁸

122207. Because, to itself, this contradiction of its essence is one consciousness, this unhappy and estranged consciousness within itself also must always have in one consciousness that of an other consciousness. But just when it thinks itself to have achieved victory and to have achieved restful unity with the other consciousness, each must again be immediately expelled from the unity. However, its true return into itself, or its reconciliation with itself, will exhibit the concept of the spirit that has been brought to life and has entered into existence, because in it, as one undivided consciousness, it is already a doubled consciousness. It itself is the beholding of a self-consciousness in an other; it itself is both of them; and, to itself, the unity of both is also the essence. However, for itself it is, to itself, not yet this essence itself, nor is it yet the unity of both.

208. While at first it is only the immediate unity of both, but while, for it, the two are opposed consciousnesses and not the same consciousness, one of them, namely, the simple unchangeable, is, to itself, as the essence, the other, however, the manifoldly changeable, as the inessential. For it, both are essences that are alien to each other. Because it is the consciousness of this contradiction, it itself takes the side of the changeable consciousness and is, to itself, the inessential. However, as consciousness of unchangeableness, or of the simple essence, it must at the same time concern itself with freeing itself from the inessential, which means to free itself from itself. For whether it is indeed for itself only the changeable and the unchangeable is, to itself, something alien, it is in that way itself simple and thereby unchangeable consciousness. It is thereby aware of the unchangeable consciousness as its essence, although it is still aware of it in such a way that for itself it itself is again not this essence. The stance that it assigns to both thus cannot be an indifference of one to the other, i.e., cannot be an indifference of itself with respect to the unchangeable. Rather, it is immediately itself both of them, and, for it, it is the relation of both as a relation of essence to the inessential, in such a manner that this latter is to be sublated. However, while both are, to itself, equally essential and equally contradictory, it is only the contradictory movement in which the opposite does not come to rest in its own opposite but instead newly engenders itself only as an opposite within it.

209. As a result, there is a struggle against an enemy in which victory really means defeat and in which attaining one thing means instead losing it in its opposite. Consciousness of life, of its existence, and of its activities only amounts to a sorrow over this existence and these doings, for consciousness has therein only the consciousness both of its opposite as being its essence and of its own nullity. In elevating itself beyond this, consciousness makes a transition into the unchangeable. However, this elevation is itself this same consciousness; it is thus immediately the consciousness of the opposite, namely, 123of itself as singular individuality. Just as a result of that, the unchangeable which enters into consciousness is at the same time affected by singular individuality, and it is current there only together with singular individuality. Instead of singular individuality having been abolished in the consciousness of the unchangeable, it only continues to emerge within it.

210. However, in this movement consciousness experiences this very emergence of singular individuality in the unchangeable and the emergence of the unchangeable in singular individuality. For consciousness, that singular individuality itself comes to be in the unchangeable essence, and, at the same time, its own singular individuality comes to be in the unchangeable essence. For the truth of this movement is the very oneness of this doubled consciousness. However, to itself, this unity becomes at first itself the sort of unity in which the difference of both is still dominant. As a result, what is present for consciousness is the threefold way in which singular individuality is bound up with the unchangeable. At one time, it comes forth again, to itself, as opposed to the unchangeable essence, and it is thrown back to the beginning of the struggle, which remains the element of the whole relationship. However, at another time, for consciousness the unchangeable itself has in itself singular individuality such that singular individuality is a shape of the unchangeable into which the entire way of existing moves over. At a third time, consciousness finds itself to be this singular individuality within the unchangeable. To consciousness, the first unchangeable is only the alien essence passing sentence on it. While the other unchangeable is a shape of singular individuality like itself, consciousness becomes, thirdly, spirit. It has the joy of finding itself therein, and it is aware that its singular individuality is reconciled with the universal.

211. What appears here to be a mode and a relationship obtaining in the unchangeable has turned out to be the learning experience of the estranged self-consciousness in its own unhappiness. To be sure, now this experience is not its one-sided movement, for it is itself unchangeable consciousness. Hence, it is also at the same time singularly individual consciousness; the movement is just as much a movement of the unchangeable consciousness, which makes its appearance in it just as the other makes its appearance in it. This is so because the movement runs through the following moments: First, there is the unchangeable opposed to the singular individual per se, then there is itself as a singular individual opposed to other singular individuals, and, finally, there is its being One with the singular individual. However, this observation, insofar as it is made by us, is ill-timed here, for until now, it has, to us, only been unchangeableness as the unchangeableness of consciousness which has arisen, and which, still burdened with an opposite, is not true unchangeableness. It is thus not the unchangeable in and for itself. Hence, we do not know how this latter will acquit itself. What has resulted here is only that for consciousness, which is our object here, the determinations indicated above appear in the unchangeable.

212. For this reason, with regard to singularly individual consciousness, the unchangeable consciousness thus itself also retains within its shape the character and the fundamentals of estrangement and of 124being-for-itself. For the latter, it is simply an event such that the unchangeable receives the shape of singular individuality. This is so because singularly individual consciousness is only to be found as opposed to the unchangeable, and it therefore has this relationship through a fact of nature.²⁹ That it is finally to be found within it appears to it in part as something engendered through itself, or it comes about for the reason that it itself is singularly individual. However, one part of this unity, in accordance with its origin and insofar as it is, appears to it as belonging to the unchangeable, and the opposition remains within this unity itself. It is through the unchangeable taking shape that the moment of the other-worldly beyond has not only lasted but has become even more securely fixed, for if, on the one hand, the other-worldly beyond seems to be brought closer to the singular individual by this shape of singular actuality, then it is, on the other hand, henceforth opposed to it as an opaque sensuous One possessing all the aloofness of something actual. The hope of coming to be at one with it must remain a hope, which is to say, it must remain without fulfillment, without ever being present. Between the hope and the fulfillment stands the absolute contingency or immovable indifference which lies in the shape itself, or in the very basis of the hope. Through the nature of this existing One, or through the actuality it has taken on, it necessarily happens that in time it has disappeared, and, having once existed, it remains spatially utterly distant.

213. However much at first the mere concept of the estranged consciousness is determined as seeking to sublate itself as a singular consciousness and thereby to become the unchangeable consciousness, still its striving henceforth takes on the following determination. It sublates its relationship to the pure unshaped unchangeable, and it gives itself instead only a relation to the shaped unchangeable. It does this because, to itself, the oneness of the singular individual with the unchangeable is henceforth the essence and object, and it is this in the way that in the concept, the essential object was only the shapeless, abstract unchangeable. It must now turn its back on the relationship in this absolute estrangement of the concept. However, it must elevate the initially external relation to the shaped unchangeable as an alien actuality into an absolute oneness with it.

214. The movement within which the inessential consciousness strives to achieve this union is itself threefold according to the threefold relationships that this consciousness will have with its shaped other-worldly beyond: once as pure consciousness; second, as a singular essence which, as desire and labor, relates itself to actuality; and third, as consciousness of its being-for-itself. – How these three modes of its being are present and how they are determined within those universal relationships is what is now to be seen.

215. If therefore at first it is taken to be pure consciousness, then while it is for pure consciousness, the shaped unchangeable seems to be posited as 125it is in and for itself. Yet the shaped unchangeable as it is in and for itself has, as was already noted, not yet emerged. If the unchangeable were in consciousness as it is in and for itself, then this would surely have to come out instead from the unchangeable than from out of consciousness itself. However, through consciousness, its presence is initially here only one-sidedly present. For that very reason, it is not perfectly and genuinely present but instead remains encumbered with imperfection, or with an opposite.

216. However, even though the unhappy consciousness does not therefore have this presence in its possession, it is at the same time high above pure thinking insofar as it is stoicism's abstract thinking turning a blind eye to singular individuality altogether and is the only unsettled and agitated thinking of skepticism – which is indeed only singular individuality both as the unconscious contradiction and the unremitting movement of that contradiction. – It transcends both of these; it both brings together and keeps together pure thinking and singular individuality, but it has not yet been elevated to that thinking for which the singular individuality of consciousness is reconciled with pure thinking itself. Put more correctly, it stands instead at the midpoint where abstract thinking comes into contact with the singular individuality of consciousness as singular individuality. It itself is this contact; it is the unity of pure thinking and singular individuality. For it, it is also this thinking singular individuality, or pure thinking; it is essentially the unchangeable itself as singular individuality. However, what is not for it is that its object, the unchangeable, which, to it, essentially has the shape of singular individuality, is it itself, is itself the singularity of consciousness.

217. In this first way in which we view it as pure consciousness, the unhappy consciousness does not conduct itself towards its object in a thinking manner. Rather, while it is just in itself pure, thinking singular individuality, and while its object is itself just this pure thinking, and while pure thinking is not itself the relation of each to the other, it only, so to speak, launches itself in the direction of thinking, and on that path it becomes devotion.³⁰ As such, its thinking remains that of the shapeless roar of the pealing of bells, or that of a warm, all-suffusing vapor, or that of a musical thinking which does not amount to concepts, which themselves would be the sole, immanent, objective mode of thinking. To be sure, the object for this infinite, pure, inward feeling will eventually come to be, but coming on the scene in that way, this object does not make its entrance as conceptualized, and for that reason it comes on the scene as something alien. What is thereby present is the inward movement of the pure heart which painfully feels itself as estranged. It is the movement of an infinite longing which is certain that its essence is that of a pure heart, that it is a pure thinking that thinks of itself as singular individuality, and that this object takes cognizance of it³¹ and bestows recognition on it for the very reason that this object thinks of itself as singular individuality. However, at the same time this essence is the unattainable other-worldly beyond which, in the act of being seized, escapes, or rather has already 126escaped. It has already escaped, for it is in part the unchangeable thinking of itself as singular individuality, and consciousness thus immediately attains itself within it, but it does so as what is opposed to the unchangeable. Instead of catching hold of the essence, consciousness only feels it and has thus fallen back into itself. While attaining this, consciousness cannot prevent itself from being this opposed consciousness, it has only caught hold of inessentiality instead of having caught hold of the essence. While in one aspect, in striving to attain itself in the essence, it only catches hold of its own divided actuality, so too in another aspect, it cannot catch hold of that other as a singular individual or as an actual other. Where the other is sought, it cannot be found, for it is just supposed to be an other-worldly beyond, or the kind of thing that cannot be found. Sought as individual, it turns out not to be a universal singular individuality of thought,³² or it turns out not to be a concept but rather to be the singular individual as an object, or as an actuality, an object of immediate sense certainty. Just for that reason, it thus turns out only to be the kind of thing that has vanished. For consciousness, what can thus be for it at the present time can only be the grave of its life. However, because this grave itself is an actuality, and since it is contrary to the nature of this actuality to confer any lasting possession, the present moment of that grave is only the struggle over an endeavor that must end in defeat. However, while consciousness has learned from experience that the grave of its actual unchangeable essence has no actuality, that the vanished singular individuality as vanished is not true individuality, it will give up searching for the unchangeable singular individuality as actual, or it will cease trying to hold on to it as something that has vanished. Only then is it for the first time capable of finding singular individuality as genuine, or as universal.

218. However, initially the return of the heart into itself is to be taken in the sense that, to itself, it is the heart which has singularly individual actuality. It is the pure heart for us, or in itself, which has found itself and which is satiated within itself, for even though for it, to itself, in its feelings, the essence has in fact cut itself off from it, this feeling is nonetheless in itself self-feeling.³³ It has felt the object of its pure feeling, and this object is itself; it thus emerges as self-feeling, or as the actual existing for itself. In this return into itself, its second relationship has come to be for us, namely, those of desire and labor, which to consciousness has proven itself to be the inner certainty of consciousness itself, a certainty it had achieved for us through the sublation and the consumption of the alien essence, specifically, of that essence in the form of self-sufficient things. However, the unhappy consciousness is to be found only as desiring and laboring consciousness; it is not in a position to find itself so that its inner certainty of itself would be its ground, nor so that its feeling of the essence would be only this feeling of its own self.³⁴ While it does not have that certainty for itself, its innerness still remains instead a shattered 127self-certainty. Its proving its own worth,³⁵ which it would obtain through work and consumption, is for that reason just the same shattered proof of its worth; or instead it must itself do away with this proof of its worth so that it finds such a proof on its own, but only the proof of the worth of what it is for itself, namely, its estrangement.

219. The actuality which desire and work turn against is for this consciousness no longer something which is null in itself, something only to be sublated and consumed by that consciousness. Rather, it is something like consciousness itself, an actuality at odds with itself,³⁶ which in one respect is only null in itself but which in another respect is also a sanctified world. This actuality is a shape of the unchangeable, for the latter has preserved singular individuality in itself, and because, as the unchangeable, it is the universal, the meaning of its singular individuality itself is that of all actuality.

220. However much consciousness were for itself self-sufficient consciousness, and however much actuality were, to itself, in and for itself null, still in work and consumption, consciousness would arrive at the feeling of its own self-sufficiency, and as a result, it would then itself be that which would sublate actuality. However, while this actuality is, to itself, the shape of the unchangeable, consciousness is not on its own capable of sublating that actuality, but rather, while consciousness does indeed arrive at annihilating actuality and consuming it, what essentially happens for it as a result is that the unchangeable itself surrenders its shape and hands it over to consciousness to consume. – For its part, consciousness likewise comes on the scene as what is actual, but, just as much, as internally shattered. This estrangement shows up in its work and its consumption, such that it breaks itself up into a relation to actuality, or it breaks itself up into a being-for-itself and a being-in-itself. That relation to actuality is the alteration, or the doing, the being-for-itself, which belongs to the singularly individual consciousness as such. However, it is therein also in itself, and this aspect belongs to the unchangeable other-worldly beyond. They are the abilities and powers, an alien gift, which the unchangeable likewise hands over to consciousness to make use of.

221. Accordingly, in its doing, consciousness is initially in relationships between two extremes. On one side, it is positioned as an active this-worldliness, confronted by passive actuality [on the other side]. Both are in relation to each other, but both also have returned into the unchangeable, where each in itself tenaciously clings to itself. Hence, it is in both aspects that it is only the superficialities which detach themselves with respect to each other, and each of them then joins the game which consists in moving around with respect to the other. – The extreme of actuality is sublated by the active extreme. However, on its side, actuality can only be sublated because it is its unchangeable essence itself which sublates it, which repels itself from itself, and which surrenders what it has repelled to the activity. The active force appears as the power in which actuality is dissolved. This consciousness is that to which 128the in-itself, or the essence, is, to itself, an other, and for this reason, this power, which is how consciousness enters into doing, is for this consciousness the other-worldly beyond of itself. Therefore, instead of making an inward return into itself from out of its doing, and instead of having itself proven its worth for itself, consciousness instead reflects this movement of doing into the other extreme. This other extreme thereby shows up as what is purely universal, as the absolute power which was the starting point for a movement in all directions. It is supposed to be the essence of the self-corroding extremes both in the way that they first made their appearance and in the flux itself.

222. The unchangeable consciousness relinquishes its shape and surrenders it, and, in exchange, the singular individual consciousness gives thanks, i.e., denies itself the satisfaction of the consciousness of its self-sufficiency and assigns the essence of its doing not to itself but to the other-worldly beyond. From both of these moments of reciprocal self-surrender on both sides, its unity with the unchangeable emerges. However, at the same time, this unity is affected by division, and it is again broken up within itself. It is from out of this unity that the opposition of universal and singular again comes on the scene. To be sure, consciousness makes a show of renouncing the satisfaction of its own self-feeling.³⁷ However, it achieves the actual satisfaction of that self-feeling, for it is desire, work, and consumption; as consciousness, it has willed, acted, and consumed. Its giving thanks, in which it recognizes the other extreme as the essence and thus sublates itself, is likewise its own doing, which offsets the other extreme's doing and counters the self-surrendering favor with an equal act. If the former cedes to consciousness what is superficial, consciousness still gives thanks but only goes that far, and while it itself surrenders its doing, i.e., its essence, it thus really does more therein than the other, which only repels the superficial from itself. The whole movement is therefore reflected not only in actual desire, labor, and consumption, but even in its very giving of thanks, a doing in which the very opposite seems to take place. That is, the whole movement is reflected off into the extreme of singular individuality. Consciousness therein feels itself to be this singular individual consciousness, and it does not let itself be deceived by its own show of renunciation, for the truth in all of this is that it has not given itself up. What has come about is only the doubled reflection into both extremes, and the result is the repeated fissure into the opposed consciousness of the unchangeable and the consciousness of a willing, performing, and consuming consciousness. It is also the repeated fissure in the self-renunciation itself which confronts it, or of singular individuality existing-for-itself as such.

223. The third relationship in the movement of this consciousness has thereby come on the scene. This third relationship follows from the second and has in truth, through its willing and through its accomplishment, put itself to the test as self-sufficient consciousness. In the first relationship, it was only the concept of actual consciousness, or the inner heart, which was not yet actual in doing and in consumption. The second 129is this actualization as external doing and as consuming. However, having returned from out of all of this, consciousness is now such that it has experienced itself as actual and as efficacious, or as that for which it is true that it is in and for itself. However, the enemy is found therein in its ownmost shape. In the battle of hearts, the singular individual consciousness is only as a musical, abstract moment. In work and consumption, as the realization of this essenceless being, it can immediately forget itself, and its conscious ownness in this actuality is suppressed through the thankful bestowal of recognition. However, this suppression is in truth a return of consciousness back into itself, namely, into itself, to itself, as the genuine actuality.

224. This third relationship, in which this genuine actuality is one extreme, is the relation of this actuality as nullity to the universal essence. The movement of this relation is still open to examination.

225. To begin with, with regard to the opposed relation of consciousness within which its reality is, to itself, immediately a nullity, the actual doing of consciousness becomes a doing of nothing, and its consumption becomes a feeling of its unhappiness. Doing and consumption thereby lose all universal content and meaning, for if they had such content and meaning, they would have existed as being-in-and-for-itself. Instead, both are withdrawn back into singular individuality, and consciousness directs itself towards that singular individuality with a view to sublating both doing and consumption. In its animal functions, consciousness is consciousness of itself as this actual singular individual. These functions, instead of being performed without embarrassment as something which are in and for themselves null and which can acquire no importance and essentiality for spirit, are instead now objects of serious attention and they acquire the utmost importance, since it is in them that the enemy shows itself in its distinctive shape. However, while this enemy engenders itself in its very suppression, consciousness, by fixating itself on the enemy, is instead continually dwelling on it instead of freeing itself from it. It continually sees itself as polluted, and, at the same time, the content of its strivings, instead of being something essential, is the very lowest, and instead of being a universal, is the most singular. What we see here is only a personality limited to itself and its own petty acts; we see a brooding personality, as unhappy as it is impoverished.

226. However, in both the feeling of its unhappiness and in the poverty of its acts, consciousness just as much binds itself to its unity with the unchangeable. For the attempted immediate annihilation of its actual being is mediated through the thought of the unchangeable, and it takes place within this relation. The mediated relation constitutes the essence of the negative movement in which this consciousness directs itself against its singular individuality, but which as a relation, is likewise positive in itself and will engender its unity for this consciousness itself.

227. This mediated relation is thereby a syllogism in which singular individuality, which had initially fixed on itself as opposed to the in-itself, is merged with this other 130extreme only through a third. It is through this mediating middle that the extreme of unchangeable consciousness is for the inessential consciousness. At the same time in the inessential consciousness, there is also the following. The inessential consciousness is just as much supposed to be for the unchangeable consciousness only through the mediating middle, and this mediating middle is thereby what both presents³⁸ the two extremes to each other and is the mutual servant of each for the other. This mediating middle is itself a conscious essence, for it is a doing which mediates consciousness as such. The content of this doing is what consciousness is undertaking, namely, the erasure of its singular individuality.

228. Within the mediating middle, this consciousness frees itself from doing and consumption as what are its own. As an extreme existing-for-itself, it repels from itself the essence of its will, and it shifts over to the mediating term, or to the servant, the very ownness of its decisions and its freedom and, with that, any blame³⁹ for its own acts. Since this mediator is in an immediate relation to the unchangeable essence, he renders service by offering counsel about what is right. According to those aspects of doing or of willing, the action, as it is obedience to an alien decision, ceases to be its own. However, for the inessential consciousness, what still remains is its objective aspect, namely, the fruit of its labor and its consumption. It likewise repels these from itself, and it renounces its willing as well as the actuality contained in its labor and consumption. In part, it renounces that actuality as the truth it has attained concerning its self-conscious self-sufficiency – while it preoccupies itself with representational thinking and with talking about something that is, to itself, totally alien and senseless. In part, it renounces it as being external property – while it gives up something of the possession it has acquired through its labor. And in part, it renounces its consumption – while in its fastings and its mortifications, it again denies itself that consumption.

229. Through these moments of first surrendering its own decision, then surrendering its property and consumption, finally, through the positive moment of carrying out a task it does not understand, it deprives itself in truth and completely of the consciousness of inner and outer freedom, of actuality as its being-for-itself. It has the certainty of having in truth emptied⁴⁰ itself of its I, and of having made its immediate self-consciousness into a thing, into an objective being. – It could prove the worth of its self-renunciation solely by this actual sacrifice, for only in that sacrifice does the deception vanish which lies in the inner recognition of giving thanks through the heart and through one's disposition and one's speech. In that self-renunciation, there is a bestowal of recognition that shifts all the power of being-for-itself away from itself and instead treats this power as a gift from above. However, in this very shifting, it itself retains its external ownness in the possession which it does not give up, and it retains its inner ownness both in the consciousness of the decision that it itself has taken and in the consciousness of the content determined through itself, which it has not exchanged for an alien content that would fill it only with meaninglessness.

131230. But in the actual, completed sacrifice, its unhappiness has in itself been purged from it just in the way that consciousness has sublated its doing as its own. However, that this purging has taken place in itself is itself a doing that has been carried out by the other extreme of the syllogism, which is the essence existing-in-itself. That sacrifice of the inessential extreme, however, was at the same time not a one-sided doing; instead, it contained the other's doing within itself. For on the one hand, surrendering one's own will is only negative according to its concept, or in itself, but at the same time it is positive, specifically, it is the positing of the will as an other, and, especially, it is the positing of the will as universal, not as the will of a singular individual. For this consciousness, the positive significance of the negatively posited singular individual will is the will of the other extreme, which, just because it is an other for consciousness, becomes, to itself, the act of giving counsel. It becomes this not through itself but through the third, the mediator. Hence, for consciousness, its will becomes universal will, a will existing in itself, although, to itself, it itself is not this will in-itself. That it surrenders its own will as a singular individual is, to itself and according to the concept, not what is positive about the universal will. Its surrender of possessions and its abandonment of consumption likewise only have the same negative significance, and the universal which as a result comes to be for it is, to itself, not its own doing. With regard to this unity of objective being and being-for-itself which lies in the concept of doing, and which for that reason, to consciousness, comes to be as the essence and object – just as this unity is, to consciousness, not the concept of its doing, it is also not the case, to consciousness, that the unity comes to be immediately as an object for that consciousness and through itself. Rather, it lets the mediating servant express this yet shattered certainty; that expression turns out to be that it is only in itself that its unhappiness is the inverse, that is to say, only in itself is it a self-satisfying doing or a blessed enjoyment in consuming. Likewise, only in itself is its impoverished doing the inverse, namely, absolute doing, or, to put it according to the concept, a doing is only a doing at all as the doing of a singular individual. However, for the consciousness itself, doing continues, and its actual doing remains impoverished. Its enjoyment in consumption remains sorrowful, and the sublation of these in any positive sense continues to be postponed to an other-worldly beyond. However, within this object, its doing and its being as this singularly individual consciousness is, to itself, being and doing in itself. Thus, within this object, the representational thought of reason has, to itself, come to be. This is the representational thought of the certainty for this consciousness that it is absolutely in itself within its singular individuality, or it is its certainty of being all reality.

¹ Begierde überhaupt. This is a matter not just of translation but of interpretation. The überhaupt here can be rendered as an underlining word (like “desire, period” or “desire, full stop” as I have it), or it can be rendered as “in general.” How you translate it depends on your interpretation of the whole section and on how you hear Hegel's voice in reading this section (would he stress the überhaupt?).

² ein Lebendiges.

³ das Andre in sich setzt.

⁴ Gestaltung.

⁵ indem dieser selbst die Negation an ihm vollzieht.

⁶ ein Anerkanntes.

⁷ es ist außer sich gekommen. The term außer sich usually means “to be beside oneself” (to be swept up in rage, or hilarity, and so on); but Hegel also clearly wants to play on the literal meaning of the term, so that he is also saying “It has come outside of itself,” or self-consciousness exists as an “external object” to itself. The sentence also has the overtones of saying that “self-consciousness has come to be anxious about itself.”

⁸ außer sich. The sentence could be much more loosely rendered: “it becomes anxious in its externality to itself.”

⁹ Einzelnes. This could be rendered more simply, but perhaps misleadingly, as “an individual.” Hegel does speak of Individualität and Individuum in other places.

¹⁰ Individuum.

¹¹ sich selbst und einander…bewähren.

¹² Person.

¹³ außer sich.

¹⁴ außer sich. Alternatively, this could be rendered: “beside itself.”

¹⁵ in sich gehen.

¹⁶ darin für es selbst, nicht das Für-sich-sein.

¹⁷ Selbstgefühl. This could also be rendered as “self-awareness,” or even “self-assurance.”

¹⁸ sie bildet.

¹⁹ in dem Bilden.

²⁰ wird nicht für es selbst.

²¹ sich gleichbleibendes Ich.

²² begriffener.

²³ Das sich gleichnamige Bewußtsein.

²⁴ denkendes Wesen.

²⁵ gedachten.

²⁶ Sich-selbst-denkens.

²⁷ erkennt.

²⁸ Wesens.

²⁹ durch die Natur.

³⁰ Hegel is making the obvious verbal play on Denken (“thought”), with its past form, gedacht, and devotion (Andacht).

³¹ erkannt.

³² gedachte Einzelnheit.

³³ Selbstgefühl.

³⁴ Selbstgefühl.

³⁵ Bewährung.

³⁶ entzweigebrochene Wirklichkeit.

³⁷ Selbstgefühls.

³⁸ vorstellt.

³⁹ Schuld. Alternatively it could be translated as “responsibility,” or even as “guilt.”

⁴⁰ entäußert.

C. (AA) Reason

V. The Certainty and Truth of 132Reason

231. Consciousness has taken hold of the thought that singular individual consciousness in itself is absolute essence, and in that thought, consciousness again takes an inward turn. For the unhappy consciousness, being-in-itself is the other-worldly beyond of itself. However, what its movement has achieved in the unhappy consciousness is that it has posited singular individuality in its complete development, or it has posited singular individuality, which is actual consciousness, as the negative of its own self, namely, as the objective extreme, or, it has driven its being-for-itself outside of itself and made it into an existent. In having done so, its unity with this universal has also come to be for it, or a unity which for us no longer falls outside the bounds of consciousness since the sublated singular individuality is the universal. Since consciousness preserves itself within its own negativity, in consciousness itself this unity as such is its essence. Its truth is what appears in the syllogisms as the middle term, or within the syllogisms in which the extreme terms came on the scene as absolutely distinguished and kept apart from each other. This middle says to the unchangeable consciousness that the singular individual has renounced himself, and it says to the singular individual that the unchangeable consciousness is for it no longer an extreme but is instead reconciled with it. This middle is the unity that immediately knows both of the other terms, relates both of them to each other, and is the consciousness of their unity. This middle expresses this unity to consciousness and thereby expresses itself to itself, the certainty of being all truth.

232. Since self-consciousness is reason, what had so far been its negative relation to otherness is now converted into a positive relation. Until now it had occupied itself only with its self-sufficiency and its freedom in order to save and preserve itself for itself at the cost of the world or its own actuality, both of which appeared to it as the negative of its own essence. However, as reason which is assured of itself, self-consciousness has come to be at rest with regard to both of them, and self-consciousness can sustain them, for it is certain of itself as reality, or it is certain that all actuality is nothing but itself, that its thinking itself is immediately actuality. It therefore conducts itself as idealism in relation to actuality. As it grasps itself in this way, it is, to itself, as if the world had only now come to be for it for the first time. Formerly, it did not understand the world; it desired it and worked on it, withdrew itself from it, took an inward turn back into itself away from it, and erased the world for itself and itself as consciousness, and it erased itself both as consciousness of it as the essence as well as consciousness of its nullity. After it has lost the grave of its truth, after it has erased 133the erasing of its actuality itself, and the singular individuality of consciousness is, to itself, the absolute essence in itself, self-consciousness discovers here for the first time the world as its newly actual world. In its continuing existence, this world interests it in the way it previously was only interested in the world's disappearance, for, to self-consciousness, that world's stable existence comes to be its own truth and present moment, and it is certain that it experiences only itself within it.

233. Reason is the certainty which consciousness has of being all reality; or so it is in that way that idealism expresses its concept of itself. In the way that as consciousness, which comes on the scene as reason and immediately has that certainty in itself, so too does idealism immediately give expression to that certainty. I am I, in the sense that the I, which is an object for me, is not as it is within self-consciousness in general, where it was there only as an empty object, nor as it is within free self-consciousness, where here it is just an object that withdraws itself from others which nonetheless still count as valid alongside it. Rather, it is an object with the consciousness of the non-being of anything that is other. It is a singular object; it is all reality and presence. However, not only is self-consciousness for itself all reality; it is also in itself all reality, as a result of its becoming this reality, or, instead by proving itself to be this reality. It initially proves itself to be this in the very path along which otherness vanishes in the dialectical movement of meaning-something, of perceiving, and of understanding. What vanishes along that path is otherness as existing in itself. In the movement that passes through the self-sufficiency of consciousness in mastery and servitude, and then on through the thoughts of freedom, skeptical liberation, and then forward to the struggle for absolute liberation by the consciousness estranged within itself, this otherness, insofar as it is only for self-consciousness, vanishes for self-consciousness itself. Two aspects came on the scene one after the other: The one in which the essence, or the true, had the determinateness for consciousness of being, the other in which it had the determinateness of only being for consciousness. However, both were reduced down to one truth, namely, that what is, or the in-itself, is only insofar as it is for consciousness, and that what is for consciousness is also what is in itself. The consciousness that is this truth has this path behind it and has forgotten it while it immediately comes on the scene as reason. Or this reason, as immediately coming on the scene, does so only as the certainty of that truth. It only gives the assurance of being all reality, but does not itself comprehend this, for the comprehension of this immediately expressed assertion is that forgotten path itself. Likewise, when one who has not taken this path hears it expressed in this pure form – for in a concrete shape, he surely makes the same assertion himself – this assertion is incomprehensible.

234. Hence, the idealism which does not present that path but which begins with this assertion is itself only a pure assurance, which neither comprehends itself nor can it make itself comprehensible to others. It expresses an immediate certainty against which other immediate certainties stand in contrast, but 134all of which have been lost along the way. With equal right, the assurances of these other certainties place themselves alongside the assurance of that certainty. Reason appeals to the self-consciousness of each consciousness: I am I, my object and my essence is the I, and no one will deny this truth to reason. However, while reason grounds its appeal on this truth, it sanctions the truth of that other certainty, namely, that there is an other for me, or to me, an other than the I is and is to me the object and essence, or while I am object and essence to myself, I am so only as I completely withdraw myself from that other, and I come on the scene alongside it as an actuality. – Only when, coming out of this opposed certainty, reason comes on the scene as reflection does reason's assertion about itself manage to come forward not only as certainty and assurance but rather as truth, and not as a truth alongside other truths but as the only truth. The immediate entrance onto the scene is the abstraction of its present existence,¹ whose essence and whose being-in-itself is the absolute concept, i.e., the movement of its having-come-to-be. – Consciousness will determine its relationship to otherness, or to its object, in various ways depending on just which stage it finds itself occupying vis-à-vis how the world-spirit is becoming conscious of itself. How consciousness is immediately to be found, and how it determines itself and its object at any given time, or how it is for itself, depends on what it has already come to be, or on what it already is in itself.

235. Reason is the certainty of being all reality. However, this in-itself, or this reality, is still for all intents and purposes a universal, the pure abstraction of reality. It is the first positivity in which self-consciousness is in itself as it is for itself, and thus the I is only the pure essentiality of the existing, or the simple category. The category which otherwise signified the essentiality of the existing, where it was indeterminate if that meant the essentiality of what is existing, full stop, or what is existing as confronting consciousness, is now the essentiality, or the simple unity of the existing only as a thinking actuality. Or, to put it differently, the category is this: Self-consciousness and being are the same essence, or the same not in comparison with each other, but rather the same in and for itself. It is only a one-sided, bad idealism which lets this unity again come on the scene as consciousness on one side and an in-itself confronting it on the other side. – Now, this category, or the simple unity of self-consciousness and being, has the difference in itself, for its essence is just this, that it is immediately self-equal in otherness, or immediately self-equal in the absolute difference. Thus, the difference is, but it is as a completely transparent difference which is at the same time therefore no difference at all. That difference appears as a plurality of categories. While idealism expresses the simple unity of self-consciousness as being all reality and immediately makes it the essence, without comprehending it as the absolutely negative essence – for only 135this absolutely negative essence has in its own self negation, i.e., determinateness, or the difference itself – it is along these lines that there is a second idealism even more incomprehensible than the first idealism. This second idealism declares that there are differences in the category, or species of the category. This assurance itself, just like the assurance about any determinate number of species of the category, is a new assurance, which, however, contains in its own self the claim that we no longer need to accept it as an assurance. For while it is in the pure I, in the pure understanding itself, that difference itself gets underway, it is thereby posited that immediacy, issuing assurances, finding the given, is to be abandoned here, and comprehension is to begin. However, to take up again the plurality of categories in some way or other as something we simply come upon, for example, in judgments, and then to continue to put up with them in that form, is in fact to be regarded as a disgrace to science. Where is the understanding supposed to be capable of demonstrating necessity if it is incapable of demonstrating the pure necessity it has within itself?

236. Now because the pure essentiality of things, like their difference, belongs to reason, we can no longer really talk of things at all, which is to say, we can longer speak of what for consciousness would only be the negative of itself. For the many categories are species of the pure category, which is to say that the pure category is still their genus or essence and is not opposed to them. However, the many categories are already equivocation itself, since at the same time they have in themselves otherness in its plurality as opposed to the pure category. They in fact contradict the pure category through this plurality, and the pure unity must sublate them in themselves, and thereby constitute itself as the negative unity of the differences. However, as negative unity, it excludes from itself both the differences as such and that first immediate pure unity as such, and it is singular individuality. This is a new category, which is an excluding consciousness, which is to say, it has an other for it. Singular individuality is its transition out of its concepts into an external reality; it is the pure schema, which is just as much consciousness as it is thereby singularity and an excluding One, a pointing towards an other. However, these others of this category are only other categories mentioned for the first time, namely, pure essentiality and pure difference, and in this category, i.e., in the very positedness of the other, or in this other itself, consciousness is equally itself. Each of these different moments points to another moment, but at the same time, within each of them, there is never any otherness at all. The pure category refers to the species, which passes over into the negative category, or into individuality. However, this latter refers back to them; it is itself pure consciousness which within each of them remains this clear unity with itself. However, this clear unity with itself is just as much directed to an other, which, while it is, has vanished, and, while it has vanished, is engendered all over again. 136

237. We see pure consciousness here posited in a twofold manner. At one time, it is posited as the restless movement to and fro which runs through all its moments, which have otherness in mind, an otherness which, in being grasped, is sublated. At another time, it is instead posited as the motionless unity which is certain of its truth. For this unity, that former movement is the other, but for this movement that former unity-at-rest is the other; consciousness and object alternate in these reciprocal determinations. Therefore, to itself, consciousness is at one time a seeking to and fro, and its object is the pure in-itself and the essence; and at another time, to itself, consciousness is the simple category, and the object is the movement of the differences. However, as essence, consciousness is the whole course of the movement itself as it makes a transition from out of itself (as the simple category) into singular individuality and the object. In the course of this movement, it is to intuit the object as something to be sublated, to appropriate the object, and to express itself as this certainty of being all reality, a certainty of both itself and its object.

238. Its first utterance is only this abstract, empty phrase: Everything is its own. This is so because the certainty of being all reality is initially the pure category. This reason which first takes cognizance of itself² in its object is the expression of an empty idealism, and this empty idealism only grasps reason in the way reason is initially to itself. In its having pointed out this pure mine of consciousness within all being, and in having declared things to be sensations or representations, such an idealism fancies itself to have shown that the abstract mine of consciousness is all of reality. For that reason, it must at the same time be an absolute empiricism because for the fulfillment of this empty mine, which is to say, to bring to fulfillment the difference and all the development and shaping of that difference, its reason needs an alien impact in which the basis of the multiplicity of sensings or representational thinking lies. Hence, this kind of idealism becomes precisely the same kind of self-contradictory equivocation as skepticism. However, whereas the latter only expresses itself negatively, the former does so positively, but it too fails just as completely as skepticism does to bring together its contradictory thoughts about pure consciousness being all reality, just as it likewise fails with its thoughts about the alien impact,³ or about sense-impressions and representations as themselves those of an equal reality. Instead, it tosses itself from one side to the other, and it falls into the bad infinite, which is to say, it falls into the sensuous infinite. While reason is all reality in the sense of being the abstract mine, and the other is what is indifferently alien to it, reason's knowing of an other is posited; it is a knowing which previously appeared as meaning-something, as perceiving and as the understanding grasping what is meant and what is perceived. At the same time, such knowing is asserted (through the concept of this idealism itself) to be not true knowing, since only the unity of apperception is the truth of knowing. Thus, in order to reach this other which is essential to it, which is to say, in fact to reach the in-itself which this pure reason does not have within itself, the pure reason of this idealism is through itself returned to that knowing which is not a knowing of the true. 137In doing so, it condemns itself knowingly and voluntarily to being untrue knowing, and it cannot divest itself of that kind of meaning-something and perceiving, neither of which has any truth for it itself. It is situated in immediate contradictions in its assertion that the essence consists in a stark twofold opposition, namely, the unity of apperception and the thing, which no matter whether the thing is called an alien impact, or an empirical being,⁴ or sensibility, or the thing in itself, remains in its concept the same as what is alien to that unity of apperception.

239. This idealism is caught in this contradiction because it asserts the abstract concept of reason as the truth. Hence, to itself, the reality that immediately emerges is instead not the reality of reason, while at the same time reason is supposed to be all reality. This reason remains a restless seeking, which in its very seeking itself declares that the satisfaction of finding anything is utterly impossible. – However, actual reason itself is not so inconsistent. Rather, as only the certainty of being all reality, it is aware within this concept that, as certainty, as the I, it is not yet reality in truth, and it is thus driven to raise its certainty into truth, and to fulfill the empty mine.

A. Observing Reason

240. We now see this consciousness, for which being has the meaning of “its own,”⁵ again entering into meaning-something and perceiving, but not as the certainty of entering into what is only other, but rather with the certainty of being this other itself. Formerly, it just happened to consciousness that it perceived and experienced quite a bit in the thing; however, here it itself makes the observations and engages the experience. Meaning-something and perceiving, which formerly were sublated for us, are now sublated by consciousness for consciousness itself. Reason sets out to know the truth, and what was a thing for meaning-something and perceiving is now to be found as a concept, which is to say, reason is to have in thinghood only the consciousness of itself. Reason thus now has a universal interest in the world because it is the certainty of having its present moment in the world, or is certain that the present is rational. It seeks its other, while knowing that it possesses nothing else in that other but itself; it seeks only its own infinity.

241. At first having only a vague sentiment of itself existing within actuality, or only knowing this in general to be something of its own, it strides in this sense forward towards a universal appropriation of its own assured property and plants the 138signs of its sovereignty on both the high and the low. However, this superficial mine is not its final interest; the joy to be found in this universal appropriation still finds the alien other in its property, which abstract reason in its own self does not possess. Reason surmises itself to be a deeper essence than the pure I is, and reason must demand that difference, diverse being, is to become for the I what is its own, that the I should view itself as actuality and find itself currently present as both a shape and as a thing. But if reason rummages around through all the innards of things, and opens all their veins so that reason might encounter itself gushing out from them, then it will have no luck; rather, it must at an earlier point have perfected itself in its own self in order to be able to experience its perfection.

242. Consciousness observes, i.e., reason wants to find itself and to have itself as an existent object, as an actual, sensuously-current mode. Observing consciousness supposes and even says that it wants to learn from experience not about itself but rather about the essence of things as things. That this consciousness means this and says so is based in this: That consciousness is reason, but reason as such is not yet, to itself, the object. However much it were likewise to know reason to be the essence of things and the essence of itself, and however much it knew that reason can only be current in consciousness in its own distinctive shape, it would still instead descend into its own depths and look for reason there rather than in things. If it were to find reason there, it would at that point again turn around and be directed outwards towards actuality in order to see its own sensuous expression in actuality, but it would take that sensuous expression essentially to be a concept. Reason, as it immediately comes on the scene as consciousness’ certainty of being all reality, grasps its reality in the sense of the immediacy of being, and it likewise grasps the unity of the I with this objective essence in the sense of an immediate unity, a unity within which reason has not yet separated and then again united the moments of being and the I, or a unity which reason has not yet recognized.⁶ As observing consciousness, reason therefore concerns itself with things, supposing that it is taking them in their truth as sensuous things opposed to the I. However, its actual doing contradicts this supposition, for it knows things, and it transforms their sensuousness into concepts, i.e., precisely into a being which is at the same time the I. In doing so, it transforms thinking into an existing thinking, or transforms being into a being that has been conceived⁷ and asserts in fact that things have truth only as concepts. For this observing consciousness, what comes to be is only what things are, but for us what comes to be is what observing consciousness itself is. However, the result of the movement of observing consciousness will be its coming to be for itself what it is in itself.

243. What observing reason is doing is to be examined in the moments of its movement as it incorporates nature, spirit, and, finally, the relation of both as sensuous being, and when as an existing actuality, it seeks itself.

a. Observation139 of Nature

244. However much the unthinking consciousness speaks of observation and experience as the source of truth, still its words may make it sound as if the whole business were only a matter of tasting, smelling, feeling, hearing, and seeing. In the enthusiasm with which it recommends tasting, smelling, etc., it forgets to say that it also in fact has no less essentially already determined the object of this sensing, and that, to itself, this determination counts for at least as much as that sensing. It will also without further ado admit that it is in general not that much concerned with perceiving, and that, for example, the perception that the penknife lies next to this tobacco-box will not count for it as an observation. The meaning of what is perceived should at least be that of a universal, not a sensuous this.

245. At first, this universal is only just what remains self-consistent, and its movement is only the uniform repetition of the same doing. The consciousness which finds in the object only universality, or the abstract mine, must shift the responsibility to itself for the real movement of the universal. While it is not yet the understanding of it, it must at least be the memory of it, a memory which expresses in a universal manner what is in actuality only available in a singularly individual manner. This superficial accentuation of individuality and the equally superficial form of universality into which the sensuous is only incorporated, but without the sensuous having in itself become a universal, or the describing of the thing, still does not have the movement in the object itself. Instead, the movement is in the describing. The object as it is described is no longer of interest; if one object is described, then another must be given preference and always sought out so that the describing does not itself just peter out. If it is no longer easy to find new, whole things, then it must turn back to those already found in order to divide them still further, to analyze them, and then to track down new aspects of thinghood in them. This restless, unceasing instinct can never run out of material; to find a new genus of distinctive significance, or even to discover a new planet, which, although it is an individual,⁸ nonetheless corresponds to the nature of a universal, can only fall to the lot of the lucky few. However, the boundary line that singles out, for example, what is an elephant, an oak, 140gold, and the line between the genus and the species itself pass through many stages into the endless particularization of the chaotic range of animals and plants, mountain ranges, metals, earth, etc., such that it is only violence and artfulness which can first put them on view. In this realm of the indeterminateness of the universal, in which particularization again approximates to singularization and into which particularization again entirely descends here and there into such singularization, what is opened up is an inexhaustible supply for observing and describing. However, here at the limits of the universal, where such an enormous field is opened up for it, what it has found is, instead of an immeasurable wealth, in fact only the limits of nature and of its own doings. It can no longer know whether what seems to have being in itself is not a contingency. What bears in itself the stamp of a confused or immature structure, of weakness and the elemental indeterminateness of a structure barely developing itself, cannot also make even a claim only to be described.

246. However much these acts of seeking and describing seem to be concerned only with things, still we see that in fact they do not advance into sensuous perceiving. Rather, what enables things to be known is more important for this seeking and describing than is the left-over range of sensuous properties, something which the thing itself cannot do without but from which consciousness exempts itself. By making this difference between the essential and the inessential, the concept elevates itself out of the distractions of sensibility, and, in doing so, cognition⁹ explains that what is at issue essentially has to do at least as much with itself as it does with things. Within this twofold essentiality, it slips into wavering back and forth about whether what is essential and necessary for cognition can also be said to be in the things. On the one hand, the distinguishing marks¹⁰ of things should only serve cognition as those marks through which the things are to be distinguished from each other. However, on the other hand it is not what is inessential in things which is cognized,¹¹ but rather that through which they themselves break free from the universal continuity of being as such, cut themselves loose from others, and be on their own.¹² Those distinguishing marks should not only have an essential relation to cognition; they should also be the essential determinatenesses of the things, and that artificial system should be in accordance with the system of nature itself and only express it. This follows necessarily from the concept of reason, and in its systems, the instinct of reason – for it behaves in this observing only as an instinct – has also reached this unity where its very objects are so constituted that they have an essentiality within them, or they have a being-for-itself within them, and they are not simply an accident of this moment or of just being here. The distinguishing marks of animals, for example, are taken from their claws and teeth. Indeed, not only does cognition distinguish one animal from another by this means, but it is by these means that the animal itself separates itself off from others. It is through these weapons that it preserves itself for itself and keeps itself detached 141from the universal. In contrast, the plant never gets as far as being-for-itself; instead, it only makes contact with the limit of individuality. It is at this limit where plants show the semblance of dividing themselves in two¹³ into sexes, and for that reason it is at this very limit that plants have been surveyed and distinguished from each other. However, what stands at an even lower level cannot itself any longer differentiate itself from an other; instead, it dwindles away as it comes into opposition. The motionless being and the being in relationships come into conflict with each other, and the thing in the latter is something different from the thing in the former, since, in contrast, the individual is what preserves itself in relations with others. However, what is incapable of this and chemically becomes something other than it is empirically, confuses cognition. It thereby brings it into the same conflict about whether cognition is to stay put with one side or with the other, since the thing itself is not consistent,¹⁴ and these two sides come undone in it.

247. In those systems of universal self-consistencies, this self-consistency therefore means the self-consistency of cognition as much as it means the self-consistency of the things themselves. Yet this expansion of these consistent determinatenesses, each of which peacefully describes the course of its progress and maintains a space in order to answer to itself, just as essentially passes over into its opposite, into the disarray of these determinatenesses. For the distinguishing mark, the universal determinateness, is the unity of opposites, of the determinate and of the universal in itself, and it must therefore break apart into this opposition. Now however much the determinateness overpowers, on the one hand, the universal in which it has its essence, still this universal likewise keeps, on the other hand, that determinateness under its dominance, and both forces that determinateness to its limit, and mingles its differences and its essentialities together there. Observation, which kept them apart in orderly fashion and believed that in them it had hold of something fixed, sees one principle reaching out over and across another, sees disarray and transitions forming themselves, and sees something combined in this one which it at first took to be utterly separated, and sees something separated which it had counted as belonging together. Only in the most universal determinations – for example, in what count as the essential distinguishing marks of an animal or a plant –the observing, in clinging tenaciously to motionless self-consistent being, must see itself here teased with cases that rob it of every determination, which silence the universality it has reached, and which set it back again to unthinking observing and describing.

248. In restricting itself to the simple or to sensuous distractions through the universal, this restrictive observing thus finds in its object the disarray of its own principle because what is determinate must by its very nature lose itself in its opposite. On those very grounds, reason must progress instead from inert determinateness, which had the semblance of lasting, to the observation of what such determinateness is in truth, namely, its relating itself to its opposite. 142What are called essential distinguishing marks are motionless determinatenesses, which, as they express themselves and as they are grasped as simple, do not exhibit what constitutes their nature, namely, to be vanishing moments of that movement taking itself back into itself. While the instinct of reason now gets around to seeking out these distinguishing marks, it searches for the law and the concepts of those determinatenesses. It does this according to the determinateness of the nature of those distinguishing marks, which for each of them essentially consists in not existing for itself but in passing over into its opposite. To be sure, it searches for them just as much as existing actuality, but, to itself, this actuality will in fact disappear, and the aspects of the law will become pure moments, or abstractions, such that the law itself comes to light in the nature of the concept, which has abolished in itself the indifferent stable existence of sensuous actuality.

249. To observing consciousness, the truth of the law is in experience in the way that sensuous being is for it, which is to say, it is not in and for itself. However much the law does not have its truth in the concept, still it is something contingent and not a necessity, or not really a law. However, that the law's being as a concept not only does not conflict with its being available for observation but for that very reason is instead in possession of necessary existence, and it is for observation. The universal in the sense of a rational universality is also the universal in the previous sense of its exhibiting itself for that consciousness as what is current and actual, or the concept presents itself in the mode of thinghood and sensuous being – but without for that reason losing its nature and falling back down into inert stable existence or indifferent succession. What is universally valid is also what is universally effective:¹⁵ What ought to be is also in fact what is, and what only should be, but is not, has no real truth. The instinct of reason remains in the right when it stands firm on this point and when it does not allow itself to be led into error by intellectual fantasies¹⁶ which only ought to be, and which, as what ought to be, are supposed to be true even if they have never been encountered in any experience at all – it does not allow itself to be led into error by hypotheses, much less by all the other invisibilities of the perennial ought, for reason is just this certainty of being in possession of reality, and what for consciousness is not an independent being,¹⁷ which is to say, what does not appear, is for consciousness nothing at all.

250. That the truth of law is essentially reality becomes for the consciousness which sticks to observation again an opposition to the concept and to the universal in itself, or, to itself, such a thing as its law is not an essence that stems from reason. In that law, it supposes that it has received something alien. Yet it refutes its own supposition in its taking 143its universality not to mean that all singular sensuous things must have provided evidence for the appearance of law in order for it to be able to assert the truth of the law. The assertion that “if you pick a stone off the ground and drop it, then it falls,” does not at all require the experiment to have been made with all stones; more likely, it just says that this experiment must have been tried with at least a good many stones, and from that we can with the greatest probability, or with perfect right by analogy, draw an inference about the rest. Yet analogy not only gives no perfect right, but its very nature refutes itself so often that the inference to be drawn from analogy itself is instead that analogy does not permit an inference to be drawn. Probability, to which the result of the inference would be reduced, loses with regard to truth every difference of lesser and greater probability; let the probability be as great as it may, vis-à-vis truth, it is nothing. However, the instinct of reason accepts such laws as the truth, and it is in the relation to its necessity, of which it does not take cognizance,¹⁸ that it first slips into making this distinction and then slips into reducing to probability the truth about what is at issue in order to designate the incomplete way that truth is available for the consciousness which has not yet achieved insight into the pure concept, for universality is present only as simple immediate universality. However, at the same time, on account of this universality, the law has truth for that consciousness: That “the stone falls” is, to that consciousness, true because, to consciousness, the stone is heavy, which is to say, because in its weight the stone has in and for itself an essential relation to the earth which is expressed in its falling. Consciousness thus has in experience the existence¹⁹ of the law, but it likewise has it there as concept, and only on account of both circumstances together is the law true, to itself. The law counts as law because it exhibits itself in appearance and at the same time is in itself the concept.

251. Because at the same time the law is in itself the concept, the instinct of reason of this consciousness necessarily sets itself to purifying the law and its moments into concepts but without knowing that this is what it wants to do, and it thus sets up experiments about the law. As the law at first appears, it exhibits itself impurely, as enveloped in singular sensuous being, and the concept which constitutes its nature exhibits itself as sunken into empirical material. In its experiments, the instinct of reason sets itself to finding out what follows in such and such circumstances. The law seems thereby only to be immersed even more in sensuous being, yet in all this, this sensuous being is instead lost. The inner significance of this research is that it finds the pure conditions of the law, and even if the consciousness expressing this should think that by doing so it is saying something different, it is saying that it is supposed to elevate the law entirely into the concept and to do away with all the links its moments have to determinate being. For example, negative electricity 144more or less first makes itself known as resin-electricity, just as positive electricity more or less first makes itself known as glass-electricity. Through experiment, both entirely lose this significance and become purely positive and negative electricity, neither of which is any longer bound up with things of a particular kind. We then can no longer say that there are bodies which are positively electrical and others which are negatively electrical. In the same way, the relation between acid and base and their movement with regard to each other constitute a law in which these oppositions appear as bodies. Yet these isolated things have no actuality; the violence which tears them apart cannot prevent them from promptly entering again into a process, for they only are this relation. They cannot last on their own,²⁰ like a tooth or a claw, and be pointed out in that way. That their essence is to pass over immediately into a neutral product makes their being into a sublated being, or into a universal, and acid and base have truth only in being universal. In the way that glass and resin thus can be positively electrical as well as negatively electrical, so too are acid and base in the same way not bound as properties to this or that actuality. Rather, each thing is only relatively acidic or basic. What seems to be decidedly a base or an acid receives in the so-called synsomates the opposite significance in relation to an other. – In this way, the result of the experiments sublates the moments, or the spiritualizations,²¹ as properties of determinate things, and it frees the predicates from their subjects. It is only as universal, as they are in truth, that these predicates are discovered. On account of this self-sufficiency, they therefore are given the names of matters, which are neither bodies nor properties. One does well to be on one's guard against using the term, “bodies,” to characterize oxygen, etc., positive and negative electricity, heat, etc.

252. In contrast, matter is not an existing thing but is rather being as a universal, or being in the mode of the concept. Reason, which is still instinct, correctly makes this distinction without being conscious that it, as it seeks the law in all sensuous being, sublates therein their merely sensuous being, and, as it construes the moments of the law as matters, their essentiality has become universal, and, in such a way of putting things, has expressed them as a non-sensuous sensuousness, an incorporeal and nonetheless objective being.

253. It is still to be seen what twists and turns its result will take for the instinct of reason and what new shape of its observing will thereby come on the scene. We see the pure law which is freed from sensuous being as the truth of this experimenting consciousness,²² as the concept, which, present in sensuous being self-sufficiently and unrestrainedly, moves itself within that sensuous being; it is immersed within sensuous being while being free-standing from it, and it is the simple concept. For this consciousness itself, what is in truth the result and the essence now makes its entrance, however, as object, and, while it is for consciousness 145not a result and has no relation to the preceding movement, as a particular kind of object. Its relation to this consciousness is that of another kind of observing.

254. Such an object, which in itself contains the process in the simplicity of the concept, is the organic. The organic is this absolute fluidity within which the determinateness, through which it would be only for others, has itself been dissolved. However much the inorganic thing has determinateness as its essence and as a result only together with other things does it constitute the completeness of the moments of the concept, nonetheless it as a result disappears when it enters the movement. In contrast, in an organic being²³ all the determinatenesses through which it is open to others are bound together under the simple organic unity. None of them come forward as essential, or as items that could relate themselves free-standingly to others, and the organic thus preserves itself in its relation.

255. The instinct of reason here sets itself to observing the aspects of law, which are, as it follows from this determination, at first organic nature and inorganic nature in their relation to each other. For organic nature, inorganic nature is just the free-standingness²⁴ which is opposed to the simple concept of organic nature, or of the unbound determinatenesses in which individual nature has at the same time been dissolved. From out of the continuity of those determinatenesses, individual nature at the same time isolates itself and is for itself. Air, water, earth, zones, and climate are such universal elements which constitute the indeterminate simple essence of individualities and within which they are at the same time reflected into themselves. Neither individuality nor what is elemental is utterly in and for itself. Rather, within that self-sufficient free-standingness in which they come on the scene for observation vis-à-vis each other, they relate to each other at the same time as essential relations, but in such a way that it is their self-sufficiency and mutual indifference which are dominant and which only in part pass over into abstraction. Law is therefore present here as the relation of an element to the formative generation²⁵ of the organic, which at one time has elemental being confronting itself and at another time exhibits it in its own organic reflection. Yet such laws, such as those that state that animals which belong to the air have the constitution of birds, that those which belong to water have the constitution of fish, and that animals in northerly latitudes have thick coats of fur, and so forth, all directly point to a poverty which does not correspond to the diversity of the organic. In addition, organic freedom knows how to exempt itself from the determinations of its forms, and everywhere necessarily offers exceptions to such laws 146or such rules, or whatever one wants to call them. This happens in such a way that these remain as only superficial determinations for all the things falling under such laws, and so too the expression of their necessity cannot be anything more than superficial; it cannot get much beyond the “great influence,” as a result of which one does not know what really belongs to this influence and what does not. Hence, relations such as that between the organic and the elemental are not really to be called laws, for in part such a relation, according to its content, does not in any way exhaust the range of the organic, and in part the moments of the relation themselves remain indifferent to each other and express no necessity. In the concept of an acid, there lies the concept of a base, just as in the concept of positive electricity there lies that of negative electricity. However, as often as a thick coat of fur may be found to go together with northerly latitudes, and that the structure of a fish is to be found to go together with water, and that the structure of birds goes together with air, nevertheless the concept of a thick covering of fur is neither contained in the concept of the north, nor does the concept of the sea contain the concept of the structure of fish, nor does the concept of air contain the concept of the structure of birds. On account of this freedom of the two aspects from each another, so too there are land animals with the essential characters of a bird, of a fish, and so on. Because it cannot be conceived to be internal to the essence, that necessity also ceases to have a sensuous existence and can no longer be observed in actuality; rather, it has departed from actuality. Since it is not to be found in the real essence itself, it is what is called a teleological relation, a relation that is external to what is related, and instead is thus the very opposite of a law. It is a thought entirely freed from nature as necessary; it leaves this necessary nature behind and moves itself for itself above it.

256. However much the previously treated relation of the organic to elemental nature does not express the essence of that relation, still the concept of purpose does in contrast contain it. For this observing consciousness, the concept of purpose, is to be sure, not the ownmost essence of the organic. Rather, to observing consciousness, this concept seems to fall outside the bounds of the organic, where it then is only the former external, teleological relation. Yet in the way that the organic had been previously determined, the organic is in fact the real purpose itself, for while it itself maintains itself in relation to an other, it is just that kind of natural being²⁶ in which nature reflects itself into the concept, and those moments which necessarily lie apart from each other, such as the moments of a cause and an effect, or of an active and a passive, are here combined into one. As a consequence, something comes on the scene here not only as the result of necessity, but, because it has returned into itself, it is a finality,²⁷ or the result is just as much the first which starts the movement and is, to itself, the purpose which it realizes. The organic does not engender something, it only conserves itself, or what is engendered is, as it is engendered, just as much already present.

257. This determination needs to be more precisely discussed both as it is in itself and as it is for the instinct of reason, 147and this needs to be done in order to see how the instinct of reason both is to be found therein and also how it thus does not recognize²⁸ itself in what it finds there. Thus, the concept of purpose to which observing reason has elevated itself is, in the way that it is observing reason's conscious concept, just as much present here as what is actual, and it is not only an external relation of the actual but rather its essence. This actuality, which is itself a purpose, relates itself purposively to an other, which is to say, its relation is a contingent relation with respect to what both immediately are. Immediately, they are both self-sufficient and indifferent to each other. However, the essence of their relation is something other than they themselves seem to be, and their doing has another sense than it has as it is immediately for sensuous perceiving. The necessity, which lies in what happens, is hidden, and it first shows itself at the end,²⁹ but in such a way that this end shows that it was also to have been what was first. However, the end points out this priority of itself as a result of the fact that through the change, which the doing undertook, nothing else emerges other than what was already there. Or, if we begin with what is first, then what is first only comes back round to itself in its end, or it comes back round to itself in the very result of its doing. Only thereby does it prove itself to be the kind of thing which has itself as its end, and therefore, as what is first, it has already come back round to itself, or it is in and for itself. What it therefore achieves by the movement of its doing is itself, and in achieving only itself it is its feeling of its own self.³⁰ For that reason, the difference between what it is and what it seeks is present, but this is only the mere semblance of a difference, and thereby it is the concept in its own self.

258. However, self-consciousness is just as much constituted by its distinguishing itself from itself and at the same time having no distinction emerge therein. Hence, it finds in the observation of organic nature nothing else but this essence, or it is to be found as a thing, as a life, and yet it differentiates between what it is itself and what it has found, a difference which is no difference at all. Just as an animal's instinct is to seek and consume food without it thereby bringing forth anything but itself, so too does the instinct of reason only find itself in its seeking. An animal stops with self-feeling. In contrast, the instinct of reason is at the same time self-consciousness. However, because it is only instinct, it is set off to one side as opposed to consciousness and has its opposite in that consciousness. Hence, the instinct of reason's satisfaction is estranged by this opposition. It does indeed find itself, namely, finds the purpose, and, just as much, finds this purpose as a thing. However, to the instinct of reason, the purpose first falls outside the bounds of the thing that presents itself as a purpose. Secondly, this purpose as purpose is at the same time objective; to the instinct of reason, it thus does not, as consciousness, fall within the bounds of itself but into those of another understanding.

259. When regarded more closely, this determination turns out to lie just as much in the concept of the thing, or it turns out that the thing is in its own self the purpose. Specifically, it maintains itself, i.e., it is its nature to conceal the necessity and at the same time to present that necessity in the form of a contingent 148relation, since its freedom, or its being-for-itself, is just its conducting itself towards what is necessary for it in the same way it would conduct itself towards what is indifferent for it. It thus exhibits itself as the kind of thing whose concept falls outside the bounds of its being. Likewise, reason has the necessity to intuit its own concept as falling outside its own bounds, and thereby to intuit itself as a thing, as the kind of thing towards which it is indifferent, which in turn is thereby indifferent towards both reason and its own concept. As instinct, it also stands pat within the bounds of this being, or within indifference, and the thing expressing the concept remains, to itself, something other than this concept and the concept something other than the thing. For reason, the organic thing is only purpose in its own self so that the necessity belongs outside of the bounds of the organic itself, or it is a necessity which presents itself as concealed within the thing's doing, while what is doing therein conducts itself as an indifferent existent-for-itself. – However, since in its own self the organic as purpose cannot conduct itself in any other way than as organic, so too it is phenomenally and sensuously currently present so that it is a purpose in its own self and is thus observed. The organic shows itself to be something self-preserving, to be both in the returning into itself and to have returned into itself. However, in this being, observing consciousness does recognize³¹ the concept of purpose, or does not recognize that the concept of purpose is not existing somewhere else in some intellect but just is here and as a thing. Observing consciousness makes a distinction between the concept of purpose and being-for-itself and self-preservation, a difference which is really no difference at all. It is not for observing consciousness that it is no difference; rather, what it is for observing consciousness, is a doing which appears to be contingent and indifferent towards what is brought about by that doing, and also towards the unity which ties both of them together – to observing consciousness, that former doing and this latter purpose come undone from each other.

260. On this view, what corresponds to the organic itself is the inner doing lying midway between what is first and what is last for it insofar as this doing has in it the character of singular individuality. However, this purposive doing as such would not measure up to the organic insofar as the doing has the character of universality and insofar as the doing itself is posited as the same as what as a result is engendered by it. That singular doing, which is only the mediating middle, through its very singularity falls under the determination of what is for all intents and purposes a singular, or contingent, necessity. Hence, what the organic does for the preservation of itself as a singular individual or as a genus is, according to this immediate content, fully lawless, for the universal and the concept belong outside its bounds. Its doing would accordingly be empty efficaciousness without any content in its own self; it would not even be the efficaciousness of a machine, for a machine has a purpose, and its efficaciousness thereby has a determinate content. As thus abandoned by the universal, it would only be an activity of an existent as an existent, i.e., it would be an activity that is not at the same time reflected into itself in the way an acid or a base is; it would be an efficaciousness that could neither detach itself from its immediate existence, 149nor could give up this existence which is lost in the relation to its opposite and still preserves itself. However, the being whose efficaciousness is here under examination is posited as a thing preserving itself in its relation to its opposite; the activity as such is nothing but the pure essenceless form of its being-for-itself, and its substance, which is not bare determinate being but rather the universal, its purpose, does not fall outside the bounds of the activity. In its own self, the activity is an activity inwardly turning back into itself, not an activity led back into itself by anything alien to itself.

261. However, for that reason this unity of universality and activity is not for this observing consciousness because that unity is essentially the inner movement of the organic and can only be grasped as concept. However, observing seeks the moments in the form of being and endurance, and because the organic whole is essentially that which does not have the moments in it nor lets them be found in it, consciousness transforms the opposition into the kind of opposition that conforms to its point of view.

262. The organic being³² emerges for consciousness in this way as a relation between two existing and fixed moments – of an opposition whose two sides thus seem to consciousness to be partly given in observation, and, according to their content, partly to express the opposition between the organic concept of purpose and actuality. However, because the concept as such a concept is therein thoroughly erased, all this takes place in an obscure and superficial manner in which thought has degenerated all the way down to representational thinking. So we see the first of these, the concept of purpose, meant (roughly speaking) in the sense of the inner, and the other, actuality, meant (roughly speaking) in the sense of the outer. Their relation creates the law that says that the outer is the expression of the inner.

263. Regarded more closely, this inner, with its opposites and their relation to each other, turns out to be the following. First of all, the two sides of the law are no longer to be taken as they were in the case of previous laws, in which the two sides appeared to be self-sufficient things so that each appeared as a particular body, nor are they to be taken as existing for others so that the universal would be supposed to have its existence somewhere outside the bounds of what is existing. Rather, the organic being³³ is laid as the foundation, or as undivided and as the content of inner and outer, and it is the same for both. The opposition is, as a result, still only a purely formal opposition, whose real aspects have the same in-itself for their essence, but at the same time, while inner and outer are also each an opposed reality and a different being for observation, each seems, to observing consciousness, to have a distinctive content of its own. However, this distinctive content, since it is the same substance, or the same organic unity, can in fact only be a different form of that substance, or that organic unity. Observing consciousness intimates as much in its claim that 150the outer is only the expression of the inner. – In the concept of purpose, we have seen the same determinations of the relationships, namely, the indifferent self-sufficiency of the various sides, and within that indifferent self-sufficiency, their unity within which they disappear.

264. It is now to be seen what shape the inner and outer have in their existence.³⁴ The inner as such an inner must have an outer being and a shape just like the outer as such an outer, for the inner is object, or is itself posited as existing and as available for observation.

265. The organic substance as inner is the simple soul, the pure concept of purpose, or it is the universal. In its division, the universal likewise remains a universal fluidity. Thus, in its being, it appears as doing, or the movement of vanishing actuality, since, in contrast, the outer, opposed to that existing inner, stably exists in the motionless being of the organic. As the relation of that inner to this outer, the law thereby expresses the content of the concept of purpose, at one time in the exhibition of universal moments, or simple essentialities, and at another time in the exhibition of that realized essentiality, or the shape. Those first simple organic properties, just to name them, are sensibility, irritability, and reproduction. These properties, or at least the first two, do not indeed seem to refer to organisms as such but only to the animal organism. The vegetable organism in fact expresses only the simple concept of the organism which does not develop its moments. Hence, in considering those moments insofar as they are supposed to be for observation, we must hold ourselves fast to what it is that puts the developed existence of those moments on display.

266. As for what now concerns these moments themselves, the following can be said. They immediately follow from the concept of what has itself as a purpose,³⁵ for sensibility as such expresses the simple concept of an organic reflective turn into itself, or the universal fluidity of this concept. However, irritability expresses organic elasticity, the organism's conducting itself reactively at the same time within that reflection. Irritability expresses the actualization in which the former abstract being-for-itself is a being for others, an actualization which is in opposition to that initial motionless inwardly-turned-being.³⁶ But reproduction is the action of this whole organism reflected into itself, its activity as a purpose in itself, or as genus in which the individual thus repels itself from itself and procreatively replicates either its organic parts or the whole individual. Taken in the sense of self-preservation as such, reproduction expresses the formal concept of the organic, or sensibility, but it is intrinsically the real organic concept, or the whole. This whole, as the individual, returns back into itself either through the engendering 151of singular parts of itself, or, as the genus, it returns back into itself³⁷ through the engendering of individuals.

267. The other significance of these organic elements, namely, as the significance of the outer, is the mode in which they are shaped, according to which these organic elements are present as actual but at the same time universal parts, or as organic systems. Sensibility takes the shape, say, of a nervous system, irritability, that of a muscular system, and reproduction, that of an intestinal system for the preservation of the individual and the species.

268. Laws which are characteristic of the organic accordingly concern a relationship between organic moments in their twofold meaning, at one time as a part of an organic shaping, and at another time as a universal fluid determinateness that runs through all those systems. In the expression of such a law, a determinate sensibility, for example, would, as a moment of the whole organism, have its expression in a determinately formed nervous system, or it would also be bound up with a determinate reproduction of the organic parts of the individual or with the propagation of the whole, and so on. – Both aspects of such a law can be observed. The outer is, according to its concept, being for others; sensibility, e.g., has its immediately actualized mode in the sensible system, and, as a universal property, it is in its expressions likewise something objective. The aspect that is called inner has its own outer aspect, which is differentiated from what on the whole is called the outer.

269. Both of the aspects of an organic law would therefore well be observable, but not the laws about the relation of these aspects. For that reason, observation is inadequate not because as observation it would be too short-sighted, nor because it would not be supposed to conduct itself empirically, but because it is supposed to start from the Idea.³⁸ Such laws, if they were to be something real, would in fact have to be present in actuality and would therefore have to be observable. Rather, observation would be inadequate because the thought of laws of this sort proves to have no truth at all.

270. It turned out that for there to be such a law, the relationship has to be such that the universal organic property would have made itself into a thing in an organic system and would have its own shaped imprint in it, so that both would be the same essence, available at one time as a universal moment and at another time as a thing. However, in addition, the inner aspect is also for itself a relationship of many aspects, and thus that at first suggests the thought of a law as a relation among universal organic activities or among properties to each other. Whether such a law is possible has to be decided on the basis of the nature of such a property. However, such a property as a universal fluidity is in part 152not something restricted, like a thing, and maintains itself within the differences of an existence which is supposed to constitute its shape. Instead, sensibility goes beyond the nervous system and pervades all the other systems of the organism: – In part, such a property is a universal moment which is essentially undivided and inseparable from reaction, or irritability, and reproduction, since, as the reflection into itself, it has in itself reaction itself. Mere reflectedness-into-itself is passivity, or dead being. It is not a sensibility, as little as action, which is the same as reaction, is, without reflectedness-into-itself, irritability. Reflection within action or reaction, and action or reaction within reflection is precisely the unity that constitutes the organic, a unity which is synonymous with organic reproduction. It follows from this that in every mode of actuality there must be – while we are initially considering the relationship of sensibility and irritability to each another – the same magnitude of sensibility present as the magnitude of irritability, and that an organic appearance can be comprehended and determined, or, if one pleases, explained, equally as much according to the one as it can according to the other. What one person might take for high sensibility, another might just as well take for both high irritability and an irritability of the same degree. However much they are called factors (and if this is not supposed to be a meaningless word), still what is thereby declared is that they are moments of the concept, thus of the real object, the essence of which is constituted by this concept which likewise has both of them in it, and if the object is in one way determined to be very sensitive, then in the other way it is just as well to be spoken of as very irritable.

271. If, as is necessary, they are distinguished, then they are distinguished according to their concept, and their opposition is qualitative. But if apart from this true difference, they are differentially posited both as existing and as being for representational thought as they might be if they were aspects of the law, then they appear in quantitative diversity. Their distinctive qualitative opposition thus enters into magnitude, and hence laws arise of the following sort, for example, that sensibility and irritability stand in inverse relations of magnitude, so that as the one increases, the other diminishes; or even better, directly taking the magnitude itself as the content so that the magnitude of something increases as its smallness diminishes. – However, should a determinate content be given to this law, say, in the following way, namely, that the magnitude of a hole increases the more that what it is filled with decreases, so too can this inverse relationship likewise be transformed into a direct relationship and expressed as the magnitude of a hole increasing in direct ratio to the amount that is decreased – a tautological proposition, which can be expressed as a direct or an inverse 153relation, with its distinctive expression only amounting to this, that a magnitude increases as magnitude increases. Just as the hole and what fills it and what is removed from it are qualitatively opposed, what is real in them and its determinate magnitude are one and the same. Likewise, the increase of magnitude and decrease of smallness are the same, so that their meaningless opposition peters out into a tautology. So too the organic moments are likewise inseparable both according to what is real in them and in their magnitude, which is itself the magnitude of what is real in them. The one decreases and increases only with the other, for either one of them has a meaning at all only insofar as the other is present – or rather, it is a matter of indifference as to whether an organic appearance is to be regarded as irritability or as sensibility, even in general and when one likewise speaks of its magnitude. In that way, it is a matter of indifference as to whether we speak of the increase of a hole as adding to its emptiness or as adding to the filling removed from it; or a number, for example, three, remains just as large whether I take it positively or negatively; and even if I increase the three to four, the positive as well as the negative has become four – in the way that the south pole in a magnet is precisely as strong as its north pole, or a positive electricity is precisely as strong as its negative, or an acid is as strong as the base on which it operates – an organic existence is such a quantitative size, like the number three or a magnet, and so forth. It is what is increased or diminished, and if it is increased, both of its factors are also increased, just as much as both poles of the magnet or both kinds of electricity increase if the magnet, etc., is strengthened. – Both are no more different in intension than in extension; the one is not supposed to decrease in extension and then in contrast increase in intension, while conversely the other is not supposed to diminish its intension and then in contrast increase in extension. This is subsumed under the same concept as that of an empty opposition; the real intension is likewise purely and simply as large as the extension and vice versa.

272. As it has become clear in the case of this legislation, the issue really has to do with the following. At the outset irritability and sensibility constitute determinate organic opposition. However, this content falls by the wayside, and the opposition runs off into a formal opposition of increase and decrease of magnitude, or of different intension and extension – an opposition which no longer has anything to do with the nature of sensibility and irritability and no longer expresses it. Hence, this empty game of legislation is not tied to organic moments; rather, it can be played everywhere with everything, and it generally rests on a lack of acquaintance with the logical nature of these oppositions.

154273. Finally, if instead of sensibility and irritability, reproduction is brought into relation with one or other of them, then the motivation for this legislation breaks down, for reproduction does not stand in opposition to those moments as they are opposed to each other. Since that legislation rests on this opposition, the mere semblance of its taking place also falls away.

274. The legislation just examined contains the differences of the organism in the sense of being moments of its concept and in fact is supposed to be an a priori legislation. However, in that legislation itself there lies essentially the following thought. Those differences signify what is present, and, in any event, merely observing consciousness has to restrict itself solely to their existence. Organic actuality necessarily has in it the kind of opposition that its concept expresses, which can be determined as irritability and sensibility, and just as these again both appear to be different from reproduction. – The externality in which the moments of the organic concept are here regarded is the proper immediate externality of the inner. It is not the outer, which is the outer of the whole and is the shape. In what follows, the inner is to be considered in relation to that outer.

275. However, if the opposition of the moments is grasped as it is in existence itself, then sensibility, irritability, and reproduction subside into being ordinary properties, which are universals that are just as indifferent towards one another as are specific weight, color, hardness, and so on. In this sense, it can indeed be observed that one organic being could be said to be more sensitive or more irritable, or to have a greater reproductive power than another – in the way that it can be observed that the sensibility, etc., of one organic being may according to its species be said to be different from that of another, or that one may be said to behave differently from another with regard to a given stimulus in the way that a horse behaves differently towards oats than it does towards hay, and the way a dog behaves differently towards both, and so on. These differences can as easily be observed as it can be observed that one body is harder than another, and so on. – If consideration is taken of such sensuous properties such as hardness, color, etc., as well as the phenomena of responsiveness to the stimulus of oats, of irritability for burdens, or of the number and kind of young that can be born, then when they are related to and compared with each other, they essentially stand in conflict with any kind of lawfulness. For the determinateness of their sensuous being consists just in their existing in complete indifference to each other and in exhibiting the freedom of nature unbound from the concept instead of exhibiting the unity of a relation. It exhibits not so much these moments themselves as it does nature's irrational playing up and down the scale of contingent magnitudes which lie between the moments of the concept.

276. The other aspect is that according to which the simple moments of the organic concept are compared with the moments of its shaping, and it would only issue the 155real law which would express the true outer as the imprint of the inner. – Now, because those simple moments are permeating, fluid properties, they do not have a kind of segregated, real expression in organic things as what is called the singular system of the shape. Or, however much the abstract idea of the organism is truly expressed in those three moments, if only for the reason that they are nothing stable and are rather only moments of the concept and of the movement, still the organism, as shape, is in contrast not to be treated as falling into three such determinate systems in the way that anatomy articulates the organism. Insofar as such systems are supposed to be found in their actuality and to be legitimated through this kind of finding, it must also be remembered that anatomy not only features three systems of that sort but a good many others as well. – Considered apart from this, the sensitive system must mean something entirely different from what is called a nervous system, the irritable system something entirely different from the muscular system, and the reproductive system something entirely different from the intestinal system of reproduction. In the systems constituting a shape as such, the organism is understood according to the abstract side of dead existence; taken in that way, its moments belong to anatomy and to the cadaver, not to cognition and the living organism. As those kinds of parts, they have in fact ceased to be, for they cease to be processes. Since the being of an organism is essentially universality, or the reflective turn into itself, the being of its whole, like its moments, cannot consist in an anatomical system. Rather, the actual expression of the whole and externality of the moments are instead only present as a movement that runs throughout the various parts of the shaping, and within which what is torn out and rigidly set up as a singular system is shown to be essentially a flowing moment, so that what can be counted as their reality is not the former actuality in the way anatomy finds it; rather, what counts as their reality is only that actuality as a process, within which alone even the anatomical parts have a sense.

277. It therefore turns out that neither the moments of the organically inner, each taken for itself, are capable of offering the different sides of a law of being, while in such a law they are supposed to be capable of being asserted to be, of being differentiated from each other, and, in the same way, neither of them is supposed to be able to be mentioned instead of the other. Nor is it the case that if one of them is placed on one side, does it or the other have in the other its realization in a fixed system, for this fixed system would be far removed from having any organic truth at all and would be far removed from being the expression of those moments of the inner. Since the organic is in itself the universal, what is essential to it is instead to have its moments be just as universal in actuality, which is to say, to have them as processes running through everything, but not as giving an image of the universal in an isolated thing.

156278. This is the way that the representational thought of a law in the organic goes wrong. The law wants to grasp and express the opposition as motionless aspects and to grasp and express in themselves the determinateness which is their relation to each other. The inner, to which that phenomenal universality belongs, and the outer, to which the parts of the motionless shape belong, were supposed to constitute the corresponding sides of the law, but in being kept apart in that way, they lose their organic significance. What precisely lies at the basis of the representation of law is that its two aspects should have a stable existence on their own part,³⁹ where each is indifferent to the other, and the relation in them would be portioned out as a dual determinateness commensurate with itself. This is instead what each aspect of the organic is in its own self. It is simple universality in which all determinations have been dissolved and which is the movement of this dissolution.

279. Looking into the difference between this legislation and previous forms will completely clear up its nature. – Specifically, if we look back to the movement of perceiving and to that of the understanding reflecting itself into itself and thereby determining its object, then we see that the understanding does not by doing so have before itself the relation of these abstract determinations (universal and singular, essential and external) in its object. Rather, it is itself that transition, to which this transition does not become objective. On the contrary, the organic unity here is itself the object, i.e., where the organic unity is exactly the relation of those opposites and where this relation is a pure transition. In its simplicity, this transition is immediately universality, and as that universality crosses the threshold into difference, whose relation the law is supposed to express, so too are its moments universal objects of this consciousness. The law thus goes like this: The outer is an expression of the inner. The understanding has here grasped the thought of the law itself, since formerly it only generally looked for laws, and it had those moments of the laws vaguely in mind as a determinate content but not as the thoughts of such laws. – With regard to the content, the kinds of laws which are not supposed to be preserved are those which are only a motionless incorporation of purely existing differences into the form of universality. Instead, the kinds of laws which are to be preserved are those which immediately encompass in these differences the restlessness of the concept and at the same time thereby encompass necessity in the relation between the two sides. Yet, just because the object, the organic unity, immediately unifies that infinite sublation, or unifies the absolute negation of being with motionless being, and because the moments are essentially pure transition, it turns out that there are no such existing aspects as had been demanded for there to be law.

280. In order to 157sustain such aspects, the understanding must hold itself to the other moment of the organic relationship, namely, to the reflectedness⁴⁰ into itself of organic existence. However, this being is so completely reflected into itself such that, to it, no determinateness vis-à-vis others remains left over. The immediate sensuous being is immediately at one with determinateness as such and thus expresses a qualitative difference in itself, as, for example, blue as against red, acid as against alkaloid, etc. However, organic being which has returned into itself is completely indifferent towards others; its existence is simple universality, and it refuses to offer any enduring sensuous differences to observation, or, what is the same thing, it shows its essential determinateness to be only the changing flux of existing determinatenesses. Hence, the way the difference as existing difference is expressed goes just this way. It is an indifferent difference, i.e., a difference as magnitude. However, the concept is therein erased and necessity vanishes. – But if the content along with the filling out of this indifferent being and the flux of sensuous determinations are gathered together into the simplicity of an organic determination, then at the same time this expresses that the content simply does not have that determinateness – the determinateness of the immediate property – and, as we saw above, the qualitative then falls solely within the bounds of magnitude.

281. Therefore, although the objective, grasped as organic determinateness, has the concept in its own self and is thereby distinguished from what is for the understanding (which in grasping the content of its laws conducts itself purely perceptually), the former comprehending⁴¹ falls back entirely within the bounds of both the principle and the style of the merely perceptual understanding, because what was grasped is put to use as moments of a law. What is thereby grasped then takes on the mode of a fixed determinateness, the form of an immediate property, or a motionless appearance. Furthermore, it is incorporated into the determination of magnitude, and the nature of the concept is suppressed. – The exchange of something merely perceived for something reflected into itself, of a mere sensuous determinateness for an organic determinateness, thus again loses its value, namely, as a result of the understanding not yet having sublated its legislative activity.

282. In order to give a few examples of this exchange: Something for perception, say, an animal with strong muscles, is determined to be an animal organism of higher irritability; or, what is a condition of great weakness for perception, is determined to be a condition of higher sensibility, or, if you please, an abnormal affection, namely, a potentization of it (to take an expression which translates what is sensuous into Latin – and, for all that, into bad Latin – instead of translating it into the concept). “That an animal 158has strong muscles” can also be expressed by the understanding as “The animal possesses a great muscular force” – in the way that great weakness similarly means a lesser force. Determination through irritability has this advantage over determination by means of force: The latter expresses the indeterminate reflective turn into itself, the former expresses the determinate reflective turn into itself, for the force that is distinctive to muscles is just irritability – and determination by means of irritability also has an advantage to that of determination as strong muscles, an advantage which, as in the case of force, already has within itself at the same time a reflective turn into itself. Likewise, weakness, or lesser force, organic passivity, is determinately expressed through sensibility. However, if this sensibility is taken for itself and rigidly fixed, and if it is still bound up with the determination of magnitude, and if, as greater or lesser sensibility, it is opposed to a greater or lesser irritability, then each is entirely reduced to the sensuous element and to the ordinary form of a property, and their relation is not that of the concept, but, on the contrary, is a relation of magnitude to which opposition now belongs and which becomes a difference devoid of thought. However much what is indeterminate in the expressions of force, strength, and weakness is excised in this way, still there now emerges the equally empty and indeterminate meandering around within the oppositions of a higher and lower sensibility and within irritabilities in their increase and decrease relative to one another. The phenomena of strength and weakness are entirely sensuous, thoughtless determinations no less so than are the phenomena of greater or lesser sensibility, as well as those of greater or lesser irritability, unthinkingly grasped and just as unthinkingly expressed as sensuous phenomena. The concept has not taken the place of those conceptless expressions. Instead, strength and weakness have been filled out by a determinateness which, taken solely for itself, rests on the concept, and although it has the concept for its content, it entirely loses this origin and character. – Therefore, through the form of simplicity and immediacy in which this content is made into an aspect of a law, and through magnitude which constitutes the element of difference for such determinations, the essence, which originally, as the concept, is and is posited as the concept, retains the mode of sensuous perception, and it thus remains as far removed from cognition as it is when it is determined according to the strength and weakness of force or according to immediate sensuous properties.

283. Now, what is still left to be considered for itself alone is what 159the outer of the organic is, and how the opposition of its inner and outer is determined in it. This is to be carried out just as the inner of the whole in relation to its own outer was first put under examination.

284. The outer, considered for itself, is the shaping as such, the system of life differentiating itself in the element of being, and, at the same time, is essentially the being of the organic creature⁴² as it is for an other – objective essence in its being-for-itself. – This other appears at first as its outer inorganic nature. If both of these are considered in relation to a law, then, as we saw above, inorganic nature cannot constitute the aspect of a law vis-à-vis the organic creature,⁴³ because the latter at the same time is utterly for itself and assumes a universal and free relation to inorganic nature.

285. To determine the relationship between these two aspects in the organic shape itself more precisely: The shape, according to one of its aspects, is thus turned against inorganic nature, while according to the other aspect, it is for itself and reflected into itself. The actual organic creature is the mediating middle, which brings together the being-for-itself of life with the outer per se, or with being-in-itself. – However, the extreme of being-for-itself is the inner as the infinite One, which takes back into itself the moments of that shape itself both from out of their stable existence and their connection with the outer. This infinite One is devoid of content; it gives itself its content in the [organic] shape, and in that shape it appears as that shape's process. In this extreme as simple negativity, or as pure singularity, the organic is in possession of its absolute freedom through which it is both safeguarded and indifferent vis-à-vis being for others and vis-à-vis the determinateness of the moments of the shape. This freedom is at the same time the freedom of the moments themselves; it is their possibility both of appearing as existing and of becoming comprehended.⁴⁴ Just as they are therein freed up with regard to the outer, so too are they freed up and indifferent with regard to each other, for the simplicity of this freedom is being, or is their simple substance. This concept, or pure freedom, is one and the same life, no matter how the shape or the being for others might yet play out here and there in so many ways. It is a matter of indifference to this stream of life what sorts of mills it drives. – First of all, it is now to be noted that this concept here is not, as it was previously, to be grasped in the examination of its own proper inner in its form of process, or in the development of its moments. Instead, it is to be grasped in its form as the simple inner, which constitutes the purely universal aspect as contrasted with the actual living being,⁴⁵ that is, as the element of the stable existence of the existing members of the shape. This is because it is this shape which is being considered here, and the essence of life appears in it as the simplicity of stable existence. Next, being for others is the determinateness of the actual shaping incorporated into this simple universality which is its essence, and it is likewise a simple universal non-sensuous determinateness, and it can only be what finds expression as number. – Number is the 160mediating middle of the shape, which ties together indeterminate life with actual life; it is simple like the former and determinate like the latter. What in the former, to the inner, would be number, the outer, according to its mode of existing as multiformed actuality, would have to express as kinds of life, color, and so on, or as the whole range of differences which develop themselves in appearance.

286. If the two aspects of the organic whole – where one is the inner and the other is the outer, such that each of them again has in its own self an inner and an outer – are compared according to the inner which both sides have, then the inner of the first was the concept as the restlessness of abstraction; but for its own inner, the second has motionless universality and therein also motionless determinateness, or number. However much therefore the former, because the concept develops its moments within it, deceptively promised laws through the mere semblance of necessity in the relation, still the latter straightaway renounces that, as number proves itself to be the determination of only one side of its laws. For number is just that entirely dead and indifferent motionless determinateness within which all movement and relation is extinguished. It has burned the bridge leading to the life of impulses, to various ways of life, and to whatever other sensuous existence there is.

287. However, this treatment of the shape of the organic as such and of the inner as the inner merely of the shape, is in fact no longer a treatment of the organic at all. For both the aspects which were supposed to be related are only posited indifferently to each other, and as a result the reflective turn into itself, which constitutes the essence of the organic, is sublated. Rather, the comparison that was here sought between the inner and the outer is now instead transferred to inorganic nature. The infinite concept is here only the essence, concealed and turning inward, or which externally falls within the bounds of self-consciousness. It is no longer, as it was in the organic, in possession of its objective present moment. This relation of inner and outer is thus still up for examination in its own proper sphere.

288. In the first place, that inner of the shape as the simple singularity of an inorganic thing is specific gravity. As a simple being, specific gravity can be observed just as well as can the determinateness of number, the sole determinateness of which specific gravity is capable; or it can in fact be found through the comparison of observations, and in this way it seems to furnish one aspect of the law. Shape, color, hardness, tenacity, and an innumerable range of other properties would together constitute the outer aspect and would have to give expression to the determinateness of the inner, or number, so that the one should find its counterpart in the other.

289. Now because negativity is here taken not as a movement of the process, but as unity brought to rest, or as simple being-for-itself, it appears 161instead as that through which the thing resists the process and through which it maintains itself within itself as indifferent with regard to the process. However, as a result of this simple being-for-itself being a motionless indifference with regard to an other, specific gravity appears as one property alongside others, and all necessary relation on its part to this plurality, or all conformity to law, thereby ceases. – The specific gravity as this simple inner does not have difference in its own self, or it only has non-essential difference in itself since its pure simplicity itself sublates every essential difference. This non-essential difference, magnitude, thus had to have its counterpart, or its other, in the other aspect, or the plurality of properties, as it is only as a result that it is difference at all. However much this plurality itself is gathered up into the simplicity of opposition, and is determined, say, as cohesion, such that this cohesion is being-for-itself in otherness in the way that specific gravity is pure being-for-itself, still this cohesion is, first of all, this pure determinateness posited in the concept in contrast to that previous determinateness, and the mode of legislation would be what has been considered above in the discussion of the relation of sensibility to irritability. – Furthermore, cohesion, as the concept of being-for-itself in otherness, is only the abstraction of that aspect opposed to specific gravity and as such has no existence. This is so because being-for-itself in otherness is the process within which the inorganic would have to express its being-for-itself as a self-conservation, which, on the other hand, would keep it from moving out of the process as a moment of a product. Yet this goes exactly against its nature, which in its own self has no purpose or universality. Rather, its process is only the determinate conduct by which its specific gravity, just like its being-for-itself, sublates itself. This determinate conduct in which its cohesion would consist in its true concept and the determinate magnitude of its specific gravity are concepts entirely indifferent to each other. However much that kind of conduct were to be entirely ignored, and however much attention was confined to the representation of magnitude, still this determination could perhaps be thought of in this way: The greater specific weight, as a higher inwardly-turned-being, would resist entering into the process more than would a less specific weight. Yet conversely, the freedom of being-for-itself preserves itself only in the ease with which it lets itself get involved with everything and maintains itself within this diversity. That intensity without the extension of relations is a vacuous abstraction, for extension constitutes the existence of intensity. However, the self-conservation of the inorganic in its relation falls, as noted, outside the bounds of its nature, since it does not contain the principle of movement in its own self, or since its being is not absolute negativity and the concept.

290. On the other hand, this other aspect of the inorganic, considered not as process but as motionless being, is ordinary cohesion, a simple 162sensuous property that has emerged on the side that confronts the moment of otherness. This otherness itself has been set free-standing and has been laid out into a plurality of properties indifferent to each other; it itself falls under this cohesion, as does specific gravity. The range of properties then together constitute the other side to cohesion. However, in cohesion as it is in the others, number is the single determinateness, which not only does not express a relation and a transition of these properties to each other but rather is just essentially this: It has no necessary relation but rather is to exhibit the abolition of lawfulness, for it is the expression of determinateness as non-essential. Therefore, a series of bodies which express the difference as a numerical difference of their specific gravities by no means runs parallel to a series where the difference is constituted by the other properties, even if for purposes of simplification only a single one or a few of them are selected. This is so because it could indeed only be the whole bundle of the properties which could constitute the other side in this parallel series. To bring this into some kind of order within itself and to bind it into a whole, observation has available for it, on the one hand, the determinatenesses of magnitude of these various properties, but, on the other hand, their differences which come on the scene as qualitative. What in this heap would now have to be characterized as positive or negative and which would sublate itself would be what is itself the internal figuration and exposition of the formula, which itself would be very much cobbled together, and it would belong to the concept which is excluded just in the way that properties, as existing, are supposed to be just lying there and are then taken up. In this existence, none of them whatsoever points to the character of the negative with regard to the other; rather, the one is as good as the other. Nor do they indicate in any other fashion their position in the arrangement of the whole. – In the case of a series which progresses with parallel differences – whether the relation is meant to be that of simultaneous increase on both sides, or only of increase in the one and decrease in the other – what is at issue has only to do with the last simple expression of this combined whole, which should constitute the one aspect of the law with regard to specific gravity. However, this one aspect, as an existing result, is nothing but what has already been mentioned, namely, a singularly individual property, as, say, ordinary cohesion (alongside the others, specific gravity among them) is indifferently present, and every one of them can be selected equally correctly, i.e., equally wrongly, to be chosen as the representative of all the other aspects. One as well as the other would only stand for ⁴⁶ the essence, or, to put it in German, would represent⁴⁷ the essence but would not actually be the real matter itself.⁴⁸ The attempt to find series of bodies which would progress in the simple parallel of the two aspects and express the essential nature of the bodies 163in a law about these aspects, must be taken as a thought which is ignorant both of its task and of the means for carrying it out.

291. Previously, the relation between the inner and outer in the shape which was supposed to be exhibited for observation was directly taken over to the sphere of the inorganic. The determination that it brought with it can now be stated more precisely, and it yields yet another form and relation among these relationships. What in the organic completely breaks down is what seems to offer the possibility of such a comparison of inner and outer in the domain of the inorganic. The inorganic inner is a simple inner, which offers itself up to perception as an existing property. Thus, its determinateness is essentially that of magnitude, and it appears as an existing property which is indifferent towards the outer or towards the plurality of other sensuous properties. However, the being-for-itself of the organically-living does not stand off to one side as opposed to what is its outer; rather, it has the principle of otherness in its own self. If we determine being-for-itself as simple self-preserving relation to itself, then its otherness is simple negativity, and organic unity is the unity of the self-equal self-relating-to-itself and pure negativity. This unity is, as unity, the inner of the organic. The organic is thereby in itself universal, or it is the genus. However, the freedom of the genus with regard to its actuality is something other than the freedom of specific gravity with regard to the shape. The freedom of the latter is an existing freedom, or it takes its stand on one side as a particular property. However, because it is an existing freedom, it is also only One Determinateness, which essentially belongs to this shape, or it is that through which this shape as essence is a determinate essence. However, the freedom of the genus is a universal freedom and is indifferent to this shape, or indifferent to its actuality. The determinateness which corresponds to the being-for-itself of the inorganic as such therefore comes on the scene in the realm of the organic as being subsumed under the organic's being-for-itself, just as in the inorganic it is subsumed under the being of the inorganic. Hence, whether that determinateness is in that being at the same time only as a property, it nonetheless falls to its lot to have the dignity of being the essence because, as the simple negative, it confronts existence as being for an other. This simple negative, in its final singular determinateness, is number. However, the organic is a singularity, which is itself pure negativity, and it thus abolishes within itself the fixed determinateness of number which is appropriate for indifferent being. Insofar as the organic has in it the moment of indifferent being and thereby that of number, number itself can thus only be taken as a kind of play in the organic but not as the essence of its vitality.

292. However much now 164pure negativity, the principle of the process, does not already fall outside the bounds of the organic, and therefore the organic does not have within its essence pure negativity as a determinateness but instead has singularity which itself is in itself universal, still within its moments as themselves abstract or universal, this pure singularity is not developed and actual in the organic. Rather, this expression goes outside the bounds of that universality, which itself falls back into inwardness, and between the actuality, or the shape, i.e., the self-developing singularity of the organism, and the organic universal, or the genus, what emerges is the determinate universal, the species. The existence at which the negativity of the universal, or the negativity of the genus, arrives is only the developed movement of a process that runs its course in the parts of the existing shape. If the genus were to have the distinguished parts in it as motionless simplicity, and if its simple negativity as such were at the same time a movement that ran its course through just as simple parts which are immediately universal in themselves, parts which, as being those kinds of moments, would here be actual, then the organic genus would be consciousness. However, the simple determinateness as determinateness of the species is present in the genus in a manner that is totally devoid of spirit. Actuality begins with the genus, or what enters into actuality is not the genus as such, i.e., is not thought at all. As the actually organic, this genus is only represented by something standing in for it.⁴⁹ What stands in for it, is number, which seems both to designate the transition from the genus into the individual shape and provide for observation both aspects of necessity, once as a simple determinateness and then again as a shape as developed into multiplicity. The meaning of this number is instead that of the indifference and freedom of the universal and the singular vis-à-vis each other. The genus abandons the singular to the essenceless difference of magnitude, but the singular, as something living, itself likewise proves itself to be free-standing from this difference of magnitude. As it has been determined, true universality is here only inner essence; as determinateness of the species, it is formal universality, and, in contrast to the latter, true universality takes its stand on the side of singularity, which as a result is a living singularity, which through its innerness defies its determinateness as species. However, this singularity is not at the same time a universal individual, i.e., one in which universality would just as much have external actuality, but rather this universal individual belongs outside the bounds of the organically-living. However, in the way it is immediately the individual of the natural shapes, this universal individual is not consciousness itself. Its existence as a singular organic living individual must not fall outside the bounds of itself if it is supposed to be consciousness.

293. Hence, we see a syllogism, in which one extreme term is the universal life as universal, or as genus, but the other extreme term is that same life as singular, or as a universal individual. However, the middle term is composed out of both. The first seems to transmit itself into it as determinate universality, or 165as species, and the other seems to transmit itself into it as genuine singularity, or as singular singularity.⁵⁰ – And since this syllogism belongs as such to the aspect of taking shape,⁵¹ what is distinguished as inorganic nature is likewise subsumed under it.

294. While the universal life as the simple essence of the genus now develops the differences of the concept and must exhibit them as a series of simple determinatenesses, so this series is thereby a system of indifferently posited differences, or is a numerical series. However much the organic, in the form of singularity, was formerly posited as being in opposition to this essenceless difference, which neither expresses nor contains its living nature – and if that is what also must be said about the inorganic when it is taken according to its entire developed existence in the multitude of its properties – still it is now the universal individual which is to be investigated not only as free from all the divisions of the genus but as being the power over them. The genus may carve itself up into species according to the universal determinateness of number, or else it may take as its reasons for division the singular determinatenesses of its existence such as, for example, figure, color, etc., and in this motionless enterprise, the species suffers violence from the aspect of the universal individual, the earth, which as universal negativity makes those differences felt as it has them in itself; the nature of those differences, according to the substance to which they belong, is something other than the nature of that of the genus. It affirmatively asserts those differences against the movement of systematization. This doing on the part of the genus becomes a wholly restricted enterprise, which it may only pursue within the bounds of those powerful elements. That enterprise becomes interrupted through the unbridled violence of those elements and comes to be both full of gaps and is stunted.

295. It follows from all this that, to observation, in existence as it has been shaped, reason is only as life, full stop. However, life as such in its differentiation has no rational sequence and demarcation and is not a system of shapes grounded within itself. – However much in the syllogism of organic shaping, the middle term (under which is subsumed both the species and its actuality as a singular individuality) were to have in its own self the extreme terms of inner universality and universal individuality, still this middle term would have in the movement of its actuality the expression and the nature of universality, and it would be a self-systematizing development. In that way, consciousness has, for its mediating middle between the universal spirit and its singularity, or sensuous consciousness, the system of the shapes of consciousness as a life of spirit ordering itself into a whole – the system which is here under examination and which has its objective existence as world history. However, organic nature has no history; organic nature 166immediately descends from its universal, or life, into the singularity of existence. The moments of simple determinateness and singular liveliness united in this actuality engender coming-to-be only as a contingent movement, within which each is active in its parts and the whole is preserved, but within which this vitality is restricted for itself only to where it reaches its pinnacle. This is so because the whole is not present within it, and the whole is not present in it because the whole is not here for itself as a whole.

296. In addition, because it is in organic nature that observing reason only comes to the intuition of itself as universal life itself, the intuition of its development and realization, to itself, comes to be only according to systems which are distinguished only very generally and whose destiny⁵² is not to have their essence lie in the organic as such but to have it lie in the universal individual, and to intuit the series under which the earth's differences lie, and which the species seeks.

297. While in its actuality, the universality of organic life thus lets itself descend immediately into the extreme of singularity without any genuine mediation existing-for-itself, so observing consciousness only has the meaning-something⁵³ as a thing before itself. If reason can have an idle interest in observing this “meaning something,” then it is confined to the description and narration of suppositions and vagaries about nature. To be sure, this spiritless freedom in making such suppositions will offer everywhere the beginnings of laws, traces of necessity, allusions to order and sequence, and ingenious and plausible relations. However, in relating the organic to the existing differences of the inorganic, and in relating the elements, zones, and climates with a view to law and necessity, observation never gets any further than the supposition of a “great influence.” So, on the other side of the coin, where “individuality” does not signify the earth but rather signifies what to organic life is its immanent One, then this immanent One in its immediate unity with the universal does indeed constitute the genus. However, just for that reason its simple unity is determined only as number and thus it permits the qualitative appearance to be free-standing – observation cannot get any further than to make charming remarks, bring out interesting connections, and make friendly concessions to the concept. However, charming remarks are no knowing of necessity. Interesting connections are just that: interesting. However, the interest is still nothing but suppositional fancy⁵⁴ about reason. The friendliness of the individual in playing around with a concept is a childish friendliness, which is really childish when it either wants to or is supposed to count for something in and for itself.

b. Observation of Self-Consciousness in its Purity and in its Relation to External Actuality: Logical and Psychological Laws

298.167 Observation of nature finds the concept realized in inorganic nature as laws, whose moments are things which at the same time behave as abstractions. However, this concept is not a simplicity reflected into itself. On the other hand, the life of organic nature is only this simplicity reflected into itself, the opposition of itself as the opposition of universal and singular which does not break apart within the essence of this life itself. The essence is not the genus, which in its undifferentiated elements separates itself and moves itself, and which at the same time would be for itself undifferentiated within its opposition. This free concept, whose universality has that developed singularity just as absolutely within itself, is found by observation only in the concept existing as the concept itself, or in self-consciousness.

299. While observation now turns back around into itself, and it directs itself to the actual concept as the free concept, it finds first of all the laws of thought. This singular individuality, which thinking is in its own self, is the abstract movement of the negative taken entirely back into simplicity, and the laws lie outside the bounds of reality. – To say they have no reality generally means nothing but that they are without truth. To be sure, they are also supposed not to be the entire truth but nonetheless to be formally true. Yet “the purely formal without reality” is itself a thought-thing,⁵⁵ that is, an empty abstraction without any estrangement in it, an estrangement which, if it were there, would be nothing else but the content itself. – But on the other side of the coin, while they are the laws of pure thinking, and pure thinking is in itself the universal and is thus knowing that immediately has being and thereby has all reality in it, these laws are absolute concepts, and they are inseparably the essentialities both of form and of things. Since universality which moves itself within itself is the estranged simple concept, the concept has in this way a content in itself, the kind of content which is all content but is not a sensuous being. It is a content that is neither in contradiction to nor separated in any way from the form; rather, it is essentially the form itself, for the latter is nothing but the universal dividing itself into its pure moments.

300. However, just as this form or this content is for observation as observation, it also acquires the determination of a found content, a given, i.e., only existing content. It becomes a motionless being of relations, a set of detached necessities, 168which, as a rigidly fixed content in and for themselves, are supposed to have truth in their determinateness and in that way are in fact extracted from the form. – However, this absolute truth of fixed determinatenesses or of many various laws contradicts the unity of self-consciousness, or it contradicts the unity of thinking and form as such. What is declared to be a fixed and constant law in itself can be only a moment of the unity reflecting itself into itself; it can come on the scene only as a vanishing magnitude. However, if in the course of being studied, they are torn away from the context of movement and are arranged as singulars, then these determinatenesses are not lacking in content since they in fact have a determinate content. What they lack is form, which is their essence. In fact, it is not because they are supposed to be only formal and to have no content that these laws are not the truth of thinking; rather, it is for the very opposite reason, namely, because it is in their determinateness, or just as a content from which the form has been taken, that they are supposed to count as something absolute. In their truth, as vanishing moments in the unity of thinking, they would have to be taken to be knowing, or to be the thinking movement, but not taken to be laws of knowing. However, observation is not knowing itself, and it does not recognize⁵⁶ that it is not knowing; rather, observation inverts its nature into the shape of being, i.e., it grasps its negativity only as laws of being. – Here it is sufficient to have pointed out the invalidity of the so-called laws of thinking on the basis of the universal nature of what is at issue. The more precise development of this belongs to speculative philosophy, in which those laws prove themselves to be what they are in truth, namely, singular vanishing moments whose truth is only the whole of the thinking movement, or knowing itself.

301. This negative unity of thinking is for itself, or it is instead being-for-itself, the principle of individuality, and within its reality it is an active consciousness. Observing consciousness will thus by the very nature of the matter which is at issue⁵⁷ be guided towards it according to its being the reality of those laws. While the way this all hangs together is not something which itself is for observing consciousness, the observing consciousness supposes that in the laws of thinking, thinking itself in one respect stands off to the side to observational consciousness, and in another respect thinking acquires another way of being⁵⁸ in what is now to observing consciousness the object, namely, the acting consciousness which is for itself in such a way that it sublates otherness and has its actuality in this intuition of itself as the negative.

302. For observation, a new field is thus opened up in the acting actuality of consciousness. Psychology contains the class of laws according to which spirit conducts itself in various ways towards the various modes of its actuality as an only found otherness. In part, spirit receives these into itself so that it comes to be according to these only unearthed habits, 169mores, and ways of thinking as the kinds of items within which it is, to itself, as actuality and as an object. – In part, it knows itself to be self-active against them, and with inclination and passion, it selects out for itself only what is particular in them, and thus makes what is objective come to be adequate to itself. In the former, it conducts itself negatively towards itself as singularity, and in the latter it conducts itself negatively towards itself as universal being. – According to the first aspect, self-sufficiency gives to that which is only found the form of conscious individuality as such, and in view of the content, it remains within the bounds of the only found universal actuality. However, according to the other aspect, it at least gives universal actuality a distinctive modification which does not contradict its essential content, or else it also gives it the kind of modification by which the individual, as particular actuality and distinctive content, opposes itself to that universal actuality – and as the individual sublates that universal actuality in an only singular manner, that opposition becomes a crime; but when it does so in a universal manner which thereby acts for all, it brings about another world, other rights, other laws, and other mores which replace what had been present.

303. Observational psychology, which at first expresses its perceptions of the universal modes which present themselves for it in active consciousness, discovers all sorts of faculties, inclinations, and passions, and while in its recounting of this collection, the recollection of the unity of self-consciousness does not allow itself to be suppressed, observational psychology must at least get to the point of being astonished that in spirit so many sorts of contingent things of so many heterogeneous sorts can be alongside one another in the way they would be in a sack, especially since they show themselves to be not motionless dead things but to be instead restless movements.

304. In recounting these various faculties, observation stays put within the universal aspect. The unity of these diverse abilities is the aspect opposed to this universality, that of actual individuality. – It can grasp and recount again the different actual individualities, for example, that one person has more inclination to this, whereas another person has more inclination to that, that one person has greater intellect than another, but all this is even less interesting than enumerating the species of insects, mosses, and so on, for these latter give observation the right to take them singularly and as devoid of concepts because they essentially belong to that element of contingent separation. Conversely, to take conscious individuality so spiritlessly as a singular existing phenomenon has the contradiction that the essence of individuality is the universal of spirit. However, while comprehension allows individuality at the same time to come on the scene in the form of universality, comprehension finds individuality's law, and now it seems to have a rational purpose and a necessary task to pursue.

305. The moments constituting the content of the law are, on the one hand, individuality itself, and on the other hand, its universal inorganic nature, namely, its circumstances, situations, habits, mores, religion, and so forth, 170and it is from these moments that determinate individuality is to be comprehended. They contain what is determinate as well as what is universal, and they are at the same time something present and available⁵⁹ which both presents itself for observation and in another respect expresses itself in the form of individuality.

306. The law of this relation of both sides must now contain what kind of effect and influence these determinate circumstances exercise on individuality. However, this individuality is precisely this: An individuality which is just as much the universal and which thus flows together in a motionless, immediate manner with those universals which are present (those mores, habits, etc.), and comes to be in accordance with them as conducting itself in opposition to them and even as inverting them, and it does this in addition to conducting itself with complete indifference towards them in its singularity, neither allowing them to exert an influence over it, nor being itself active in its opposition to them. What is supposed to have an influence on individuality and which influence it is supposed to have – which really means the same thing – depends for that reason entirely on individuality itself. As a result, this individuality has become this determinate individuality, which is to say nothing more than that it has already been this all along. Circumstances, situations, mores, and the like, which on the one hand show themselves to be present and on the other hand show themselves to be within this determinate individuality, themselves express only the indeterminate essence of individuality, which is not the issue here. However much these circumstances, this style of thought, those mores, or the whole state of the world itself were not to have existed, still the individual would not have become what he is, for all individuals are this universal substance when they are situated in this state of the world. – In whatever way the state of the world has been particularized in this individual – and it is such an individual that is supposed to be comprehended – the state of the world would have to have been particularized in and for itself, and within this determinateness which it gave itself, to have had an effect on an individual. Only in that way could it have made the individual into the determinate individual that he is. However much the state of the world had been so constituted in and for itself as it appears in individuality itself, still the latter would be comprehended on the grounds of the former. We would have a double gallery of pictures, each of which would be the reflection back of the other. The one would be the gallery of complete determinateness and the complete encompassing of external circumstances; the other would be the same gallery translated into the way in which those circumstances are in the conscious being.⁶⁰ The former would be the spherical surface, the latter the center which represents that surface within itself.

307. However, the spherical surface, the world of the individual, immediately bears the double meaning of the world existing in and for itself and the situation, and that of the world of the individual. This would be so either insofar as this individual were to have only merged with the world, or insofar as the individual would have let that world in the way that it is, enter into it, and would have conducted itself towards it only as a formal consciousness – or else, it would be the world of the individual in the sense in which what is present and available has been inverted by that individual. – Since actuality is capable of having this twofold meaning on account of this freedom, 171the world of the individual is only to be comprehended on the basis of the individual himself, and the influence of actuality upon the individual, an actuality that is represented as existing in and for itself, receives through this individual absolutely the opposite sense. The individual either lets the stream of actuality with its flowing influence have its way in him, or he breaks it off and turns that stream of influence on its head. Psychological necessity thereby becomes such an empty phrase that it includes the absolute possibility that what is supposed to have had this influence could very well also not have had any influence whatsoever.

308. Being, which is supposed to be in and for itself and which is supposed to constitute one aspect, which to be sure is the universal aspect of a law, thereby falls by the wayside. Individuality is what its world is as its own. Individuality itself is the circle of its own doing, within which it has exhibited itself as actuality and within which it is plainly only the unity of only present and made being,⁶¹ a unity whose aspects do not come undone as they did in the representational thought of psychological law, where they fell apart into a world present in itself and an individuality existing for itself. Or, if those aspects are thus each considered for themselves, then there is neither any necessity present, nor is there any law governing their relation to each other.

c. Observation of the Relation of Self-Consciousness to its Immediate Actuality: Physiognomy and Phrenology

309. Psychological observation finds no law relating self-consciousness to actuality or to the world opposed to it, and, through their mutual indifference to each other, such observation is driven back to the distinctive determinateness of real individuality which is in and for itself, or which contains the opposition of being-for-itself and being-in-itself as erased in their absolute mediation. It is individuality which has now become the object for observation, or has become the object to which observation now turns its gaze.⁶²

310. The individual is in and for itself; the individual is for itself, or he is a free doing. However, the individual is also in itself, or he himself has an original determinate being – a determinateness which, according to the concept, is the same as that which psychology had wanted to find outside of him. Opposition thus emerges in its own self 172as twofold. There is a movement of consciousness and the rigidly fixed being of a phenomenal actuality, the kind of actuality that in the individual is immediately his own. This being, the body of the determinate individuality, is its primordiality,⁶³ its own “what-it-has-not-done.” However, while the individual is at the same time only what he has done, so is his body also the expression of himself which is brought forth by him. At the same time, it is a sign, which has not remained an immediate matter but is that in which the individual only makes known what he is, in the sense of putting his original nature into practice.

311. If we consider the moments that are present here in relation to the previous outlook, then there is here a universal human shape, or, at least, the universal human shape of a climate, or of a portion of the world, or of a people, in the way that there were previously the same universal mores and culture. The particular circumstances and the situation within the bounds of the universal actuality come into play here; here is this particular actuality as a particular formation of the shape of the individual. – On the other side of the coin, in the way that the free doing of the individual and actuality as his own were posited in contrast to that actuality present, the shape here stands as an expression of his own actualization posited by the individual himself, or the traits and forms of his self-active essence. However, actuality, which is just as much universal as it is particular and which observation formerly encountered as external to the individual, is here the actuality of the individual, his inborn body, and here the expression belonging to his own doing belongs to this very body. In psychological examination, both actuality existing in and for itself and determinate individuality had to be related to each other. However, here it is the whole determinate individuality which is the object of observation, and each aspect of its opposition is itself this whole. To the outer whole, there thus belongs not only the original being, the inborn body, but just as well the formation of the body, which belongs to the activity of the inner. The body is the unity of uncultured and cultured being and is the actuality permeated by the being-for-itself of the individual. This whole embraces the determinate original fixed parts and the traits which emerge solely through acting. This whole is, and this being is an expression of the inner, of the individual posited as consciousness and as movement. – This inner is likewise no longer formal, no longer without content, or no longer without indeterminate self-activity, whose content and determinateness, just as in the way it was previously, would lie in external circumstances. Rather, it is an original character determinate in itself, whose form is only the activity. What is up for examination here are the relationships between both aspects. More specifically, what is up for examination is how this relation is to be determined and how we are to understand the expression of the inner in the outer.

312. To 173start with, it is only as an organ that this outer makes the inner visible, or into a being for others. This is so because the inner, insofar as it is in the organ, is the activity itself. The speaking mouth, the laboring hand, and, if one pleases, the legs too, are the organs of actualization and accomplishment that have the doing as doing, or the inner as such, in themselves. However, the externality which the inner achieves through the doing is the deed, in the sense of an actuality cut off from the individual. Language and labor are expressions in which the individual on his own no longer retains and possesses himself; rather, he lets the inner move wholly outside of him and he thus abandons it to the other. For that reason, we can just as well say that these expressions express the inner too much as we can say that they express it too little. Too much – because the inner itself breaks out in these expressions, no opposition remains between them and the inner; they do not only provide an expression of the inner, they immediately provide the inner itself. Too little – because in speech and action the inner makes itself into an other and thereby abandons itself to the mercy of the element of transformation, which twists the spoken word and the accomplished deed and makes something else out of them than what they, as the actions of this determinate individual, are in and for themselves. Through this externality of influence which is exerted by others, the products of actions not only lose the character of being something constant with regard to other individualities. While they relate themselves to the inner, which they contain, they relate in the same way to a detached, indifferent externality, and then as inner they can also be, through the individual himself, something other than they appear. – Either for the sake of appearance the individual intentionally makes them into something else than they are in truth, or he is too incompetent to give himself the external bearing which he genuinely wanted and too incompetent to secure it so that the product of his action could not be twisted around by others. Thus the act as an accomplished piece of work has the double and opposite significance of being either the inner individuality and not its expression; or, as external, to be an actuality free-standing from the inner, which is something entirely different from the inner. – On account of this two-sidedness, we must be on the lookout for the inner as it is visible, or external, and yet still in the individual himself. However, in the organ it is only as the immediate act itself which achieves its externality in the deed which itself either does or does not represent the inner. Regarded according to this opposition, the organ does not completely underwrite the expression which is sought.

313. Now however much the external shape could express the inner individuality only insofar as the external shape is neither an organ nor a doing, and thereby only insofar as it is a motionless whole, still it would then conduct itself as a stably existing thing which should have motionlessly received into its own passive existence the inner as something alien. 174It thereby would have become the sign of the inner – an external contingent expression, whose actual aspect is for itself⁶⁴ meaningless, a language whose sounds and sound-combinations are not the real thing itself but are intertwined with it through free arbitrary choice and for that language are contingent.

314. Such an arbitrary combination of the kinds of things that are external to each other yields no law. However, physiognomy is supposed to distinguish itself from other spurious arts and hopeless studies by the fact that it examines determinate individuality in terms of the necessary opposition of an inner and an outer; it examines character as a conscious essence and as an existing shape, and it relates these moments to each other as they are related to each other through their concept, and these relations thus must constitute the content of a law. In contrast, in astrology, palmistry, and other such similar sciences, only externalities related to externalities seem to be present, or anything whatsoever related to something or another which is completely alien to it. It is this constellation at time of birth, and, if that kind of externality is brought even closer to the body itself, these lines on the hand are both external moments for a long or a short life, and the fate of singular people themselves. As externalities they relate themselves indifferently to each other, and neither has the necessity for the other which is supposed to lie in the relation of the outer to the inner.

315. The hand, of course, does not seem nearly as much to be an externality to such fate. Instead, as the inner, it seems to relate itself to destiny. This is so because destiny is also again only the appearance of what the determinate individuality as inner original determinateness is in itself. – Now, to know what this individuality is in itself, the palm reader as well as the physiognomist takes a shorter path than, for example, Solon, who thought he could only begin to think about this on the basis of and after the course of his whole life. Solon studied the appearance whereas the former studies the in-itself. However, that the hand must exhibit the in-itself of individuality vis-à-vis its fate is easily seen from the following. After the organ of speech, it is by and large the hand by which a person brings himself to appearance and actualizes himself. It is the ensouled artisan of his fortune; we may say of the hand that it is what a man does, for in the hand, as the active organ of his self-accomplishment, the person is currently present as ensouling the hand, and while he is the origin of his own fate, the hand will thus express this in-itself.

316. One moves from this determination, namely, that the organ of activity is just as much a being as it is a doing in the organ, or that the inner being-in-itself is itself current in it and has a being for others, to another point of view about the matter which itself differs from the preceding. However much the organs in general were shown to be incapable of being taken as 175expressions of the inner because even though the doing as doing is current within them, still the doing as deed ⁶⁵ is only the outer; therefore, the inner and outer come undone from each other and thus either are or can be alien to each other. Therefore, according to the determination of the organ which we examined, the organ must also again still be taken as a mediating middle for both of them. This is so just for the reason that while the doing is both currently present in the organ and at the same time constitutes an externality of the organ and to be sure an other than the deed, the organ in fact remains with the individual and is in him. – Now, this mediating middle and unity of the inner and outer is initially itself also external. However, this externality is thereby at the same time incorporated into the inner. As simple externality it stands opposed to the dispersed externality, which either is a singular piece of work, which for the whole individuality is contingent, or else is an entire externality, a fate splintered into a plurality of works and conditions. Therefore, the simple lines of the hand along with the tone and range of the voice as the individual determinateness of language – these too again acquire through the hand a steadier existence than they do through the voice, specifically in writing, namely, in its particularity as handwriting – all of these are an expression of the inner, so that as simple externality, the expression again relates itself as an inner vis-à-vis the diverse externality of action and fate. – However much therefore the determinate nature and inborn distinctiveness of the individual, along with what these have become through cultural formation, are initially taken to be the inner, to be the essence of acting and of fate, still this inner has its appearance and externality in the first instance in the individual's mouth, hand, voice, and handwriting, as well as in the other organs and their enduring determinatenesses. Only then does it thereby express itself even further outwardly in its actuality in the world.

317. Because this mediating middle is itself determined as the outward expression, which is at the same time taken back into the inner, its existence is not confined to the immediate organ of action. This mediating middle is instead the non-consummating movement and form of the face and the embodiment of the face itself. According to this concept, these traits and their movements are the doings that remain repressed in the individual and, according to his relation to the actual doing, are his own oversight and observation of the doing, are the outer expression as reflection upon the actual expression. – For that reason, the individual is not silent both in the face of and within his external doing because in that doing he is at the same time reflected into himself, and he outwardly expresses this being-reflected-into-himself. This theoretical doing, or the individual's speaking with himself on the matter, is also audible to others, for it is itself an outward expression.

318. In this 176inner, which in its outward expression remains an inner, the individual's being-reflected out of his actuality is to be observed, and it remains to be seen what relation it has to the necessity that is posited in this unity. – At the outset, this being-reflected is different from the deed itself and therefore can be something other and can also be taken for something other than the deed. One sees from a face whether the person is serious about what he says or does. – But conversely, there is the following. What is supposed to be an expression of the inner is at the same time an existing expression and hence itself subsides into the determination of being, which is absolutely contingent for the self-conscious essence. It is thus indeed an expression, but at the same time it is so only in the sense of a sign, so that the makeup of that through which it is expressed is completely indifferent to the content expressed. The inner within this appearance is indeed a visible invisible but without itself being intertwined with this appearance. It can be in some other appearance just as well as some other inner can be in that same appearance. Lichtenberg is thus right in saying: Supposing the physiognomist did once take the measure of a man; it would only be a matter of decent resolve on the man's part to make himself again incomprehensible for centuries. – In the way that in the previous relationships, in the circumstances lying before us, there was an existent, and the individuality took for itself what he could and what he wanted from it, and he either submitted to this existent or he twisted it around, and for that reason the existent did not contain the necessity and essence of individuality – likewise, the appearing, immediate being of individuality is here the sort that either expresses its reflectedness from out of actuality and its inwardly-turned-being, or is only a sign of individuality, a sign which is indifferent to the signified and for that reason in truth signifies nothing. To the individual, the sign is as much its face as it is its mask, which it can remove. – Individuality permeates its shape and both moves itself and speaks in it. But this entire existence just as much passes over into an indifferent being vis-à-vis the will and action. Individuality abolishes the significance that being formerly had, namely, for it to have individuality's reflectedness into itself, or for individuality to have its true essence in it, and, by the same token, individuality puts its true essence instead into the will and into the deed.

319. Individuality gives up that being-reflected-into-self which is expressed in various traits and instead places its essence in the work. It therein contradicts the relationships which have taken root through the instinct of reason, which descends into observations of self-conscious individuality with regard to what is supposed to be its inner and its outer. This point of view brings us to the genuine thought that lies at the basis of – if one wishes to call it this – the science of physiognomy. The opposition which this observing stumbles into is, according to the form, that of the practical versus the theoretical, and it posits that both of them lie within the bounds of the practical itself – that is, it is the opposition 177of individuality actualizing itself in action (taken in its most general sense) versus individuality actualizing itself at the same time as reflecting itself into itself from out of this action and making this action into its object. Observation takes up this opposition according to the same inverted relationships in which the opposition takes its determination in appearance. For observation, the deed itself and the work, whether it be that of speech or a stabilized actuality, counts as the non-essential outer, – However, the inwardly-turned-being of individuality counts as the essential inner. Between the two aspects which practical consciousness has in it, intention and deed – that is, what the action is meant to be and the action itself – observation selects the former aspect as the true inner. This is supposed to have its more or less inessential outward expression in the deed, but its true outward expression in its shape. This latter outward expression is an immediate sensuous presence of individual spirit. The inwardness, which is supposed to be the true, is the ownness of the intention and the singularity of being-for-itself. Both are the spirit which is meant. What observation has for its objects is an existence which it “means,” and it is between them that it looks for laws.

320. The immediate act of meaning to say something about the present moment of spirit is natural physiognomy, a hasty judgment made at first glance about the inner nature and the character of its shape. The object of this supposition is the kind of object such that in its essence, it is in truth something other than only sensuous immediate being. To be sure, it is also, within the sensuous, this being-reflected-into-itself from out of the sensuous. It is current, and it is the visible as the visibility of the invisible which is the object of observation. However, this sensuously immediate present is the actuality of spirit as it is only for the act of “meaning to say something.” According to this aspect, observation occupies itself with the existence which spirit is meant to have, or it occupies itself with physiognomy, handwriting, the sound of the voice, etc. – Observing relates such an existence to the same kind of “intended” inner⁶⁶to exist. It is not the murderer or the thief who is supposed to be known;⁶⁷ rather, it is the capacity to be a murderer, a thief. The rigid abstract determinateness is lost in the concrete infinite determinateness of the singular individual, a determinateness that now calls for more skillfully contrived depictions than those qualifications really are. Such skillfully contrived depictions certainly give voice to a lot more than the qualification of being a murderer, a thief, or of being good-hearted, unspoiled, and so on, but they are far from adequate for the purpose of expressing the being that is meant, or the singular individuality, any more than do the depictions of shape which go further than only providing a picture of a flat brow, a long nose, etc. As a being about which one aims to say something, the singular shape, like the singular self-consciousness, is inexpressible. The “science of knowing man,” which is concerned with such alleged people, as well as the science of physiognomy, which is concerned with the person's presumed actuality and seeks to raise the unconscious judging of natural physiognomy 178to the level of knowing, is thus something that has neither a foundation nor an end in sight. It can never manage to say what it means because all it does is to “mean something,” and its content is thus only fancy.⁶⁸

321. The laws which this science sets out to find are the relations between these two aspects it means to talk about,⁶⁹ and thus the laws can themselves be no more than empty opinionating.⁷⁰ Since this alleged knowing takes it upon itself to deal with the actuality of spirit, it also has as its object precisely the following. Spirit is reflected out of sensuous existence back into itself. For spirit, determinate existence is an indifferent contingency, and so it must immediately know that in the laws which it has stumbled upon, nothing has thereby really been said. Rather, it must immediately know that these laws are in fact just pure chatter, or they only amount to saying what is on one's mind.⁷¹ It is an expression that is true in that it expresses just that – it states one's view⁷² and does thereby say anything about the thing itself; it only adds that it is one's own view.⁷³ However, according to their content, such observations cannot differ from these: “It always rains at our annual fair,” says the retailer, and “It also rains every time,” says the housewife, “when I put my washing out to dry.”

322. Lichtenberg, who characterizes physiognomic observation in this way, adds this remark: “If someone said, ‘To be sure, you act like an honest man, but I can see from your face that you are forcing yourself to do so and are a knave at heart,’ then any upright fellow, when addressed in that fashion, will, until the end of time, respond with a slap in the accuser's face.” – This retort is for that reason exactly to the point, because it is the refutation of the first presupposition of such a science of what people mean, namely, that the actuality of a person is supposed to be his face, etc. – The true being of a person is rather his deed. Individuality is actual in the deed, and the deed is what sublates what is only meant there in both aspects. At one time, what is meant is a motionless bodily being, and individuality exhibits itself instead in action as the negative essence which only is insofar as it sublates being. The deed thereupon likewise sublates the inexpressibleness of the meaning with a view towards self-conscious individuality, which in that meaning is infinitely determined and determinable. In the achieved deed, this bad infinite is done away with. The deed is something simply determinate, universal, to be grasped in an abstraction; it is murder, theft, beneficence, a courageous act, and so on, and what it is can be said of it. The deed is this, and its being is not only a sign, it is the matter at issue itself. The deed is this, and the individual person is what the deed is. In the simplicity of this being, the individual person is for others an existing, universal essence, and he ceases to be only something conjectured.⁷⁴ To be sure, the individual is not posited therein as spirit, but while it is his being as being that is talked about, and while on the one hand the twofold being, the shape and the deed, stand over and against each other and each one is 179supposed to be his own actuality, so too the deed alone is instead to be asserted to be his genuine being – not his physique, which is supposed to express what he means by his acts, or what one might suppose that only he could do. Likewise, on the other side of the coin, while his accomplished work⁷⁵ and his inner possibility, capacity, or intention are opposed, it is the former alone which is to be regarded as his true actuality even if he deceives himself about it, or, after he has taken an inward turn away from his action and back into himself, even if he then means this inner to be different from what is in the deed. Individuality, which entrusts itself to the objective element while becoming an accomplished work, makes itself vulnerable to being altered and inverted. However, just what constitutes the character of the deed is whether the deed is an actual being that holds its own ground, or whether it is only a work intended to be,⁷⁶ which, being nothing in itself, comes to nothing. Objectivity does not alter the deed itself; rather, it only shows what the deed is, which is to say, whether it is, or whether it is nothing. –What must be left to the idleness of mere opinionating,⁷⁷ namely, the parsing of this being into intentions and into those kind of nuances, through which the actual person, i.e., his deed, is supposed to be explained away into a being of such opinionating, in the same way that the individual himself may surely to himself fabricate particular intentions about his actuality. If this idle conjectural opinionating wishes to put its deedless wisdom into practice, and if it wishes to deny the character of reason to the person who acts and also to misuse him in this manner by explaining what he is in terms of his physique and the lines on his face and not in terms of his deed, then it will run into the riposte mentioned above, which demonstrates to it that the physical shape⁷⁸ is not the in-itself, but instead can be the object itself for certain sorts of treatment.

323. If we look now at the range of the relationships themselves in which self-conscious individuality can be observed to be standing with regard to its outer, there will still be one relationship left over which observation has as yet to make its object. In psychology it is the external actuality of things which is supposed to have its self-aware counterpart within spirit and which is supposed to make spirit comprehensible. In physiognomy, on the other hand, spirit is supposed to be cognized in its own outer as in a being, which is language – the visible invisibility of its essence. What remains still open is the determination of the aspect of actuality which concerns individuality expressing its essence in its immediate, fixed, purely existing actuality. – This latter relation is therefore to be distinguished from the physiognomic as a result of its being the speaking presence of the individual, who in his expressive speech-act⁷⁹ exhibits at the same time the outward expression reflecting itself into itself and studying itself, an expression which is itself movement, and motionless physical traits which are themselves essentially a mediated being. However, in the determination still up for examination, the outer is finally an 180entire motionless actuality which is not in its own self a speaking sign but which, separated from self-conscious movement, presents itself for itself and is as a mere thing.

324. One thing becomes initially clear about the relation of the inner to its outer, and it is that it seems that it must be conceived as a relationship of causal connection, while the relation of an existent-in-itself to another existent-in-itself as a necessary relation is this relationship of causal connection.

325. If spiritual individuality is now to have an effect on the body, then as a cause, it must be itself bodily. However, the bodily nature, in which there is spiritual individuality as a cause, is the organ, but not the organ for acting on external reality; rather, it is the organ within itself of the self-conscious creature⁸⁰ acting outwardly only on its own body. It is not easy to see at one glance which things could be these organs. If we were only to think of organs in general, then the organ for work as such would be obvious, as it would be likewise obvious which was the organ of sexual impulse, and so on. Yet such organs are to be considered as instruments or as parts, which spirit, as one extreme, has as the mediating middle between the other extreme, the external object. However, an organ is here understood to be that in which the self-conscious individual as an extreme sustains himself for himself against his own actuality which is opposed to himself, while at the same time the individual is not turned outwards but is instead reflected in his action and by virtue of which the aspect of being is not a being for others. In the physiognomic relation, the organ is, to be sure, also regarded as an existence reflected into itself and as reviewing the act. However, this being is an objective being, and the result of physiognomic observation is that self-consciousness ends up confronting its actuality as something indifferent. This indifference vanishes because this being-reflected-into-itself is itself efficacious. As a result, the former existence supports a necessary relation to this being-reflected-into-itself. However, for this being-reflected-into-itself to be effectively acting on existence, it must itself have a being which is not for all intents and purposes itself objective, and it is as such an organ that it is supposed to be shown.

326. Now, for example, in ordinary life anger, as itself such an inner doing, is mistakenly located as lying in the liver. Plato assigns to the liver something even higher, something which to many is even the highest of all, namely, prophesying, or the gift of making pronouncements about the holy and the eternal in an irrational manner. Yet the movement which the individual has in his liver, heart, and so forth cannot be regarded as the individual's movement entirely reflected into itself. Rather, that movement is instead in those places where it has already acquired a bodily stamp and where it is in possession of an animal existence which is moving itself outwards towards external reality.

327. In contrast, the nervous system is the immediate motionlessness of the organism within its movement. The nerves themselves are no doubt again organs of the consciousness which is already engulfed in an outward direction. However, the brain and spinal cord 181may be considered as the immediate presence of self-consciousness persisting within itself – a presence that is not objective and which is also not moving outwards. Insofar as the moment of being which this organ has is a being for others, an existence, it is a dead being and is no longer the presence of self-consciousness. However, this inwardly-turned-being is, according to its concept, a fluidity in which the cycles thrown into it have themselves immediately been dissolved and in which no difference is expressed as existing. Meanwhile, in the way that spirit itself is not an abstract-simple but rather a system of movements in which it both distinguishes itself into moments but remains free within this difference, and in the way that spirit articulates its body into various performances and determines one singular part of the body for only one performance, so too can the fluid being of its inwardly-turned-being be represented as differentiated. It also seems that it must be represented in this way because the being reflected-into-itself of spirit in the brain itself is again only a mediating middle between its pure essence and its bodily articulation, a middle which must thus have the nature of both and also of the existing articulation in it.

328. The spiritual-organic being has at the same time the necessary aspect of a motionless stable existence.⁸¹ The former, as the extreme term of being-for-itself, must step back and have this latter as the other extreme over and against it, which is then the object on which the former acts as a cause. However much the brain and spinal cord are that bodily being-for-itself of spirit, still the skull and spinal column are the other extreme which is separated off and added to it, or, to be specific, are the motionless fixed thing. – However, while anyone who thinks of the genuine location of the existence of spirit thinks not of the spine but only of the head, it follows that in the course of an investigation into the kind of knowing here before us, we can content ourselves with the following reason – and in the present case not too bad a reason at that – if we are to confine this existence of spirit to the skull. Insofar as, from time to time, knowing and acting are also indeed in part driven in – and indeed in part driven out – through the spine, then, even if it should strike anyone to regard the spine as the location of spirit, this would not demonstrate either that the spinal cord must equally be taken as the indwelling location of spirit or that the spinal column should be taken as the existing counter-image for the simple reason that this would prove too much. One can just as well remember that there are also other equally beloved external paths to come by the activity of spirit if one is to awaken it or inhibit it. – Thus, the spinal column, if you please, rightly falls by the wayside. That the skull alone surely does not contain the organs of spirit is something that is as well contrived as are many other doctrines of nature-philosophy. This is what was previously excluded from the concept of this relation, and it was for this reason that the skull was taken to be the aspect of existence. Or, if we are forbidden to be reminded of the concept of what is at stake here, experience still surely teaches that just as one sees with the eye as the organ of sight, 182then it is not with the skull that we commit murder, steal, write poetry, etc. – For that reason, one should also abstain from using the expression, “organ,” for the meaning of the skull, a meaning about which there is still something to be said. For although people are accustomed to saying that for rational people what matters are not words but the matters themselves, that still does not entitle anybody to designate a thing in terms that are not appropriate to it, for it is at the same time both a matter of clumsiness and deceit to suppose that one only does not have the right word or that the word is lying dormant, when in fact, what is lacking is the relevant matter itself, i.e., the concept. If the latter were available, one would also have the right word for it. – What has been here determined is, first of all, that just as the brain is the living head, the skull is the caput mortuum.

329. In this dead being, the spiritual movements and determinate modes of the brain would have to give themselves their own display of their external actuality, an actuality which is nonetheless still in the individual himself. For the relation between those movements to the skull, that dead being which does not have spirit indwelling within it, what presents itself is the external mechanical relation which was previously established, so that the genuine organs – and these are in the brain – press the skull here into a round shape and there widen it or flatten it or however else one might illustrate this kind of influence. Itself a part of the organism, it must be thought of as having within it, as is the case with every bone, a self-formation, so that seen from this point of view, it instead presses on the brain and thus for its part fixes the brain's external boundary, which, since the bone is the harder of the two, is something it has the capacity to do. However, there would still continue to be the same relation in the determination of the activity of both to each other, since whether the skull is the determining or the determined, nothing at all in the causal connection would be altered, except that the skull would then be turned into the immediate organ of self-consciousness because within it the aspect of being-for-itself would be found as cause. Yet while being-for-itself as organic living activity belongs to both in the same way, the causal connection between them in fact breaks down. However, this further formation of both would inwardly hang together and would be an organic pre-established harmony which permits both aspects which relate themselves to each other to be free-standing vis-à-vis each other. Each would have its own shape which would not need to correspond to that of the other. Even more free-standing would be the relation of the shape and quality to each other – just as the form of the grape and the taste of wine are free-standing vis-à-vis each other. – However, while the determination of being-for-itself falls within the bounds of the brain, whereas that of existence falls within the bounds of the skull, it is within the bounds of the organic unity that there is also a causal connection to be posited between the two aspects. There is 183a necessary relation between them as external to each other, or there is a relation which is external to itself and through which the shape of each would therefore be determined through the other.

330. However, in light of the determination according to which the organ of self-consciousness would be the active cause working on the aspect confronting it, there is much which could be said from this or that angle about it since the issue concerns the makeup of a cause that is studied according to its indifferent existence, its shape and magnitude, of a cause whose inner and whose being-for-itself are what is precisely supposed to have nothing to do with immediate existence. The organic self-formation of the skull is initially indifferent to mechanical influence, and the relation between these two relations, since the former is a relating itself to itself, is this very indeterminateness and boundlessness itself. Furthermore, even if the brain were to incorporate into itself the differences of spirit as existing differences, and if it were to be a plurality of inner organs that each occupied various spaces – this would contradict nature, which gives to each of the moments of the concept their own existence. Nature places the fluid simplicity of organic life purely off to one side, and it likewise places the articulation and division of organic life within its differences off to the other side, so that in the way that they are supposed to be taken here, they would prove themselves to be particular anatomical things – and thus it would be left undetermined whether a spiritual moment, depending on whether it was originally stronger or weaker, would in the former case either have to possess a more expanded brain-organ, or in the latter case a more contracted brain-organ, or else just the other way around. – The same would apply to whether the brain's training enlarges or reduces the organ, or whether it makes it thicker or finer. Since it remains undetermined how the cause is constituted, it is as a result likewise left undetermined how the influence exerted on the skull is to come about, or whether it is a widening or a narrowing and collapsing of it. Or, to put the matter in somewhat genteel terms, if this influence is determined as a stimulating influence, then it is left undetermined whether this takes place in the manner of a swelling, like that brought about by a cantharides-plaster, or by a shriveling like that brought about by vinegar. – Plausible grounds can be put forward for all those kinds of views since the organic relation, which plays a just as important part, allows one of those views to fit as well as the other, and it is indifferent to all these intellects.⁸²

331. However, to the observing consciousness, the question about determining this relation is of no concern. This is so because, in any event, it is not the brain that stands on one side of the relation as an animal part. Rather, it is the brain as the being of self-conscious individuality. – This individuality, as settled character and self-moving conscious doing, is for itself and is inwardly turned to itself.⁸³ Its actuality and its existence for others stand in opposition to being-for-and-inwardly-turned-to-itself. This being-for-and-inwardly-turned-to-itself is the essence and subject, which has a being in the brain, but this being, the brain, is subsumed under the former, and it receives its value only through the indwelling meaning. However, the other 184side of self-conscious individuality, namely, that of its existence, is being as self-sufficient and as subject, or as a thing, namely, a bone. The actuality and existence of man is his skull-bone. – This is the relationship, and this is the way the observing consciousness understands the two sides of this relationship.

332. The issue now for observing consciousness has to do with the more determinate relationship between these aspects. The meaning of the skull-bone is generally that of being the immediate actuality of spirit. However, the many-sidedness of spirit gives just as many multiple meanings to its existence. What is still to be achieved is a more determinate grasp of the meaning of the singular areas into which this existence is divided. It also remains to be seen just how these areas in themselves indicate those meanings.

333. The skull-bone is not an organ of activity, nor is it even a speaking movement. Neither theft, nor murder, etc., is committed by the skull-bone, nor does it even in the least make a change in countenance such that it would thereby become a verbal gesture. – Nor does this existent even have the value of a sign. Countenance and gesture, tone of voice, for that matter, even a post hammered onto a deserted island, all directly proclaim that they mean something other than what they immediately only are. Without further ado, they proclaim themselves to be signs, as they have a determinateness in themselves which points to something else that does not distinctively belong to them. In the presence of a skull, one can surely think of many things, just like Hamlet does with Yorick's, but the skull-bone for itself is such an indifferent, unencumbered thing that there is nothing else immediately to be seen in it nor to think about; there is just it itself. To be sure, it is a reminder of the brain and its determinateness, and it reminds us of other skulls with different formations, but it is not a reminder of any conscious animation,⁸⁴ while neither a countenance nor a gesture is impressed on it, nor is there anything which would indicate that it came from a conscious act, for it is the kind of actuality which is supposed to put on view a different aspect in individuality. This other aspect would no longer be a being reflecting itself into itself; rather, it would be pure immediate being.

334. Furthermore, since the skull does not itself feel, it seems that perhaps a more determinate significance could be given to it. Through their proximity to the skull, certain determinate sensations would allow us to recognize⁸⁵ what the skull is supposed to mean, and as a conscious mode of spirit has its feeling in a determinate place on the skull, then perhaps this place on the skull will indicate by its shape that mode of spirit and its particularity. For example, when engaged in strenuous thinking, some people complain of feeling a painful tension somewhere in the head, or sometimes they even complain when they are thinking at all; likewise, stealing, committing murder, writing poetry, and so forth, 185might each be accompanied by its own proper feeling, which moreover would have to have its own particular location as well. This location of the brain, which in this manner would be more in motion and be more activated, would most likely also even further develop the neighboring location of the bone. Or this latter location would, out of sympathy or consensus, not be inert but would enlarge or diminish or in whatever way it might compile itself. – What makes such a hypothesis nonetheless improbable is the following. Feeling as such is something indeterminate, and feeling in the head as the center might well be the universal sympathy in all suffering, so that blended in with the thief's, the murderer's, or the poet's tickling or pain in the head, there would be other feelings, and these would be no more easily distinguished from each other than they could be from those which one can call mere bodily feelings. Distinguishing these feelings from each other would be no easier than determining an illness by the symptom of a headache, if we were indeed to restrict its meaning only to bodily matters.

335. In fact, it does not matter from which aspect the matter is examined. Any necessary and reciprocal relation between them, as well as any obvious indication of the relation, breaks down. If the relation is still supposed to come about, what remains left over and necessary is a conceptless and free-standing pre-established harmony of the corresponding determination of both aspects, since one of them is supposed to be a spiritless actuality, a mere thing. – On one side stands a whole set of motionless locations on the skull, and on the other side stands a whole set of spiritual properties whose plurality and whose determination will depend on the state of psychology. The poorer the representational thought of spirit is, the easier the matter becomes on this side, for the properties in part become all the fewer, and in part they become more isolated, fixed, and ossified. As a result, they are both more similar to the determinations of the bones and more comparable with them. Yet, although the poverty of the representational thought of spirit makes much of that easier, a very large set of items on both sides still remains. The total contingency of their relation for observation remains. However much each of the children of Israel, who were supposed to be like the sand on the seashore, was supposed to take for himself the grain of sand which was a sign of him, still the indifference and arbitrariness by which each would be allotted his very own grain of sand would be just as great as the indifference and arbitrariness which allocates to a place on the skull and to the form of the bones every capacity of the soul and every passion, and, what must also be noted here, all the nuances of character which the more refined psychology and knowing of human nature are accustomed to discussing. – The skull of a murderer has this feature – that it is neither an organ nor a sign, but just this knotty protuberance, a bump. However, this murderer still has a set of other properties as well as other bumps. And, to go along with the bumps, he has indentations as well; one has the choice between bumps and indentations. And again his murderous propensity can be related to any bump or indentation whatsoever, and this in turn to any property whatsoever, 186for the murderer is neither only this abstraction of a murderer, nor does he have only one protuberance and one indentation. For that reason, the observations which are made about this must sound just about as good as those of the retailer at the annual fair about the rain, or of the housewife at the fair about her laundry. Both the retailer and the housewife could also make the observation that it always rains when this particular neighbor passes by or when roast pork is eaten. Just as rain is indifferent to these circumstances, so too for observation this determinateness of spirit is also indifferent in relation to this determinate being of the skull. This is so because of the two objects of this observing, the one is a desiccated being-for-itself, an ossified property of spirit, just as the other is a desiccated being-in-itself. Such an ossified thing, as both are, is completely indifferent to everything else. It is just as much a matter of indifference to the high bump itself whether a murderer is in its vicinity as it is to the murderer whether its flatness is close to him.

336. There certainly remains the possibility that a bump at any location may be associated with any kind of property, passion, etc. One can imagine⁸⁶ the murderer with a high bump here at this place on the skull and the thief with a bump over there. Viewed from this side, phrenology is capable of yet greater extension, for at first it seems only to be restricted to the association of a bump with a property in the same individual, so that this individual possesses both a bump and a property. However, natural phrenology – for if there is a natural physiognomy, there must be such a thing as natural phrenology – already goes beyond this restriction. It not only judges that a crafty person has a bump as thick as a fist lying behind the ear; it also imagines that it is not the unfaithful wife herself but the other individual in the marriage who has bumps on his forehead. – Likewise, one may also imagine⁸⁷ that the person living under the same roof with the murderer, or even the murderer's neighbor, or, to take it still further, his fellow citizens, etc., have high bumps on some location on the skull, just as one may just as well imagine the flying cow which was first caressed by the crab that rode on the donkey, and after that…, etc. – However, if possibility is taken not in the sense of a possibility of imagining⁸⁸ but in the sense of inner possibility, or in the sense of the concept, then the object is the kind of actuality which both is and should be a pure thing and which is not supposed to have the sort of meaning which it can have in representational thought⁸⁹ alone.

337. Taking no note of the indifference of the two sides, the observer nonetheless sets himself to work to determine these relations. He does this in part because he is supported anew by the universally rational premise that the outer is the expression of the inner, and in part because he finds support for his views in the analogy to the skulls of animals – 187although those animal skulls may well have a simpler character than those of people's skulls, at the same time it becomes all the more difficult to say what character they do have while it cannot be easy on anybody's imagination to insert himself truly into the nature of an animal. – In that way, to affirm the laws that he wishes he had discovered, the observer finds first-rate assistance in a difference that must also occur to us here. – At least the being of spirit cannot be taken as something so utterly unmoved and immovable. Man is free; one admits that his original being only consists of dispositions over which the person has much influence or which require favorable circumstances to be developed, i.e., one can talk about an original being of spirit with the same ease that one can talk about the kind of item that does not exist as “what is.”⁹⁰ If observations were thus to contradict what everyone would affirm as law, or if there were to be to be fine weather at the annual fair or on washing day, then the retailer and the housewife could say that it really is supposed to rain, and thus that the disposition to rain is nonetheless present. The same goes for observing the skull – this individual really is supposed to be what his skull proclaims him to be according to the law, but he has an original disposition which has not been cultivated and developed. This quality is only not present, but it is supposed to be present. – The law and the supposed-to-be are grounded on observing actual rain and on the actual sense of the determinateness of the skull. However, if that actuality is not present, the empty possibility is just as valid. – This possibility, i.e., the non-actuality of the stated law and the observations contradicting the law, must as a result be allowed in the door, since the freedom of the individual and the developing circumstances are indifferent towards what is, full stop,⁹¹ both as the original inner as well as the external bone structure, and because the individual can be something other than what he internally originally is and even more than what he is as a bone.

338. We therefore have the possibility that this bump or indentation on the skull may indicate both something actual as well as a disposition, namely, it is something so indeterminate that it may indicate something not actual at all. As always, we see how things go with a bad subterfuge, namely, that it is itself ready to be used against what it is supposed to support. We see the conjecturing⁹² brought by the nature of the matter at issue into saying, however unthinkingly, the opposite of what it affirms – into saying that there is something indicated by this bone but also into saying with the same ease that the same thing is not indicated by this bone.

339. As it indulges in this subterfuge, what this conjecturing⁹³ has in mind is the true thought that being as such is not the truth of spirit at all, and this thought straightaway demolishes such a subterfuge. As the disposition already is an original being that has no share in the activity of spirit, such an original being, for its part, is also the 188bone. The existent without spiritual activity is a thing for consciousness. It is so little the essence of consciousness that it is instead the opposite of it, and consciousness is only actual, to itself, through the negation and abolition of such a being. – Taken from this aspect, it is to be regarded as a complete denial of reason to offer a bone as the actual existence of consciousness, and that is what it is professed to be while it is regarded as the outer of spirit, for the outer is just the existing actuality. It is of no help to say that we only infer from the outer to the inner, which is supposed to be something other than the outer, and that the outer is supposed to be not the inner itself but only its expression. For in the relationship of both to each other, the determination of the actuality which thinks of itself and which has subjected itself to thinking falls within the bounds of the inner, and that of existing actuality falls within the bounds of the outer. – However much therefore a person is told, “You, your inner, are constituted in this way because your bones are so constituted,” still this means nothing but that I regard a bone as your actuality. The riposte to such a judgment, namely, a slap in the face as was mentioned in the case of physiognomy, initially brings the soft parts out of their high regard and lofty position, and it only proves both that neither of them is a true in-itself and that they are not the actuality of spirit. – The retort here would really have to go as far as smashing the skull of the person who makes a statement like that in order to demonstrate to him in a manner as palpable as his wisdom that for a person a bone is nothing in-itself and is even less his true actuality.

340. Without hesitation, the raw instinct of self-conscious reason will reject such a science of phrenology – as well as reject this other observing instinct of self-conscious reason, which, once it has blossomed into a foreshadowing of cognition, has spiritlessly grasped cognition as, “The outer is supposed to be an expression of the inner.” However, the worse the thought is, the less easy it sometimes is to say exactly where its badness lies, and it becomes even more difficult to explicate it. This is so because the thought can be said to be even worse when the abstraction which counts, to itself, as the essence becomes itself all the more pure and all the more empty. However, the opposition which is at issue here has for its elements the individuality which is conscious of itself and the abstraction of an externality that has become entirely a thing – that inner being of spirit grasped as a fixed, spiritless being standing in opposition to that kind of being. – However, it also seems that observing reason has thereby in fact reached its pinnacle, the point where it must abandon itself and upend itself, for only what is entirely bad in itself has the immediate necessity to reverse itself. – As it can be said of the Jewish people that precisely because they immediately stand before the gates of salvation, they are both supposed to be and actually have been the most corrupted of all peoples. What this people should be in and for themselves, 189this being-themselves,⁹⁴ is what to themselves they are not; instead, they shift it off into an other-worldly beyond of themselves. Through this self-relinquishing,⁹⁵ they make a higher existence possible for themselves which they could achieve if only they could again take their object back into themselves rather than if they had remained within the immediacy of being. This is so because spirit is all the greater, the greater the opposition out of which it returns into itself. Spirit itself produces this opposition in the sublation of its immediate unity and in the self-relinquishing of its being-for-itself. Yet if such a consciousness does not reflect itself, the mediating middle where it stands is the unsanctified void, while what is supposed to bring that mediating middle to its fulfillment has become an unyielding extreme. In that way, this last stage of observing reason is its very worst, and for that reason its complete reversal is necessary.

341. The overview of the series of relations which have been examined up to this point itself constitutes the content and object of observation. It shows that in its first mode, namely, the observation of the relationships obtaining in inorganic nature, sensuous being has, to observation, already vanished. The moments of its relations are exhibited as pure abstractions and as simple concepts which are supposed to be kept firmly tied to the existence of things. However, this latter point breaks down so that the moment proves itself to be a pure movement and a universal. This free movement, complete within itself, retains the meaning that it is something objective, but it now comes on the scene as a One. In the process of the inorganic, that One is the non-existing inner. As One but as existing, it is the organic. – That One, as being-for-itself, or as negative essence, confronts the universal, extracts itself from it, and remains free-standing on its own,⁹⁶ such that the concept, which is realized only in the elements of an absolute isolation,⁹⁷ does not find its true expression in organic existence, namely, to be there as a universal. Rather, it remains an outer, or, what is the same thing, an inner of organic nature. – The organic process is only free in itself but not for-itself. It is in the purpose that the being-for-itself of its freedom emerges, and it exists as another essence, as a wisdom aware of itself which is external to the process. Observing reason thus addresses itself to this wisdom, to spirit, to the concept existing as universality, or to the purpose existing as purpose, and henceforth, to observing reason, its own essence is the object.

342. Observing reason at first addresses itself to its purity. While observing reason is a grasping of the object (which is self-moving within its differences) as an existent, the laws of thinking become, to observing reason, relations between the permanent and another permanent. But since the content of these laws are only moments, these laws blend together in the One of self-consciousness. – This new object, likewise taken as existent, is singular, contingent self-consciousness. Observation thus stands both within the bounds of spirit as it meant spirit to be and within the bounds of the contingent relationships of conscious 190actuality to unconscious actuality. Spirit in itself is only the necessity of this relation. Observation therefore approaches spirit even more closely and compares its own actuality, willing and acting, with its own actuality, contemplating⁹⁸ and reflecting itself into itself, which is itself objective actuality. This outer, although it is a language of the individual which he has on his own, is, as a sign, at the same time something indifferent to the content which it is supposed to designate just as that which, to itself, posits the sign is indifferent to the sign itself.

343. For this reason, observation finally turns away from this changeable language and goes back to hard and fast being. According to its concept, it expresses externality as the outer immediate actuality of spirit, neither in the sense of an organ, nor as a language or a sign, but in the sense of a dead thing. What was sublated by the very first observation of inorganic nature, namely, that the concept is supposed to be present as a thing, is established by this last mode of observation so as to make the actuality of spirit itself into a thing, or, to put it conversely, so as to give dead being the significance of spirit. – Observation has thus reached the point where it gives expression to what our concept of observation was, namely, that the certainty of reason seeks itself as an objective actuality. – By this it is not meant that spirit, represented by a skull, is declared to be a thing. What is supposed to lie in this thought is certainly not materialism, as it is called. Rather, spirit must instead be something very different from these bones. However, that spirit is means nothing other than that it is a thing. However much being as such, or being-a-thing, is predicated of spirit, still, for that reason, this is genuinely expressed by saying that spirit is the sort of thing that a bone is. Hence, it must be considered to be of supreme importance that the true expression of this has been found. Of spirit it is simply to be said, “it is.” However much it is otherwise said of spirit that it is, it has a being, it is a thing, a singular actuality, still it is not thereby meant that it is something we can see, or take in our hands, or push around and so forth, but that is what is said of it, and what in truth the foregoing has been saying may be expressed in this way: The being of spirit is a bone.

344. This result now has a twofold meaning. One is its true meaning insofar as it is a complement to the results of the preceding movement of self-consciousness. The unhappy self-consciousness emptied itself of its self-sufficiency and agonizingly rendered its being-for-itself into a thing. As a result, it returned from self-consciousness into consciousness, i.e., into that consciousness for which the object is a being, a thing. – However, this, the thing, 191is self-consciousness. The thing is thus the unity of the I and of being; it is the category. While the object for consciousness is determined in that way, consciousness has reason. Consciousness, as well as self-consciousness, is authentically in itself reason. However, it is only of consciousness, for which the object has been determined as the category, that it can be said that it has reason. – But this is still distinct from the knowing of what reason is. – The category, which is the immediate unity of being and what is its own, must pass through both forms, and observing consciousness is just the following. It is that to which the category exhibits itself in the form of being. In its result, consciousness expresses as a proposition that of which it is the unconscious certainty – the proposition which lies in the concept of reason. This proposition is the infinite judgment that the self is a thing – a judgment which sublates itself. – Through this result the category has thus definitely reached the point where it is this self-sublating opposition. The pure category, which is for consciousness in the form of being, or immediacy, is the still unmediated object, the object that is present, and consciousness is likewise an unmediated conduct. The moment of that infinite judgment is the transition from immediacy into mediation, or negativity. The object that is present is thus determined as a negative object, whereas consciousness is determined as self-consciousness with regard to the object. That is, the category, which, in observing, has traversed the form of being, is now posited in the form of being-for-itself. Consciousness no longer wants to find itself immediately. Rather, it wishes to engender itself by its own activity. It itself is, to itself, the purpose of its own doing in the way that in observing it was, to itself, concerned only with things.

345. The other meaning of the result is the one already considered, that of observation without concepts. This does not know any other way to grasp itself and express itself other than by naively declaring that the bone, as it is to be found as a sensuous thing which does not lose its determinateness as an objectivity for consciousness, is the actuality of self-consciousness. However, it also has no clear consciousness about what it is saying in this proposition, and it grasps neither the determinateness of the subject and predicate, nor their relation to each other. Even less does it grasp the proposition in the sense of an infinitely dissolving judgment and of the concept. – From out of a kind of natural honesty which lies at a deeper level of self-conscious spirit, it instead conceals from itself the ignominiousness of brute, conceptless thought which takes a bone to be the actuality of self-consciousness. It then whitewashes that thought by means of an unthinking mixture of all sorts of relations between cause and effect, between sign and organ, etc., relations which make no sense here, and by then relying on distinctions derived from that senseless mixture, it conceals just how tawdry the proposition really is.

192346. Viewed as the being of spirit, brain-fibers and the like are already only a hypothetical actuality that has itself only been thought about – they are not existing, not felt, not seen actualities, or they are not the true actuality. If they are there, if they are seen, they are dead objects, and then they no longer count as the being of spirit. However, its genuine objectivity must be immediate and sensuous, so that in this objectivity as dead – for the bone is dead insofar as what is dead is in the living being itself – spirit is posited as actual. – The concept of this representational thought is the following. Reason is, to itself, all thinghood, also purely objective thinghood itself. However, it is this within the concept; or, the concept alone is the truth of reason, and the purer the concept itself is, the more foolish is the representational thought into which it sinks if its content is [taken] not as concept but instead as representation – if the self-sublating judgment is not taken with the consciousness of its infinity but is instead taken to be an enduring proposition, whose subject and predicate each count as valid on their own⁹⁹ and where the self is fixed as self, the thing as thing, and, for all that, where one is supposed to be the other. – Within itself, reason, or essentially the concept, is immediately estranged into itself and its opposite, an opposition which, just for that reason, is immediately sublated. However, if reason presents itself in this way both as itself and its opposite, and if it is held fast in the entirely singular moments of this falling apart, then reason is grasped irrationally.¹⁰⁰ The purer the moments of this falling-apart are, the more tawdry is the appearance of this content, which is either solely for consciousness, or is solely expressed naively by consciousness. – The depth from which spirit pushes out from its inwardness but which it only manages to drive to the level of representational consciousness and then abandons it there – and the ignorance of this consciousness about what it says – are the same kind of connection of higher and lower which, in the case of the living being, nature itself naively expresses in the combination of the organ of its highest fulfillment, the organ of generation, with the organ of urination. – The infinite judgment as infinite would be the completion of self-comprehending life, whereas the consciousness of the infinite judgment which remains within representational thought conducts itself like urination.

B. The Actualization of Rational Self-Consciousness Through Itself

347.193 Self-consciousness found the thing as itself and itself as a thing; i.e., it is for self-consciousness that it is in itself objective actuality. It is no longer the immediate certainty of being all reality. Rather, it is the kind of certainty for which the immediate has the form of what has been sublated, so that the certainty's objectivity still only counts as superficial, where the certainty's innerness and essence is self-consciousness itself. – Hence the object to which self-consciousness positively relates itself is self-consciousness. The object is in the form of thinghood, i.e., it is self-sufficient. However, self-consciousness has the certainty that for it this self-sufficient object is nothing alien. It thereby knows that it is in itself recognized by the object. Self-consciousness is spirit that has the certainty of having its unity with itself in the doubling of its self-consciousness and in the self-sufficiency of both self-consciousnesses. To self-consciousness, this certainty must now be elevated to truth. To self-consciousness, what counts, that it is to be in itself and within its inner certainty, is supposed to enter into its consciousness and come to be for it.

348. What the universal stations of this actualization will be, in general have already been indicated through the comparison with the preceding paths. Just as observing reason repeated within the elements of the category the movement of consciousness (namely, sensuous-certainty, perceiving, and understanding), reason will also again pass through the doubled movement of self-consciousness, and then from self-sufficiency it will make its transition into its freedom. At first, this active reason is aware of itself only as an individual, and as such an individual, it must demand and engender its actuality in an other. – Thereupon, however, while its consciousness elevates itself into universality, it becomes universal reason and is consciously aware of itself both as reason, or aware of itself as already recognized in and for itself, which in its pure consciousness unites all self-consciousnesses. It is the simple spiritual essence which, as it becomes clear to itself at the same time, is the real substance into which the earlier forms return as returning into their ground, such that vis-à-vis this ground, these earlier forms are only singular moments of its coming to be. They are moments which do indeed tear themselves loose and which appear as shapes on their own, but which in fact only have existence and actuality when they are supported by that ground, and only have their truth insofar as they are and remain within its bounds.

349. If 194we start with this aim, which is the concept that has already emerged for us in its reality – namely, the recognized self-consciousness which has the certainty of itself in another free self-consciousness and which likewise finds its truth in that free self-consciousness – or, if we single out this still inner spirit as the substance which has already vigorously grown into its existence, then within this concept, the realm of ethical life opens itself up. For ethical life is nothing but the absolute spiritual unity of the essence of those individuals in their self-sufficient actuality. It is in itself a universal self-consciousness, which, to itself, is actual in another consciousness in such a way that this other consciousness has complete self-sufficiency, or is a thing for it, and it is just therein conscious of the unity with the other self-consciousness, and it is in this unity with this objective essence that it is first self-consciousness. In the abstraction of universality, this ethical substance is only the law as it has been thought; however, it is equally as much immediate actual self-consciousness, or it is an ethos.¹⁰¹ Conversely, the singular consciousness is only this existing One, while it is conscious of the universal consciousness in its own singularity as its being, and while its doing and existence is the universal ethos.

350. In the life of a people, the concept of the actualization of self-conscious reason has in fact its consummate reality, namely, where in the self-sufficiency of the other, each intuits its complete unity with the other, or where I have for an object this free thinghood of an other, which is the negative of myself and which I simply find before me, as my being-for-myself. Reason is present as the fluid universal substance, as the unchangeable simple thinghood which shatters into many completely self-sufficient beings¹⁰² in the way that light likewise shatters into stars as innumerable luminous points, each shining by its own light, which in their absolute being-for-itself have not only in themselves been dissolved in the simple self-sufficient substance but have also been dissolved for-themselves in it. They are conscious of themselves as being these singular self-sufficient beings¹⁰³ as a result of their having sacrificed their singular individuality and as a result of this universal substance being their soul and essence. In the same way this universal is again their doing as singular individuals, or it is the work which is brought forth by themselves.

351. The individual's purely singular goings-on¹⁰⁴ are related to the needs that he has as a natural creature, which is to say, as an existing singular individuality. That even these, its commonest functions, do not come to grief but rather have actuality, comes about through the universal sustaining medium, through the power of the whole people. – However, not only does it have this form of stable existence for its doing as such; it has its content equally as much within the universal substance. What the individual does is the universal skillfulness and ethos of all. In his actuality, he is entangled with the doings of all insofar as this content completely isolates itself. The individual's labor for his needs is a satisfaction of the needs of others as much as it is of his own needs, and the satisfaction of his own needs is something he attains only through 195the labor of others. – Just as the singular individual in his singular labor already without awareness performs a universal labor, he in turn also achieves the universal as his consciously known object. The whole becomes, as the whole, his own work, for which he sacrifices himself and through which he gets himself back. – There is nothing here which would not be reciprocal, nothing by which the self-sufficiency of the individual in the dissolution of its being-for-itself, in the negation of itself, would not give itself its own positive meaning of being for itself. This unity of being for an other, or of making-oneself-into-a-thing, and of being-for-itself, this universal substance, speaks its universal language within the ethos and laws of a people. However, this existing unchangeable essence is nothing but the expression of that singular individuality which has the semblance of opposition to it. The laws express what each individual is and does. The singular individual takes cognizance¹⁰⁵ of them as not only his universal objective thinghood, but rather as himself within them, or of them as isolated in his own individuality and in each of his fellow citizens. Hence, within the universal spirit, each has the certainty of himself, and each finds in existing actuality nothing but himself; he is as certain of the others as he is of himself. – In all of them, I intuit that for themselves, each is a self-sufficient being¹⁰⁶ just as I am a self-sufficient being; I intuit in them the free unity with the others so that just as this free unity is through me, so too it is through the others themselves. It is through them as Myself and through Myself as them.

352. For that reason, in a free people reason is in truth actualized. It is a current living spirit not only in that the individual finds his destiny,¹⁰⁷ that is, his universal and singular essence, expressed and found present as thinghood, but also that he himself is this essence and that he has also achieved his destiny. For that reason, the wisest men of antiquity made the claim: Wisdom and virtue consist in living in conformity with the ethos of one's people.

353. However, once self-consciousness has attained this happy fortune,¹⁰⁸ that is, where self-consciousness has achieved its destiny¹⁰⁹ and where it lives surrounded by that destiny, then self-consciousness, which is according to the concept at first spirit and is spirit only immediately, leaves it behind; or also – it has not yet achieved its destiny, for both can be equally said.

354. Reason must depart from this happy fortune, for the life of a free people is only in itself or immediately the real ethical life, 196or the real ethical life as an existing ethical life, and this universal spirit is thereby also itself something singular, a totality of ethos and laws, a determinate ethical substance which in that lofty moment, namely, the consciousness about its essence, first casts off that restriction. It has its absolute truth only in this cognition, not, however, immediately in its being. Within this being, it is in part a restricted ethical substance, and the absolute restriction is in part spirit's existence in the form of being.

355. Furthermore, the singular consciousness, as it immediately has its existence in real ethical life, or in the people, is thus an unalloyed trust, for which the universal spirit has not been dissolved into its abstract moments and does not also know itself as being for itself pure singularity. However, if it has arrived at this thought, as it must, this immediate unity with spirit, or its being within spirit, its trust, is lost. Isolated for itself,¹¹⁰ it is now to itself the essence and no longer the universal. The moment of this singularity of self-consciousness indeed is within the universal spirit itself, but only as a vanishing magnitude which, as it comes on the scene for itself, has just as much been immediately brought to dissolution within spirit, and it is only as trust that it comes to the level of awareness. While that moment fixes on itself – and each moment, because it is a moment of the essence, must arrive at the point where it exhibits itself as the essence – so has the individual set himself over and against those laws and that ethos. Those laws and that ethos are then only a thought without absolute essentiality, an abstract theory without actuality. However, as this I, it is, to itself, the living truth.

356. Or it could be that self-consciousness has not yet attained this happy fortune of being the ethical substance, the spirit of a people. For, having returned back from observation, spirit is at first not yet actualized as such through itself; it is only posited as an inner essence, or as an abstraction. – Or, spirit first is immediately. However, as immediately existing, it is singular; it is the practical consciousness that intervenes in its world as it finds it, and it makes this intervention with the purpose of doubling itself in the determinateness it has in being a singular individual. It aims to engender itself as a This as its existent mirror image, and to become conscious of this unity of its own actuality with the objective essence. It has the certainty of this unity. What counts for it is that the unity is in itself already present, or that this correspondence between itself and thinghood is already present, and that, to itself, it only has to come to be this through itself, or that its making is just as much its finding the unity. While this unity is called happiness, this individual is thereby cast forth into the world by his spirit to seek his happiness.

357. Therefore, however197much the truth of this rational self-consciousness is for us the ethical substance, still, for it, the beginning of its ethical experience of the world is here. From one aspect, this rational self-consciousness has not yet become the ethical substance, this movement presses onwards towards that end, and within what is sublated in the movement are the singular moments which to self-consciousness were effectively in place¹¹¹ in isolation. They have the form of an immediate willing, or a natural drive which attains its satisfaction, and this satisfaction in turn is itself the content of a new drive. – From another aspect, this rational self-consciousness has lost the happiness of existing within the substance, and these natural impulses are combined with the consciousness of the purposes within the natural impulses as its true destiny¹¹² and true essentiality. Ethical substance has sunk down into a predicate devoid of selfhood, whose living subjects are the individuals who fulfill their universality and destiny from out of themselves. – Therefore, in the former sense, those shapes are the coming-to-be of ethical substance, and they precede this substance. In the latter sense, they succeed it, and, for self-consciousness, they bring the substance which is supposed to be its destiny to its dissolution. According to the former aspect, the immediacy which is the very rawness of the impulses is lost in the movement in which the truth of those impulses is experienced, and their content passes over into a higher content. However, according to the latter aspect, what is lost is consciousness’ false representation which posits its destiny as lying within those impulses. According to the former, the aim that they accomplish is the immediate ethical substance. According to the latter, the aim is the consciousness of the substance, the consciousness that knows the substance as its own essence. Insofar as that comes about, this movement would be the coming-to-be of morality, a higher shape than that of the previous ethical life. Yet, at the same time, these shapes constitute only one aspect of morality's coming to be, namely, that which falls within the bounds of being-for-itself, or within which consciousness sublates its purposes. It is not the aspect according to which it comes forth from out of the substance. Since these moments cannot yet have the meaning of having been fashioned into purposes which stand in opposition to that lost ethical life, here they are valid just in their naive, natural content, and the aim towards which they press is the ethical substance. However, while our time lies closer to the form those moments take when they appear after consciousness has forsaken its ethical life (and when, in searching for that ethical life, it repeats those forms), those moments may be better represented in the expressions of those ways in which it is in search of ethical life.

358. Self-consciousness, which is only first the concept of spirit, enters onto this path in the determinateness of being to itself the essence as a singular spirit, and its purpose therefore is to give itself actualization as a singular individual and, as such, to take pleasure in giving itself its actualization.

359. With its destiny¹¹³ that of being, to itself, the essence as existing-for-itself, self-consciousness is the negativity of the other. Hence, in its consciousness it is the positive, and as the positive, it confronts the kind of self-consciousness which certainly is but which has the meaning for it of what-does-not-exist-in-itself.¹¹⁴ Consciousness appears as estranged from this actuality as it finds it and into the purpose that it achieves through sublating 198that actuality. Instead of that sublated actuality, it now makes its own purpose into actuality itself. However, its first purpose is to intuit its immediate abstract being-for-itself, or to intuit itself in an other as this singular individual, or to intuit itself in another self-consciousness. The experience of the truth of this purpose places self-consciousness at a higher rank, and henceforth self-consciousness itself is, to itself, the purpose insofar as self-consciousness is at the same time universal and has the law immediately in it. However, in accomplishing this law of its heart, it learns from experience that the singularly individual being¹¹⁵ cannot thereby sustain himself but rather that the good can only be put into practice through the sacrifice of the singularly individual being, and self-consciousness becomes virtue. As virtue, it learns from experience that its purpose has in itself already been put into practice, that it finds happiness immediately in doing something, and that the good is the doing itself. The concept of this entire sphere, that thinghood is the being-for-itself of spirit itself, comes to be for self-consciousness in its movement. While self-consciousness has found the concept, it is, to itself, reality as an individuality immediately expressing itself, which no longer finds any resistance in an actuality opposed to it, and whose object and purpose are only this giving voice to itself.

a. Pleasure and Necessity

360. The self-consciousness which is, to itself, reality has in its own self its object, but as the sort of object which it initially has only for itself and which does not yet exist. Being stands over and against it as an actuality other than its own, and self-consciousness undertakes to intuit itself as another self-sufficient essence by way of putting its being-for-itself into practice. This first purpose is to become conscious of itself as a singular essence within that other self-consciousness, or to make this other into itself. It has the certainty that in itself this other already is itself. – Insofar as it has elevated itself from out of the ethical substance and from out of the motionless being of thinking, to its being-for-itself, so does it have the law of ethos and existence, together with the skills¹¹⁶ related to observation and theory, only as a gray and gradually vanishing shadow behind it, for this is instead the knowing of the kind of thing whose being-for-itself and whose actuality is other than that of self-consciousness. Instead of the seemingly heavenly spirit of the universality of knowing and doing in which the feeling and the gratification of singular individuality fall silent, the spirit of the earth has entered into it, a spirit to whom the only being which counts as the true actuality is that of the actuality of singular consciousness.

It despises intellect and science199

Man's highest gifts –

It has given itself over to the devil,

And must perish.

361. It therefore plunges into life and puts into practice the pure individuality in which it comes on the scene. It does not so much make its own good fortune as it immediately takes it and takes pleasure in it. The shadows cast by science, laws, and principles, which alone stand between it and its own actuality, vanish like a lifeless fog which it cannot absorb with the certainty of its reality. It helps itself to life in the way that a ripe fruit is plucked which itself accommodates itself to its being so taken.

362. Its doing is, according to one of the moments, a doing of desire. It is not a matter of erasing the entire objective essence, but rather, of erasing the form of its otherness, or of its self-sufficiency, which is an essenceless semblance. For in itself that otherness counts, to itself, as the same essence, or as its selfhood. The element in which desire and its object both self-sufficiently and indifferently stably exist vis-à-vis each other is that of living existence. The indulgence of desire sublates this existence insofar as that living existence corresponds to its object. However, here this element which gives separate actuality to both is instead the category, a being which is essentially a represented being. It is thus the consciousness of self-sufficiency – whether it be that of natural consciousness or a consciousness educated in a system of laws which sustains each of the individuals for itself. This separation is not in itself for self-consciousness, which knows the other as its own selfhood. It therefore arrives at the enjoyment of pleasure, or it arrives at the consciousness of its actualization in a consciousness which is in appearance self-sufficient, or it arrives at the intuition of the unity of both self-sufficient self-consciousnesses. It achieves its purpose, and it then experiences in that achievement what the truth of its purpose is. It comprehends itself as this singular being existing-for-itself. However, the actualization of this purpose is itself the sublation of the purpose, since self-consciousness becomes not an object to itself as this singular individual but instead as the unity of itself and the other self-consciousness, and thereby as a sublated singular individual, or as universal.

363. The pleasure enjoyed indeed positively signifies that it has come to be objective self-consciousness to itself, but it just as much negatively signifies that it has sublated itself. While it conceives of its actualization only in the former sense, its experience enters its consciousness as a contradiction 200in which the attained actuality of its singular individuality sees itself destroyed by the negative essence, which confronts it as empty and devoid of actuality, but which nonetheless is its all-consuming power. This essence is nothing but the concept of what this individuality is in itself. However, this individuality is still the poorest shape of self-actualizing spirit, since it is, to itself, the very abstraction of reason, or it is the immediacy of the unity of being-for-itself and being-in-itself. Its essence is therefore only the abstract category. However, it no longer has the form of immediate, simple being, a form which it had for the observing spirit, where it was abstract being, or posited as alien, or was thinghood itself. Here, being-for-itself and mediation have entered into this thinghood. Therefore, they come on the scene here as a circle whose content is the developed pure relation of the simple essentialities. The attained actualization of this individuality thus consists in nothing more than this, namely, that this cycle of abstractions has been cast out from the self-enclosed confines of simple self-consciousness into the element of being-for-itself, or into the element of objective expansion. Thus, to self-consciousness, what in its savoring of its pleasure comes to be the object as its essence is the further expansion of those empty essentialities, or of pure unity, of pure difference, and of their relation. Furthermore, the object, which individuality experiences as its essence, has no content. It is what is called necessity, since necessity, fate, and the like, is just this: That we do not know how to say what it is doing or what its determinate laws and its positive content are supposed to be because it is the absolute pure concept itself intuited as being, the simple and empty but nonetheless inexorable and impassive relation whose work is only the nothingness of singular individuality. The relation is this firm connection because what is connected are the pure essentialities, or the empty abstractions. Unity, difference, and relation are categories, each of which is in and for itself nothing and each of which is only in relation to its opposite. Thus, they cannot be decoupled from each other. They are related to each other through their concept, since they are the pure concepts themselves, and it is this absolute relation and abstract movement which constitutes necessity. Instead of having plunged from dead theory into life, the only singular individuality, which at first has only the pure concept of reason for its content, has thus instead plunged into the consciousness of its own lifelessness, and, to itself, has come to be only as empty and alien necessity, as dead actuality.

364. The transition takes place from out of the form of the One into that of universality, out of one absolute abstraction into the other, out of the purposes of pure 201being-for-itself, which has jettisoned all community with others, into the pure opposite, which as a result is just as abstract being-in-itself. It thereby appears so that the individual has only perished, and the absolute aloofness of singular individuality is pulverized on that hard but continuous actuality. – While, as consciousness, it is the unity of itself and its opposite, this transition is still for consciousness. It is its purpose, and its actualization as well as the contradiction of what to it was the essence and what in itself is the essence. – It experiences the twofold meaning which lies in what it did. It helped itself to life, but in doing so, it instead laid hold of death.

365. This transition of its living being into lifeless necessity thus appears to it to be an inversion mediated by nothing. What would mediate it would have to be that in which both aspects would be one, in which consciousness would therefore recognize¹¹⁷ one moment in the other, or recognize its purpose and its doing in its fate and its fate in its purpose and its doing, or recognize its own essence in this necessity. However, this unity is for consciousness just pleasure itself, or the simple singular feeling, and the transition from the moment of its purpose into the moment of its true essence is for it a pure leap into the opposite, since these moments are not contained and connected with each other in feeling but only in the pure self, which is a universal, or is thinking. To itself, consciousness is consequently through its experience, within which its truth was, to consciousness, supposed to have come to be, instead become a riddle to itself. To it, the consequences of its deeds are not its deeds themselves, and what befalls it is for it not the experience of what it is in itself. The transition is not a mere alteration in form of the same content and essence, which is represented at one time as the content and essence of consciousness, and at another time as object, or as the intuited essence of itself. Abstract necessity therefore counts as the only negative and uncomprehended power of universality in which individuality is shattered.

366. The appearance of this shape of self-consciousness only gets this far. The final moment of its existence is the thought of its loss within necessity, or the thought of itself as an essence absolutely alien to itself. However, in itself self-consciousness has survived this loss, for this necessity, or this pure universality, is its own essence. This reflection of consciousness into itself, knowing necessity as itself, is a new shape of consciousness.

b. The Law of the Heart, and the Insanity of Self-Conceit

367.202 What necessity is in truth in consciousness is what it is for the new shape of self-consciousness in which self-consciousness is, to itself, necessity. It immediately knows that it has the universal, or the law, within itself, which on account of this determination, that it is immediately in the being-for-itself of consciousness, is called the law of the heart. As singular individuality, this shape is for itself the essence as was the former shape, but it is richer on account of the determination that, to itself, this being-for-itself counts as necessary, or as universal being-for-itself.

368. The law is immediately self-consciousness’ own law, or it is a heart which in itself has a law and is therefore the purpose which self-consciousness sets itself to realize. It remains to be seen whether its actualization corresponds to this concept, and whether, within this actualization, it will come to experience this, its law, as the essence.

369. An actuality confronts this heart, for in the heart, the law is first only for itself as the concept. It is not yet actualized and thus at the same time it is something other than the concept. As a result, this other determines itself as an actuality which is the opposite of what is to be actualized, and it is thus the contradiction between the law and singular individuality. On the one hand, actuality is thus a law by which singular individuality is oppressed, a violent order of the world which contradicts the law of the heart – and on the other hand, it is humanity suffering under that order, a humanity that does not follow the law of the heart, but which is instead subjected to an alien necessity. – This actuality, which appears in the present shape of consciousness as confronting it, is, as light is cast on it, nothing but the preceding estrangement between individuality and its truth, or a relationship of dreadful necessity by which individuality is crushed. For that reason, for us the preceding movement confronts the new shape because the new shape has in itself originated out of it, and the moment from which it stems is necessary for it. However, to itself, that moment appears as something it just finds as given, while it has no consciousness of its origin and, to itself, the essence is instead for itself, or it is the negative in-itself opposed to this positive in-itself.

370. This necessity contradicting the law of the heart as well as the present suffering arising out of it, are what this individuality aims at sublating. This individuality is thereby no longer the recklessness of the previous shape, which only 203wanted individual pleasure. Rather, it is the seriousness of a high purpose that seeks its pleasure in the exhibition of its own admirably excellent essence and in authoring the welfare of mankind. What it actualizes is itself the law, and its pleasure is at the same time universal for all hearts. Both are, to itself, inseparable; its pleasure is lawful, and the actualization of the law of universal humanity is its own individual pleasure. For in its own self, individuality and necessity are immediately one; the law is a law of the heart. Individuality has not yet been jiggled out of its place, and the unity of both has neither been brought about by the mediating movement of individuality nor has it yet been established through discipline. The actualization of the immediately wicked essence counts as exhibiting its own excellence and as authoring the well-being of mankind.

371. In contrast, the law which is opposed to the law of the heart is separated from the heart and is free-standing.¹¹⁸ Humanity, which belongs to this law, does not live in the gratifying unity of the law and the heart, but rather, lives either in dreadful separation and suffering, or at least in the deprivation of enjoying itself in obeying the law, and it lives in the defect of the consciousness of its own excellence in the transgression of the law. Because that divine and human order, a binding order, is separated from the heart, it is to the heart a semblance which is supposed to forfeit what is joined to it, namely, power and actuality. In its content, that order may contingently coincide with the law of the heart, at which point the law of the heart can acquiesce in it. However, it is not lawfulness purely as such which, to the heart, is the essence but rather the consciousness of itself in such lawfulness, its consciousness that it has therein satisfied itself. However, where the content of universal necessity does not correspond to the heart, then, according to its content, universal necessity is also nothing in itself, and it too must give way to the law of the heart.

372. The individual thus accomplishes the law of his heart. The law becomes a universal order, and pleasure becomes an actuality which is in and for itself lawful. However, in this actualization, the law has in fact escaped the individual, and it immediately becomes only the relationship which was supposed to be sublated. Through its actualization, the law of the heart just ceases to be a law of the heart, for it thereby receives the form of being and is now the universal power for which this heart is a matter of indifference, so that as a result, the individual in establishing his own order no longer finds it to be his own. Hence, through the actualization of his law, he does not produce¹¹⁹ his law. However, while both in itself the order is his own but is, for him, alien, what he authors is only that of his own entanglement in the actual order, indeed, he is entangled in an order which is not only alien to him but which is also a hostile dominance. – Through his deed the individual posits himself as being in, or 204instead, as, the universal element of existent actuality, and his deed itself is by his own lights supposed to have the value of a universal order. However, he has thereby set himself free from himself. As universality, the individual continues for itself to grow and purify itself of singularity. The individual who wishes only to cognize¹²⁰ universality in the form of his immediate being-for-itself does not therefore cognize himself in this free-standing universality, but at the same time he belongs to it, for it is his own doing. This doing thus has the inverted significance of contradicting the universal order, for his deed is supposed to be the deed of his singular heart, not some free-standing universal actuality. At the same time, he has in fact recognized this universal actuality, for his doing means that he posits his essence as free-standing actuality, which is to say, bestowing recognition on actuality as his essence.

373. Through the concept of his doing, the individual has determined the more precise way in which actual universality, to which he himself belongs, turns against him. As actuality, his deed belongs to the universal; however, its content is his own individuality, which wants to preserve itself as this singular individual in opposition to the universal. One is not speaking about establishing any determinate law. The immediate unity of the singular heart with universality is the thought which is supposed to be valid and to be elevated to the status of law, that every heart must recognize¹²¹ itself in the law. However, only this individual's heart has posited his actuality in his deed, which, to himself, expresses his being-for-itself, or his pleasure. The deed is supposed to count immediately as universal, which is to say that it is in truth something particular and only has the form of universality. But his particular content is as such content supposed to count as universal. Hence, others do not find the law of their hearts in this content; rather, they find instead that it is the law of another's heart which has been accomplished. It is according to the universal law that each is supposed to find the law in his own heart, such that they just as much turn themselves against the actuality which his heart established, just as he had turned against what their hearts had established. Therefore, just as the individual initially found only the rigid law, now he finds that the hearts of people are opposed to his admirable intentions, and they are thus themselves to be loathed.

374. Because this consciousness is aware of universality at first only as immediate and of necessity as the necessity of the heart, to itself, it is unfamiliar with the nature of actualization and efficaciousness, that this actualization as the existing¹²² in its truth is instead the universal in itself, within which the singularity of consciousness, which puts its trust in this actualization in order to be as this immediate singular individuality, instead founders. Instead of attaining its own being, the being it therefore attains is the alienation of itself from itself. It is no longer dead necessity in which it does not recognize¹²³ itself, 205but rather it is necessity which is brought to life through universal individuality. He took this divine and human order as he found it validly in force, as a dead actuality, within which, just like himself, who had fixated on himself as this heart existing for itself and thus opposed to the universal, so would each of the others belonging to this order have no consciousness of itself. However, it instead finds that order is animated by the consciousness of all and is a law for all hearts. This consciousness learns from experience that actuality is a living order, and in fact at the same time learns this just as a result of actualizing the law of its own heart, since this means nothing else but that individuality becomes, to itself, an object as the universal but in which it does not know¹²⁴ itself.

375. Therefore, for this shape of self-consciousness, what emerges from its experience as the truth contradicts what this shape is for itself. What it is for itself has the form of absolute universality for it, and it is the law of the heart which is immediately one with self-consciousness. At the same time, the stably existing and living order is just as much its own essence and handiwork. What it originates is nothing other than what this shape itself originates, and that shape is in an equally immediate unity with self-consciousness. In this way, this self-consciousness, which belongs to a doubly opposed essentiality, is in itself contradictory and, in what is most inner to it, has broken down. The law of this heart is only that in which self-consciousness cognizes¹²⁵ itself, but through the actualization of that law, the universally valid order has just as much become to self-consciousness its own essence and its own actuality. What is therefore self-contradictory in its consciousness is both in the form of essence and in the form of its own actuality for it.

376. While it expresses both this moment of its own self-aware downfall and therein the result of its experience, it shows itself to be this inner inversion of its self, as the madness of a consciousness for which its essence is immediately a non-essence and its actuality a non-actuality. – The madness cannot be taken to mean that in general the essenceless is taken to be the essence, or that the non-actual is taken to be actual, so that what for one person would be essential or actual would not be so for another, and the consciousness of the actual and of the non-actual, or of the essential and the inessential, would come apart. – However much something is in fact actual and essential for consciousness per se but is not so for me, still I have at the same time in the consciousness of its nullity the consciousness of its actuality since I too am consciousness per se – and while they are both fixed, so is this a unity that is insanity in general. However, in such a condition, there is for consciousness only an object which has gone mad, not consciousness per se within itself and for itself. As a consequence of the experience which has resulted here, consciousness is, however, in its law aware of itself as this actuality, and, at the same time, while it is, to itself, 206just this same essentiality, this same actuality is alienated, it is as self-consciousness, as absolute actuality aware of its own non-actuality; or, according to their contradictions, both aspects immediately are valid to it as its essence, which thus in its innermost aspects has gone mad.

377. The heart-throb for the welfare of mankind therefore passes over into the bluster of a mad self-conceit. It passes over into the rage of a consciousness which preserves itself from destruction as a result of the very inversion which is itself which it casts out of itself and which makes every effort to regard and to express that inversion as other than itself. It therefore pronounces the universal order to be an inversion of the law of its heart and its own happiness; it pronounces that the universal order is an inversion completely fabricated by fanatical priests and gluttonous despots, along with their various lackeys, who, by having lowered themselves to such abjection, now seek compensation for their own humiliation by humiliating and oppressing those further below them. It is an inversion which has as its cost the nameless misery of deceived humanity. – In its madness, consciousness expresses that it is individuality itself which, as alien and contingent, drives one mad and which is itself what is inverted. But it is the heart, or the singularity of consciousness immediately willing to be universal, which drives one mad and which is inverted, and its doing is only the production of what makes this contradiction become its consciousness. For the truth is to this consciousness the law of the heart – something merely fancied¹²⁶ which has not stood the test of time as has the stably existing order but rather, instead, as it has shown itself to this consciousness, to founder. This, its law, is supposed to have actuality. As actuality, as a valid order, the law is, to itself, its own purpose and essence, but actuality, or just the law as the valid order, is to it, immediately and instead null and void. – Likewise, its own actuality, itself as the singularity of consciousness, is, to itself, the essence, but, to itself, its purpose consists in positing that singularity as existing. To it, its own self as non-singular is thus instead immediately the essence, or purpose as law, therein as a universality which is said to be the law for its consciousness itself. – This, its concept, becomes, through its doing, its object. Therefore, its self thus experiences instead the law as non-actual and the non-actuality as its own actuality. It is thus not a contingent and alien individuality but rather just this very heart, which, according to all of its aspects, is in itself the inverted and inverting.

378. However, while the immediately universal individuality is both the inverted and the inverting, this universal order, since it is the law of all hearts, which is to say, the law of the inverted, is in itself the inverted, just as the blustering madness declared it to be. At one time, this order proves to be a law for all hearts 207in the resistance which the law of one heart encounters in other singular individuals.¹²⁷ The stably existing laws are defended against the law of an individual, and they are defended because they are not unconscious, empty, dead necessity, but rather because they are spiritual universality and substance, within which those in which spiritual universality and substance have their actuality, live as individuals and are aware of themselves, so that when they also complain about this order and when they affirm the opinions of the heart against the laws of that order (as if this substance were indeed running contrary to their own inner law), they are in their hearts in fact clinging to that substance as their essence. If this order is taken from them, or if they set themselves outside of it, then they lose everything. While the public order's actuality and power consists just in that, the public order appears as the universal essence which is animated and self-equal, and individuality appears as its form. – However, this order is just as much the inverted itself.

379. For it is in this order being the law of all hearts that all individuals immediately are this universal, that this order is an actuality which is only the actuality of individuality existing for itself, or the actuality of the heart. Consciousness, which proposes the law of its heart, experiences resistance from others because it contradicts the equally singular laws of their own hearts, and in their resistance the latter are doing nothing but establishing their own laws and putting them in force. Hence, the universal which is present here is only a universal resistance, a combat of all against all, within which each both asserts his own singular individuality but at the same time fails at it because each individuality experiences the same resistance and is reciprocally brought to dissolution by the others. What seems to be the public order is therefore this universal feud within which each in itself wrests for himself what he can, in which each executes justice upon the singular individuality of others, and where each establishes his own singular individuality which then likewise vanishes at the hands of others. We have here the way of the world, the semblance of an enduring course of events, a fancied universal,¹²⁸ whose content is instead the essenceless game of setting up and then dissolving these singular individualities.

380. If we examine both aspects of the universal order in relation to each other, then this final universality has for its content restless individuality, for which opinion or singularity is law, the actual is non-actual, and the non-actual is actual. However, universality is at the same time the aspect of the actuality of the order, for the being-for-itself of individuality belongs to it. – The other aspect is the universal as the motionless essence and just for that reason only as an inner, which is not nothing but is nonetheless not an actuality, and which can itself become actual only through the sublation of the individuality which has arrogated to itself actuality. This shape of consciousness must, to itself, come to be in the laws, in the true and good in themselves, not as singularity but only as essence, knowing individuality to be the inverted and inverting, and consequently it will have to sacrifice the singularity of consciousness. This shape of consciousness is virtue.

c. Virtue and the Way of the World

381.208 In the first shape of active reason, self-consciousness was, to itself, pure individuality, and confronting it was empty universality. In the second shape, both parts of the opposition had both of those moments, law and individuality, in themselves. However, the one part, the heart, was their immediate unity, and the other was their opposition. Here, in the relationships between virtue and the way of the world, each of the members is both the unity and the opposition of the moments, or each is a movement of law and individuality vis-à-vis each other but it is an opposing movement. For the consciousness of virtue, the law is the essential, and individuality is to be sublated, and therefore to be sublated in its consciousness as well as in the way of the world. In the former, one's own individuality is to be brought under the discipline of the universal, or of the good and true in itself, but it still remains therein a personal consciousness. True discipline solely consists in the sacrifice of one's entire personality as proof that personal consciousness in not in fact still fixated on minutiae. At the same time, in this individual sacrifice, individuality is eradicated in the way of the world, for individuality is also a simple moment common to both. – In the way of the world, individuality behaves in a completely opposite way than it does when it is posited in the virtuous consciousness. In the way of the world, it makes itself the essence and subordinates the good and the true in themselves to itself. – Furthermore, for virtue the way of the world is only the universal inverted through individuality. Rather, the absolute order is likewise a common moment, but in the way of the world, it is only not as existing actuality that it is present for consciousness but rather as the way of the world's inner essence. Hence, that order is instead not to be first brought out by virtue, for such bringing out is, as doing, the consciousness of singular individuality, and it is singular individuality which is instead to be sublated. However, through this sublating, there is, as it were, only a space which has been opened to the in itself of the way of the world so that it may in and for itself come into existence.

382. The universal content of the actual way of the world has already emerged. Taken more precisely, it is again nothing but the two preceding movements of self-consciousness. It is from them that the shape of virtue has emerged; while they are its origin, virtue has them prior to itself. However, virtue both sets itself to sublating its origin and to realizing itself, or to becoming for itself. On the one hand, the way of the world is thus singular individuality which seeks its pleasure and gratification, therein finding only its downfall, and as a result satisfying the universal. However, this satisfaction itself, just like the rest of the moments of these 209relations, is both an inverted shape and movement of the universal. Actuality is only the singularity of pleasure and gratification, but the universal is opposed to it. Actuality is a necessity which is only the empty shape of the universal, only a negative reaction, a content-less doing. – The other moment of the way of the world is individuality, which wills to be a law in and for itself, and which, in this conceit, disturbs the stably existing order. To be sure, the universal law holds its own against this sort of self-conceit, and it no longer comes on the scene as opposed to consciousness, or as empty, as a dead necessity; it comes on the scene rather as a necessity within consciousness itself. In the way it is as the conscious relation of an absolutely contradictory actuality, it is madness, but in the way it exists as an objective actuality, it is utter invertedness itself. In both aspects, the universal therefore exhibits itself as the power of their movement, but the existence of this power is only the universal inversion.

383. The universal is now supposed to receive from virtue its true actuality through the sublating of individuality, through the principle of inversion. Virtue's purpose is thereby again to invert the inverted way of the world and to bring out its true essence. This true essence initially is in the way of the world only as the in-itself of the way of the world. The true essence is not yet actual, and thus virtue only has faith in it. Virtue proceeds to elevate this faith to the level of vision, but without enjoying the fruit of its labor and sacrifice. This is so because insofar as virtue is individuality, in engaging in the struggle,¹²⁹ it engages with the way of the world; but its purpose and true essence lie in defeating the actuality of the way of the world. As a result, the existence of the good which is thereby brought about is the cessation of its doing, or of the consciousness of individuality. – How this struggle itself will survive, what virtue will experience in the course of this struggle, whether the way of the world will be defeated, and whether virtue shall triumph through the sacrifice it makes – all this must be decided on the basis of the nature of the living weapons the combatants carry, for the weapons are nothing but the essence of the combatants themselves, an essence which reciprocally comes on the scene for both of them. What their weapons are is the result of what is present in itself in this struggle.

384. The universal is for the virtuous consciousness in faith, or truly in itself. It is not yet an actual but rather an abstract universality. In this consciousness itself, it is as purpose, and in the way of the world it is as the inner. For the way of the world, it is in this very determination that the universal also exhibits itself in virtue, for virtue just wills to put the good into practice; it does not pretend to give it actuality. This determinateness can also be 210regarded in this way, that the good, while it emerges in the struggle with the way of the world, thereby exhibits itself as existing for an other and not as something existing in and for itself, for otherwise it would not want to give itself its truth by means of conquering its opposite. The good is only at first for an other, which means the same as what was shown in the previous and opposite way of regarding the matter, namely, that the good is an abstraction which only has reality in and for itself in those relationships themselves.

385. The good, or the universal as it here comes on the scene, are what are called gifts, abilities, powers. It is a mode of the spiritual in which the spiritual is represented as a universal; it requires the principle of individuality to bring it to life and give it movement, and it has its actuality in this, its individuality. This universal is well used by this principle insofar as it is deployed in the consciousness of virtue, and it is misused by it as far as it is deployed in the way of the world – it is a passive instrument, ruled by the hand of free individuality. It is indifferent to the use that individuality makes of it, and it can be misused to bring out an actuality which is that instrument's own destruction, or bring out a lifeless matter which lacks its own self-sufficiency and which can be formed in all kinds of ways, even all the way down to its own ruin.

386. While this universal is in the same way at the disposal of the virtuous consciousness just as it is at the disposal of the way of the world, it is not foreseeable whether virtue, so equipped, will triumph over vice. The weapons are the same; they are these abilities and powers. To be sure, virtue has set up an ambush with its faith in the original unity of its purpose and the essence of the way of the world, a unity which during the course of the fight is supposed to attack the enemy from the rear and accomplish that purpose in itself. But by doing so, the result is that the knight of virtue's own doing and struggle turn out in fact to be mere shadow-boxing,¹³⁰ something which he cannot take seriously because he holds that his real strength consists in the good's existing in and for itself, i.e., in the good accomplishing itself – it is shadow-boxing which he dare not even allow to become serious. This is so because what he turns against the enemy and which he then both finds turned against himself and which he dares to put at risk of deterioration and damage in its own self as well as in the enemy, is not supposed to be the good itself. He fights to preserve the good and to put it into practice, but what is put at risk are only indifferent gifts and abilities. Yet these indifferent gifts and abilities are in fact the very universal itself as utterly devoid of the individuality which is supposed to be sustained and actualized through the struggle. – However, through the struggle, what is at stake is at the same time already immediately realized, and it is the in-itself, the universal. Its actualization means only that at the same time it is supposed to be for an other. The two aspects mentioned above, according to which the universal became an abstraction, are no 211longer separated, but rather, in and through the struggle, the good is posited especially in both modes. – However, the virtuous consciousness enters into its struggle with the way of the world as a struggle against something opposed to the good. What the way of the world offers to the virtuous consciousness is the universal, and it offers it not only as an abstract universal but as a universal brought to life by individuality and which is for an other, or the actual good. Where virtue comes to grips with the way of the world, it always meets with those places which are themselves the existence of the good. It is the good, which as the in-itself of the way of the world is inseparably intertwined with everything in the appearance of the way of the world, and which also has its existence in the actuality of the way of the world. For virtue, the way of the world is thus invulnerable. But all the moments which virtue itself was supposed to put at risk and all those which it was supposed to sacrifice are just those existences of the good which are thereby inviolable relationships. The struggle can thus only be an oscillation between preservation and sacrifice, or instead, what can come to pass is neither a sacrifice of what is one's own, nor an injury to what is. Virtue is not only like the combatant whose sole concern in the fight is to keep his sword shiny; rather, it was in order to preserve its weapons that virtue started the fight. Not only can it not use its own weapons, it also must preserve intact those of its enemy and protect them against virtue itself, for they are all noble parts of the good on behalf of which it went into the fight in the first place.

387. In contrast, to this enemy the essence is not the in-itself; rather, the essence is individuality. Its power is thus the negative principle, for which nothing endures or is absolutely sacred but which can risk and bear the loss of everything and anything. Thereby, to itself, victory is in its own self guaranteed just as much as it is guaranteed by the contradiction in which its opponent entangles himself. What for virtue is in itself is to the way of the world only for the way of the world itself. The latter is free-standing from each of those moments which are firmly fixed for virtue and to which virtue is bound. As a result, the way of the world has that kind of moment in its power so that such a moment counts for it only as something it can sublate with the same ease as it can allow it to continue to exist, and it can do the same to the knight of virtue who is bound to that moment. This knight of virtue cannot shake himself loose from that moment as he might from a cloak thrown round him, where he could set himself free simply by leaving it behind. The knight of virtue cannot do that since to himself such a moment is the essence which is not to be surrendered.

388. Finally, the hope is in itself futile that the good in-itself is cunningly supposed to attack the way of the world from behind. The way of the world is the self-certain, alert consciousness which never lets itself be attacked from behind; rather, it stands on its guard in all directions, since everything is for it and stands before it. But if the good in-itself is for its enemy, it is in the struggle we have seen. 212However, insofar as the good is not for its enemy but rather is in itself, it is the passive instrument of gifts and abilities, mere matter without actuality. If one were to represent the good as existing, it would be a sleeping consciousness remaining somewhere off stage, who knows where?

389. Virtue is therefore defeated by the way of the world because virtue's purpose is in fact the abstract non-actual essence, and because, taking actuality into consideration, what it does rests on differences which are only verbal. Virtue wanted to consist in bringing the good to actuality through the sacrifice of individuality, but the aspect of actuality is itself nothing but the aspect of individuality. The good was supposed to be what is in itself, to be opposed to what is, but the in-itself, taken according to its reality and truth is instead being itself. The in-itself is initially the abstraction of essence in relation to actuality. However, the abstraction is just what is not really, but is only as a difference for consciousness. However, this means that what is as a difference for consciousness is itself what is called actual, for the actual is what is essentially for an other, or it is being. However, the consciousness of virtue rests on this difference between the in-itself and being, a difference that has no truth. – The way of the world was supposed to be the inversion of the good because it would have individuality for its principle. However, this latter is the principle of actuality, for it is the very consciousness through which what is-in-itself is likewise for an other. The way of the world inverts the unchangeable, but it in fact inverts it from the nothingness of abstraction into the being of reality.

390. The way of the world is victorious over what constitutes virtue in opposition to it. It is victorious over that for which the essenceless abstraction is the essence. However, it is not victorious over something real but only over the creation of differences which are no differences, over this pompous talk about what is best for humanity and about the oppression of humanity, this incessant chattering about sacrifice for the good and the misuse of gifts. – Those kinds of ideal essences and purposes all slip away from sight since they are only empty words which elevate the heart but leave reason empty; they edify but erect nothing; they are only declamations whose content is this: The individual who pretends to act for such noble ends and who masters such admirable oratory counts to himself as an excellent creature¹³¹ – he gives himself and others a swelled head, although the swelling is only due to self-important puffery. – Ancient virtue had its own determinate, secure meaning since it had its basis, itself rich in content, in the substance of the people, and it had an actual, already existing good for its purpose. Hence, it was also oriented neither against actuality as a universal invertedness nor against the way of the world. However, the virtue which has been just considered has left that substance behind, and it is a virtue with no essence, a virtue only of ideas and 213words which have dispensed with that content. The emptiness of these oratorical flourishes in their struggle with the way of the world would be revealed at once if what its oratory really means were simply to be stated. – It is therefore presupposed that what these oratorical flourishes mean is well known. The demand to put this familiarity into words would either be fulfilled by a new torrent of fancy oratory, or by an appeal to the heart, which internal to itself is supposed to state what those fine words mean, which is to say, it would amount to an admission that it cannot in fact say what it means. – It seems that the culture of our own time has unconsciously come to a kind of certainty about the emptiness of that kind of fancy oratory, while any interest in those oratorical flourishes has disappeared along with any interest in the kind of self-puffery involved in them. This finds expression in the way such oratory nowadays only produces boredom.

391. The result which therefore emerges from this opposition consists in the following. Consciousness drops the representation of a good in-itself which yet could have no actuality; it casts it off as if that representation were only an empty cloak. In its struggles, consciousness has learned from experience that the way of the world is not as wicked as it seemed to be, for its actuality is the actuality of the universal. With this experience, the mediating middle of producing the good through the sacrifice of individuality falls by the wayside, for it is individuality which is exactly the actualization of what is-in-itself. The inversion itself ceases to be viewed as an inversion of goodness, for it is instead the very inverting of the good itself as mere purpose into actuality. The movement of individuality is the reality of the universal.

392. However, what in fact has been just as much defeated and which has vanished is what as the way of the world stood opposed to the consciousness of the existing-in-itself. There the being-for-itself of individuality opposed the essence, or the universal, and it appeared as an actuality separated from being-in-itself. However, while it has turned out that actuality is in undivided unity with the universal, the being-for-itself of the way of the world likewise proves to be nothing more than just a point of view, just like the in-itself of virtue is itself only a point of view. The individuality of the way of the world may well think it acts only for itself or in its own self-interest, but it is better than it thinks; its doing is at the same time a universal doing which is in-itself. However much it acts in its own self-interest, it simply does not know what it is doing, and however much it affirms that all men act in their own self-interest, still it only asserts that all men are not really aware of what acting is. – However much it acts for itself, still what this does is just to bring forth into actuality what is existing-in-itself, which is therefore the purpose of being-for-itself, which in turn thinks it is opposed to the in-itself. – Its empty cleverness, as well as its finely tuned explanations which know how to point out that self-interest surfaces everywhere, have likewise themselves all vanished, just as the purpose of the in-itself and its fancy oratory has also done.

214393. Therefore, what is going-on¹³²with individuality is an end in itself, and the use of powers, along with the game of giving them outward expression is what gives life to what otherwise would be the dead in-itself. The in-itself is not an abstract universal without existence, not something which is never accomplished. Rather, it is immediately itself this present moment and this actuality of the processes of individuality.

C. Individuality, Which, to Itself, is Real in and for Itself

394. Self-consciousness has now grasped the concept of itself, which was initially only our concept of it, namely, that in its certainty of itself, it is all reality, and its purpose and essence henceforth consist in the self-moving permeation of the universal – of its gifts and abilities – and individuality. The singular moments of this fulfillment and permeation, prior to the unity into which they have come together, are the purposes which have been considered up until this point. As abstractions and chimeras, what has vanished are those moments which belonged to those first empty shapes of spiritual self-consciousness, which themselves had their truth only in what was fancied¹³³ as the being of the heart, the imagination, and rhetoric. They did not have their truth in reason, which is now in and for itself certain of its reality and no longer seeks to bring out itself as a purpose in opposition to immediately existent actuality. Rather, it has the category as such as the object of its consciousness. – To be specific, it is the determination of self-consciousness existing for itself, or negative self-consciousness which was the determination in which reason came on the scene and which is sublated. This self-consciousness came upon an actuality that would be its negative, and it was, to itself, to have first realized its purpose through sublating that actuality. However, while purpose and being-in-itself have proven themselves to be the same as being for others and the actuality which it came upon, truth no longer parts with certainty. – Now the posited purpose is supposed to be taken as the certainty of itself, and the actualization of the posited purpose is supposed to be taken as the truth; or the purpose is supposed to be taken for the truth, and the actuality is supposed to be taken for the certainty – but rather the essence and the purpose in and for itself is the certainty of immediate reality itself, the permeation of being-in-itself and being-for-itself, of the universal and individuality. The doing is in its own self its own truth and actuality, and the 215exhibition or expression of individuality is, to itself, its purpose in and for itself.

395. With this concept, self-consciousness has thus returned into itself from out of the opposed determinations which the category had for self-consciousness and from out of the opposed determinations in the way self-consciousness related itself to the category, as observing consciousness and then as active self-consciousness. Self-consciousness has the pure category itself for its object, or it is the category which has become conscious of itself. The account self-consciousness has with its previous forms is now closed. They lie behind it, forgotten; they do not confront it as its given world; rather, they develop themselves within themselves as transparent moments. Nonetheless, in its consciousness, they still fall apart into a movement of distinct moments which have not yet been comprehensively combined into their substantial unity. However, in all of these moments, self-consciousness clings firmly to the simple unity of being and self which is its genus.

396. Consciousness has thereby cast aside all opposition and all the conditions for its doing. It begins anew from itself, not by directing itself towards an other but by directing itself towards itself. While individuality is actuality in its own self, the material for having an effect and the purpose of the doing lies in the doing itself. The doing thus has the appearance of the movement of a circle, which within itself set itself into motion and moves freely in the void, and which, as unimpeded now both enlarges and contracts and is fully satisfied in playing such a game within itself and with itself. The meaning of the element in which individuality exhibits its shape is that of a pure absorption of this shape. It is simply the light of day to which consciousness wishes to show itself. The doing alters nothing and opposes nothing; it is the pure form of translating not having been seen into having been seen, and the content brought into daylight which is exhibited there is itself nothing but what this doing already is in itself. This doing is in itself; this is its form as the conceived unity,¹³⁴ and it is actual. This is its form as existing unity; doing itself is the content only when it is in this determination of simplicity as contrasted to the determination of its transition and its movement.

a. The Spiritual Kingdom of Animals and Deception; or the Crux of the Matter (die Sache selbst)

397.216 First of all, this individuality which is real in itself is again singular and determinate. The absolute reality which it knows itself to be is, as it will become aware, therefore the abstract universal which is without fulfillment and without content and is only the empty thought of this category. – It remains to be seen how this concept of individuality which is real in itself determines itself within its moments, and how, to itself, individuality's concept of itself enters into its consciousness.

398. The concept of this individuality (in the way that individuality, as such individuality, is for itself all reality) is initially a result. It has not yet displayed its movement and reality, and it is here immediately posited as simple being-in-itself. However, negativity, which is the same as what appears as movement, is in the simple being in itself as determinateness, and being, or the simple in-itself, becomes a determinate extent.¹³⁵ Individuality thus comes on the scene as an original determinate nature. It comes on the scene as original nature, for individuality is in itself – as original determinate, for the negative is in the in-itself and as a result the in-itself is a quality. However, this restriction on being cannot limit the doing of consciousness, for this latter is here an unqualified relating of itself to itself. The relation to an other, which would be a restriction of it, is sublated. The original determinateness of nature is thus only a simple principle – a transparent universal element in which individuality likewise remains free and self-equal as it unfolds its differences, and as it is without hindrance in pure reciprocity with itself in its actualization. In the same way indeterminate animal life injects the breath of life into the element of water or air or earth, within these more determinate principles, and immerses all of its moments in them, but nevertheless, notwithstanding the restriction of the elements, keeps those moments in its own control, preserves itself in its oneness, and remains, as this particular organization, the same universal animal life.

399. This determinate original nature of consciousness, which remains free and whole within that nature, appears as the immediate, sole, and proper content of what is, to the individual, the purpose. To be sure, the content is determinate content, but it is only content to the extent that we consider being-in-itself in isolation. However, in truth it is reality permeated with individuality, or 217actuality in the way that consciousness, as singular, initially has it in its own self, namely, as existing but not yet posited as acting. However, for the doing, that determinateness is on the one hand not a restriction which it would want to transcend; this is so because if it is regarded as an existing quality, then it is the simple color of the element within which it moves itself. However, on the other hand, it is only in [the sphere of] being that negativity is determinateness, but the doing is itself nothing but negativity. In the acting individuality, determinateness has thus been dissolved into utter negativity, or into the embodiment¹³⁶ of all determinateness.

400. Within the doing and within the consciousness of acting,¹³⁷ the simple original nature now enters into the difference which belongs to the consciousness of acting. At first, the doing is an object in the way that the object still belonged to consciousness, an object which is present as purpose, and as thus opposed to an actuality which is present. The other moment is the purpose's movement represented as motionless, the actualization as the relation of the purpose to the wholly formal actuality, thereby the representation of the transition itself, or the mediating middle. Finally, the third moment is the object in the way that it is no longer the purpose of which the actor is immediately conscious as his own purpose. Rather, it is the object as it has emerged from the actor to be outside of him and to be for him as an other. – However, according to the concept of this sphere, these various aspects are now to be held on to so that the content in them remains the same and so that no difference enters, neither the difference between individuality and being per se, nor that between purpose as opposed to individuality as original nature, nor that of purpose as opposed to the present actuality, and likewise neither that between the mediating middle as opposed to actuality as absolute purpose, nor that between effectuated actuality as opposed to the purpose, or to the original nature, or to the mediating middle.

401. First of all, therefore, the original determinate nature of individuality, its immediate essence, is not yet posited as acting and thus is called a particular ability, talent, character, and so forth. This distinctive tincture of spirit is to be regarded as the individual content of the purpose and to be regarded solely as reality. If one represents consciousness as going beyond all that and as wanting to bring some other content to actuality, then one represents it as a nothing working its way into nothing. – Furthermore, this original essence is not only the content of the purpose; it is also in itself the actuality which otherwise appears as the given material of the doing, as just found, and which is to be fashioned into actuality. The doing is, in particular, the pure translation of the form of the being not yet exhibited into the form of the being that is exhibited. The being-in-itself of the former, the actuality opposed to consciousness, has degenerated into that of an only empty semblance. As it determines itself into acting, this consciousness thus is not to 218let itself be led astray by the semblance of the present actuality, and, from aimlessly roving about in empty thoughts and purposes, it just as much has to bind itself to the original content of its essence. – To be sure, this original content is just for this consciousness as consciousness has actualized the content. However, what has fallen by the wayside is the difference between a content which is only for consciousness internally and an actuality existing in itself which is external to consciousness. – Only because what is for consciousness is what consciousness is in itself must it act, or acting is just the coming to be of spirit as consciousness. What it is in itself, it therefore knows on the basis of its own actuality. Hence, the individual cannot know what he is prior to having brought himself to actuality through action. – But he thereby seems not to be able to determine the purpose of his doing before he has taken the action. However, at the same time, while he is consciousness, he must, prior to the action, have the action itself as wholly his own, i.e., the purpose in front of him. The individual who sets himself to act therefore seems to be situated in a circle in which every moment already presupposes the other. It thus seems that he is incapable of finding a beginning for his actions because he only gets to know his original essence, which must be his purpose, first from his deed, but, in order to act, he must have the purpose beforehand. However, precisely for that reason, he has to begin immediately and, whatever the circumstances may be, without any further reservations about beginnings, middles, and ends, to set himself to act, since his essence and his nature (which is-in-itself) are beginning, middle, and end all rolled into one. As beginning, the individual's nature is present in the circumstances of action, and the interest which the individual finds in some particular thing is the answer already given to the question: Whether he should act and what is here to be done? For what seems to be an actuality only found is in itself his original nature, which only has the semblance of that of a being – a semblance which lies in the very concept of a self-estranging doing – but which, as his original nature, is expressed in the interest which his original nature finds in it. – Likewise the how, or the mediating middle, is determined in and for itself. By the same token, talent is nothing but determinate original individuality regarded as the inner mediating middle, or the transition of purpose into actuality. However, the actual mediating middle and the real transition are the unity of talent with the nature of the matter at issue present in the interest. In the mediating middle, the former (talent) represents the aspect of acting, while the latter (the nature of the matter at issue), represents the aspect of content. Both are individuality itself as the permeation of being and doing. What is thus present are the given circumstances, which in themselves are the individual's original nature. Next, there is the interest that posits those found circumstances as its own, or as purpose. Finally there is the linkage and the sublation of these opposites in the mediating middle. This linkage itself still falls 219within consciousness, and the whole which has been just now considered is only one side of an opposition. This remaining semblance of opposition is sublated through the transition itself, or through the mediating middle – for the mediating middle is the unity of the outer and the inner, the contrary of the determinateness which it has as an inner mediating middle, and it likewise sublates them and posits itself, this unity of doing and being, as the outer, as individuality itself actually having come to be, i.e., as individuality which is posited for individuality itself as the existing. In this way, neither as circumstances, nor as purpose, nor as means, nor as a work¹³⁸ does the entire action ever step out from itself.

402. However, in the case of a work the difference among the original natures seems to come on the scene. The work, like the original nature it expresses, is something determinate, for negativity, as an existing actuality freed from the doing, is as a quality in the work. However, consciousness determines itself over and against the work as what has in it determinateness as negativity, full stop, or as doing. Consciousness is thus the universal confronting the work's determinateness; it can therefore compare one kind of work with another, and, from that, can grasp individuality itself as different individualities. It can grasp the individual who, in his work, is more comprehensive, either as being a stronger energy of will or as a richer nature, i.e., a nature whose original determinateness is less restricted – in contrast, it can grasp another individual as a weaker and more meager nature. In contrast to this purely inessential difference of quantity, good and bad would express an absolute difference, but this does not occur here. Whatever would be taken one way or another is in the same manner the goings-on, the self-presentation, and the self-expression of an individuality, and for that reason, all of it is good, and, in effect, one could not say would be bad here. What would be called a bad work is the individual life of a determinate nature realizing itself in the work. It would only be debased into a bad work by a comparative thought, which is itself empty, for it goes beyond the essence of the work, which is to be a self-expression of an individuality seeking and demanding who knows what. – The comparative thought could only concern itself with the difference previously mentioned, but that difference, being one of magnitude, is in itself an inessential difference, especially so in this case, where it would be various works or individualities which would be compared with each other. However, these individualities have nothing to do with each other; each relates itself only to itself. The original nature is alone what is in-itself, or it is it alone which could be laid down as a standard for evaluating the work or vice versa. However, both correspond to each other; there is nothing for individuality that does not come about through individuality, or there is no actuality, 220not individuality's nature and its activities, nor any activities nor an in-itself of individuality which is not actual, and it is only these moments which are to be compared.

403. Consequently, there is in this matter neither exaltation nor lament nor remorse. Anything of that sort arises from imagining another content and another in-itself than what is in the individual's original nature and the way it is to be worked out in actuality. Whatever the individual does and whatever happens to him, it is he who has done it, and it is himself. He can only have the consciousness of having purely translated his own self from the night of possibility into the daylight of the present, from the abstract in-itself into the meaning of actual being, and he can have the certainty that what to him is to be found in the latter is nothing but what lay dormant in the former. The consciousness of this unity is to be sure likewise a comparison, but what is compared only has the very semblance of opposition. It is a semblance of form which, for the self-consciousness of reason (that individuality in its own self is actuality) is nothing more than mere semblance. Therefore, because the individual knows that he can find in his actuality nothing but its unity with him, or can find only self-certainty in its truth, and because he thus always achieves his end, the individual can experience only joy in itself.

404. This is the concept that consciousness, which is certain of its concept as the absolute permeation of individuality and being, makes of itself. Let us see whether this concept is confirmed by its experience and whether its reality thereby corresponds to it. The work is the reality which consciousness gives itself; it is that in which the individual is for the individual¹³⁹ what he is in itself, so that the consciousness for which the individual comes to be in the work is not a particular consciousness but rather universal consciousness. In his work, he has placed himself outside of himself and into the element of universality, into the determinateless space of being. The consciousness which steps back from its work is in fact the universal consciousness – because it becomes absolute negativity, or activity within this opposition – which confronts its work, which is determinate. As a work, consciousness thus goes beyond itself, and consciousness is itself the determinateless space which does not find itself fulfilled in its work. However much its unity was previously sustained in the concept, still this took place simply as a result of the sublation of the work as an existing work. But the work is supposed to be, and it remains to be seen how individuality will sustain its universality in the work's being and how it will know how to satisfy itself therein. – Initially, what is up for examination is the work for itself which has come to be. It has received the whole nature of individuality; hence, its being is itself an activity in which all differences permeate each other and dissolve into each other. The work is thus cast out into a stable existence 221in which the determinateness of the original nature in fact plays the part of itself against other determinate natures and intervenes in their affairs, just as they in their turn intervene in the affairs of others, and within this universal movement, each loses itself as a vanishing moment. However much it is in the concept of individuality which is real in and for itself that all the moments, circumstances, purpose, means, and actualization are all the same as each other, and however much the original determinate nature only counts as a universal element, still, while this element becomes objective being, its determinateness as such a determinateness reaches the light of day in the work, and the individuality receives its truth in its dissolution. This dissolution exhibits itself in detail so that the individual, as this individual, has, to himself, in this determinateness, become actual. However, this determinateness is not only the content of actuality but is just as much the form of actuality, or actuality as such actuality is the very determinateness which consists in being opposed to self-consciousness. From this standpoint, actuality exhibits itself as the actuality which has vanished from the concept, or which exhibits itself as only an alien actuality which one only finds oneself. The work is, i.e., it is for other individualities, and it is for them an alien actuality in whose place they must posit their own actuality in order to give themselves through their activity the consciousness of their unity with actuality. That is, their interest through their original nature is placed¹⁴⁰ into the work, is something other than a proper¹⁴¹ interest in this work, and the work is thereby transformed into something different. The work is thus something utterly transitory which is erased by the counter-play of other powers and interests and which instead exhibits the reality of individuality itself as disappearing rather than as achieved.

405. To consciousness, in its work the opposition of being and doing emerges, an opposition which in the earlier shapes of consciousness was at once the beginning of action but which is here only a result. However, that opposition has in fact likewise been established as the basis by consciousness as individuality setting itself to action as real in itself. This is so because the determinate original nature as the in-itself was presupposed for action, and the original nature's content was pure achievement for the sake of achievement. However, the pure doing is the self-equal form which is thereby not equal to the determinateness of the original nature. Here, as is usual, it is a matter of indifference which of the two is called concept and which is called reality. The original nature is what has been thought, or it is the in-itself confronting the doing within which that original nature initially has its reality; or the original nature is the being both of individuality as such individuality and of individuality as its work. However, the doing is the original concept as absolute transition, or as becoming. In its work, consciousness learns from its own experience about this inadequation¹⁴² of concept and reality that lies in the essence of consciousness. Therefore, it is in its work that, to itself, consciousness comes to be as it is in truth, and its empty concept of itself vanishes.

222406. In this ground-level contradiction in the work, which is the truth of this individuality (which, to itself, is real in itself), all of individuality's aspects again come on the scene as contradicting each other, or the work is taken as the content of the whole individuality turning out from doing, which is the negative unity that holds all the moments captive, into being. The work frees those moments, and in the element of stable existence, those moments become indifferent to each other. Concept and reality thus separate themselves from each other as purpose and that which is original essentiality. It is contingent that the purpose has a genuine essence, or that the in-itself is made into a purpose. By the same token, concept and reality again separate from each other as the transition into actuality and as the purpose; or it is contingent that the means expressing the purpose are the ones chosen. Finally, these inner moments taken all together, whether they have a unity in themselves or not – the individual's doings are again contingent with regard to actuality as such. It is fortune that decides in favor of a badly determined purpose and badly chosen means just as much as it decides against them.

407. However much now, to consciousness in its work, what comes to be is the opposition between willing and achievement, between purpose and means, and, again, between this innerness taken all together and actuality itself, which in general encompasses the contingency of its doing within itself, still the unity and the necessity of this consciousness is also just as present. This latter aspect overlaps with the former, and the experience of the contingency of the doing is itself only a contingent experience. The necessity of the doing thereby consists in the purpose being purely and simply related to actuality, and this unity is the concept of doing. Action is undertaken because the doing is in and for itself the essence of actuality. In the work, to be sure, there turns out to be a contingency which contrasts being achieved to willing and achieving, and this experience, which seems as if it must count as the truth, contradicts that concept of action. But if we look at the content of this experience in its completeness, then that content is the work which is vanishing. What sustains itself is not the vanishing itself, but rather it is the vanishing itself which is both actual and bound up with the work, and it vanishes with the work. The negative, together with the positive which is its negation, itself perishes.

408. This vanishing of the vanishing lies in the concept of individuality that is real in itself, for it is objective actuality which is that in which the work, or what is in the work, vanishes, and it is objective actuality which was supposed to give what was called “experience” its supremacy over individuality's concept of itself. However, objective actuality is a moment which, within this consciousness itself, also no longer has any truth for itself. Truth consists only in the unity of the work with the doing, and the true work is only that unity of being and doing, of willing and accomplishing. To consciousness, 223in virtue of the certainty lying at the basis of its acting, the actuality opposed to this certainty is the actuality itself that only is for consciousness. To consciousness, which as self-consciousness has returned into itself and to which all opposition has vanished, the opposition can no longer take this form of its being-for-itself over and against actuality. Rather, the opposition and the negativity which come to light in the work thereby affects more than just the content of the work or of consciousness but rather also affects actuality as such actuality and thereby affects the opposition present in that actuality through actuality itself and thereby affects the work's vanishing. In this manner, consciousness thus reflects itself into itself from out of its transitory works and affirms its concept and certainty as the existing and the enduring vis-à-vis the experience of the contingency of the doing. It experiences in fact its concept, within which actuality is only a moment, or is something for consciousness, and not what is in-and-for-itself. It experiences actuality as a vanishing moment, and actuality thus counts, to itself, only as being, full stop, whose universality is the same as its doing. This unity is the true work; it is the crux of the matter, which unreservedly affirms itself and is experienced as what endures, independently of the contingency of the individual's doing and of the contingency of circumstances, means, and actuality.

409. The crux of the matter is opposed to these moments only inasmuch as they are supposed to be valid in isolation, but it is essentially their unity as the permeation of actuality and individuality. It is to the same extent a doing, and, as doing, it is a pure doing, and thereby is to the same extent the doing of this individual. As still belonging with the individual, it is this doing, as a purpose, in opposition to actuality. Likewise, it is the transition from this determinateness into an opposing determinateness and finally into an actuality that is present for consciousness. The crux of the matter thereby expresses the spiritual essentiality in which all these moments are sublated as valid for themselves, and therefore valid only as universal moments, and in which the certainty that consciousness has of itself is, to consciousness, an objective essence, a crux of the matter.¹⁴³ It is an object born out of self-consciousness as its own object, without thereby ceasing to be a free-standing, genuine object. – The thing¹⁴⁴ of sensuous-certainty and perception now has its significance for self-consciousness alone. On this rests the difference between an ordinary thing and a matter at issue.¹⁴⁵ – Running its course within this will be a movement which corresponds to the movement in sensuous-certainty and perception.

410. Therefore, in the crux of the matter as the permeation of individuality and objectivity which has objectively come to be, to self-consciousness, its true concept of self-consciousness has come to be, or self-consciousness has arrived at a consciousness of its substance. As it is here, it is at the same time a consciousness of its substance, or a consciousness that has now come to be, and it is thus immediate consciousness. This is the determinate way in which 224spiritual essence is present here and has not yet progressed to the point of becoming truly real substance. In this immediate consciousness of the crux of the matter, the crux of the matter itself has the form of simple essence, which, as universal, contains all its various moments within itself and which accords with them, but it is also again indifferent to them as determinate moments. It is free-standing for itself,¹⁴⁶ and, as this free-standing, simple, abstract crux of the matter, it counts as the essence. On the one hand, the various moments of the original determinateness, or what constitutes this individual's crux of the matter, namely, his purposes, his means, his acts and his actuality, are for this consciousness singular moments which it can abandon and surrender vis-à-vis the crux of the matter. However, on the other hand, they all have the crux of the matter for their essence only so that the crux of the matter finds itself to be the abstract universal in each of these various moments and can be their predicate. The crux of the matter is not yet the subject, but rather those moments count as subjects because they fall within the bounds of singularity as such; however, the crux of the matter is first just the simple universal. It is the genus which is to be found in all these moments as its species and which is likewise free-standing from all of them.

411. Consciousness is called honest which on the one hand has arrived at this idealism which the crux of the matter expresses, and on the other hand has the truth as this formal universality in the crux of the matter. To the honest consciousness, what it has to deal with is always the crux of the matter, and in its dealings with it, it meanders within its various moments or species. While it does not attain the crux of the matter in one of these moments or in one meaning, as a result it gets a hold of it in some other moment or meaning, thereby always gaining the satisfaction which, according to its concept, is supposed to be its lot. However things may happen to turn out, the honest consciousness achieves and attains the crux of the matter, for as this universal genus of those moments, the crux of the matter is the predicate of all of them.

412. Even if the honest consciousness does not bring a purpose into actuality, he has nonetheless willed the purpose, i.e., he makes the purpose as purpose, as the pure doing that does nothing, into the crux of the matter. He can therefore console himself by saying that something has nonetheless always been impelled and done. Since the universal itself subsumes the negative, or the vanishing, under itself, it is also the case that if the work is wiped out, then that too is something he did. He has incited others to do this, and he finds satisfaction in the vanishing of his actuality in the way that wayward boys themselves take a certain pleasure in getting spanked for the simple reason that they are its cause. Or, if he has not even tried to work out the crux of the matter and in fact has done nothing at all, it is because he did not want to do it. The crux of the matter is to himself the very unity of his decision and reality; he asserts that actuality could be nothing else than what matters to him. – If finally something of interest to him has come to be without his own involvement in it, then to himself it is this actuality itself which is the crux of the matter just because of the interest that he himself finds in it, 225which is quite independent of whether or not he brought about that actuality. However much it is good luck that has personally befallen him, still he counts it as his deed and his desert; however much it is just a worldly event having nothing further to do with him, he still makes it just as much his own; and an interest unbound to any deed counts to himself as his taking a stand, which he was either for or against, and for which he either fought or supported.

413. As it has become clear, the honesty of this consciousness, along with the satisfaction that it everywhere experiences, consists in its not getting its thoughts together about the crux of the matter. The crux of the matter is to himself just what is his crux of the matter just as much as it is not a work at all, or it is just as much pure doing as it is empty purpose or perhaps an actuality unencumbered by deeds. It makes one meaning after another into the subject of this predicate, and then it forgets one after the other. Now in the mere “having either willed it or else not even having wanted to,” the crux of the matter assumes the significance of both an empty purpose and the unity of willing and achieving in thought alone.¹⁴⁷ The consolation for the eradication of the purpose, whether willed or whether simply done, as well as the satisfaction of having given others something to do, makes the pure doing or the entirely bad work into the essence, for what is called a bad work is no work at all. Finally, where a stroke of good luck means one just finds the actuality, then what simply is (without a deed to its name) becomes the crux of the matter.

414. However, the truth of this honesty is that it is not as honest as it seems, for it cannot be so thoughtless as to let these various moments in fact come undone from each other in that way. Rather, it must have an immediate consciousness of their opposition because they are so plainly related to each other. The pure doing is essentially this individual's doing, and this doing is likewise essentially an actuality, or a fact. Conversely, actuality essentially is only as his doing as well as a doing, full stop, and just as his doing is at the same time only as a doing, full stop, it is also actuality. While to himself, what seems to be his concern is only the crux of the matter as abstract actuality, it is also the case that he is concerned with it as his doing. However, while, to him, just as much as it has only to do with what's going on,¹⁴⁸ he is thereby not really serious about the whole affair. Rather, to himself, he is concerned with a real fact¹⁴⁹ and that real fact as his own. While finally it seems to be an issue of only willing what is his real fact¹⁵⁰ and only willing his doing, he again is concerned with what is the real fact, full stop,¹⁵¹ that is, with an actuality that endures in and for itself.

415. Just as the crux of the matter and its moments appear here as content, they are likewise also necessary as forms in consciousness. The moments make their appearance as content only in order to vanish, and each gives way to the other. Consequently, they must be present in their determinateness as sublated, but, sublated in that way, they are aspects of consciousness itself. The crux of the matter is present as the in-itself, or the in-itself's 226reflection into itself. However, the suppression of the moments by each other is expressed in consciousness so that they are not posited in itself in consciousness but only for an other. One of the moments of the content is exposed by consciousness to the light of day and is represented as being for others. But consciousness is at the same time reflected into itself, and thus what is opposed to it is just as present within consciousness, and consciousness retains it for itself as its own. At the same time, it is not that any one of those moments would only be placed outside of consciousness and another would be retained within the innerness of consciousness. Rather, consciousness alternates between them since it has to make one of them into what is essential for itself, and has to make the other moment into what is essential for others. The whole is the self-moving permeation of individuality and the universal. However, because this whole for consciousness is present only as the simple essence and thereby as the abstraction of the crux of the matter, its moments, as separated moments, fall outside of the whole and thus come undone from each other, and, as the whole, it [the whole] is exhausted and exhibited¹⁵² only through the dividing alternation between putting out on display and of retaining for itself. While in this alternation consciousness has one moment for itself as essential in its reflection, but another only externally in consciousness, or for others, what thus comes on the scene is a game individualities play with each other, in which they reciprocally deceive each other as well as themselves, so that each is equally deceiver and deceived.

416. An individuality therefore sets himself to put something into practice.¹⁵³ He seems thereby to get to the point about the crux of the matter. He acts, and in that action he comes to be for others, and to himself it seems that this all has to do with actuality. Others therefore take his doing as an interest in the crux of the matter as such and to be an interest in the aim of putting into practice the crux of the matter as it is in itself, regardless of whether this is done by himself or by the others. While they accordingly point out that the crux of the matter has already been put into practice by themselves (or, if not, they offer their assistance and actually provide it), still the former consciousness is instead far beyond the point where they think he is supposed to be. What interests him about the crux of the matter is what it has to do with his own goings-on,¹⁵⁴ and by becoming fully aware that was what he meant by the crux of the matter, they find that they have been hoodwinked.¹⁵⁵ – However, their haste to offer their assistance in fact itself consisted in nothing but their own desire to see and to show off not the crux of the matter but only their own activities, i.e., they wanted to deceive the others in exactly the same manner in which they complain about having been deceived themselves. – While it has now been put back fully on view that what counts as the crux of the matter is his own goings-on and his alone, the play of his own powers, so consciousness seems to be engaged with its own essence for itself and not for others, or only to be concerned with doing as its own doing and not as the doings of others, and thereby permitting those others equally as much to do as they please with respect to the crux of the matter for them. But they are mistaken again; that consciousness is already somewhere else 227than where they thought it was. To this consciousness, this does not have to do with the thing's substantiality as something singular to him. Rather, it has to do with the thing's substantiality as a universal, something which is for everyone. Hence, that consciousness mixes itself into their doings and their works, and if consciousness can no longer take their work or their doings away from them, it at least takes an interest in their works by way of passing judgment on them. However much it gives them its stamp of approval and its praise, still this just means that in dealing with the work, it not only praises the work itself but at the same time praises its own generosity and its own moderation so that it does not spoil the work as a work through its reproach of it. In showing an interest in the work, it takes pleasure in itself in doing so. Likewise, to itself, the work that it reproached is welcomed just for this enjoyment of its own doing, which is the result of the reproach. However, those who hold that they have really been deceived by this kind of intrusion, as well as those who just pretend to be deceived, are instead themselves only wanting to deceive in the same way. They pretend that what they are engaged in is something that is only for themselves and in which their sole aim is to bring themselves and their own essence to fulfillment. Yet while they act and thereby present themselves to the light of day, they immediately contradict by their deed their very pretense of wanting to shut out the daylight, to keep out universal consciousness, and to keep out everyone else's participation. Actualization is instead a matter of putting into the universal element an exhibition of what is one's own in the universal element, through which what is one's own both becomes and indeed ought to become the fact of the matter at issue¹⁵⁶ for everyone.

417. There is therefore just as much deception of oneself and of others when what is at stake is supposed be the pure fact. A consciousness that brings into the open a fact¹⁵⁷ instead learns from experience that others come hurrying over like flies to freshly poured milk, and they too want to know themselves to be busily engaged with it. Likewise, those others then likewise learn from experience that this consciousness is not concerned with such a fact as an object but only with it insofar as the fact is his.¹⁵⁸ Conversely, however much it is only the doing itself, the use of powers and abilities, or the expression of this individuality, which is supposed to be the essential, still they all mutually learn from experience that everyone is on the move and considers himself invited, and that instead of a pure doing or a distinctive individual doing, there is something which is just as well for others, or it is a crux of the matter which has been brought into the open. The same happens in both cases, and it only takes on a different sense vis-à-vis what had been thereby accepted and supposed to count as valid. Consciousness experiences both aspects as equally essential moments, and it therein learns from experience about the nature of the crux of the matter, namely, that it is neither only a thing,¹⁵⁹ which would be opposed both to doing in general and to individual doing, nor is it doing which would be opposed to stable existence and would be the free genus of these moments as its species. Rather, it is an essence whose being is the doing of singular individuals and of all individuals, and whose doing is immediately for others, or it is a fact¹⁶⁰ and is only a fact insofar as it is the doing of each and all, the essence that is the essence of all essence, that is spiritual essence. What consciousness 228experiences is that no single one of these moments is the subject but rather that each one instead dissolves into the universal crux of the matter. Each of the moments of individuality, taken one after another, were in force for the mindlessness of this consciousness as subject, and now they gather themselves up into the simple individuality which, as this individuality, is just as immediately universal. As a result, the crux of the matter sheds the relation of the predicate and the determinateness of lifeless, abstract universality and is instead substance permeated by individuality. It is the subject within which individuality is just as much itself as much as it is this individual, as much as it is all individuals. It is the universal, which is a being only as this doing which is the doing of each and all. It is an actuality because this consciousness knows it as its own singular actuality and as the actuality of all. The pure crux of the matter is what was determined above as the category. It is being which is the I, or, the I which is being but as thinking, which still distinguishes itself from actual self-consciousness. However, the moments of actual self-consciousness are here posited as being one with the simple category itself to the extent that we designate the content of actual self-consciousness as purpose, doing, and actuality and designate its form as being-for-itself and being for an other. As a result, the category is at the same time all content.

b. Law-Giving Reason

418. In its simple being, spiritual essence is pure consciousness and is this self-consciousness. The original-determinate nature of the individual has lost its positive significance of being in itself the element and purpose of the individual's activity. It is only a sublated moment, and the individual is a self as the universal self. Conversely, the formal crux of the matter has its fulfillment in individuality distinguishing itself within itself in its doings, for the differences within individuality constitute the content of that universal. As the universal of pure consciousness, the category is in itself. It is just as much for itself, for the self of consciousness is just as much its moment. It is absolute being, for that universality is the simple self-equality of being.

419. What is the object to consciousness therefore has the meaning of being the true. It is, and it is valid in the sense that it is in and for itself and it is validly in force. It is the absolute fact of the matter¹⁶¹ which no longer suffers from the oppositions of certainty and its truth, the universal and the singular, purpose 229and its reality. Rather, its existence is the actuality and the doing of self-consciousness. This fact is thus the ethical substance, and the consciousness of it is ethical consciousness. Likewise, the object of this consciousness counts, to itself, as the true, for it unifies self-consciousness and being in one unity. It counts as the absolute, for self-consciousness neither can nor does it any longer want to transcend this object, for consciousness is therein at one with itself.¹⁶² It cannot go beyond the object, for the object is all being and all power – it does not will to do so, for the object is the self, or the willing of this self. The object is the real object in its own self as object, for it has in it the difference of consciousness. It divides itself into social estates¹⁶³ which are the determinate laws of the absolute essence. However, these social estates do not obscure the concept, for the moments of being, pure consciousness, and the self remain included within its bounds – a unity which constitutes the essence of these social estates and which no longer permits these moments in these differences to come undone from one another.

420. These laws or social estates of the ethical substance are immediately given recognition. Their origin and legitimacy cannot be questioned and something other than them cannot be sought, for such an other as the essence existing in and for itself, would only be self-consciousness itself. However, self-consciousness is nothing but this essence, for it is itself the being-for-itself of this essence, which for that very reason is the truth because it is just as much the self of consciousness as it is the in-itself of consciousness, or pure consciousness.

421. While self-consciousness knows itself as a moment of the being-for-itself of this substance, so does it therefore express the existence of the law within itself so that the healthy reason¹⁶⁴ immediately knows what is right and good. Just as it knows this immediately, the law is also immediately validly in force for it, and the law immediately states: This is right and good. In fact, this is right and good. The right and the good are determinate laws. That is the fulfilled crux of the matter full of content.

422. What is so immediately given must be just as much immediately accepted and reflected upon. Just as we had to see how what it was that sensuous-certainty immediately expressed as existing was constituted, we now still have to see just what constitutes the being which is expressed by this ethically immediate certainty or by the immediately existing social estates of ethical essence. Examples of a few such laws will demonstrate this, and while we take them in the form of pronouncements knowingly made by healthy reason,¹⁶⁵ we do not have to first bring along the moment which is to be claimed for them when they are considered as immediate ethical laws.

423. “Every one ought to speak the truth.” – When this is expressed as an unconditional duty, the condition will at once be added: If 230he knows the truth. The command will accordingly now state: Everyone should speak the truth, at all times according to his knowing and conviction of it. Healthy reason, which is just this ethical consciousness which immediately knows what is right and good, will also explain that this condition is already so closely linked with its universal pronouncements that it is how it meant that the command was to be taken. However, it thereby admits that it has instead already immediately violated the pronouncement in its own expression of it. It said: Each ought to speak the truth; however, it meant: One ought to speak the truth according to his knowing and conviction, i.e., it said something other than it meant, and saying something other than one means is what one calls “not speaking the truth.” The improved untruth, or the improved lack of adroitness, is now expressed: Each ought to speak the truth according to his knowing and conviction about it at the time. – However, therewith what is universally necessary, what is valid in itself, or what the proposition wanted to express is instead inverted into a complete contingency: Whether the truth will be spoken is left up to the contingency of whether I know it and can convince myself of it; and with that there is nothing further said, other than that it is a confused muddle of truth and falsity which ought to be said and relative to what one knows, intends, and comprehends. This contingency of content has universality only in the form of the proposition in which it is expressed; but as an ethical proposition, it promises a universal and necessary content, and it thus contradicts itself through the contingency of its content. – Finally, if the proposition were to be improved so that the contingency of knowing and conviction of the truth were to be dropped, and if it were that the truth is supposed to be known, then it would be a command that completely contradicts its starting point. Healthy rationality was at first supposed to have the ability to express the truth immediately; however, now what is being said is that it ought to know the truth, i.e., that it does not immediately know how to state the truth. – Viewed from the aspect of content, in the demand that we should know the truth, the proposition has fallen by the wayside, for this demand is related to knowing, full stop: One ought to know; therefore what is demanded instead is thus something which is free of every determinate content. However, the talk here was of a determinate content, or of a difference in ethical substance. But this immediate determination of ethical substance is the kind of content which was shown instead to be a matter of complete contingency, and when that content is thus elevated into universality and necessity so that knowing is expressed as the law, that content instead vanishes.

424. Another famous command is: Love thy neighbor as thyself. It is directed to a singular individual in a relationship with another singular individual, and it asserts it as a relationship between a singular individual and a singular individual, or as a 231relationship of sentiment. Active love – for an inactive love has no being and is for that reason surely not what is meant here – aims at removing an evil from someone and adding some good to him. To this end, the difference must be drawn between what is evil in regard to him,¹⁶⁶ what is the appropriate good vis-à-vis this evil, and what in general is his welfare; i.e., I must love him intelligently.¹⁶⁷ Unintelligent love will do him harm, perhaps even more so than hatred. However, intelligent, essential beneficence is in its richest and most important shape an intelligent and universal doing of the state – a doing compared with which what a singular individual does is in general something so trivial that it is hardly worth the trouble to talk about it. What the state does is of such great power that if the singular individual's activity were to oppose it and directly choose for himself the life of crime, or if out of love for another person he were to will that he cheat the universal out of its right and out of the share it has in him, then his doing would be entirely without utility and would be irresistibly destroyed. The only significance that remains to beneficence is that of sentiment, or that of a wholly singular act, an act of assistance in time of need which is itself just as contingent as it is momentary. Chance not only determines its occasion but also whether it amounts to a work at all, or whether it has not directly dissolved and instead inverted into evil. Therefore, acting for the welfare of another, which is expressed as necessary, is so constituted that maybe it can exist, also maybe not, and if quite contingently such a case turns up, it may perhaps turn out to be a work, perhaps even a good work, but then again perhaps not. This law thereby has no more universal content than did the first law which was considered, and it does not express something that is in and for itself, which, as an absolute ethical law, it is supposed to do; or, such laws stay fixed at the ought but have no actuality. They are not laws; they are only commands.

425. It is in fact clear from the nature of the crux of the matter that what must be waived is the appeal to a universal, absolute content, for every determinateness posited in the simple substance – and its essence is to be simple – is inadequate to it. In its simple absoluteness, the command itself expresses immediate ethical being. The difference which appears in it is a determinateness and thus a content subsumed under the absolute universality of this simple being. While appeal to an absolute content must thereby be waived, only formal universality which corresponds to this content, or does not contradict itself, can be adequate. Contentless universality is formal universality, and “absolute content” only signifies a difference that is no difference, or a complete absence of content.

426. All that remains for such law-giving is thus the pure form of universality, or in fact the tautology of the consciousness which confronts the content 232and is a knowing neither of what is nor of genuine content but is instead a knowing of the essence, or of the self-equality of such content.

427. The ethical essence is thereby not itself immediately a content but is only a standard for determining whether a content is capable of being a law on the basis of its simply not contradicting itself. Law-giving reason is demoted to a reason that only tests laws.

c. Reason as Testing Laws

428. A difference in the simple ethical substance is a contingency for that substance, a contingency which we saw arise in determinate commands as the contingency of knowing, actuality, and acts. The comparison of that simple being with its determinateness, which in turn did not correspond to that simple being, was made by us. The simple substance therein showed itself to be formal universality, or to be pure consciousness which, free-standing vis-à-vis the content, confronts it and is a knowing of it as determinate content. In this manner, this universality remains the same as the crux of the matter was. However, within consciousness this universality is an other; it no longer is the inert, utterly unthinking genus but is related to the particular and counts as its power and truth. – This consciousness initially seems to be the same testing which was formerly what we were doing, and its doing seems incapable of being anything else than what has already taken place, a comparison of the universal with the determinate, from which their inadequacy [to each other], just as it did previously, results. However, the relationship of content to universal is here something different because this universal has obtained a different significance. It is formal universality, something with which the determinate content is compatible, for within that universality the content is considered only in relation to itself. In our testing, the universal, solid substance stood over and against that determinateness, which developed itself as the contingency of the consciousness into which the substance entered. Here, one member of the comparison has vanished; the universal is no longer the existing substance validly in force, or the right in and for itself, but is rather simple knowing or form which compares a content only with itself and which looks at it in order to see whether it is a tautology. Laws are no longer given laws but are tested, and for the consciousness that is doing the testing, the laws have already been given. It takes up their content as the content simply is, without (as we did) going into any consideration of the content's individuality and contingency sticking on to its actuality. Instead, it comes to a standstill in the face of the 233command as a command, and it conducts itself just as simply towards this command, as the command is its standard.

429. However, for that very reason this testing does not get very far. Just because the criterion is a tautology and is indifferent with regard to the content, it incorporates one content into itself with the same ease that it does its opposite. – Take the question: Ought it be a law in and for itself that there should be property? In and for itself, not because of utility for other ends? The ethical essentiality consists precisely in the law's being only in agreement with itself¹⁶⁸ and, through this agreement with itself, being supposed to be grounded in its own essence and not supposed to be conditional. Property in and for itself does not contradict itself; it is an isolated determinateness, or a determinateness posited as being in agreement with itself. It would be no more self-contradictory to have no property at all, or no dominion over things, or to have a community of goods. That something belongs to nobody, or that it belongs to the first-comer who takes possession of it, or that it belongs to everyone together and belongs to each according to his need, or that it is owned in equal portions, is a simple determinateness, a formal thought, like its opposite, property. – However much a thing under no dominion is regarded as an object necessary for needs, still it is necessary that it become the possession of some singular individual, and it would be contradictory instead to make the free-standingness¹⁶⁹ of the thing into a law. However, by “absence of dominion over things,” what is meant is not the absolute absence of dominion, but that the thing ought to come into someone's possession in accordance with the singular individual's needs, namely, not in order to be preserved but to be immediately used. However, a concern for need so totally in accordance with contingency is contradictory to the nature of the conscious beings about which we are speaking here, for such a being must represent his need in the form of universality, must be concerned for his whole existence, and he must acquire for himself a lasting good. The thought that a thing is contingently to be awarded to the first self-conscious living creature according to his needs is thus not in agreement with itself. – If in a community of commonly owned goods which takes care in both a universal and lasting way to see to it that each gets as much as he requires for his share, then in such a community there will be a contradiction between this inequality and the essence of consciousness, for which the principle is the equality of individuals. Or, according to the latter principle, if the goods are equally divided, then the share granted will have no relation to need, a relation which, after all, is the very concept of “a share.”

430. But if in this way no-property appears to be contradictory, this is only for the reason that it has not been left as a simple determinateness. The same thing happens to property when it has been dissolved into its moments. The singular thing which is my property thereby counts as something universal, established, and lasting, but this contradicts its nature, which consists in its being used and in its vanishing. At the same time it counts as mine, 234which all others recognize and from which they are excluded, but my being recognized therein is the basis of my equality with all others, which is the contrary of exclusion. – What I possess is a thing,¹⁷⁰ i.e., a being for others as such, but which is universally and indeterminately for me alone. That I possess it contradicts its universal thinghood. Property therefore contradicts itself in all aspects as much as non-property does; each has in it both of these opposing and self-contradictory moments of singularity and universality. – However, when each of these determinatenesses is represented simply as property or non-property without any further development, one is as simple as the other, i.e., is not self-contradictory. The standard of the law which reason has in its own self therefore fits every case equally well and is thus in fact no criterion at all. – It would also be very peculiar if tautology, the principle of non-contradiction, which everyone concedes to be only a formal criterion for knowing of theoretical truth, i.e., as something which is supposed to be wholly indifferent to truth and untruth, were for the knowing of practical truth supposed to be more than that.

431. In both of the moments which were just now under examination, namely, the moments of the fulfillment of the previously empty spiritual essence, there were the positing of immediate determinatenesses in ethical substance and then the knowing of whether those determinatenesses are laws; both of them have now been sublated. What seems to be the result is that neither determinate laws nor a knowing of these determinate laws is able to transpire. Yet substance is the consciousness of itself as absolute essentiality, a consciousness which can therefore neither relinquish the difference in the substance nor relinquish the knowing of this difference. That both law-giving and law-testing have shown themselves to be null and void means that both, when taken individually and in isolation, are only moments of the ethical consciousness which never ceases to be in movement; and the movement in which they come on the scene has the formal sense that the ethical substance as a result presents itself as consciousness.

432. Insofar as both of these moments are more detailed determinations of the consciousness of the crux of the matter, they can be seen as forms of honesty, which, as is usual with its formal moments, now gads about in a content which is supposed to be the good and the right and now gads about in testing such a fixed truth, and thinks it has the force and validity of commands in healthy rationality and intelligent insight.

433. However, without this honesty, the laws do not count as the essence of consciousness, and likewise the testing of laws does not count as a doing internal to consciousness. Rather, in the way that each of these moments on its own¹⁷¹ comes on the scene immediately as an actuality, one of them expresses an invalid establishment and existence of actual laws, while the other expresses a liberation from them which is just as invalid. As a determinate law, the law has a contingent content – which here means that it is a 235law of a singular consciousness of an arbitrary content. That immediate law-giving is thus the tyrannical outrage that makes arbitrariness into law and ethical life into obedience to such arbitrary laws – into obedience to laws that are only laws and are not at the same time commands. So too the second moment means, to the extent that the moment is isolated, the testing of laws, the moving of the immovable, and the iniquity of a knowing which cleverly argues itself into a freedom from absolute laws and takes absolute laws to be for him an issuance of an alien arbitrary will.

434. In both forms these moments are negative relations to the substance, or to the real spiritual essence; or the substance does not yet have its reality in those moments. Rather, consciousness still contains the substance in the form of its own immediacy, and the substance is first only this individual's own willing and knowing, or it is the ought of a non-actual command and a knowing of formal universality. However, while these modes have been sublated, consciousness has returned back into the universal, and those oppositions have vanished. As a result, the spiritual essence is actual substance, in that these modes are not in force singularly but are in force only as sublated, and the unity within which they are only moments is the self of consciousness, which henceforth is posited as being in the spiritual essence, which makes it into an actual, fulfilled self-conscious spiritual essence.

435. At first the spiritual essence thereby is for self-consciousness as a law existing in itself; the universality of testing laws, which was formal universality and not universality existing in itself, has been sublated. Likewise, it is an eternal law that does not have its ground in the will of this individual, but which is in and for itself and is the absolute pure will of all and has the form of immediate being. The law is also not a command which only ought to be; rather, it is and is validly in force; it is the universal I of the category which is immediately actuality, and the world is only this actuality. However, while this existing law is unreservedly valid and in force, the obedience given by self-consciousness is not that of service rendered to a master, whose orders would be only arbitrary and in which it would not recognize¹⁷² itself. Rather, the laws are the thoughts of its own absolute consciousness, thoughts which it itself immediately has. It also does not have faith in them, for faith, to be sure, also sees the essence, but it sees it as an alien essence. Through the universality of its own self, ethical self-consciousness is immediately at one with the essence. In contrast, faith begins with a singular consciousness; it is a movement of this consciousness as forever approaching this unity without ever reaching the present moment of its essence. – On the contrary, that former consciousness has sublated itself as a singular individual, this mediation is completed, and only in its being completed is it the immediate self-consciousness of ethical substance.

436. The difference between self-consciousness and the essence is thus completely transparent. As a result, the differences in the essence itself are not 236contingent determinatenesses, but, on account of the unity of the essence and self-consciousness from which alone such an inequality could arise, they are the social estates of its structure permeated by its life, non-estranged spirits clear to themselves, unblemished heavenly shapes, which in their differences sustain the unprofaned innocence and unanimity of their essence. – Self-consciousness stands in a just as simple, clear relationship to them. They are and nothing more than that. – This constitutes the consciousness of their relationships. That way they count for Sophocles’ Antigone as the unwritten and unerring law of the gods:

Not now and yesterday, but forever

It lives, and nobody knows from whence it appeared.¹⁷³

They are. If I inquire about their emergence and confine them to their point of origin, so have I gone beyond them, for it is I who am henceforth the universal, and they are the conditioned and restricted. However much they are supposed to be legitimated through my insight, still I have already set their unwavering being-in-itself into motion, and I regard them as something which is perhaps true for me but perhaps not. An ethical disposition just consists in immovably sticking to what is right and in abstaining from any movement, any undermining, and any reduction. – Suppose something is entrusted to me: It is the property of another, I recognize it because it is so, and remain unwavering in this relationship. If I keep the entrusted item for myself, then according to the principle I use in testing laws, namely, that of tautology, I commit no contradiction whatsoever, for I then no longer see it as the property of another. To keep something that I do not view as somebody else's property is perfectly consistent. Changing the point of view is no contradiction, for what is at stake is not the point of view but the object and the content, and it is those which are not supposed to contradict themselves. If I can alter the point of view that something is mine into the point of view that it is the property of another – as I do when I give something away as a gift – without becoming thereby guilty of a contradiction, then I can just as well take the opposite route. – It is not therefore because I find something's not being self-contradictory that it is right; rather, it is right because it is the right. That something is the property of another is the basic underlying reason for this. I am not to argue cleverly at length on this, nor am I to look around for a variety of thoughts, contexts, considerations, or, for that matter, even just to let such things occur to me, nor am I to think of legislating laws or of testing them. In those sorts of movements of my thoughts, I would dislocate those relations while I could in fact quite arbitrarily and quite easily make the opposite fit onto my indeterminate tautological knowing and also 237make that into the law. But rather, whether this or the opposite determination is the right is determined in and for itself. For myself, if I wanted, I could have just as easily made none of them into law, and, when I start putting myself in the position of testing them, I have already started down an unethical path. Because the right for me is in and for itself, I am within the ethical substance. The ethical substance is thus the essence of self-consciousness; however, self-consciousness is ethical substance's actuality and existence, its self, and its will.

¹ Vorhandenseins.

² sich erkennende.

³ fremden Anstoßes.

⁴ Wesen.

⁵ das Sein…Seinen.

⁶ erkannt.

⁷ gedachtes.

⁸ Individuum.

⁹ das Erkennen.

¹⁰ Merkmale.

¹¹ erkannt.

¹² für sich.

¹³ Entzweiung.

¹⁴ Gleichbleibende.

¹⁵ gültig…geltend (“valid…effective”).

¹⁶ Gedankendinge.

¹⁷ Selbstwesen.

¹⁸ erkennt.

¹⁹ Sein.

²⁰ für sich.

²¹ Begeistungen.

²² versuchenden Bewußtseins.

²³ Wesen.

²⁴ Freiheit.

²⁵ Bildung.

²⁶ Wesen.

²⁷ das Letzte.

²⁸ erkennt.

²⁹ am Ende: “last of all,” not “end” in the sense of “purpose.”

³⁰ Selbstgefühl.

³¹ erkennt.

³² Wesen.

³³ Wesen.

³⁴ Sein.

³⁵ Selbstzweck.

³⁶ In-sich-sein.

³⁷ zurückkehrt. More loosely put, this might be rendered as “comes back home to itself.”

³⁸ Idee.

³⁹ für sich.

⁴⁰ Reflektiertsein.

⁴¹ Auffassen.

⁴² Wesens.

⁴³ Wesen.

⁴⁴ aufgefaßt zu werden.

⁴⁵ Wesen.

⁴⁶ repräsentieren.

⁴⁷ vorstellen.

⁴⁸ die Sache selbst.

⁴⁹ durch einen Repräsentanten vertreten.

⁵⁰ einzelne Einzelnheit.

⁵¹ Gestaltung.

⁵² Bestimmung (“whose determination”).

⁵³ das Meinen.

⁵⁴ Meinung.

⁵⁵ Gedankending.

⁵⁶ kennt es nicht.

⁵⁷ Natur der Sache.

⁵⁸ ein anderes Sein.

⁵⁹ Vorhandenes.

⁶⁰ Wesen.

⁶¹ des vorhandenen und des gemachten Seins.

⁶² zu dem sie übergeht.

⁶³ Ursprünglichkeit.

⁶⁴ für sich.

⁶⁵ das tun als Tat.

⁶⁶ gemeintes Innres.

⁶⁷ erkannt.

⁶⁸ Gemeintes.

⁶⁹ gemeinten.

⁷⁰ Meinen.

⁷¹ eine Meinung von sich.

⁷² Meinung.

⁷³ Meinung von sich.

⁷⁴ nur gemeintes.

⁷⁵ sein Werk. I add the “accomplished” to the “work” in order to mitigate the possible confusion between a “work” in the sense of, say, a “literary work” with “work” in the sense of “labor.”

⁷⁶ gemeintes.

⁷⁷ Meinung.

⁷⁸ Figur.

⁷⁹ handelnden Äußerung.

⁸⁰ Wesens.

⁸¹ ruhenden bestehenden Daseins.

⁸² Verstand.

⁸³ in sich.

⁸⁴ Bewegung.

⁸⁵ erkennen.

⁸⁶ vorstellen.

⁸⁷ vorstellen.

⁸⁸ Vorstellens.

⁸⁹ Vorstellung.

⁹⁰ als Sein existiert.

⁹¹ Sein überhaupt.

⁹² das Meinen.

⁹³ Meinung.

⁹⁴ Selbstwesenheit.

⁹⁵ Entäußerung.

⁹⁶ bleibt für sich frei.

⁹⁷ Vereinzelung.

⁹⁸ betrachtenden.

⁹⁹ für sich.

¹⁰⁰ unvernünftig.

¹⁰¹ Sitte.

¹⁰² Wesen.

¹⁰³ Wesen.

¹⁰⁴ Tun und Treiben.

¹⁰⁵ erkennt.

¹⁰⁶ Wesen.

¹⁰⁷ Bestimmung. This could also be rendered as his “determination” or “purpose.”

¹⁰⁸ Glücke.

¹⁰⁹ Bestimmung.

¹¹⁰ für sich.

¹¹¹ gelten.

¹¹² Bestimmung.

¹¹³ Bestimmung.

¹¹⁴ eines Nichtansichseienden.

¹¹⁵ Wesen.

¹¹⁶ Kenntnisse.

¹¹⁷ erkennte.

¹¹⁸ für sich.

¹¹⁹ bringt…hervor.

¹²⁰ erkennen.

¹²¹ erkennen.

¹²² das Seiende.

¹²³ erkennt.

¹²⁴ erkennt.

¹²⁵ erkennt.

¹²⁶ gemeintes.

¹²⁷ Einzelnen.

¹²⁸ gemeinte Allgemeinheit.

¹²⁹ ist sie das tun des Kampfes.

¹³⁰ Spiegelfechterei. Literally, this means “fencing at mirrors,” or, more colloquially, “shadow-boxing.”

¹³¹ Wesen.

¹³² Tun und Treiben.

¹³³ gemeinten.

¹³⁴ gedachter Einheit.

¹³⁵ Umfang.

¹³⁶ Inbegriff.

¹³⁷ in dem tun…des tuns.

¹³⁸ Werk.

¹³⁹ für es.

¹⁴⁰ gesetztes. Alternatively, this could be rendered as “posited.”

¹⁴¹ eigentümliche.

¹⁴² Unangemessenheit.

¹⁴³ eine Sache.

¹⁴⁴ Das Ding.

¹⁴⁵ eines Dings und einer Sache.

¹⁴⁶ frei für sich.

¹⁴⁷ gedachten.

¹⁴⁸ ums Tun und Treiben.

¹⁴⁹ eine Sache.

¹⁵⁰ seine Sache.

¹⁵¹ die Sache überhaupt.

¹⁵² dargestellt.

¹⁵³ auszuführen.

¹⁵⁴ Tun und Treiben.

¹⁵⁵ getäuscht.

¹⁵⁶ zur Sache.

¹⁵⁷ eine Sache.

¹⁵⁸ die seinige zu tun ist.

¹⁵⁹ eine Sache.

¹⁶⁰ Sache.

¹⁶¹ absolute Sache.

¹⁶² bei sich selbst.

¹⁶³ Massen. This rendering as “social estate” is taken from Grimms Wörterbuch.

¹⁶⁴ gesunde Vernunft.

¹⁶⁵ gesunden Vernunft; not quite “healthy common sense,” but close to it.

¹⁶⁶ an ihm das Übel.

¹⁶⁷ mit Verstand.

¹⁶⁸ das Gesetz nur sich selbst gleiche.

¹⁶⁹ Freiheit des Dinges.

¹⁷⁰ Ding.

¹⁷¹ für sich.

¹⁷² erkennte.

¹⁷³ This is a quote from Sophocles’ Antigone.

(BB) Spirit

VI. 238Spirit

437. Reason is spirit as the certainty of being all reality has been elevated to truth, and reason is, to itself, conscious of itself as its world and of the world as itself. – The coming-to-be of spirit was demonstrated in the immediately preceding movement, within which the object of consciousness, the pure category, elevated itself to the concept of reason. In observing reason, this pure unity of the I and of being, of being-for-itself and being-in-itself, is determined as the in-itself, or as being, and the consciousness of reason finds the unity. However, the truth of observing is instead the sublation of this immediate instinct for finding, the sublation of this unconscious existence of the truth. The intuited category, the found thing, enters consciousness as the being-for-itself of the I, which now knows itself in the objective essence as the self. However, this determination of the category, as being for-itself opposed to being-in-itself, is just as one-sided and is a self-sublating moment. Consequently, the category is determined for consciousness as it is in its universal truth, as essence existing-in-and-for-itself. This still abstract determination, which constitutes the crux of the matter, is itself just the spiritual essence, and its consciousness is a formal knowing of the spiritual essence, a knowing that gads around in a variety of the spiritual essence's contents. As a singular individual, this consciousness is in fact still distinguished from the substance; it either legislates arbitrary laws, or it supposes that it has those laws as they are in and for themselves solely in its knowing as such, and it takes itself to be the power which passes judgment on them. – Or, considered in terms of substance, this is the spiritual essence existing-in-and-for-itself, but which is not yet the consciousness of itself. – However, the essence existing-in-and-for-itself, which as consciousness is at the same time actual and which represents itself to itself, is spirit.

438. Its spiritual essence has already been characterized as ethical substance, but spirit is ethical actuality. Spirit is the self of the actual consciousness which spirit confronts, or rather which confronts itself as an objective actual world, a world which has, for the self, just as much lost all significance as something alien, 239just as the self has lost all sense of being a dependent or independent being-for-itself separated from that world. Spirit is the substance and the universal self-equal, lasting essence¹ – it is the unshakable and undissolved ground and point of origin for the doing of each and all – it is their purpose and goal as the conceptualized² in-itself of all self-consciousnesses. – This substance is just as much the universal work, which as a result engenders itself through the doing of each and all as their unity and equality, for this substance is being-for-itself, or the self, doing. As substance, spirit is unwavering, just and equitable self-equality.³ However, as being-for-itself, it is the dissolved essence, the self-sacrificing, kindly essence, within which each completes his own work, rends something from the universal being, and takes his own share from it. This dissolution and singularization of the essence is just the moment of the doings of each and the self of each; that moment is the movement and soul of the substance, and it is the effectuated universal spiritual essence. Precisely therein that it is “being” dissolved in the self, the substance is not the dead essence, but rather is actual and alive.

439. Spirit is thereby the self-supporting, absolute, real essence. All the previous shapes of consciousness are abstractions from it. They are this, that spirit analyzes itself, differentiates its moments, and lingers with the individual.⁴ Isolating such moments has spirit itself as its presupposition and its stable existence, or the isolating only exists in the spirit which is existence.⁵ Isolated in this way, these moments seem as if that isolation is what they were. However, just as they are only moments or vanishing magnitudes, is shown by their advance and retreat into their ground and essence, and this essence just is this movement and dissolution of these moments. Here, where spirit or the reflection of spirit into itself is posited, can our reflection on them according to this aspect briefly remind us that they were consciousness, self-consciousness, and reason. Spirit is thus consciousness, full stop, what comprehends within itself sensuous-certainty, perception, and understanding to the extent that in its analysis of itself, spirit holds fast to the moment that, to itself, it, spirit, is objective, existent actuality and abstracts from this that its actuality is its own being-for-itself. If on the contrary it holds fast to the other moment of the analysis, that its object is its being-for-itself, then it is self-consciousness. However, as immediate consciousness of being-in-and-for-itself, as the unity of consciousness and self-consciousness, it is consciousness which has reason, which, as the “having” denotes, has the object as rationally determined in-itself, or by the value of the category, but so that for the consciousness of the object, the object does not yet have the value of the category. Spirit here is the consciousness out of whose examination we just arrived. When this reason, which spirit has, is finally intuited by spirit as the reason that is, or as the reason that is actual in spirit and which is spirit's world, then spirit is in its truth. It is spirit, it is the actual ethical essence.

440. 240Spirit is the ethical life of a people to the extent that it is the immediate truth; it is the individual who is a world. It must advance to a consciousness about what it immediately is, it must sublate the beautiful ethical life, and, by passing through a series of shapes, it must attain a knowing of itself. However, these shapes distinguish themselves from the preceding as a result of which they are real spirits, genuine actualities, and, instead of being shapes only of consciousness, they are shapes of a world.

441. The living ethical world is spirit in its truth. As spirit initially attains an abstract knowing of its essence, ethical life declines into the formal universality of law. Spirit, henceforth estranged within itself, depicts one of its worlds in its objective element, namely, the realm of cultural formation,⁶ as a harsh actuality, and another as confronting that first one in the element of thought, namely, the world of faith, the realm of essence. However, both worlds, when grasped in concepts by spirit (which, in coming out of this loss of itself, turns inward) are thrown into disarray and are revolutionized through insight⁷ and its dissemination, the Enlightenment, and the realm which had thus been divided and extended into the this-worldly present and the other-worldly beyond returns back into self-consciousness, which now in morality grasps itself as essentiality and grasps essence as its actual self. Morality no longer posits its world and its ground as lying outside of itself, but rather lets everything die out within itself, and is the conscience of the spirit certain of itself.

442. The ethical world, disrupted into the this-worldly present and the other-worldly beyond, and the moral worldview are thus the spirits whose movement and whose return into spirit's simple self existing-for-itself develop themselves, and, as their goal and result, the actual self-consciousness of absolute spirit steps forward.

A. True Spirit, Ethical Life

443. In its simple truth, spirit is consciousness, and it forces its moments away from each other. Action divides spirit into substance and the consciousness of substance, and it divides substance just as much as it does consciousness. As universal essence and purpose, substance confronts itself as an isolated actuality. The infinite mediating middle is self-consciousness, which 241is in itself the unity of itself and substance, which now becomes for itself, unifies the universal essence and its isolated actuality, raises the latter to the former, and acts ethically – and it brings the former down to the latter and accomplishes the purpose, which is substance as it has been rendered into thought.⁸ It engenders the unity of its own self and substance as its work⁹ and thereby as actuality.

444. In the coming apart of consciousness, the simple substance has in part sustained an opposition to self-consciousness, and in part, thereby just as much presents in itself the nature of consciousness, [which is] to differentiate itself as a world divided into social estates.¹⁰ The substance thus fissures into a differentiated ethical essence, into a human and a divine law. Likewise, according to its essence, self-consciousness, in confronting substance, assigns itself to one of these powers, and, as knowing, it divides itself into both an ignorance of what it is doing and a knowing of what it is doing, and it is thus a deceived knowing. In its deed, it thus experiences the contradiction of those powers into which substance estranged itself, and it experiences their mutual destruction and the contradiction in its knowing of the ethical life of its actions – the contradiction of what ethical life is in and for itself – and it meets its own downfall. However, through this movement, ethical substance has in fact become actual self-consciousness, or this self has come to be in-and-for-itself-existing, but it was just therein that ethical life perished.

a. The Ethical World, the Human and Divine Law, Man and Woman

445. The simple substance of spirit divides itself up as consciousness, or, as consciousness of abstract sensuous being passes over into perception, so does the immediate certainty of real ethical being also pass over, and just as simple being becomes for sense-perception a thing of many properties, so for ethical perception a case of acting becomes an actuality of many ethical relations. However, to the former, the useless plurality of properties is condensed into the essential opposition between singularity and universality, and for the latter, which is purified, substantial consciousness, the plurality of ethical moments condenses itself instead into the twofoldness of a law of singular individuality and a law of universality. However, each of these social estates of substance remains the whole spirit. If the things in sense-perception have no substance other than 242the two determinations of singularity and universality, here they only express the superficial opposition of both aspects to each other.

446. In the essence we are here considering, the meaning of singular individuality is that of self-consciousness in general, not that of a singular, contingent consciousness. In this determination, the ethical substance is thus the actual substance, absolute spirit realized in the plurality of determinately existing consciousnesses. The spirit is the polity,¹¹ which, when we entered into the practical shaping of reason itself, was for us the absolute essence and which here emerges in its truth for itself as a conscious ethical essence and as the essence for the consciousness which we now have as our object. It is spirit which is for itself, while it sustains itself within the counter-glow¹² of the individuals – and which is in itself, or is substance while it sustains the individuals within itself. As the actual substance, it is a people, and as actual consciousness, it is the citizens of the nation.¹³ This consciousness has its essence in simple spirit, and its certainty of itself in the actuality of this spirit, in the whole people, and it immediately therein has its truth. But it does not have its truth in something which is not actual; it has it in a spirit which exists and is validly in force.¹⁴

447. This spirit can be called the human law because it is essentially in the form of actuality conscious of itself. In the form of universality, it is the familiarly known law and extant mores which are both present. In the form of singularity, it is the actual certainty of itself in the individual as such, and in the certainty of itself as simple individuality, it is the government. Its truth is the validity in force which is publicly open to the light of day. It is an existence which, for immediate certainty, takes on the form of existence¹⁵ set free-standing.

448. However, another power confronts this ethical power and public: the divine law, for the ethical power of the state has its opposite in the simple and immediate essence of ethical life as the movement of self-conscious acting. As actual universality, the power of the state is a force confronting the individual being-for-itself, and as actuality itself, it still has in the inner essence something other than itself.

449. We have already been reminded that each of the opposed ways in which the ethical substance exists wholly contains that substance and all the moments of its contents. However much the polity is therefore the substance as awareness of its actual doings, still the other aspect has the form of immediate, or existing, substance. In that way, the existing substance is, on the one hand, the inner concept, or the universal possibility of ethical life in general, but, on the other hand, it just as much has in it the moment of self-consciousness. This moment expressing ethical life in this element of immediacy, or in the element of being, or an immediate consciousness of itself as essence as well as being this self in an 243other, which is to say, as a natural ethical polity – this moment is the family. As the unaware concept of its consciously aware actuality, as the elemental unit¹⁶ of the actuality of the people, as, to the people, immediate ethical being – as the ethical life educating, acculturating, and sustaining itself through the work for the universal, as the Penates [household divinities], the family stands over and against the universal spirit.

450. However, whether or not the ethical being of the family is determined as immediate being, it is not in its ethical essence to the extent that it is the natural relationship of its members, or to the extent that their relation is the immediate relation of singular actual members, for the ethical is in itself universal, and this natural relationship is essentially just one spirit and only as spiritual essence is it ethical. How this distinctive ethical life is constituted remains to be seen. – In the first place, because the ethical is the universal in itself, the ethical relation among the members of the family is neither a relation of sentiment, nor is it the relationship of love. Now it seems that the ethical must have been placed into the relationship which the individual members of the family bear to the whole family as substance, such that the singular individual's acts and the individual's actuality have only that substance for their purpose and their content. However, the conscious purpose which is the doing of this whole, insofar as this purpose has to do with the whole, is itself the singular individual. The acquisition and sustaining of power and wealth have in part to do only with needs, and they involve desire; in their higher determination, they in part become something that is only mediated. This [higher] determination does not fall within the bounds of the family itself but concerns what is truly universal, the polity. This determination is instead negative vis-à-vis the family; it consists in taking the singular individual out of the family, in subjugating his naturalness and individuality, and thus in leading him towards virtue, towards a life lived in and for the universal. The positive purpose distinctive of the family is the individual as such a singular individual. For this relationship to be ethical, neither he who acts nor he to whom the action is related can come on the scene contingently, as happens in some form of assistance or service to be rendered. The content of the ethical action must be substantial, or, whole and universal. Hence, the action can only be related to the whole individual, or, to the individual as universal. Again, this must also not be so understood that it would be represented as doing him some service to further his entire happiness, since such service, as it is an immediate and actual action, only does something very singular to him – nor must it be represented that ethical action is actually education, in a series of endeavors having him as a whole as its object and which bring him out as its accomplished work. Apart from the purpose which is negative vis-à-vis the family, the actual action in such an education has only a restricted content – and finally, it should even less be represented that such service is a type of “help in time of need” through which the whole individual is in truth saved, 244for such service is itself an entirely contingent deed, the occasion for which is an everyday actuality that can just as well be as not be. Therefore the action, which embraces the entire existence of blood relations, has as its object and content the singular individual – not the citizen, for he does not belong to the family, nor does it have the singular individual who is to become a citizen and is supposed to cease counting as this singular individual – but rather, it has as the object the individual who as this singular individual belongs to the family, and who as a universal being,¹⁷ is exempted from his sensuous, i.e., singular actuality. The action no longer concerns the living but rather the dead; it concerns he who, out of the long progression of his dispersed existence, is condensed into one completed shape and who has been elevated out of the unrest of contingent life into the motionlessness of simple universality. – Because he is only actual and substantial as a citizen, the singular individual, taken not as a citizen but as belonging to the family, is only the unreal¹⁸ shadow without any core.

451. This universality to which the singular individual as such a singular individual has arrived is pure being, death; it is what has naturally and immediately come about¹⁹ and is not something a consciousness does. The duty of the family member is thus to augment this aspect so that his final being, this universal being, will also not belong solely to nature and remain something non-rational. It is to make it so that it too may be something done, and that the right of consciousness would be asserted within that being. Or, the sense of the action is instead that because the motionlessness and universality of a self-aware essence does not in truth belong to nature, the semblance that this is the kind of act which can be ascribed to nature falls by the wayside, and the truth is established. – What nature did in him is the aspect by which his coming to be the universal itself appears as the movement of an existent. To be sure, the movement itself falls within the ethical polity, and it has this polity as its purpose. Death is the consummation and the highest work that the individual as such undertakes for the polity. However, insofar as he is essentially singularly individual, it is contingent as to whether his death was both immediately connected with and was the result of his work for the universal. This is so in part because if it was, then it would be the natural negativity and movement of the individual as an existent, within which consciousness does not return into itself and become self-consciousness. Or, while the movement of the existent consists in its having been sublated and in its having arrived at being-for-itself, death is the aspect of estrangement in which the being-for-itself at which it arrived is something other than the existent which entered into the movement. – Because ethical life is spirit in its immediate truth, the aspects into which its consciousness was dispersed also fall into this form of immediacy, and singular individuality crosses over into this abstract negativity, which, without consolation or reconciliation in itself, must receive it essentially through an actual and external action. – The blood-relationship therefore supplements 245the abstract natural movement by adding to it the movement of consciousness, by interrupting nature's work, and by wresting the blood-relation away from destruction; or, better, because destruction, the individual's becoming pure being, is necessary, the blood-relationship takes upon itself the deed of destruction. – It thereby comes to pass that the dead, universal being, is elevated into a being returned into itself, a being-for-itself, or the powerless pure singular singularity is elevated to universal individuality. He who is dead, by having his being set free from his doing, or his negative oneness, is empty singular individuality, only a passive being for others, and is left to the mercy of every lower individuality devoid of reason and to the forces of abstract matter, both of which are now more powerful than he, or the former lower creatures on account of the life that they have and the latter forces of matter on account of their negative nature. The family keeps the dead away from those dishonoring acts of unconscious desire and abstract creatures,²⁰ and in place of them, it puts their own acts; it weds their kin to the womb of the earth, to the elemental, imperishable individuality. The family thereby makes the dead into a member of a polity which instead overwhelms and keeps in check the powers of the particular elements of matter and the lower living creatures which come to be free from him and which sought to destroy him.

452. This last duty thus constitutes the consummate divine law, or it constitutes the positive ethical action vis-à-vis the singular individual. All other relationships in regard to him, those which do not remain stalled in love [for him] but rather which are ethical, belong to human law, and their negative meaning is that of the elevation of the singular individual above his confinement within the natural polity to which he belongs as an actual individual. Now, however much human law²¹ has for its content and power the actual ethical substance conscious of itself, the whole people; and divine right and law have their content and power in the singular individual who is in the other-worldly realm beyond actuality, still the singular individual is not powerless. His power is that of the abstract pure universal, the elemental individual, which constitutes the individuality which tears itself loose from the elements and the self-conscious actuality of the people, withdraws back into the pure abstraction as into its essence as their ground. – How this power will exhibit itself in the people themselves is something which is still to be further developed.

453. Now, there are differences and levels in the one law as well as in the other. For while both essences have the moment of consciousness in themselves, the difference unfolds itself within themselves, which constitutes their movement and distinctive life. The examination of these differences shows the way in which they engage themselves²² and the self-consciousness of the two universal essences of the ethical world, as well as showing their connection and their transition into each other.

454. The polity, the higher, valid law open to the light of day, has its actual liveliness in the government within which it is individual. 246The government is actual spirit reflected into itself, the simple self of the whole ethical substance. This simple force allows the essence to diffuse itself into its members and to give to each part both a stable existence and its own being-for-itself. It is there that spirit has its reality, or its existence, and the family is the elemental unit²³ of this reality. However, spirit is at the same time the force of the whole, which again assembles these parts into a negative One, gives them the feeling of their non-self-sufficiency, and sustains them in the consciousness that they have their life only in the whole. On the one hand, the polity may thus organize itself into the systems of personal self-sufficiency, property, personal rights, and rights in things; and it may just as well organize the various ways of working for what are initially singular purposes – those of acquisition and consumption – such that it subdivides them into their own assemblies and makes those assemblies self-sufficient. The spirit of the universal gathering is the simplicity and the negative essence of these self-isolating systems. In order not to let them become rooted and rigidly fixed within this activity of isolating themselves, which would otherwise let the whole come undone and the spirit within it fade away, the government must from time to time shake them to their core by means of war. As a result, it infringes on their established order, violates their right to self-sufficiency, and throws them into disarray. By the labor the government imposes on them, those individuals, who have become more and more absorbed in their own lives and who thereby tend to tear themselves loose from the whole in striving after inviolable being-for-itself and personal security, are made to feel the power of their lord and master, death. Through this dissolution of the form of stable existence, spirit wards off its descent from out of ethical life into only natural existence, and it sustains and elevates the self of its consciousness into freedom and into its force. – The negative essence shows itself to be the polity's underlying power and the force of its self-preservation. The polity therefore has the truth and substantiation of its power in the essence of the divine law and in the realm of the netherworld.

455. Likewise, the divine law prevailing in the family has for its part differences within itself, and the relations among those differences constitute the living movement of its actuality. However, among the three relationships of man and wife, parents and children, and siblings as brothers and sisters, it is the relationship of man and wife which is initially the immediate self-cognizance²⁴ of one consciousness in another and the cognizance of reciprocal recognition. Because it is natural self-cognizance and not ethical self-cognizance, it is only the representation and picture of spirit, not actual spirit itself. – However, the representation, or the picture, has its actuality in an other than itself; this relationship therefore does not have its actuality in its own self but in the child – in an other whose coming into being is that relationship and in which the relationship disappears. This progression from one generation to another has its stable existence in the people. – The piety of man and wife towards each other is thus intermixed with both a natural 247relation and with sentiment, and their relationship does not in its own self have its return into itself, nor does the second relationship, that of the piety of parents and children to each other. The piety of parents towards their children is affected by the emotion brought on by their awareness that they have their actuality in an other and that they see their children come to their own being-for-itself without the parents being able to get it back. The child's being for itself remains an alien actuality, an actuality all its own. – But conversely the devotion of children towards their parents is affected by the emotion of their coming-to-be, or having their own in-itself in an other who is vanishing, and in achieving being-for-itself and their own self-consciousness only through separation from their origin – a separation within which the origin recedes.

456. Both these relationships come to a standstill in the transitions and the inequality of the aspects that are assigned to them. – However, the unmixed relationship is found between brother and sister. They are the same blood; however, in them it has reached its state of rest and equilibrium. Hence, they neither desire each other, nor have they given or received this being-for-itself to each other. Rather, they are free individualities with respect to each other. The feminine, as the sister, hence has the highest intimation of ethical essence. This intimation does not rise to a consciousness of the actuality of ethical essence because the law of the family is the inner essence existing-in-itself, which does not lie in the daylight of consciousness. Rather, it remains inner feeling, the divine displaced from actuality. The feminine is bound to these Penates, and it is in those Penates that she partly intuits her universal substance and partly intuits her singular individuality, though at the same time this relation of singular individuality is not the natural relation of pleasure. – As a daughter, the woman must now see her parents vanish, and she must be herself both naturally moved by that loss and be at ethical peace, for it is only at the expense of this relationship that she can achieve the being-for-itself of which she is capable. She thus cannot intuit her being-for-itself positively in her parents. However, the relations of mother and wife have singular individuality partly as something natural, something to which pleasure is appropriate, and partly as something negative, which in the relationship can only behold therein its own disappearance, and in part as something contingent which can be replaced by another individuality. In the household of ethical life, it is not this man, and it is not this child; rather, it is a man, children as such – these female relationships are grounded not on sentiment but on the universal. The difference between her ethical life and the man's ethical life consists in this, that in her destiny²⁵ for singular individuality and in her pleasure, she remains both immediately universal and alien to the individuality of desire, whereas in the man, these two aspects become separated; and while as a citizen, he possesses the self-conscious power of universality, the life of the social whole, as a result he purchases for himself the right of desire while at the same time maintaining his freedom from such desire. While 248singular individuality is thus mingled into the woman's relationship, her ethical life is not pure. However, insofar as she is ethical, singular individuality is a matter of indifference, and the wife dispenses with the moment of cognizing herself as this self in an other. – But to the sister, the brother is the motionless essence itself, equal to her, and her recognition²⁶ in him is pure and unmixed with any natural relation. The indifference of singular individuality and its ethical contingency is thus not present in this relationship. Rather, the moment of the singular self, as recognizing and being recognized, may here assert its right because it is bound up with the equilibrium of blood relations and with relations utterly devoid of desire. The loss of a brother is thus irreplaceable to the sister, and her duty towards him is the highest.

457. This relationship is at the same time the limit at which the self-enclosed family dissolves and moves outside of itself. The brother is the aspect according to which the family's spirit becomes that of individuality that turns itself against the other and makes its transition into the consciousness of universality. The brother leaves this immediate, elemental, and for that reason genuinely negative ethical life of the family in order to acquire and to bring out the actual ethical life which is conscious of itself.

458. He makes a transition from the divine law, in whose sphere he had lived, to the human law. However, either the sister becomes, or the wife remains, the overseer of the household and the guardian of the divine law. In this way, both the sexes overcome their natural essence, and they emerge in their ethical significance as diversities who divide between them the two differences that ethical substance gives itself. These two universal essences of the ethical world have their determinate individuality in naturally differentiated self-consciousnesses, because the ethical spirit is the immediate unity of substance with self-consciousness, an immediacy which thus, according to the aspect of reality and difference, at the same time appears as the existence of a natural difference. – It is the aspect which appeared in the shape of the individuality which is real, to itself, or in the concept of spiritual essence, as original determinate nature. This moment loses the indeterminateness which it still had there and loses the contingent diversity of aptitudes and capacities. It is now the determinate opposition of the two sexes, whose naturalness at the same time sustains the meaning of their ethical destiny.

459. The difference between the sexes and their ethical content nonetheless remains within the unity of the substance, and the difference's movement is just the abiding coming to be of that substance. The spirit of the family sends the man out into the polity, and he finds his self-conscious essence in that polity. Just as the family has its universal substance and its stable existence in the polity, the polity conversely has the formal element of its own actuality in the family and its force and proof in the divine laws. Neither of the two alone is in and for itself. 249In its vital movement, human law originates from the divine law, the law in force on earth originates from the law of the netherworld, the conscious law originates from the unconscious law, mediation originates from immediacy, and all just as much return to that from whence they came. In contrast, the netherworldly power has its actuality on the earth, and through consciousness, it becomes existence and activity.

460. The universal ethical essences are thus the substance as universal consciousness and as singular consciousness. They have the people and the family for their universal actuality, and they have man and wife for their natural self and their activating individuality. In this content of the ethical world, we see that the purposes which the previous substanceless shapes of consciousness had set for themselves are now achieved. What reason only grasped as an object has become self-consciousness, and what self-consciousness only possessed within itself is here present as true actuality. – What observation knew as an item as it found it, in which the self would have had no share, is here a set of given mores, an actuality which is at the same time the deed and work of those who are finding themselves in it. – The singular individual seeking the pleasure of relishing his singular individuality finds it in the family, and the necessity within which that pleasure slips away is his own self-consciousness as a citizen of his nation – or, it is the knowing of the law of the heart as the law of all hearts, the consciousness of the self as the recognized universal order of society – it is virtue, which enjoys the fruits of its own sacrifice and which brings about what it is concerned with, namely, to lift the essence out of the actual present, and its own relish to be in this universal life. – Finally, consciousness of the crux of the matter is satisfied within the real substance, which contains and sustains in a positive manner the abstract moments of that empty category. The substance has a genuine content in the ethical powers, a content that takes the place of the insubstantial commands which healthy rationality wanted to give and to know – just as it thereby obtains a material standard which in its own self is self-determined,²⁷ not for the testing of laws but for testing what is done.

461. The whole is a peaceful equilibrium of all the parts, and each part is a local spirit that does not seek its satisfaction beyond itself. Rather, each local spirit has its satisfaction within itself because it is itself in this equilibrium with the whole. – To be sure, this equilibrium can only be a living equilibrium because of an inequality that arises within it, an inequality which is then brought back to equality by justice. However, justice is neither an alien essence which is situated somewhere off in the other-worldly beyond, nor is it the actuality of mutual maliciousness, treasonous behavior, ingratitude, etc., an actuality unworthy of the name of justice and which would execute judgment in an unthinking and arbitrary way without even thinking about the context, or in unconscious acts of omission and commission. 250Rather, as the justice of human law, it is that which brings back into the universal the being-for-itself, or the self-sufficiency, of the estates and singular individuals who are moving out of and away from that equilibrium. As such, justice is the government of the people, which is, to itself, the current individuality of the universal essence and the self-conscious will of all. – However, in bringing the universal back into equilibrium, a universal which is becoming ever more dominant over singular individuals, justice is likewise the simple spirit of he who has suffered wrong. – It has not been subverted into he who has suffered wrong and an other-worldly essence. He himself is the power of the netherworld, and it is his Erinyes [the Furies] which take vengeance, since his individuality, his blood, still lives on in the household, and his substance has an enduring actuality. In the realm of ethical life, the wrong that can be inflicted upon the singular individual would only be this, that something purely and simply happens to him. Nature is the power that commits this wrong to consciousness, that makes it into a pure thing, and the wrong is the universality not of the polity but rather that of the abstract universality of being. In undoing the wrong it has suffered, singular individuality does not turn against the polity because it has not suffered at the polity's hands; rather, he or she turns against nature. As we saw, the consciousness of the blood [relations] of the individual undoes this wrong so that what was a mere event becomes, on the contrary, a work, and, as a result, being, a finality, is supposed to be something also willed and hence also something gratifying.

462. The ethical realm is in this way an undefiled world in its stable existence, a world unpolluted by any division. Likewise, its movement consists in one of its powers peacefully coming to be the other so that each preserves and brings forth the other. To be sure, we see it dividing itself into two essences and their actuality, but their opposition is instead the proof of one through the other, and their mediating middle and element is the immediate permeation of each by the other in which they immediately come into contact with each other as actual powers. One of the extremes, universal spirit conscious of itself, is integrated²⁸ with its other extreme, its force and its element, or it is integrated with unconscious spirit through the individuality of the man. In contrast, the divine law has its individualization, or the singular individual's unconscious spirit has its existence in the woman through which, as the mediating middle, the unconscious spirit rises out of its non-actuality into actuality and steps out of the realm of unknowing and the unknown into the conscious realm. The union of man with woman constitutes the active mediating middle of the whole, and it constitutes the elemental unit²⁹ which, estranged into the extremes of divine and human law, is just as much their immediate union. It makes the first two syllogisms into the same syllogism and unites the opposed movements into one movement from actuality down to non-actuality – a downward movement of the human law, which has organized itself into 251self-sufficient members, towards danger and trial by death – and an upward movement of the laws of the netherworld towards the actuality of daylight and to conscious existence. Of these movements the former falls to man, the latter to woman.

b. Ethical Action, Human and Divine Knowing, Guilt and Fate

463. The way in which the opposition is constituted in this realm is such that self-consciousness has not yet emerged in its right as singular individuality. From one aspect, individuality counts in self-consciousness only as the universal will, but from another aspect, it counts in it as the blood of the family. This singular individual counts only as the non-actual shade. – As yet, no deed has been committed; but the deed is the actual self. – It disturbs the peaceful organization and movement of the ethical world. What appears as order and harmony between both of its essences, each of which proves the worth of the other and completes the other, becomes through the deed a transition of opposites within which instead each proves itself to be the nullity, not the authentication, of itself and the other – it becomes the negative movement, or the eternal necessity of a dreadful fate which in the abyss of its simplicity engulfs both the divine and the human law as well as that of the two self-consciousnesses in which these powers have their existence – and for us it makes a transition into the absolute being-for-itself of pure singularly individual self-consciousness.

464. The ground from which this movement both starts and on which it advances is the realm of ethical life, but this movement's activity is self-consciousness. As ethical consciousness, it is the simple, pure direction towards ethical essentiality, or duty. Within it, there is neither arbitrary choice nor is there struggle or indecision, as it has forsaken both giving the law and testing the law. Rather, to itself, the ethical essentiality is the immediate, the unwavering, what is free of contradiction. There is therefore neither the painful spectacle of a collision between passion and duty, nor the comical spectacle of a collision between duty and duty – a collision, which according to its content is the same as that between passion and duty, for 252passion is just as capable of being represented as duty. This is because duty, like consciousness withdrawing itself back into itself from out of its immediate essentiality, becomes a formal-universal with which, just as it did before, any content corresponds equally well. However, the collision of duties is comical because it expresses the contradiction in an absolute which is opposed to itself and thus an absolute which is immediately the nullity of this so-called absolute or duty. – However, ethical consciousness knows what it has to do, and it has decided whether it is to belong to divine or to human law. This immediacy is a being-in-itself and hence, as we have seen, its meaning is at the same time that of a natural being. It is nature, not the accident of circumstances or of choice, which assigns one sex to one law and the other to the other law – or, conversely, it is both ethical powers which give themselves their individual existence and their actualization in the two sexes.

465. Now, because on the one hand ethical life consists essentially in this immediate decisiveness, and for that reason only one law is the essence for consciousness, on the other hand, it is because the ethical powers are actual in the self of consciousness that these forces receive the significance of excluding each other and of being opposed to each other – they exist for itself in self-consciousness just as they only exist in itself within the realm of ethical life. Because it has decided in favor of one of them, ethical consciousness is essentially character. It is not the equal essentiality of both which is for ethical consciousness; and for that reason, the opposition appears only as an unfortunate collision of duty with an actuality utterly devoid of any right. Ethical consciousness is in this opposition as self-consciousness, and as such it sets itself to subordinate by force the actuality opposed to the law to which it belongs, or to deceive this opposed actuality. While it sees right only on its own side and sees only wrong on the other, the consciousness that belongs to divine law beholds on the other side human, contingent violence; and that consciousness which belongs to human law beholds on the other side the obstinacy and disobedience of inward being-for-itself. For the commands of government have a universal, public sense lying open to the light of day, but the will of the other law is the sense of the netherworld, sealed up in innerness, a sense which in its existence appears as the will of singular individuality and, when it stands in contradiction to the first, is sacrilege.

466. There thereby arises in consciousness the opposition between the known and the not known, just as in substance, there was an opposition between the conscious and the unconscious, 253and the absolute right of ethical self-consciousness comes into conflict with the divine right of essence. For self-consciousness as consciousness, objective actuality as such objective actuality has essentiality, but according to its substance, self-consciousness is the unity of itself and this opposite, and ethical self-consciousness is the consciousness of substance. For that reason, the object as opposed to self-consciousness has entirely lost the significance of having for itself essence.³⁰ Just as the spheres in which the object is only a thing have long since disappeared, so too have these spheres within which consciousness fixes itself on something and then makes a singular moment into the essence. Against such one-sidedness, actuality has a force of its own; it is in league with the truth against consciousness and only presents to consciousness what the truth is. However, from the cup of absolute substance, ethical consciousness has drunk the forgetfulness of all the one-sidedness of being-for-itself, its purposes and its distinctive concepts, and for that reason, it has at the same time drowned all of its own essentiality and the self-sufficient meaning of objective actuality in this Stygian water. Hence, while it acts according to the ethical law, its absolute right is that it find in this actualization nothing but the attainment of this law itself, and it finds that the deed shows nothing other than ethical doing. – The ethical, as the absolute essence and at the same time the absolute power, cannot suffer any inversion of its content. If it were only absolute essence without power, it could experience inversion through individuality. However, as ethical consciousness, this individuality has forgone the inverting activity when it forsook one-sided being-for-itself, just as conversely mere power would be inverted by essence if that power were still such a one-sided being-for-itself. On account of this unity, individuality is the pure form of substance which is the content, and the act is the transition from thought to actuality, but only as the movement of an essenceless opposition whose moments have no particular content and no essentiality distinct from each other. Thus the absolute right of ethical consciousness is that the deed, the shape of its actuality, is supposed to be nothing other than what it knows.

467. However, the ethical essence has split itself into two laws, and, as a non-estranged conduct towards the laws, consciousness is only assigned to one of them. Just as this simple consciousness insists on the absolute right that the essence shall have appeared to it as it is in itself, this essence insists on the right of its reality, or on the right to be a doubled essence. However, this right of essence does not at the same time stand over and against self-consciousness, as if it were to exist somewhere else, but rather, it is self-consciousness’ own essence, and only there does it have 254its existence and its power; its opposite is self-consciousness’ own deed. Just because it is, to itself, a self and sets itself to action, self-consciousness elevates itself out of simple immediacy and itself posits this estrangement. Through the deed, it abandons the determinateness of ethical life, of being the simple certainty of immediate truth, and it posits a separation of itself within itself as that between what is active and what is for it the negative actuality confronting it. Through the deed, it thus becomes guilt, since the deed is its own doing, and its own doing is its ownmost essence. Guilt also takes on the meaning of crime, for as simple ethical consciousness, it has addressed itself to one of the laws but has rejected the other, and, by its deed it thus violates that other law. – Guilt is not the indifferent, ambiguous essence; it is not as if the deed, as it actually lies open to the light of day, might or might not be the guilty self's own doing, as if something external and accidental could be attached to the doing which did not belong to it and according to which the doing would therefore be innocent. Rather, the doing is itself this estrangement; it is this positing of itself for itself and this positing of an alien external actuality confronting itself. It belongs to the doing itself that such an actuality is, and it only is through the act. Hence, innocence amounts to non-action, like the being of a stone, not even that of a child. – However, according to the content, ethical action has the moment of crime in itself because it does not sublate the natural distribution of the two laws to the two sexes. Rather, within natural immediacy, it remains instead as a non-estranged directedness to the law, and, as doing, it makes this one-sidedness into guilt, grapples with only one of essence's aspects, and conducts itself negatively towards the other, i.e., violates it. Where exactly it is that guilt and crime, along with doing and acting, will belong in universal ethical life will be given more determinate expression later, but this much is immediately clear. It is not this singular individual who acts and is guilty, for as this self, he is just the non-actual shade, or he is only as the universal self. Individuality is purely the formal moment of doing anything at all, and the content of the laws and mores is determined by his station in life. He is the substance as genus which through its determinateness becomes a species, but the species remains at the same time the universal of the genus. In the life of a people, self-consciousness descends from the universal only down to the point of particularity; it does not get as far as the point of singular individuality, which in its doings posits an excluding self, an actuality negative to itself. Rather, self-consciousness’ action rests on a secure trust in the whole, where there is no admixture of anything alien, neither that of fear nor that of enmity.

468. 255In its deed, ethical self-consciousness now experiences the developed nature of actual acting, indeed, as much as it did when it submitted to both the divine and the human law. The law which is revealed to it is the essence bound up with its opposite. The essence is the unity of both, but the deed has only carried out the terms of one law in opposition to the other. However, interrelated in the essence with this other, the fulfillment of one law calls forth the other, and, with the deed having made it so, it calls forth the other as a violated and hostile essence now demanding revenge. As concerns the action, only one aspect of the decision itself lies open to the light of day. However, the decision is in itself the negative, which confronts an other to itself, an alien to itself, which is knowing. Hence, actuality keeps concealed within itself this other aspect which is alien to knowing and which does not show itself to consciousness as it is in and for itself – which neither shows the son that the man insulting him and whom he strikes dead is his father, nor shows him that the queen whom he takes as his wife is his mother. In this way, a power that shuns the daylight preys on ethical self-consciousness, a power which bursts forth only after the deed is done and when it has taken self-consciousness in its grip. This is so because the completed deed is the sublated opposition between the knowing self and the actuality confronting it. The agent can neither deny the crime nor deny his guilt. – The deed consists in setting the unmoved into motion, which thereby brings forth what had been sealed off as mere possibility, and it links the unconscious to the conscious and the non-existent to being. In this truth, therefore, the deed comes to light – as that in which the conscious is combined with the unconscious and in which what is one's own is combined with what is alien. It comes to light as the estranged essence, whose other aspect consciousness also experiences as its own, as a power violated by it and thereby roused to hostility.

469. It can be that the right which lay in reserve is not present in its distinctive shape for the acting consciousness but is only present in itself, or in the inner guilt of the decision and the action. However, ethical consciousness is more complete and its guilt more pure if it knows beforehand the law and the power against which it takes an opposing stance, takes them to be violence and wrong, to be an ethical contingency, and then, like Antigone, knowingly commits the crime. The accomplished deed inverts its point of view. What the accomplishment itself expresses is that the ethical must be actual, for the actuality of the purpose is the purpose of acting. Acting directly expresses the unity of actuality and substance. It says that actuality is not accidental to essence, but rather that, in league with essence, there is nothing which is granted that is not a true right. On account of this actuality ethical consciousness must bestow recognition on its opposite, and on account of its own doing, ethical consciousness must acknowledge its guilt:

256Because we suffer, we recognize³¹ that we have erred.³²

470. This recognition expresses the sublated conflict between ethical purpose and actuality, and it expresses the return to the ethical disposition which knows that nothing counts but the right. However, as a result the agent gives up his character and the actuality of his self and is brought to his downfall. His being is to belong to his ethical law as his substance, but in the recognition of the opposition, this law has ceased for him to be his substance, and instead of attaining his actuality, the agent has attained a non-actuality, a disposition.³³ – To be sure, the substance appears in individuality as pathos, and individuality appears as what brings the substance to life and hence stands above it. However, it is a pathos that is at the same time his character. Ethical individuality is immediately and in itself at one with its universal; it has existence only within it and is incapable of surviving the downfall that this ethical power suffers at the hands of its opposite.

471. However, in this situation ethical individuality has the certainty that the individuality whose pathos is this opposed power suffers no more evil than it has inflicted. The movement of the ethical powers against each other and the individualities which set these powers into life and action have therein reached their true end in that both sides experience the same demise. This is so because neither of the powers has any advantage over the other that would make it into a more essential moment of substance. The equal essentiality and indifferent stable existence which both have in their juxtaposition to each other is their self-less being; in the deed they are as independent beings³⁴ but as diverse, as what contradicts the unity of the self and which constitutes their utter lack of right and their necessary demise. According to its pathos, or its substance, character in part just as much belongs only to one power, and, according to the aspect of knowing, each is just as much estranged into the conscious and into the unconscious; and while each itself calls forth this opposition and is through its own deed its own work of not-knowing, each posits that it itself take on the guilt which devours it. The victory of one power and its character along with the conquest of the other would thus only be one part and would be the imperfect work which inexorably advances towards equilibrium. It is in the equal subjection of both sides that absolute right is first achieved, and ethical substance, as the negative power that devours both sides has emerged. That is, fate, omnipotent and just, has come on the scene.

472. If both powers are taken according to their determinate content and its individualization, then the picture that arises is that of their conflict as it has crystallized according to its 257formal aspect, as the antagonism which ethical life and self-consciousness bear towards both unconscious nature and a contingency made available through that nature – the latter, that is, nature, has a right against the former because the former is only true spirit, and it only is in an immediate unity with its substance – and, according to its content, the conflict is pictured as the schism between divine and human law. – Youth leaves the unconscious essence and the spirit of the family, and it becomes the individuality of the polity. However, that youth still belongs to the nature from which it has wrested itself away is demonstrated by youth's contingently emerging in the form of two brothers with equal rights to take possession of the polity. For them, who enter into the ethical essence, the inequality of earlier and later birth has, as a natural difference, no meaning. However, as the simple soul, or as the self of the spirit of the people, the government does not tolerate a dualism of individuality, and by the accident of there being more than one, nature confronts the ethical necessity of this unity. For that reason, these two brothers are at odds with each other, and their equal right to the power of the state shatters both of them, each of whom is just as much in the wrong. Humanly considered, he who has committed the crime is the one who, because he was not in possession of his right, attacked the very polity in which the other stood at the head; in contrast, the one has right on his side who knew how to take the other only as a singular individual cut off from the polity and who, in finding him in this powerlessness, banished him from the polity. He struck at only the singular individual as such and not the polity; he did not strike at the essence of human right. Attacked and defended by empty singular individuality, the polity sustains itself, and it is through each other that the brothers come to their mutual demise, since individuality, which in its being-for-itself is linked to a danger to the whole, has expelled itself from the polity and dissolves itself. However, the polity will honor the one it found to be on its side; in contrast, the government, the re-established simplicity of the self of the polity, will punish the one who had already proclaimed on the walls of the city the devastation he would wreak, and this punishment will be that of denying him final honors. The one who assaulted the highest spirit of consciousness, the religious community,³⁵ must be stripped of the honor due to his fully perfected essence, or the honor due to the isolated spirit.

473. However much the universal so easily pushes off the pure tip of its pyramid and is victorious over the rebellious principle of singular individuality, or the family, still it has as a result committed itself to a struggle with divine law. This is a struggle between spirit conscious of itself and unconscious spirit, for unconscious spirit is the other essential power and is for that reason not destroyed but only offended by the conscious spirit. Yet confronting the authoritative law lying open to the light of day, unconscious spirit has a bloodless shade to help it put its law actually into effect. Hence, as the law of weakness and of darkness, it is initially subjugated to daylight's law 258and to its force, for its authority is only valid in the netherworld and not on the earth. However, the actual, which took its honor and power from the inner, has by doing so devoured its essence. The revealed spirit has the roots of its force in the netherworld; the people's self-reassuring certainty has the truth of its oath which binds them all into one only in the mute unconscious substance of all, in the waters of forgetfulness. The achievement of public spirit is thereby transformed into its opposite, and the public spirit experiences that its supreme right is supreme wrong and that its victory is instead its own downfall. For that reason, the dead individual whose right is infringed knows how to find instruments for his vengeance which are as actual and forceful as the power that injured him. These powers are other polities whose altars the dogs or birds defiled with the corpse, which was itself not elevated into unconscious universality by being appropriately returned to the elemental individual, the earth. Instead, it has remained above ground in the realm of actuality, and, as the force of divine law, it has now acquired a self-conscious, actual universality. These powers rise up in hostility and destroy the polity that has dishonored and disrupted its own force, the piety of the family.

474. In this representation, the movement of human and divine law has its necessity expressed in individuals in whom the universal appears as a pathos, and the movement's activity appears as an individual doing which bestows a semblance of contingency to the necessity of the movement. However, both individuality and doing constitute the principle of singular individuality as such, a principle which in its pure universality was called the inner divine law. As a moment of the polity made public, it does not only have the effectiveness of the netherworld, or an external effectiveness in its existence; it also just as much has a public, actual existence and movement in the actual people. Taken in this form, what was represented as the simple movement of the individualized pathos acquires a different look, and the crime together with the destruction of the polity (a destruction founded in that crime) acquire the real form of their existence. – Thus, in its universal existence, or the polity, human law is in its activity itself the manliness of the polity and is in its actual activity the government, and it moves itself and sustains itself by absorbing into itself the isolation of the Penates, or their self-sufficient individualization into different families over which women preside and which keep them dissolved within the continuity of its fluidity. However, the family is at the same time its elemental unit, and its universal energizing ground is singular consciousness. While the polity 259gives itself stable existence only by disrupting familial happiness and by dissolving self-consciousness in the universal, it creates an internal enemy for itself in what it suppresses, which is at the same time essential to it, or it creates an enemy in the feminine itself. By intrigue, the feminine – the polity's eternal irony – changes the government's universal purpose into a private purpose, transforms its universal activity into this determinate individual's work, and it inverts the state's universal property into the family's possession and ornament. In this way, the feminine turns to ridicule the solemn wisdom of maturity, which, being dead to singular individuality – dead to pleasure and enjoyment as well as to actual activity – only thinks of and is concerned for the universal. The feminine turns this mature wisdom into an object of ridicule for immature, high-spirited youths and into an object of contempt for those youths’ enthusiasm. As such, she elevates the force of youth into the status of what is validly established³⁶ – she elevates the force of the son, born to his mother as her master, and what counts is the force of the brother as one in whom the sister finds a man as an equal with herself, the man through whom the daughter, freed from her own non-self-sufficiency, achieves the enjoyment and the dignity of womanhood. – However, the polity can only sustain itself by suppressing this spirit of individuality, and because that spirit is an essential moment, the polity likewise creates it by its repressive stance towards it as a hostile principle. Nevertheless, since this principle, in separating itself from universal purposes, is only evil and is within itself null, it would be incapable of accomplishing anything if the polity itself were not to recognize the force of youth, or the manhood, which, although immature, still stands within individuality as the force of the whole. For the polity is a people, it is itself individuality, and it is so only essentially for itself in that other individualities are for it and in its excluding these from itself and knowing itself to be independent of them. The negative aspect of the polity, which directs itself inward and suppresses the isolation of the individual but which also directs itself outward and is self-active, has its weapons in individuality. War is the spirit and the form in which the essential moment of ethical substance, the absolute freedom of ethically independent beings³⁷ from all existence, is present in its actuality and in having proved itself. While, on the one hand, war makes the single systems of property and personal self-sufficiency as well as singular personality itself feel the force of the negative, in war this negative essence otherwise brings itself to the forefront as what sustains the whole. The brave youth, in whom the feminine has its pleasure, or the suppressed principle of corruption, comes now into full view and is what counts. Now what will render a decision on the existence of ethical essence and spiritual necessity is natural strength and what appears as the luck of the draw. Because the existence of ethical life thus rests on strength and chance, 260it has already been decided that it breathes its last. – Just as previously it was only the Penates in the spirit of the people which perished, now it is the living spirits of the people which perish through their individuality, and they collapse into one universal polity whose simple universality is devoid of spirit, is dead, and whose liveliness is the singular individual as singular. The ethical shape of spirit has disappeared, and another shape steps in to take its place.

475. This demise of ethical substance and its transition into another shape is determined, as a result, by this: That ethical consciousness is immediately directed towards the law, and this determination of immediacy means that nature itself enters into ethical life's action. Its actuality only reveals the contradiction and the germ of corruption which ethical spirit's beautiful unanimity and motionless equilibrium have in this motionlessness and beauty itself, for immediacy bears the contradictory meaning of being the unconscious restfulness of nature and the self-conscious restless restfulness of spirit. – On account of this naturalness, this ethical people per se is an individuality determined by nature and is thus a restricted individuality which finds its sublation in another individuality. However, this determinateness disappears, a determinateness which is posited as existing and which is a restriction, but which is also just as much the negative itself and the self of individuality. While this determinateness disappears, the life of spirit and this substance, which is conscious of itself in the self-consciousness of all, are both lost. In both of them, the substance emerges as a formal universality and no longer dwells in them as a living spirit. Instead, their simple unadulterated individuality has been shattered into a plurality of multiple points.

c. The State of Legality

476. The universal unity into which the living immediate unity of individuality and substance returns is the spiritless polity, a polity which has ceased to be the un-self-aware substance of individuals, and within which those individuals, according to their singular being-for-itself now each count as independent beings³⁸ and as substance. The universal is splintered into the atoms of absolutely multiple individuals; this spirit, having died, is an equality in which all count for as much as each and where each and all count as persons.³⁹ – What in the ethical world was called the hidden divine law 261has in fact emerged out of its innerness into actuality. In the former the singular individual was and counted as actual only as the universal blood of the family. As this singular individual, he was the selfless departed⁴⁰spirit, but now he has emerged from out of his non-actuality. Because it is only ethical substance which is true spirit, the singular individual returns into the immediate certainty of himself. He is that substance as the positive universal, but his actuality is to be a negative, universal self. – We saw the powers and shapes of the ethical world immersed into the simple necessity of an empty fate. This power of the ethical world is the substance reflecting itself into its simplicity, but the absolute essence reflecting itself into itself, the very necessity of empty fate, is nothing but the I of self-consciousness.

477. Henceforth this counts as the essence existing in and for itself. This, its being recognized, is its substantiality. However, this is abstract universality because its content is this aloof self, not the self which has been dissolved in the substance.

478. Personality has thus here stepped out of the life of ethical substance. It is the actual self-sufficiency of consciousness which counts and is in force. The non-actual thought of such self-sufficiency, which comes to be through the renunciation of actuality is what earlier appeared as stoical self-consciousness. Just as stoical self-consciousness itself emerged out of mastery and servitude as the immediate existence of self-consciousness, personality emerges out of immediate spirit – emerges out of the universally dominating will of all and their servile obedience. What to stoicism was the in-itself only in abstraction is now an actual world. Stoicism is nothing but the consciousness that brings the state of legality, the self-sufficiency devoid of spirit, to its abstract form. Through its flight away from actuality, it only reached the thought of self-sufficiency, and it existed absolutely for itself not through binding its essence to any kind of existence at all. Instead, it has given up on any of those kinds of existence, and it posits that its essence lies solely in the unity of pure thinking. In the same manner, the right of the person is neither bound up with a richer or more powerful existence of the individual itself, nor is it bound up with a universal living spirit. Rather, it is bound up instead with the pure One of its abstract actuality, or to that One as self-consciousness, full stop.

479. Now just as the abstract self-sufficiency of stoicism exhibited its actualization, so too will this self-sufficiency repeat stoicism's movement. Stoicism passes over into the skeptical disorientation of consciousness, into a kind of blather about the negative, which in shapelessly drifting from one contingency of being and thought to 262another, certainly brings them to dissolution within its absolute self-sufficiency, but then likewise creates them anew. It is in fact only the contradiction between the self-sufficiency of consciousness and its un-self-sufficiency. – Likewise, the self-sufficiency of the person in lawful right is instead this same universal disorientation and mutual dissolution, for what counts as the absolute essence is self-consciousness taken as the pure empty One of the person. With respect to this empty universality, the substance has the form both of being brought to fulfillment and of the content, and this content is now left free-standing and in a state of disorder, for the spirit which subjugated it and held it together in its unity is no longer present. – Hence, this empty One of the person is in its reality a contingent existence, an essenceless movement and doing that never reaches any kind of stable existence. Just like skepticism, the formalism of legal right is thus through its concept without any distinctive content. It finds a multiply stable existence, that of property, and it impresses on it the very same abstract universality (through which it is now called property) as that of skepticism. But however much actuality determined in that way is what skepticism designates as semblance that has only a negative value, still in legal right it has a positive value. That negative value consists in actuality signifying the self as thinking, the self as the universal in itself. However, the positive value consists in its being mine in the sense of the category, or as a validity that is recognized⁴¹ and actual. Both are the same abstract universal. The actual content, or the determinateness of something's being mine – whether it be an external possession or else that of either inner richness or a poverty of both spirit and character – is not contained in this empty form and does not concern it. The content thus belongs to a power of its own, which is something other than the formal universal, namely, that of contingency and arbitrary choice. – For that reason, in its actual validity, the consciousness of legal right experiences itself instead as the loss of its reality; it experiences its complete inessentiality, and it learns that to designate an individual as a person is an expression of contempt.

480. The free power of the content determines itself in such a way that the dispersal into the absolute plurality of atoms of personality is through the nature of this determinateness at the same time equally collected into a single and equally spiritless point alien to them, which on the one hand is a purely singular actuality, the same as the aloofness of their personality, but, in opposition to their own empty singular individuality, it refers at the same time to all content and, as a result, signifies for them their real essence. In contrast to the absolute actuality they mean to have, it is in itself the universal power and absolute actuality. In this way, this lord of the world is, to himself, the absolute person, who at the same time embraces all existence within himself and for whose consciousness there is no higher type of spirit. He is a person, but he is the solitary person confronting all the others. All these 263others constitute the authoritative⁴² universality of the person, for the singular individual as such a singular individual is true only as the universal plurality of singular individuality. Cut off from this plurality, the solitary self is in fact a powerless and non-actual self. – At the same time, the solitary self is the consciousness of the content that confronts that universal personality. However, when freed from its negative power this content is the chaos of the spiritual powers, which are now unchained and which madly and destructively set themselves into motion as elemental essences raging in debauched excesses against each other. Their self-consciousness, lacking any force, is the powerless embrace of their tumult and is its basis. This lord of the world, cognizant of himself as the epitome of all actual powers, is a monstrous self-consciousness who knows himself as an actual god. However, since he is only the formal self who is unable to bring those powers under control, his emotional life⁴³ and his self-indulgence are equally monstrous excesses.

481. In the destructive violence he exercises upon the selves of his subjects as they confront him, the lord of the world has the actual consciousness of what he is, namely, the universal might of actuality. This is so because his power is not the union of spirit in which persons became cognizant⁴⁴ of their own self-consciousness, but instead, as a person, each is for himself, and he excludes continuity with others through the absolute aloofness of his point-like existence. Those persons are thus in an only negative relationship to each other in the same way that they are in a negative relationship to the lord of the world, who is himself their relation to each other, or their continuity with each other. As this continuity, he is the essence and content of their formalism, but he is a content alien to them, a hostile essence who sublates what counts for them as their essence, namely, their contentless being-for-itself – and as the continuity of their personality, he destroys that very personality itself. While the content alien to personality makes itself felt in it, and it makes itself felt because it is their reality, personality thus experiences instead its substancelessness. In contrast, the destructive groping around in this essenceless arena gives itself a consciousness of its mastery over all others, but this self is merely a laying waste to everything and thus is only external to itself⁴⁵ and instead is the discarding of its own self-consciousness.

482. This is the way in which the aspect is constituted in which self-consciousness as absolute essence is actual. However, the consciousness which is driven back into itself from out of this actuality thinks through this, its inessentiality. Earlier we saw the stoic self-sufficiency of pure thinking pass through skepticism and find its truth in the unhappy consciousness – the truth which is at stake in its being-in-and-for-itself. However much this knowing appeared at that time only as the one-sided point of view of consciousness as such an unhappy consciousness, still it is here where its actual truth has come into view. What the truth consists in is that this universal validity 264of self-consciousness is the reality alienated from it. This validity is the universal actuality of the self, but this actuality is immediately just as much an inversion. It is the loss of its essence. – The actuality of the self which was not present in the ethical world has been attained by its return into the person, and what was unified in the ethical world now comes on the scene as both developed and as alienated from itself.

B. Spirit Alienated from Itself: Cultural Formation

483. The ethical substance kept the opposition enclosed within its simple consciousness, and it kept this consciousness in an immediate unity with its essence. For that reason, the essence for consciousness has the simple determinateness of being, towards which consciousness is immediately directed and whose ethos it is. Consciousness neither counts to itself as this exclusionary self, nor does the substance signify an existence excluded from it, with which consciousness would have posited itself as one only by alienating itself from that substance and engendering it at the same time. However, the spirit whose self is the absolutely discrete self has, to itself, its content confronting it as a just as hard actuality, and the world bears the determination of the external, the negative of self-consciousness. However, this world is a spiritual essence; in itself, it is the permeation of individuality and being. Its existence is the work of self-consciousness, but it is just as much an alien actuality with its own distinctive being which is immediately present for self-consciousness and within which self-consciousness does not recognize⁴⁶ itself. This actuality is the external essence and the free-standing content of legal right. However, this external actuality, which the lord of the world of legal right encompasses within himself, is not only this elemental external essence contingently present for the self; it is also his non-positive labor – or, instead, his negative labor. It receives its existence through self-consciousness’ own self-relinquishing⁴⁷ and de-essentialization,⁴⁸ which, in the desolation that prevails in the world of legal right, seems to be inflicted on it by the external violence of those unleashed elements. These elements are for themselves only what brings about both this sheer desolation and their own dissolution. However, this dissolution which is their negative nature is precisely the self; it is their subject, their doing, and their coming-to-be. However, this doing and this coming-to-be whereby the substance becomes actual is the alienation of personality, for the immediate self, or the self 265without alienation, which is in force in and for itself, is insubstantial; it is the game played by these raging elements. Its substance is thus itself its own self-relinquishing,⁴⁹ and the self-relinquishing is the substance itself, or it is the spiritual powers bringing themselves into order in a world and as a result sustaining themselves.

484. It is in this manner that substance is spirit, or the self-conscious unity of the self and essence. However, for each other, what each of them means is also alienation from the other. Spirit is consciousness of an objective actuality freely existing on its own,⁵⁰ but confronting this latter consciousness is the former unity of the self with essence, or actual consciousness confronting pure consciousness. On the one hand, through its self-relinquishing, actual self-consciousness makes a transition into the actual world, which then passes over again back into actual self-consciousness. But on the other hand, this actuality, as well as the person and objectivity, are all sublated; they are purely universal. Their alienation is pure consciousness, or the essence. The present moment immediately has its opposite in its other-worldly beyond, which is its thinking and having been thought, just as this other-worldly beyond has its opposite in the this-worldly, which is its actuality alienated from it.

485. This spirit therefore develops not only a world, it also develops a doubled world, which is divided and opposed within itself. – The world of ethical spirit is its own present time, and hence every power within it is in this unity, and insofar as each differentiates itself from the other, each is in equilibrium with the whole. Nothing signifies the negative of self-consciousness; even the departed spirit is present in the blood of his relatives, current in the self of the family, and the universal power of government is the will, the self of the people. However, here, [at this stage of the exposition,] “the currently present” only means objective actuality, which has its consciousness in the other-worldly beyond. As essence, each singular moment receives this and thereby receives actuality from an other, and insofar as such a consciousness is actual, its essence is something other than its actuality. Nothing has a spirit grounded and indwelling within itself but is external to itself in something alien. – Neither is the equilibrium of the whole the unity remaining at one with itself⁵¹ and its reassurance returned into itself. Rather, it rests on the alienation of opposites. The whole therefore is, as is each singular moment, a self-alienated reality. One of the realms into which it breaks up is the realm in which both self-consciousness as well as its object are actual, and the other realm is that of pure consciousness, which is the other-worldly beyond of the former and which has no actual present but which is instead for faith. The ethical world was separated into the divine and the human law together with their respective shapes, and its consciousness was separated into knowing and the unconscious. Now both return back into their fate, or return back into the self 266as the negative power of this opposition, and in that way so too will both of these realms of self-alienated spirit return back into the self. But if the former was only the self immediately in force, or was the singular person, then this second, which returns into itself from out of its own self-relinquishing, will still be the universal self, consciousness grasping the concept. All of the moments of these spiritual worlds, which claim for themselves a fixed actuality and an unspiritual stable existence, will be dissolved within pure insight. As the self grasping itself, this pure insight completes the process of cultural formation. It comprehends nothing but the self and everything as the self, i.e., it comprehends⁵² everything, erases all objectivity, and transforms all being-in-itself into being-for-itself. When it is turned against faith as the alien realm of essence lying in the other-worldly beyond, it is the Enlightenment. This Enlightenment also brings alienation to its culmination in this realm in which alienated spirit recovers itself and where it has a consciousness of being both self-equal and motionless. The Enlightenment throws the housekeeping of faith into disarray by bringing in the utensils belonging to the world of the here-and-now, a world which faith cannot deny is its property while its consciousness just as much belongs to that world. – In this negative task, pure insight at the same time realizes itself and engenders its own object, that of the unknowable absolute essence and that of utility. While in this manner actuality has lost all substantiality, and there is thus nothing more in itself in actuality, not only are the realms of both faith and the real world overturned, this revolution brings out absolute freedom, and it is with this freedom that the previously alienated spirit, which has completely returned back into itself, abandons this land of cultural formation and crosses over into another land, into the land of moral consciousness.

I. The World of Self-Alienated Spirit

486. The world of spirit falls apart into two worlds. The first is the actual world, or the world of its alienation itself, but the other is the world which spirit, in elevating itself above the first world, constructs for itself in the ether of pure consciousness. This second world, which is opposed to that alienation, is for that reason not free from it, but is rather instead only the other form of alienation, which consists in the consciousness of two sorts of worlds, embracing both of them. It is not therefore self-consciousness of the absolute essence as it is in and for itself; it is not religion which is being considered. Rather, it is faith insofar as it is a flight away from the actual world and thus does not exist in and for itself. Such a flight 267away from the realm of the present is hence immediately in its own self a doubled flight. Pure consciousness is the element into which spirit elevates itself, but pure consciousness is not only the element of faith, it is just as much that of the concept. Hence both emerge together at the same time, and the former comes into view only in opposition to the latter.

a. Cultural Formation and its Realm of Actuality

487. The spirit of this world is spiritual essence infused with a self-consciousness that knows itself as this self-consciousness, immediately current and existing for itself, which knows the essence as an actuality over and against itself. However, the existence of this world as well as the actuality of self-consciousness rests on the movement of self-consciousness relinquishing itself of its personality and thereby engendering its world. By doing so it relates to it as something alien so that it henceforth must take possession of it. However, the renunciation of its being-for-itself is itself the engendering of actuality, and therefore in that renunciation self-consciousness immediately takes possession of actuality. – Or, self-consciousness is only something, it only has reality insofar as it alienates itself from itself. By doing this, it posits itself as a universal self-consciousness, and its universality is its validity and its actuality. Hence, this equality of all is not the former equality of legal right, nor that of the immediate recognition⁵³ and validity of self-consciousness for the reason that self-consciousness is. Rather, that it is valid comes about through the alienating mediation which consists in making itself conform to the universal. The spiritless universality of legal right absorbs every natural manner of character and existence into itself and authorizes them. However, the universality that is in force here is the universality which has come to be, and for that reason it is actual.

488. It is cultural formation through which the individual here has validity and actuality. The individual's true original nature and his substance are the spirit of the alienation of natural being. Hence, this self-relinquishing is as much his purpose as it is the existence of his natural being. It is at the same time the mediating middle, or the transition into actuality of the substance conceived in thought⁵⁴ as well as the transition of determinate individuality into essentiality. This individuality culturally educates itself into what it is in itself and only as a result is it in itself, does it have actual existence. The more it has such cultural education, the more it has actuality and power. Although here the self as this self knows itself to be actual, its actuality still solely consists in the sublation of the natural self. The original determinate nature is thus reduced to an inessential difference of magnitude, to a greater or lesser energy of will. However, the purpose and content of the self 268belonging solely to the universal substance can only be a universal. The particularity of a nature that becomes purpose and content is something powerless and non-actual. It is a type⁵⁵ that futilely and ridiculously tries to set itself to work; it is the contradiction involved in giving to the particular an actuality which is immediately universal. However much individuality is thus falsely posited as lying in the particularity of nature and character, still in the real world there are no individualities and characters to be found; rather, the individuals have the same existence for each other; the individuality that is supposed to be is only a fancied⁵⁶ existence which has no remaining endurance, where what receives actuality is only what empties itself of itself and is for that reason the universal. – For that reason, what is only meant to be counts for what it is, namely, a type. A type is not quite the same as Espèce, “the most horrible of all nicknames, for it means mediocrity and expresses the highest level of contempt.” To be “a type” and “to be a good one of its type” are German expressions, which add to it an air of honesty, as if it were not uttered with such bad intent; or else it means that in fact consciousness does not yet draw the implications about what in fact is a type, what is cultural formation, and what is actuality.

489. What in relation to the single individual appears as his cultural formation is the essential moment of the substance itself, namely, the immediate transition of its universality, as having been thought, into actuality, or into the simple soul through which the in-itself is something recognized and is existence. Hence, the movement of individuality culturally educating itself is the coming-to-be of such an individuality as universally objective essence; i.e., it is the coming-to-be of the actual world. This world, although having come to be through individuality, is for self-consciousness immediately alienated and has the form of an unshakeable actuality for it. However, at the same time, self-consciousness, which is certain that this is its substance, sets about to take possession of it. It achieves this power over its substance through cultural formation, which from this aspect has the appearance of self-consciousness making itself conform to reality as much as its original character's energy and talents permit it. What appears here as the authority of the individual under which the substance is subsumed and thereby sublated is the same as the actualization of the substance, for the power of the individual consists in making itself conform to the substance, or the individual empties itself of its own self and thus posits itself as the objectively existing substance. Hence, its cultural formation and its own actuality are the actualization of the substance itself.

490. To itself, the self is only actual as sublated. Hence, to itself, the self does not constitute the unity of the consciousness of itself and its object; rather, to itself, the object is the negative of itself. – Through the self, as the soul, the substance is thus developed into its moments so that the opposites 269spiritualize each other, and through its own alienation, each both gives a stable existence to the other and, just as much, receives it from the other. At the same time, each moment has its determinateness as an insurmountable validity and a steadfast actuality with respect to the other. Thinking fixes this difference in the most universal manner through the absolute opposition of good and bad, which, taking flight from each other, cannot in any way become one and the same. However, this fixed being has as its soul the immediate transition into its opposite; instead, existence is the inversion of each determinateness into its opposite, and only this alienation is the essence and the sustaining of the whole. What is now up for examination is this actualizing movement and spiritualizing of the moments. The alienation will alienate itself, and through that alienation, the whole will take itself back into its concept.

491. First up for examination is the simple substance itself in the immediate organization of its existing but still not spiritualized moments. – Just as nature explicates itself into universal elements, under which fall: air, the enduring purely universal transparent essence; water, the essence that is ever sacrificed; fire, their ensouling unity, which likewise ever dissolves their opposites as their simplicity becomes disunited within it – the earth as both the firm knots of this classification⁵⁷ and the subject of this essence as it is of their processes, that from which they start and to which they return. – In this way, the inner essence, or the simple spirit of self-conscious actuality, explicates itself into just those kinds of universal, though spiritual, social estates⁵⁸ and presents itself as a world – it explicates itself into the first social estate, the universal in itself, the self-equal spiritual essence – and then it explicates itself as being the other, the essence existing for itself which has become unequal within itself, an essence that is self-sacrificing, self-forsaking; after that, it explicates itself into the third social estate, which, as self-consciousness, is subject, and which immediately has in its own self the force of fire. – In the first essence, it is conscious of itself as being-in-itself, but in the second it has the coming-to-be of being-for-itself through the sacrifice of the universal. However, spirit itself is the being-in-and-for-itself of the whole, which estranges itself into substance as lasting and the substance as self-sacrificing and then likewise takes substance back again into its unity and takes back the flame which bursts out and consumes the substance as well as its lasting shape. – We see that this essence corresponds to the polity and the family of the ethical world, but without possessing the indigenous spirit which these latter have. On the contrary, if fate is alien to the latter, then self-consciousness here both is, and knows itself as, the actual power over these spheres.

492. What is now up for examination are these links, namely, according to how they are initially represented within pure consciousness as thoughts, or as essences existing in themselves, as well as how they are represented in actual consciousness as objective essences. – The first is in that former form of simplicity, as the self-equal essence, or the immediate, and unchanging essence of all consciousness, the good – the independent spiritual 270power of the in-itself, in which the movement of consciousness existing-for-itself is only incidental. In comparison, the other is the passive spiritual essence, or the universal insofar as it relinquishes itself and permits individuals to come to have their consciousness of their singular individuality in it; it is the null essence, the bad. – This absolute becoming of dissolution is itself lasting. As the first essence is the foundation, starting point, and result of individuals, and these are purely universally within it, so in contrast is the second essence on the one hand a self-sacrificing being-for-others, and on the other hand is for that very reason the individual's constant return to itself as the singular individual and its lasting coming-to-be-for-itself.

493. However, these simple thoughts of the good and the bad are just as immediately alienated from themselves. They are actual and are as objective moments in actual consciousness. That way the first essence is state power and the other is wealth. – State power is like the simple substance as well as the universal work – the absolute crux of the matter in which individuals find their essence expressed and within which their singular individuality is only the very consciousness of their universality. – The crux of the matter is likewise the work and the simple result, and, because it is a result, the fact that it emerges from their own doings itself disappears. The work remains the absolute foundation and stable existence of all of their acts. – This simple ether-like substance of their life is, through this determination of their unchangeable self-equality, being, and for that reason, it is being for others. It is thus in itself the opposite of itself, namely, wealth. Whether wealth is the passive or the null, it is in any case a universal spiritual essence; it is the result which is continuously coming to be, just as it is the work and the doings of all, as it again dissolves within everyone's consumption of it. In consumption, individuality comes to be for itself, or as a singular individual. However, this consumption itself is the result of the universal doing just as it reciprocally engenders both universal work and everyone's consumption, and the actual has the utterly spiritual significance of being immediately universal. In this moment, each singular individual surely thinks he is acting in his own interest, since it is the moment in which he gives himself the consciousness of being for himself, and for that very reason he does not take it to be something spiritual. Yet even viewed only externally, it is evident that each in his own consumption benefits everyone else, and that in his labor each likewise works for everyone else as well as for himself, and in turn everyone else works for him. His being-for-itself is thus in itself universal, and self-interest is only something fancied that cannot even come close to making actual what it intends to do, namely, to do something that would not be to the benefit of all.

494. In both of these spiritual powers self-consciousness thus takes cognizance⁵⁹ of its substance, its content, and its purpose. It intuits its dual essence within them, seeing in 271one of them its being-in-itself and seeing in the other its being-for-itself. – At the same time, as spirit it is the negative unity of its stable existence and the separation of individuality from the universal, or of actuality from the self. Mastery and wealth are thus present for the individual as objects, i.e., as the kind of objects which he knows himself to be free from, and, between them and himself, he presumes that he is able to choose neither of them. As this free and pure consciousness, the individual confronts the essence as an essence that is only for him. He then has the essence as essence within himself. – Within this pure consciousness the moments of the substance are to himself neither state power nor wealth, but rather the thoughts of the good and the bad. – However, self-consciousness is furthermore the relation of his pure consciousness to his actual consciousness, or the relation between what has been thought⁶⁰ and the objective essence. Self-consciousness is essentially judgment. – Through the immediate determinations of both aspects of the actual essence, it has already been made clear what is supposed to be good and what is supposed to be bad, namely, that the good is state power, and the bad is wealth. Yet this first judgment cannot be regarded as a spiritual judgment, for within the first judgment the one aspect has been determined as only existing-in-itself, or as the positive, and the other aspect as only existing-for-itself, or as the negative. However, as a spiritual essence, each of them is the permeation of both moments, and thus they are not exhausted in those determinations. In relating itself to itself, self-consciousness is in and for itself, and thus it must relate itself to each of them in a twofold manner with the result that their nature, which is to that of being self-alienated determinations, will draw attention to itself.

495. To self-consciousness, the object in which it finds itself is now itself good and is in itself, and the object in which it finds its own opposite is bad. The good is the equality of objective reality with self-consciousness, but the bad is their inequality. At the same time, what is good and bad for it is good and bad in itself, for it is precisely that in which both of these moments of being-in-itself and of being-for-it are the same. It is the actual spirit of the objective essences, and its judgment is the proof of its power in them, a power which makes them into what they are in themselves. It is not this, the way in which they immediately are in themselves equal or unequal, i.e., abstract being-in-itself or being-for-itself, that is their criterion and truth. Rather, it is what they are in their relation to spirit, their equality or inequality with spirit. Spirit's relation to these moments, which are initially posited as objects and become in-itself through spirit, becomes at the same time their reflection into themselves through which they receive actual spiritual being, and that which is their spirit steps forward. However, just as their first immediate determination is distinguished from spirit's relation to them, the third moment, so their own proper spirit is also distinguished from the second moment. – Initially their second in-itself, 272which emerged through spirit's relation to them, must yet turn out differently from the immediate in-itself, since this mediation of spirit instead sets the immediate determinateness into motion and turns it into something else.

496. Consciousness existing in and for itself thereby undoubtedly now finds in state-power its simple essence and its stable existence per se, but it does not find its individuality as such individuality, finding therein its being-in-itself but not its being-for-itself. Instead, it finds therein doing as a singular doing to be repudiated and subjugated into obedience. Thus, in the face of this power, the individual reflectively takes an inward turn.⁶¹ To himself, it is the oppressive essence and is the bad, for instead of being his equal, it is utterly unequal to individuality. – In contrast, wealth is the good; wealth has to do with universal consumption; it gives itself away and gives to everyone a consciousness of their selves. Wealth is in itself universal beneficence. However much it fails at any given act of beneficence and however much it is not obliging to every need, this is only a contingency which in no way detracts either from its universal, necessary essence of conveying itself to all singular individuals or from its being a thousand-handed benefactor.

497. Both of these judgments give a content to the thoughts of the good and the bad which is the contrary of what they had for us. – However, self-consciousness had only been related to its objects incompletely, namely, according to the standards of being-for-itself. But consciousness is just as much the essence existing in-itself, and it must likewise make this aspect into the standard through which the spiritual judgment is first perfected. According to this aspect, state-power expresses to consciousness his essence. In part state-power is the motionless law, in part it is the government and command which arranges and orders the singular movements of the universal doing. One is the simple substance itself, the other is its own doing which animates and sustains itself and all individuals. The individual thus therein finds his ground and essence expressed, organized, and activated. – In contrast, in the consumption of wealth the individual does not experience his universal essence but rather receives only a transitory consciousness along with an enjoyment of himself as a singular individuality existing-for-himself, and receives the inequality with his essence. – The concepts of good and bad therefore receive here a content which is the opposite of what they had before.

498. Both of these modes of judging find each as an equality and an inequality. The first judging consciousness finds state-power to be unequal and finds the consumption of wealth to be equal to himself. In contrast, the second finds the former, state-power, to be equal, and the latter, consumption of wealth, to be unequal. There is a twofold finding-of-equality and a twofold finding-of-inequality, an opposed relation to both of the real essentialities. – We must assess these different acts of judging and apply to them the standard that has been advanced. The relation of consciousness which is a finding-of-equality is thereby the good; 273that which is a finding-of-inequality is the bad; and both of these kinds of relation must themselves henceforth be regarded as diverse shapes of consciousness. As a result of its conducting itself in diverse ways, consciousness itself comes under the determination of diversity, to be itself good or bad, not for the reason that it would have for its principle either being-for-itself or pure being-in-itself, for both of these are equally essential moments. The two-sided judging we have been considering represented those principles as separated, and thus it contains only abstract modes of judging. Actual consciousness has both principles in it, and the difference falls solely within its essence, namely, in the relation of itself to the real.

499. The mode of this relation is that of opposition. One of the opposites is a conduct towards state-power and wealth as a relation to an equal, the other as a relation to an unequal: – The consciousness of the relation which is a finding-of-equality is the noble-minded. In public power, it sees its equal, and it thus sees that it has its simple essence and its activity within that power. Its stance towards state-power is that of being in the service of actual obedience to it as well has having inner respect for it. Likewise, in wealth it provides, to itself, the consciousness of its other essential aspect, being-for-itself. Thus, it equally regards wealth as the essence in relation to itself, confers recognition on the benefactor who indulges him, and it holds itself to be under an obligation of gratitude.

500. The consciousness of the other relation, by comparison, is that of baseness, which clings tenaciously to the inequality between both essentialities. It thus sees the authority of the ruler as a shackle, as the suppression of its being-for-itself, and it thus hates the ruler and only obeys him with concealed malice, standing ever-ready to spring into revolt. – It considers wealth, through which it arrives at the enjoyment of its being-for-itself, just as much to be inequality with its lasting essence. While through wealth it only comes to a consciousness of singular individuality and of transitory consumption, it loves wealth but despises it, and, with the disappearance of that consumption, of what is in itself vanishing, it regards its relationship to the wealthy as having also vanished.

501. Now these relations initially express the judgment, the determination of what both the essences are as objects for consciousness, not yet as what they are in and for themselves. On the one hand, the reflection represented in the judgment is initially for us that of a positing of one determination as well as the other, and it is thus an equal sublation of both but not yet the reflection of them for consciousness itself. On the other hand, they are initially immediate essences; they neither have come to be these immediate essences, nor in themselves are they self-consciousness. That for which they are does not yet animate them;274 they are predicates which are not yet themselves subjects. On account of this separation, the whole of the spiritual judging also falls apart into two consciousnesses, each of which is subject to a one-sided determination. – Now, at first as the indifference of both aspects of alienation – one of which is the in-itself of pure consciousness, namely, the determinate thoughts of the good and the bad, and the other is their existence as state-power and wealth – elevated itself into the relation of both, into a judgment, so is this external relation to be elevated to inner unity, or to a relation of thinking to actuality, and the spirit of both shapes of judgment is to come forth. This takes place because judgment becomes inference; it becomes the mediating movement within which the mediating middle and the necessity of both aspects of the judgment come forward.

502. In the judgment, the noble-minded consciousness is to be found confronting state-power so that this state-power is to be sure not yet a self but is the universal substance. However, the noble-minded consciousness is conscious of it as its essence, as being its purpose and absolute content. Relating itself so positively to this substance, it establishes a negative relationship towards its own purposes, its particular content, and its existence, and it does away with them. It is the heroism of service – the virtue that sacrifices singular being to the universal and thereby brings this universal into existence – the person who by himself abjures possession and consumption and, for the powers that be, acts and is actual.

503. Through this movement, the universal becomes merged with existence itself just as existing consciousness culturally forms itself into essentiality through this self-relinquishing. That from which this consciousness alienates itself in its service is its own consciousness which is itself sunken into existence; however, self-alienated being is the in-itself. Through this cultural formation, it acquires a respect for itself and a respect from others. – However, state-power, which was initially only the universal in thought,⁶² that is, the in-itself, now becomes through this very movement the existing universal; it becomes actual power. It is this existing universal and actual power only in the actual obedience that it achieves through the judgment of self-consciousness, which judges that this actual power is the essence, and attains the essence through the free sacrifice of this self-consciousness to the actual power. This doing, which merges the essence with the self, engenders the doubled actuality, namely, the self as what has true actuality and state-power as the true that is validly in force.

504. However, through this alienation, this state-power is not yet a self-consciousness which knows itself to be state-power. It is only state-power's law, or its in-itself, which is valid. State-power still has no particular will, for the self-consciousness which renders service has still not emptied its pure self and thereby spiritualized state-power; it has only spiritualized state-power with its being, or the serving consciousness has only sacrificed its existence to state-power, not its 275being-in-itself. – This self-consciousness counts as the kind of self-consciousness which conforms to the essence and is recognized on account of its being-in-itself. The others find their essence activated in it but not their being-for-itself – they find their thinking, or, their pure consciousness, brought to fulfillment but not their individuality. It is thus validly in force in their thoughts, and it enjoys honor. It is the self-consciousness of the proud vassal, who actively works for state-power insofar as the latter is not a particular will but rather an essential will, and, to himself, he himself counts for something only within this honor, only in the essential ideas⁶³ of general opinion and not in the grateful opinion on the part of a particular individuality, for he has not helped this latter individuality to achieve its being-for-itself. If he were indeed to relate himself to state-power's own will which itself has not yet come to be, his language would be that of counsel, which he would give for the sake of the general good.⁶⁴

505. State-power thus still lacks any will to oppose that counsel, and it is indecisive about the different opinions about the common good. It is not yet government and for that reason is not yet in truth actual state-power. – The being-for-itself, the willing which as willing has not yet been sacrificed, is the inner isolated spirit of the estates, a spirit which, with respect to its talk about the common good, reserves to itself its particular common good and is inclined to make all this chatter about the common good into a surrogate for action. The sacrifice of existence which occurs in its service is, to be sure, complete when it has advanced as far as death, but the continual danger of death (when it is survived) leaves behind a determinate existence and, as a result, a particular for-itself which makes the counsel given about the common good into something ambiguous and suspect, something where the counselor in fact reserves for himself his own opinion and his particular individual will in the face of state-authority. The counselor thus relates himself unequally to state-power and, as falling under the determination of the base consciousness, he is always within a stone's throw of rebellion.

506. This contradiction which being-for-itself has to sublate contains in this form, that of standing in the inequality between being-for-itself vis-à-vis the universality of state-power, at the same time, the form that the former relinquishing of existence which while reaching its culmination in death, is itself an existing relinquishing, not one that returns back into consciousness – This consciousness does not survive the relinquishing; it is not in and for itself. Rather, it only makes a transition into its unreconciled opposite. The true sacrifice of being-for-itself is thus solely that in which it sacrifices itself just as completely, as it does in death, but in which it just as much preserves itself within this self-relinquishing. It thereby becomes actual as what it is in itself, as the identical unity of its own self with what is opposed to it. The isolated inner spirit, the self as such a self, thereby steps forward and alienates itself, and as a result, state-power is at the same time elevated into its own proper self. 276Without this alienation, all the acts of honor, the actions of the noble consciousness, and the counsels of its insight would remain equivocal; they would have the former departed ambush of particular intention and self-will.

507. However, this alienation takes place solely in language, which comes on the scene here in its distinctive significance. – In both the ethical world as laws and command and in the world of actuality as counsel, language has the essence for its content and is the form of that essence. However, here it receives as its content the form which it is, and it is as language that it is validly in force. It is the force of speech as that which accomplishes what is to be accomplished, for language is the existence of the pure self as the self. In language, the singular individuality of self-consciousness existing for itself comes into existence⁶⁵ so that it is for others. Otherwise, the I as this pure I is not there.⁶⁶ In every other expression, the I is submerged in an actuality, in a shape from which it can withdraw; it reflects itself into itself from out of its action as well as from out of its physiognomic expression, and it leaves behind an incomplete existence, a soulless existence, in which there is always too much as well as too little. However, language contains the I in its purity; it alone expresses the I itself. This, its existence, is, as existence, an objectivity which has its true nature in language. The I is this I – but is just as much universal. Its appearance is just as much the self-relinquishing and the disappearance of this I, and, as a result, its remaining in its universality. The I that expresses itself is brought to a hearing; it is an infection in which it has immediately made its transition into a unity with those for which it is there,⁶⁷ and it is a universal self-consciousness. – In its being brought to a hearing, its existence has itself immediately become fainter. This, its otherness, is taken back into itself, and its existence is just this: as a self-conscious now, as it is there, it is not there, and through this disappearance, it is there. This disappearing itself is thus immediately its lasting. It is its own knowing of itself, and it is its knowing of itself as a self which has passed over into another self, which itself has been brought to a hearing and is universal.

508. Spirit contains this actuality here because the extremes whose unity it is just as immediately each have the determination to be for itself its own actuality. Their unity is subverted into aloof aspects, each of which is for the other an actual object excluded from it. The unity thus emerges as a mediating middle which is excluded and distinguished from the departed actuality of the two aspects; thus it itself has an actual objectivity differentiated from its aspects, and it is for them, i.e., it is existent.⁶⁸ The spiritual substance enters into existence,⁶⁹ first while it has gained for its aspects the sort of self-consciousness which knows this pure self to be an actuality which is immediately 277in force, and therein it just as immediately knows that it is this actuality only through the alienating mediation. Through the former, the moments are refined into the self-knowing category and thereby are refined right up to the point that they are moments of spirit. Through the latter, spirit comes into existence as spirituality.⁷⁰ – In this way, spirit is the mediating middle which presupposes those extremes and is engendered through their existence. – However, it is just as much the spiritual whole welling up between them and which estranges itself into them, and it is only through this contact that, within its principle, it fashions each of them into the whole. – That both extremes are already sublated and subverted in themselves is what brings out their unity, and this unity is the movement which merges both of them together, which exchanges their determinations, namely, merges them together within each extreme. This mediation thereby places⁷¹ the concept of each of the two extremes into the concept's actuality, or it makes what each is in itself into its spirit.

509. Both extremes, state-power and the noble consciousness, have been subverted through the latter. State-power is subverted into the abstract universal to which an obedient response is given and into the individual will existing-for-itself, but which does not yet itself measure up to the universal. The noble consciousness is subverted into the obedience of sublated existence, or into the being-in-itself of self-respect and honor, and into the pure being-for-itself which is not yet sublated, into the will still lying in ambush. The two moments into which the extremes are purified and are thus moments of language are the abstract universal, which goes by the name of the common good, and the pure self, which in its service repudiated its consciousness which was absorbed within a manifold existence. In the concept, both are the same, for the pure self is just the abstract universal and therefore their unity is posited as their mediating middle. However, the self is only actual in the extreme of consciousness – but the in-itself is only actual in the extreme of state-authority. What is lacking in consciousness is that state-power should actually have passed over into consciousness not only as honor – what is lacking in state-power is that it should be obeyed not only as the so-called common good but also obeyed as the will, in other words, obeyed as the self that makes the decision. The unity of the concept in which state-power still stands and into which consciousness has distilled itself becomes actual in this mediating movement, whose simple existence as the mediating middle is language. – Nonetheless, it does not yet have for its aspects two selves present as selves, for state-power is yet to be spiritualized into a self. This language is hence not yet spirit in the way that spirit completely knows itself and expresses itself.

510. The noble consciousness, because it is the extreme of the self, appears as the source of the language through which the aspects of the relationships are shaped into ensouled wholes. – The heroism of silent service 278becomes the heroism of flattery. This expressive reflection of service constitutes the spiritual, self-subverting mediating. It not only reflects its own extreme into itself, it also reflects the extreme of universal authority⁷² back into this self, and it makes that authority, which initially is in itself, into being-for-itself, into the singular individuality of self-consciousness. It thereby becomes the spirit of this authority and becomes an unlimited monarch.⁷³ – Unlimited: The language of flattery elevates this authority into its purified universality; the moment, as language's creation, as existence purified into spirit, is a purified self-equality. – Monarch: The language of flattery just as much elevates singular individuality to its peak; according to this aspect of simple spiritual unity, the noble consciousness empties itself of the pure in-itself of its thinking, its I itself. To put it more determinately: Flattery elevates singular individuality, which otherwise is only fancied,⁷⁴ into its existing purity, into giving the monarch his own name, for it is in the name alone within which the difference of the singular individual from all others is not intended⁷⁵ but is made actual by all. In the name, the singular individual counts as a pure individual singular, no longer only in his own consciousness but in the consciousness of all. Through his name, therefore, the monarch becomes absolutely cut off from everyone; he becomes singled out and solitary. In the name, the monarch is the atom that cannot communicate its essence and which has no equal. – As a result, this name is its reflective turn into itself, or is the actuality which the universal power has in its own self. Through the name, the universal power is the monarch. Conversely, he, this singular individual, thereby knows himself, this singular individual, as the universal power, and he knows that the nobles are not only prepared to enter into the service of state-power but also to group themselves around the throne as his ornaments and to incessantly tell the one who sits on that throne what he is.

511. In this way, the language of their praise is the spirit which merges together both extremes within state-power itself. This language reflects the abstract power into itself and gives that power the moment of the other extreme, that of the willing and deciding being-for-itself, and it thereby gives it a self-conscious existence.⁷⁶ Or, as a result this singular individual actual self-consciousness comes around to knowing itself with certainty as power. This power is the self sharpened to a point into which the many points of selfhood, through the relinquishing of their inner certainty, are blended together. – However, while this ownmost spirit of state-power itself consists in having its actuality and its nourishment in the sacrifices of the deeds and thoughts of the noble consciousness, it is a self-alienated self-sufficiency. The noble consciousness, the extreme of being-for-itself, relinquished itself of the universality of thinking, and in exchange the noble consciousness itself receives back the extreme of actual universality; the power 279of the state has been transferred to him. State-authority is initially only truly activated in the noble consciousness; in his being-for-itself, state-power ceases to be the inert essence which, as the extreme of abstract being-in-itself, it appeared to be. – Regarded in-itself, state-power reflected into itself, or state-power as having become spirit, means nothing other than that state-power has come to be a moment of self-consciousness, i.e., it is only as sublated. It is thereby now the essence as such an essence whose spirit consists in being sacrificed and relinquished, or it exists as wealth. – State-power, which according to its concept is always in the process of becoming wealth, nonetheless continues to remain as an actuality in its confrontation with wealth. However, it is an actuality whose concept is this very movement of passing over into its contrary, the self-relinquishing of power, through the service and reverence through which it itself arises. For itself the distinctive self, which is its will, becomes thus a self-relinquishing universality in casting aside the noble consciousness, or it becomes a consummated singular individuality and a contingency at the mercy of any stronger will. All that remains to it of universally recognized and non-mediated self-sufficiency is the empty name.

512. However much therefore the noble consciousness determines itself as what would relate itself to the universal power in an equal manner, still the truth of that noble consciousness instead lies in its retaining its own being-for-itself in its service to state-power, but in the genuine disavowal of its personality, its truth is the actual sublation and the disruption of the universal substance. Its spirit is a relationship of thoroughgoing inequality, which, on the one hand, comes about in its retaining its own will in its being honored, and, on the other hand, in its giving up its own will in part by itself alienating its own inner and thus becoming the highest pitch of inequality with itself, and in part by subjugating the universal substance to itself so that it makes that substance thoroughly unequal to itself. – It becomes clear that, as a result, its determinateness, which it had in judgments contra to what was called the base consciousness, has thereby also vanished. The base consciousness has achieved its end, that of subordinating universal power to being-for-itself.

513. Enriched in this way by the universal power, self-consciousness exists as universal beneficence, or universal power is wealth which is again itself an object for consciousness. – This is so because to self-consciousness, wealth is the universal placed into subjection, but which through this first sublation has not yet absolutely returned back into the self. The self does not as yet have itself as self as an object; rather, it has the sublated universal essence as an object. While this object has only just come to be, the immediate relation of consciousness to it has been posited, and consciousness has thus not yet exhibited its inequality with this object. It is the noble consciousness, which, receiving its being-for-itself in the universal that has become inessential, thus gives recognition to the object and is full of gratitude to its benefactor.

514. 280Wealth already has in its own self the moment of being-for-itself. It is not the universal of state-power, utterly devoid of a self, nor is it the indigenous inorganic nature of spirit; rather, it is state-power in its own self through its own willing which clings to itself as it confronts a will that wants to seize control of it for its own activities of consumption. However, while wealth only has the form of essence, this one-sided being-for-itself, which is not in itself but instead is the in-itself which has been sublated, is in its consumption the essenceless return of the individual into himself. Wealth thus itself needs to be enlivened, and the movement of its reflection consists in this, that wealth, which only is for itself, is to become being-in-and-for-itself; and wealth, which is the sublated essence, is to become the essence. In that way, it preserves its own spirit in its own self. – Since the form of this movement has been analyzed earlier, here it suffices to determine its content.

515. The noble consciousness thus relates itself here not to the object as essence. Rather, what is alien, to itself, is here being-for-itself. It finds that its own self as such a self is alienated, and it finds it as an objective, fixed actuality which it has to receive from another fixed being-for-itself. Its object is being-for-itself and thus its own; but as a result of its being an object, it is at the same time immediately an alien actuality which is its own being-for-itself, which has a will of its own, that is to say, the noble consciousness sees his own self under the authority of an alien will, and he is dependent on that alien will to let him have a will of his own.

516. Self-consciousness can abstract from every singular aspect, and for that reason, it retains its recognition⁷⁷ and validity-in-itself as the essence existing for itself even in an obligation which concerns only one of those aspects. However, here it sees itself from the side of its ownmost pure actuality, or it sees its I as external to itself and as belonging to an other, and it sees its personality as such dependent on the contingent personality of another, dependent on the contingency of a moment, an arbitrary choice, or dependent on some otherwise utterly irrelevant circumstance. – In the state of legality, what is within the authority of the objective essence appears as a contingent content which can be abstracted away from, and the authority does not concern the self as such; rather this self is instead recognized as a self. However, the self here sees its certainty of itself as such a certainty that is the most essenceless, as the pure personality absolutely devoid of personality. The spirit of its gratitude is thus the feeling of how this deepest abjectness is also the deepest indignation. While the pure I itself intuits itself as external to itself and as disrupted, it is in this disruption that everything which has continuity and universality, everything which is called law, good, and right, has come undone and met its downfall. All equality has been dissolved, for what is present is the purest inequality, the absolute inessentiality of the absolutely essential, the being-external-to-itself of being-for-itself. The pure I itself has been absolutely subverted.

517. However much this consciousness thus gets back from wealth the objectivity of its being-for-itself and sublates that objectivity, still according to its concept, 281it is not only not perfected in the way in which the preceding reflection was perfected, it is also for its own part unsatisfied. The reflection in which the self receives itself as something objective is the immediate contradiction posited as lying in the pure I itself. But as the self, this consciousness immediately stands above this contradiction; it is the absolute elasticity which again sublates the self's sublation and dismisses the dismissal which would have its being-for-itself become alien to it, and, indignant against this reception of itself, it is in that reception itself for itself.

518. Therefore, while the circumstances of this consciousness are bound up with this absolute disruption, the difference within its spirit, which is a difference determined as the opposition between the noble consciousness and the base consciousness, itself falls by the wayside, and both are the same. – The spirit of beneficent wealth can be further distinguished from that of the spirit receiving the benefit of the beneficent act and bears special examination. – The spirit was essenceless being-for-itself, the relinquished essence. However, through its communication,⁷⁸ it becomes the in-itself. While it fulfilled its determination-as-destiny,⁷⁹ which was to sacrifice itself, it sublates singular individuality, to be for itself only in consuming things, and as sublated singular individuality, it is universality, or essence. – What it communicates,⁸⁰ what it gives to the other, is being-for-itself. But it does not offer itself up as self-less nature, as the natural, naive self-sacrificing condition of life; rather, it offers itself up as a self-conscious essence, holding onto itself. It is not the inorganic power of the elements, which is known by the receptive consciousness to be transitory in itself; rather, it is the power over the self that knows itself to be independent and arbitrary, and at the same time it knows that what it dispenses is the self of an other. – Wealth thus shares this abjectness with its client, but for wealth, arrogance takes the place of indignation, for according to one aspect, it knows, as its client knows, that its being-for-itself is a contingent thing, but that it itself is this contingency standing under the authority of where legal personality stands. In its arrogance, which fancies that with a meal it has earned an alien I-self and as a result earned the subjection of that other's inmost essence, it overlooks the inner indignation of the other self. It overlooks the fact that all shackles have been completely cast aside; it overlooks this pure disruption, in which, while, to itself, the self-equality of being-for-itself has become utterly unequal, all equality, all stable existence has itself been disrupted; this utter disruption itself does the most to disrupt the opinions and point of view of the beneficent actor. It stands immediately before this most inward abyss, before this bottomless depth, in which all foothold and substance have vanished, and in these depths it sees nothing but a common thing, a play of its vagaries, an accident of its arbitrary choices. Its spirit is just essenceless opinion, a superficiality forsaken by spirit.

519. 282Just as self-consciousness had its own language when facing off against state-power, or just as spirit came on the scene as the actual mediating middle between these two extremes, self-consciousness too has a language in facing off against wealth, and even more does its indignation have its own language. That language, which supplies wealth with the consciousness of its essentiality and as a result authorizes itself, is likewise the language of flattery, but of the ignoble kind – for what it expresses as the essence, it knows as the relinquished essence, the essence not existing in itself. However, as already noted, the language of flattery is spirit which is still one-sided. To be sure, its moments are those of a self distilled by the cultural formation of service into a pure existence and the being-in-itself of power. But the pure concept in which the simple self and the in-itself, or the former pure I and this pure essence, or thinking, are the same – this unity of both aspects, where reciprocity comes about in the interstices, does not lie in the consciousness of this language. The object is still, to him, the in-itself in opposition to the self, or, to him, the object is not at the same time its own self as such a self. – However, the language of disruption is the perfected language of this entire world of cultural formation as well as its true existing spirit. This self-consciousness, which corresponds to its own indignation, which repudiates its own abjectness, is immediately the absolute self-equality in absolute disruption, the pure mediation of pure self-consciousness with itself. It is the equality of the identical judgment in which one and the same personality is both the subject as well as the predicate. However, this identical judgment is at the same time the infinite judgment, for this personality is absolutely estranged, and subject and predicate are utterly indifferent entities that have nothing to do with each other and which have no necessary unity, even so that each is the power of its own personality. Being-for-itself has its being-for-itself as its object, as an utterly other and at the same time equally immediately as itself – It has itself as an other, but not as an other which would have another content. Rather, the content is the same self in the form of absolute opposition and its own indifferent existence. – Thus, here the spirit of this actual world of cultural formation is present; it is a spirit conscious of itself in its truth and conscious of its concept.

520. This spirit is the absolute and universal inversion and alienation of actuality and of thought; it is pure cultural formation. In this world, what is experienced is that it is neither the actual essence of power and wealth, nor their determinate concepts, the good and the bad, or the consciousness of the noble and the base, which are in possession of the truth. Rather, all these moments invert themselves into other moments, and each is the opposite of itself. – While the universal power, which is the substance, arrives at its own spirituality through the principle of individuality, it receives its own self only as a name in itself, and while it is actual 283power, it is instead the powerless essence which sacrifices itself. – However, this relinquished selfless essence, or the self that has become a thing, is instead the return of the essence into itself. It is being-for-itself existing-for-itself, the existence of spirit. – Just as much, the thoughts of this essence, of the good and the bad, invert themselves in this movement. What is determined as good is bad, and what is determined as bad is good. The consciousness of one of each of these moments, assessed as the noble and the base consciousness, turn out in their truth to be instead just as much the inversion of what these determinations are supposed to be, and the noble consciousness turns out to be just as base and abject as the abjection that transformed itself into the nobility of the most culturally matured freedom of self-consciousness. – Taken formally, everything is, when viewed externally, just as much the inversion of what it is for itself; and, again, what it is for itself is not what it is in truth but is rather something other than it wants to be; its being-for-itself is instead the loss of its own self, and its alienation from itself is instead its self-preservation. – What is now present is the following. All moments execute a universal justice against each other; each in itself alienates itself from itself just as much as it imagines itself to be in its opposite, and in this manner each inverts its opposite. – But the true spirit is this very unity itself of the absolutely separated extremes, and, to be sure, as their mediating middle it just comes into existence through the free-standing actuality of these selfless extremes. Its existence consists in a universal speaking and in this turmoil-ridden judging, for which all those moments, which are supposed to count as the essence and to count as the actual members of the whole, dissolve themselves, and its existence is just as much a game of self-dissolution which it plays with itself. Hence, this judging and speaking are the indomitable truth which overwhelms everything; in this real world, this and this alone is what is truly at work. Each part of this world therein reaches the point where his spirit is expressed, or where what is spoken about him is spoken with wit⁸¹ and what is said of him is just what he is. – The honest consciousness takes each moment to be a lasting essentiality and is the uncultured thoughtlessness which does not know that it is just as much the inverse. However, the disrupted consciousness is the consciousness of inversion, namely, of the absolute inversion. The concept is the ruling power within it. It is that which brings together the thoughts which, to honesty, are separated from each other, and it is that whose language is thus rich in spirit and wit.

521. The content of spirit's speech about itself and its speech concerning itself thus inverts all concepts and realities. It is thus the universal deception of itself and others, and, for that very reason, the greatest truth is the shamelessness in stating this deceit. This speech is the madness of the musician “who piled up and mixed together some thirty airs, Italian, French, tragic, comic, of all sorts of character; 284now, with a deep bass, he descended into the depths of hell, then, contracting his throat, with a falsetto he tore apart the vaults of the skies, alternately raging and then being placated, imperious and then derisive.” To the motionless consciousness, which in all honesty posits that the melody of the good and the true lies in the harmony of sound and uniformity of tones, i.e., in one note, this speech appears as a “blather of wisdom and folly, a medley consisting of as much skill as it did of baseness, of as many right as of false ideas, of such a complete inversion of sentiment, of such consummate disgracefulness as well as of such entire candor and truth. It will be unable to refrain from breaking out into all these tones, and from running up and down the entire scale of feeling, of moving from the deepest contempt and depravity to the highest admiration and stirring emotion. A strain of the ridiculous will be blended in with the latter, which denatures them.” The former will find in their candor itself a strain of reconciliation; they will find in their distressing depths the all-powerful move which spirit gives to itself.

522. If we take the speech of this disorientation, which is so clear to itself, and contrast it with the speech of that simple consciousness of the true and the good, we find that the latter, when confronting the frank and self-aware eloquence of the culturally formed and educated spirit,⁸² can only speak in monosyllables, for it can say nothing to that spirit which the culturally formed and educated spirit does not itself know and say. If it gets beyond speaking in monosyllables, then it says the same thing that the culturally formed and educated spirit expresses, but in doing so, it still commits itself to the foolishness of thinking that it is saying something new and different. Even its own syllables, when it speaks of the disgraceful and the base, are already this foolishness, for the culturally formed and educated consciousness says the same things about itself. However much in its speech this spirit both inverts all that is monotonous, because this self-equal is only an abstraction, in its actuality it is, however, in itself that very inversion, and however much in contrast the unbowed consciousness takes the good and the noble under its protection, i.e., what retains its sameness of meaning in its expression in the only way here possible – which is to say that the good does not lose its value because it is bound up with the bad or mingled with it, for this is supposed to be its condition and necessity, and the wisdom of nature is supposed to lie therein – still this consciousness, while it intends to contradict that speech, has as a result only summed up in a trivial way the content of spirit's speech – which, while having turned the opposite of the noble and the good into the condition for and the necessity of the noble and the good, and while unthinkingly supposing itself to be saying something other than that what is called noble and good, is in its essence the inversion of itself, just as, conversely, the bad is the excellent.

523. If the simple consciousness substitutes for these spiritless thoughts the actuality of the excellent, while it cites the excellent in examples of a 285contrived case or a true anecdote and thus shows that it is not an empty name but rather is present, so the universal actuality of the inverted act confronts the entire real world in which that example therefore only amounts to something wholly thinned out, only an Espèce. To present the existence of the good and the noble as a single anecdote, whether fictitious or true, is the most caustic thing that can be said about it. – If finally the simple consciousness requires the dissolution of this entire world of inversion, then it cannot demand of the individual that he withdraw from the world, for even Diogenes in his barrel is conditioned by it. To demand this of the individual is to demand exactly what counts as the bad, namely, to demand that he care for himself as a singular individual. However, if the demand to withdraw is directed at universal individuality, it cannot mean that reason must again give up the spiritually and culturally formed consciousness which it has reached, or that reason should let the vast wealth of its moments fall back down again into the simplicity of the natural heart and regress once more into the backwoods and proximity of the animal consciousness which is called nature (and which is also called innocence). Rather, the demand for this dissolution can be directed only to the spirit of cultural formation itself, namely, that out of its disorientation, it come back round to itself and attain a still higher consciousness.

524. However, in fact spirit in itself has already accomplished this. Its own disruption of consciousness, conscious of itself and giving expression to itself, is the derisive laughter about existence as much as it is about the disorientation of the whole and about itself. At the same time, it is the fading sound, interrogating itself, of this entire disorientation. – Interrogating itself, this vanity of all actuality and of every determinate concept is the doubled reflection of the real world into itself, at one time in this self of consciousness as this self, and at another time in the pure universality of consciousness, or in thinking. According to the first aspect, in coming round to itself spirit has directed its gaze onto the world of actuality, and it still has that reality for its own purpose and its own immediate content. According to the other aspect, its gaze is in part turned away from the world of actuality and solely into itself; it is in part turned away from the world and towards heaven, where it has its object in the other-worldly beyond of the world of actuality.

525. From the former aspect of the return into the self, the vanity of all things is its own vanity, or it is itself vain. It is the self existing-for-itself, which does not only know how to evaluate and how to chatter about everything, but which also knows how to convey wittily the fixed essence of actuality as well as the fixed determinations posited by judgment, and it knows how to speak of them in their contradictions. This contradiction is their truth. – From the point of view of form, it knows everything to be alienated from itself. Being-for-itself is separated from being-in-itself; what is meant and what is the purpose are separated from the truth; being for others is separated from both; and what is feigned is separated from what really matters and from the true intention. – It therefore knows 286how to express correctly each moment's contrast with every other moment; it knows how to correctly express in general the invertedness of all of them; it knows better than each of them what each is, irrespective of how each of them is determined. While it is acquainted with the substantial according to the aspect of discord and conflict which it brings to concord within itself, but not according to the aspect of the concord, it understands very well how to pass judgment on what is substantial, but it has lost the ability to take hold of it. – This vanity thereby needs the vanity of all things in order to give itself the consciousness of the self by way of them. It consequently itself creates this vanity and is the soul that bears it. Power and wealth are the highest ends of its efforts, and it knows that it culturally forms itself into the universal through renunciation and sacrifice, arrives at a possession of the universal, and in this possession has universal validity; and it is power and wealth which are the actual recognized powers. However, its validity is itself vain, and just while it gains mastery over these powers, it knows them to be not independent beings,⁸³ but instead knows that it itself is their power, and it knows them as vanity itself. In its witty speech, it shows that in possessing them, it has itself gone beyond them, and its witty speech is thus its highest interest and the truth of the whole. In witty, spirited speech, this self, as this pure self which belongs neither to the actual determinations nor to the merely conceived determinations, comes to be, to itself, the spiritual, truly universally valid self. It is the nature of all self-disrupting conditions, and it is the conscious disruption of them. However, only as indignant self-consciousness does it know its own disruption, and in this knowing of its disruption, it has immediately elevated itself above it. In that vanity all content becomes negative, and it can no longer be grasped as positive. The positive object is only the pure I itself, and the disrupted consciousness is in itself this pure self-equality of self-consciousness as having come back round to itself.

b. Faith and Pure Insight

526. The spirit of the alienation of itself has its existence in the world of cultural formation. However, while this whole has become alienated from itself, beyond this whole there lies the non-actual world of pure consciousness, or of thinking. Its content is the purely thought,⁸⁴ and its absolute element is thinking. However, while thinking is initially the element of this world, consciousness only has these thoughts, but it does not as yet think them, or it does not know that they are thoughts. Instead, to itself, they are in the form of representation, for it steps out of actuality and into pure consciousness, but it itself still is within the sphere and the determinateness of actuality. The disrupted consciousness is initially in itself 287the self-equality of pure consciousness, for us, not for itself. It is thus only the immediate elevation that is not yet accomplished within itself, and it still has within itself the principle opposing it and through which it is conditioned, but without as yet having mastered that principle through the mediating movement. Hence, to itself, the essence of its thought does not count as essence only in the form of the abstract in-itself, but rather as an essence in the form of a common actuality, of an actuality that has only been elevated into another element without having lost the determinateness of an unthought⁸⁵ actuality. – It is essentially to be distinguished from the in-itself which is the essence of stoical consciousness. For stoicism, only the form of thought as such counted, and its thought thereby had some other content alien to itself which was taken from actuality. However, for the former consciousness, what counts is not the form of thought. – It is just as much to be distinguished from the in-itself of the virtuous consciousness, to which the essence does indeed stand in a relation to actuality, to which it is the essence of actuality itself, but only a non-actual essence. – For that consciousness, the essence, although lying beyond actuality, nonetheless still counts as an actuality. By the same token, the right and good that are the in-itself of legislative reason and the universal for the consciousness that tests and examines laws, do not have the determination of actuality. – Consequently, however much in the world of cultural formation even pure thinking, as one aspect of alienation, fell by the wayside, namely, as the standard for judging the abstractly good and the abstractly bad, still pure thinking, by having gone through the movement of the whole, had become enriched in the moment of actuality and as a result also in content. However, this actuality of essence is at the same time only an actuality of pure consciousness, not of actual consciousness. To be sure, elevated into the element of thinking, this actuality does not yet count to this consciousness as a thought, but to this consciousness, it lies instead beyond its own actuality, for the former is the flight from the latter.

527. Just as religion – for it is clear that it is religion that is being spoken of – comes on the scene here as the faith belonging to the world of cultural formation, religion does not yet come on the scene as it is in and for itself. – It has already appeared before us in other types of determinateness, namely, as the unhappy consciousness, as the shape of the substance-less movement of consciousness itself. – In ethical substance it also appeared as a faith in the netherworld, but consciousness of the departed spirit is not really faith, not really the essence posited in the element of a pure consciousness which lies beyond the actual. Rather, faith itself has an immediate present; its element is the family. – However, religion has here in part emerged from the substance and is the pure consciousness of that substance; this pure consciousness, the essence, is in part alienated from its actual existence. Thus, it is indeed no longer the movement of substance-less consciousness, but it still bears the determinateness of opposition to actuality as this actuality itself, and it is the opposition to the actuality 288of self-consciousness in particular. It is thus essentially only a faith.

528. This pure consciousness of absolute essence is an alienated consciousness. It requires a closer look to see how its other determines itself, and pure consciousness is only to be taken in combination with this other. At first, this pure consciousness seems to have confronting it only the world of actuality. However, while it is only the flight away from this actuality and is, as a result, the determinateness of opposition, it has in its own self this determinateness of opposition. Thus, pure consciousness is in its own self essentially self-alienated, and faith constitutes only one aspect of it. To us, the other aspect has already emerged. Specifically, pure consciousness is the reflection out of the world of cultural formation so that both its substance and the social estates into which it is structured show themselves to be what they are in themselves, to be spiritual essentialities, absolutely restless movements, or determinations that are immediately sublated in their opposite. Their essence, the simple consciousness, is thus the simplicity of the absolute difference which is immediately no difference at all. It is thereby pure being-for-itself, not as this singular individual, but rather as the self which is universal within itself, as a restless movement which attacks and permeates the motionless essence of the crux of the matter. Thus, within it, the certainty that immediately knows itself to be the truth, to be pure thinking as the absolute concept in the power of its negativity, is present, a certainty which erases all objective essences that are supposed to confront consciousness and which makes those essences into a being of consciousness. – This pure consciousness is at the same time just as much simple because its difference is no difference at all. However, as this form of the simple reflective turn into itself, it is the element of faith within which spirit has the determinateness of positive universality, of being-in-itself in contrast to the being-for-itself of self-consciousness. – Forced back into itself out of this only essenceless, self-dissolving world, spirit is according to its truth in undivided unity as much as it is the absolute movement and negativity of its appearing; it is equally as well their essence as satisfied within itself, and it is their positive motionlessness. However, both of these moments, as being generally subsumed under the determinateness of alienation, come undone from each other and enter into a twofold consciousness. The former is pure insight as the spiritual process integrating itself in self-consciousness; this is a process which has confronting it the consciousness of the positive, or the form of objectivity or of representing, and it directs itself against it. However, its own object is only the pure I. – In contrast, the simple consciousness of the positive or of motionless self-equality has its object in the inner essence as essence. Pure insight itself thus has at first no content in its own self because it is negative being-for-itself, 289whereas in contrast faith has the content without the insight. However much the former does not step outside of self-consciousness, still the latter does likewise have its content within the element of pure self-consciousness. However, it has it in thinking, not in concepts, in pure consciousness, not in pure self-consciousness. Faith is thereby indeed pure consciousness of the essence, which is to say, of simple inwardness, and is therefore thinking – the chief moment in the nature of faith, which is usually overlooked. The immediacy with which the essence lies within faith has to do with its object being essence, which is to say, pure thinking. However, insofar as thinking enters consciousness, or insofar as pure consciousness enters into self-consciousness, this immediacy comes to have the significance of an objective being that lies beyond consciousness of self. Through this significance, which the immediacy and simplicity of pure thinking thus come to have in consciousness, the essence of faith descends from thought all the way down into representational thought, and it comes to be a supersensible world which is supposed to be essentially an other to self-consciousness. – In contrast, in pure insight the transition of pure thinking into consciousness has the opposite determination. The meaning of objectivity is that it is an only negative content, that it sublates itself and returns into the self, i.e., only the self is to itself genuinely the object, or, the object only has truth insofar as it has the form of the self.

529. Just as faith and pure insight conjointly belong within the elements of pure consciousness, so too do they conjointly belong to the return out of the actual world of cultural formation. They therefore make themselves available for consideration according to three aspects. According to one of them, each is in and for itself, external to all relationships. According to another, each relates itself to the actual world that is opposed to pure consciousness. According to the third aspect, each relates itself to the other from within pure consciousness.

530. The aspect of being-in-and-for-itself within the faithful consciousness is its absolute object, or the object whose content and determination have according to the concept of faith already resulted. This is so because the object is itself nothing but the real world elevated into the universality of pure consciousness. The articulation of the latter, the real world, thus constitutes the organization of the world of faith, except that within the latter essence, the parts do not alienate themselves within their spiritualization.⁸⁶ Rather, they are essences existing in and for themselves, enduring spirits, and have returned into themselves and are at one with themselves in their own sphere.⁸⁷ – It is thus only for us that the movement of their transition is an alienation of the determinateness in which they are in their differences, and it is only for us that it is a necessary series. However, for faith, their difference is a motionless diversity, and their movement is an event.

531. We can briefly label them according to the external determination of their form. Just as in the world of cultural formation, state-power or the good came first, here too what comes first 290is the absolute essence, which is spirit existing in and for itself insofar as spirit is the simple eternal substance. However, in the realization of its concept, which is to be spirit, substance passes over into being for others. Its self-equality becomes actual self-sacrificing absolute essence. It becomes a self, but a transitory self at that. Hence, the third point is the return of this alienated self and the humbled substance into their first simplicity. It is only in this manner that substance is represented as spirit. –

532. These differentiated essences, brought by thinking from out of the flux of the actual world back into themselves, are changeless eternal spirits, whose being is to think the unity that constitutes them. However much self-consciousness is lost in reverie, these essences all the same intervene in it; for if, in the form of the first simple substance, the essence were to be unmoved, it would remain alien to self-consciousness. However, the relinquishing of this substance and then of its spirit has the moment of actuality in it and thereby makes itself privy to the faithful self-consciousness, or, the faithful consciousness belongs to the real world.

533. According to this second relationship, the faithful consciousness in part has its actuality in the real world of cultural formation, and it constitutes what has already been considered, that world's spirit and existence. However, in part faith confronts its own actuality as being that of vanity itself, and it is the movement of sublating that actuality. This movement does not consist in its supposedly having a spirited, witty consciousness about its own invertedness, for it is the simple consciousness that reckons wit to be vanity because wit still has the real world for its purpose. Rather, confronting the motionless realm of its thinking is actuality as a spiritless existence, which consequently is to be overcome in an external manner. Through the sublation of both doing and sensuous knowing, this obedience of service and praise brings forth the consciousness of unity with the essence existing in and for itself, although not as an intuited, actual unity. Rather, this service is only that incessant engendering [of the unity], a doing which never completely reaches its goal in the present. To be sure, the religious community⁸⁸ arrives at that, for that community is universal self-consciousness. However, for singular self-consciousness, the realm of pure thinking necessarily remains an other-worldly beyond of its actuality; or, while, through the self-relinquishing of the eternal essence, this other-worldly beyond has become actual, the religious community is a sensuous, unconceptualized actuality. However, one sensuous actuality remains indifferent to another sensuous actuality, and the other-worldly beyond thus has only received the determination of remoteness in space and time. – However, the concept, the current actuality of spirit to itself, remains for the faithful consciousness the inner, which is both all that is and which is efficacious, but which never itself comes to light.

534. However, in pure insight the concept alone is the actual, and this third aspect of faith, that of being an object for pure insight, is the 291genuine relation in which faith comes on the scene here. – Likewise, pure insight itself is in part in and for itself and in part in its relationship to the actual world insofar as the actual world is still positively present, namely, as vain consciousness, and finally, it is in part to be examined in that relationship to faith.

535. We have seen what pure insight is in and for itself. As faith is the pure motionless consciousness of spirit as the essence, pure insight is the self-consciousness of the same thing. Hence, it knows the essence not as essence but as the absolute self. It thus proceeds to sublate all self-sufficiency that is other to self-consciousness, whether it is the self-sufficiency of the actual or whether it is what is existing-in-itself, and it proceeds to make them into concepts. Pure insight is not only the certainty of self-conscious reason that it is all truth; rather, it knows that it is all truth.

536. However, as the concept of pure insight comes on the scene, it is not yet realized. Its consciousness of the concept accordingly appears as something still contingent and singularly individual, and what to it is the essence appears as a purpose which it is to realize. This consciousness first of all has the intention of making pure insight universal, which is to say, of making everything that is actual both into concepts and into one concept within every self-consciousness. The intention is pure, for its content is pure insight, and this insight is likewise pure, for its content is just the absolute concept which neither has opposition in an object nor is bounded in its own self. Both aspects are immediately situated within the unlimited concept, namely, that everything objective is only supposed to mean being-for-itself, self-consciousness; and that this is supposed to signify a universal, or that pure insight is supposed to be the possession of all self-consciousnesses. In this respect, this second aspect of the intention is a result of cultural formation inasmuch as in such cultural formation, the differences of objective⁸⁹ spirit, the parts and judgmental determinations of its world, as well as those differences which appeared as original determinate natures, have all come to ruin. Genius, talent, the particular abilities in general, belong to the world of actuality, inasmuch as this world still contains in it the aspect of the spiritual kingdom of animals, where in mutual forcibleness and confusion they fight and deceive each other over the essence of the real world. – The differences, to be sure, have no place in this world as honest Espèces. Individuality is neither content with the non-actual crux of the matter, nor does it have any particular content and purposes of its own. Rather, it counts only as something universally accepted, namely, as cultured;⁹⁰ and the difference reduces itself into a matter of more or less energy – a difference of magnitude, which is to say, a non-essential difference. However, this last diversification came to ruin through the difference having been transformed from a difference within the complete disruption of consciousness into an absolutely qualitative difference. What is therein the other to the I is only the I itself. In this 292infinite judgment, all one-sidedness and idiosyncrasy of the original being-for-itself is erased. As the pure self, the self knows itself as its own object; and this absolute equality of both sides is the element of pure insight. – Pure insight is thus the simple essence with no difference within itself, and is just as much the universal work and universal possession. In this simple spiritual substance, self-consciousness gives itself and sustains for itself the consciousness of its own singular individuality just as much in every object, or the consciousness of its own doing, just as, conversely, the individuality of self-consciousness is therein equal to itself and is universal. – This pure insight is thus the spirit that calls out to every consciousness: Be for yourselves what you all are in yourselves – rational.

II. The Enlightenment

537. The distinctive object against which pure insight aims the force of the concept is faith, which is understood as the form of pure consciousness which confronts pure insight within the same element. However, pure insight also has a relation to the actual world, for, like faith, it is a return into pure consciousness from the actual world. To start with, it remains to be seen just how its activity is constituted with respect to the impure intentions and the inverted insights of that world.

538. Mention was made above of the motionless consciousness which confronts this self-dissolving and self-recreating vortex; it constitutes the aspect of pure insight and intention. However, as we saw, no particular insight about the sphere of cultural formation falls within this motionless consciousness; instead, it is the latter itself which has the most painful feeling and the truest insight about itself – namely, the feeling of the dissolution of all of its self-assurances, the feeling that every moment of its existence, every bone in its body, has been broken on the wheel. Likewise, it is the language of this feeling and its spirited, witty speech pronouncing judgment on all aspects of its condition. Hence, pure insight can have here none of its own activity and content and thus can only carry on as the formal, loyal comprehension of its own witty insight into the world and its language. While this language is scattered, the judgmental assessment is just the claptrap of the moment which is instantly forgotten, and however much it is a whole only for a third consciousness, still this third consciousness can be distinguished from the others as pure insight only if it gathers up all those various self-scattering traits into a universal picture and then makes them into the insight of all.

539. 293Through this simple mediating middle, pure insight will bring this world's confusion to its dissolution, for it has turned out that those social estates, determinate concepts, and individualities are not the essence of this actuality. Rather, it has turned out that actuality has its substance and support solely in the spirit which exists in judging and reviewing, and it is the interest in providing content to all this clever argumentation and chit-chat which alone sustains the articulation of the whole and the social estates. In this language of insight, its self-consciousness is still something existing-for-itself, which is this singular individual, but the vanity of the content is at the same time the vanity of the self vainly knowing its content. Now, while the motionless consciousness grasping the entirety of this witty and vain chit-chat gathers all of it together into a collection of what is most “to the point” and what is the most “cutting to the quick,” what perishes in addition to the rest of the vanity of existence is the soul still sustaining the whole of that existence, the vanity of the witty assessment. The collection shows most people a better wit, or at least it shows everyone a more varied wit than their own, and it shows that being a “wiseacre” and “appraiser” is something both universal and now universally familiar. The only interest that was still present thereby erases itself, and singular insightfulness dissolves into universal insight.

540. Nonetheless, knowing of the essence stands fast over and above vain knowing, and pure insight appears in its genuine activity to the extent that it comes on the scene in conflict with faith.

a. The Struggle of the Enlightenment with Superstition

541. The various modes of the negative conduct of consciousness, which are in part those of skepticism and in part those of theoretical and practical idealism, are subordinate shapes with respect to those of pure insight and of its diffusion, the Enlightenment. This is so because pure insight is born from the substance, and it both knows the pure self of consciousness as absolute, and it incorporates that self into the pure consciousness of the absolute essence of all actuality. – While faith and insight are the same pure consciousness but are opposed according to their form, the essence for faith is thought but not thought as concept, and thus something utterly opposed to self-consciousness. However, for pure insight the essence is the self, and so for each other, each is the utter negative of the other. – As they come on the scene confronting each other, all content corresponds to faith, for in its element of motionless thinking, every moment gains stable existence. – However, 294pure insight is at first without content; instead, it is the pure disappearance of content, but by its negative movement towards what is negative to it, it will realize itself and give itself a content.

542. It knows faith to be opposed to itself and thus opposed to reason and truth. Just as, to the Enlightenment, faith is on the whole a tissue of superstitions, prejudices, and errors, the consciousness of this content is, to the Enlightenment, further organized into a realm of errors in which false insight, as the universal social estate of consciousness, is immediate, naive, and completely lacking in any reflective turn into itself.⁹¹ However, the Enlightenment also has in it the moment of a reflective turn into itself,⁹² or, also in it, of self-consciousness separated from naiveté, as an insight remaining for itself in the background, and an evil intention by which the naive consciousness is tricked. That social estate is the victim of deception by a priesthood, which remains entrenched in its envious conceit that it and it alone remains in possession of insight and which puts into practice its various and sundry forms of self-interest. At the same time, this priesthood conspires with despotism, which, as the synthetic, conceptless unity of the real and of this ideal realm – an oddly inconsistent essence – stands above the bad insight of the multitude and the bad intention of the priests and unites both of these within itself. Drawing on the stupidity and disorientation brought about among the people by the deceitful priesthood, despotism, which despises both, draws on both of them to gain the advantage of its own undisturbed control and of the fulfillment of its own pleasures and its whims, while it is at the same time this very same dullness of insight, this very same superstition and error.

543. The Enlightenment does not engage with these three aspects of the enemy indiscriminately, for while its essence is pure insight which is in and for itself universal, its true relation to the other extreme is that which has to do with what is common to and is the equal of both. The aspect of singular individuality, which isolates itself from the universal naive consciousness, is its opposite and it cannot immediately come into contact with it. The will of the deceiving priesthood and the oppressive despot is thus not the immediate object of its doing, but rather, its object is insight without a will, the insight which is not thinning itself out into being-for-itself, or the concept of rational self-consciousness which has its existence in the social estates but which is not yet present within them as the concept. However, while pure insight rescues this honest insight and its naive essence from prejudices and errors, it wrests from the hands of bad intentions the reality and its power of its deceit, whose realm has its basis and material in the conceptless consciousness of the universal social estates – the being-for-itself [of the universal social estate] has its substance in simple consciousness, full stop.

544. The relation of pure insight to the naive consciousness of absolute essence now has two sides. On the one hand, pure insight is in itself 295one and the same as the naive consciousness, but on the other hand, this naive consciousness within the simple element of its thought lets the absolute essence, as well as its parts, go their own way. It allows them to give themselves stable existence, and for that reason, it allows them to count only as its in-itself and to be in an objective mode, but it repudiates its being-for-itself within this in-itself. – To the extent that for pure insight this faith is, according to the first aspect, in itself pure self-consciousness and is supposed to become this only for itself, pure insight has in this concept of faith the element in which, in place of false insight, it realizes itself.

545. From this aspect, that both are essentially the same, the relation of pure insight happens in and through the same element. The communication between them is immediate, and their giving and receiving is an undisturbed flow of the one into the other. Whatever other pegs may be driven into consciousness, it is in itself this simplicity in which everything is dissolved, forgotten, and unencumbered, and which is thus utterly receptive to the concept. For that reason, the communication of pure insight is comparable to a peaceful diffusion of something like a scent in a compliant atmosphere. It is a pervading infection and is not noticeable beforehand as being opposed to the indifferent element into which it insinuates itself; it thus cannot be warded off. It is only when the infection has become widespread that it is for consciousness, which had carefreely yielded itself to it, for what this consciousness received into itself was precisely the simple essence, which was equal to itself and to consciousness but which was at the same time the simplicity of negativity taking a reflective turn into itself.⁹³ This latter inward turn, according to its nature, also subsequently unfolds itself into an opposition, and it thereby reminds consciousness of its previous mode. It is the concept which is the simple knowing that at the same time knows itself and its opposite, but which knows this opposite to be sublated within it. As soon as pure insight thus is for consciousness, this insight has already made itself widespread, and the struggle against it betrays the fact that the infection has already taken hold. The struggle is too late, and all the remedies taken only make the disease worse, for the disease has seized the very marrow of spiritual life, namely, consciousness in its concept, or its pure essence itself. For that reason, there is no force within it that could prevail over the disease. Because it is in the essence itself, its still isolated expressions are repressed, and its superficial symptoms are muffled. This is immensely to its advantage, for in that case it neither uselessly squanders its force nor does it show itself to be unworthy of its essence, something which is the case when it breaks out into symptoms and when there are singular outbreaks contrary both to the content of faith and to the way its external actuality coheres. Rather, now that it is an invisible and undetected spirit, it winds its way all through the nobler parts, and it has soon taken complete hold over all the fibers and members of the unaware idol. At that point, 296“some fine morning it gives its comrade a shove with the elbow, and, thump! kadump! the idol is lying on the floor”⁹⁴ – on some fine morning, where the noontime is bloodless and when the infection has permeated every organ of spiritual life. Only then does memory alone still preserve the dead mode of spirit's previous shape as a vanished history (although exactly how it does this nobody knows), and the new serpent of wisdom, which is elevated for adoration, has in this way painlessly only shed its withered skin.

546. However, this mute weaving of spirit in the simple inwardness of its substance conceals to itself what it is doing and is only one side of the realization of pure insight. Its diffusion does not only consist in “like coming together with like,” and its actualization is not only extension without opposition. Rather, the doing on the part of negative essence is just as essentially a developed self-differentiating movement, which, as a conscious doing, must set up its moments within a determinately manifested existence and which must as such be present as a noisy ruckus and a violent struggle with its opposite.

547. It thus remains to be seen how pure insight and intention conduct themselves negatively with respect to the other which they find confronting them. – Since their concept is all essentiality and there is nothing external to them, pure insight and intention, which conduct themselves negatively, can only be the negative of themselves. Therefore, as insight it becomes the negative of pure insight; it becomes untruth and unreason, and as intention it becomes the negative of pure intention and grows into lies and a dishonesty about its purpose.

548. It is thereby entangled in this contradiction as a result of having both let itself get into this quarrel and as a result of thinking of itself as doing battle with something other. – This is what it means to do, for its essence as absolute negativity is just its having otherness in its own self. The absolute concept is the category; it is knowing and the object of knowing being one and the same. What pure insight thereby expresses as its other, what it expresses as an error or a lie, can be nothing but it itself; it can only condemn what it is. What is not rational has no truth, or what is not conceptually comprehended is not; while reason thus speaks of an other, it really speaks only of itself; in doing so, it does not manage to get outside of itself. – For that reason, this struggle with the opposite unifies within itself the meaning that it is insight's own actualization. This consists in the very movement of developing the moments and taking them back into itself. One part of this movement is the difference in which comprehending insight confronts itself as object to itself, and as long as it lingers in this moment, it is alienated from itself. As pure insight, 297it is without any content; the movement of its realization consists in it itself becoming, to itself, the content, for an other cannot become, to it, the content because it is the self-consciousness of the category. However, while insight at first knows the content in its opposite only as content, and does not as yet know it as itself, pure insight fails to see itself in it. Hence, the sense of its culmination is that it cognizes the content, which, to itself is initially objective, as its own. However, its result will thereby neither be the re-establishment of the errors against which it fights, nor will it only be its first concept, but rather it will be an insight which knows the absolute negation of itself as its own actuality, which cognizes itself, or cognizes its own self-cognizing concept. – This nature of the Enlightenment's struggle with errors is that in struggling with them it is struggling with itself, and that it is condemning in them what it asserts, is for us, or what it and its struggle in itself are. However, the first aspect of this struggle is the pollution of the Enlightenment through its incorporation of negative conduct into its self-equal purity, the way in which it is an object for faith. That is, it lies in the way faith therefore experiences it as lies, unreason, and malicious intent, just as for the Enlightenment, faith is itself experienced as error and prejudice. – As regards its content, it is in the first place empty insight whose content appears to it as an other. Hence, in faith it comes across this content in this shape which is not yet its own, as an existence totally independent of it.

549. The Enlightenment therefore grasps its object universally in such a way that it at first takes it to be pure insight, and so that, while not cognizing itself, it declares it to be error. In insight as such insight, consciousness grasps an object so that the object becomes, to consciousness, the essence of consciousness, or becomes an object which consciousness permeates and within which consciousness sustains itself, remains at one with itself,⁹⁵ and remains currently present to itself, and, while it is thereby the object's movement, engenders the object itself. This is what the Enlightenment correctly expresses as faith, as when it says that what faith takes to be the absolute essence is a being of faith's own consciousness, is its own thought, is something brought out by consciousness. The Enlightenment thereby declares faith to be in error and to be a fiction about the same thing that the Enlightenment itself is about. – The Enlightenment, which wishes to teach faith this new wisdom, does not tell it anything new when it does so, for the object of faith is to faith also only this, namely, the pure essence of faith's own consciousness such that this consciousness does not posit itself as lost and negated in the object but instead places its trust in it, which just means that as this consciousness precisely within that object, it comes across itself, or comes across itself as self-consciousness. The certainty of self whom I trust, is, to me, my own certainty of itself. I cognize my being-for-myself in that certainty of itself, I know that my being-for-myself bestows recognition on it, and I know it is purpose and essence. However, faith is trust because the faithful consciousness relates itself immediately to its object and 298thus intuits that it is at one with the object, that it is in the object. – Furthermore, while what is the object for me is that within which I cognize myself, at the same time, to myself, I am therein as an other self-consciousness, which means that I am as the kind of self-consciousness which has become alienated therein from his own particular singularity, namely, from his naturalness and contingency, but which remains therein in part self-consciousness and in part essential consciousness, like pure insight. – It lies not only in the concept of insight that consciousness recognizes⁹⁶ itself in the object into which its insight goes and that has itself immediately in that object, and that not only does it do this without abandoning what has been thought⁹⁷ and then returning into itself from out of that abandonment. It also lies in the concept of insight that it is conscious of itself as the mediating movement, or it is aware of itself as doing, as engendering. As a result, its unity is for it in thought as the unity of the self and the object. – It is precisely this very consciousness which is also that of faith. Obedience and doing are a necessary moment through which the certainty of existence within the absolute essence comes about. To be sure, this doing by faith does not indeed appear in such a way so that the absolute essence is itself generated as a result. However, the absolute essence of faith is essentially not the abstract essence which is supposed to lie in an other-worldly beyond of that of the faithful consciousness; rather, it is the spirit of the religious community, the unity of that abstract essence and self-consciousness. For it to be the spirit of the religious community, an essential moment is the doing of the community itself. It is only by being engendered by consciousness – or, instead, it is not without being engendered by consciousness, for as essential as this engendering is, it is equally essentially not the only ground of the essence, but is only a moment of it. At the same time, the essence is in and for itself.

550. On the other side, the concept of pure insight is, to itself, an other than its object, for it is just this negative determination which constitutes the object. So, from that other aspect, it also expresses the essence of faith to be alien to self-consciousness, not the essence of self-consciousness but rather a changeling⁹⁸ covertly foisted on it. However, here the Enlightenment is being completely fatuous, and faith experiences the Enlightenment as a way of talking that neither knows what it is saying, nor understands what is at stake when it talks about clerical fraud and the deception of the people. It speaks about this as if through some kind of hocus-pocus, priestly conjurers foisted on consciousness something absolutely alien and other to it as its essence, and at the same time it says that this is the essence of consciousness, that consciousness believes in it, trusts in it, and seeks to make it favorably disposed towards itself – which is to say that consciousness intuits its pure essence likewise to be its singular and universal individuality in that essence, and, through its own doing, it engenders this unity of itself with its essence. It immediately declares that what it pronounces to be alien to consciousness is what is ownmost to consciousness – How, then, 299can it possibly speak about deception and mystification? While what it immediately says about faith is the opposite of what it asserts about faith, to faith itself it appears instead to be a conscious lie. How are deception and mystification to come about at the very point where consciousness immediately has in its truth the certainty of itself, at the very point where it possesses itself in its object, while it is to be found in the object equally as much as it engenders itself in it? In the words being used, the difference is no longer present. – However much the general question was once raised, “whether it is permissible to deceive a people?”, still the answer in fact should have been that the question itself is ill-posed because it is impossible to deceive a people about this matter. Putting brass in place of gold and offering counterfeit instead of genuine coins may well have swindled individuals many a time; many people have been led to believe that a battle lost was a battle won; and lies of all sorts about empirical things and particular events have been made plausible for a while. However, within the knowing of that essence in which consciousness has immediate certainty of itself, the notion that it is sheer delusion is entirely out of the question.

551. Let us further see how faith experiences the Enlightenment in the differentiated moments of its consciousness. From the point of view just noted, this was only gestured at in a very general way. However, these moments are as follows: pure thinking, or the absolute essence, as object, in and for itself; next, as knowing, faith's relation to the ground of its faith; and, finally, faith's relation to it in its doings, or in its religious service. Just as pure insight both mistook itself and completely denied itself in faith, so too we shall find it behaving in these moments in just as inverted a manner.

552. Pure insight conducts itself negatively to the absolute essence of the faithful consciousness. This essence is pure thinking posited within itself as object, or as the essence. In the consciousness of faith, this in-itself of thinking at the same time acquires the form of objectivity for the consciousness existing in and for itself, but what it acquires is only the empty form. Its determination is thus that of something represented.⁹⁹ However, while pure insight is pure consciousness according to the aspect of the self existing for itself, this other appears to pure insight as the negative of self-consciousness. This could still be taken either as the pure in-itself of thinking, or else as the being of sensuous-certainty. However, while at the same time it is actual consciousness for the self, and this self as the self that has an object, so is insight's distinctive object as such an ordinary existing thing of sensuous-certainty. Its object appears to it in faith's representation of it. Pure insight condemns this, and in doing so, it condemns its own object. 300It already, however, does wrong to faith when it grasps the object of faith as if faith's object were insight's own object. Accordingly, it says of faith that its absolute essence is a piece of stone, a block of wood with eyes that do not see, or else that it is something made of bread-dough obtained from the field, which, when transformed by men, is then returned there. Or when it says in whatever other ways that faith anthropomorphizes the essence and makes it objective and presentable.¹⁰⁰

553. In passing itself off for what is pure, the Enlightenment here turns into a transitory thing just what to spirit is eternal life and the holy spirit, and it besmirches it with the point of view of sensuous-certainty, which is in-itself negative – with a point of view which is simply not present to faith in its acts of worship, so that the Enlightenment is simply lying to faith about it. What faith reveres is, to faith, without question neither stone nor wood, nor bread-dough, nor any other sort of temporal, sensuous thing. However much it occurs to the Enlightenment to say that its object is nevertheless also this, or even that this is what it is in itself and in truth, still faith is in part just as well acquainted with that “also,” but, to itself, that “also” lies outside of its worship. However, to faith, things such as a stone, etc., are not the in itself, but rather, to faith, what is in itself is solely the essence of pure thinking.

554. The second moment is the relation of faith as knowing consciousness to this essence. As pure, thinking consciousness, this essence is immediate to faith. However, pure consciousness is just as much a mediated relation of certainty to truth, which is a relation that constitutes the ground of faith. For the Enlightenment, this ground just as much becomes a contingent knowing of contingent occurrences. However, the ground of knowing is the knowing universal, and in its truth it is absolute spirit, which, in abstract pure consciousness, or in thinking as such, is only absolute essence, but which as self-consciousness is self-knowing. Likewise, pure insight posits this knowing universal, the simple self-knowing spirit, as the negative of self-consciousness. This pure insight is indeed itself pure mediated thinking, or thinking mediating itself with itself. It is pure knowing, but while it is pure insight, or pure knowing which does not yet know itself, i.e., it is what, to itself, is not yet this pure, mediating movement, this movement appears to pure insight, as does everything which it is itself, as an other. Thus comprehended¹⁰¹ in its actualization, it develops this moment which is essential to it, but the moment appears to it as belonging to faith, and in its determinateness as something external to pure insight, it appears to be a contingent knowing of exactly those rather ordinary and matter of fact¹⁰² stories. Here it therefore charges religious faith 301with basing its certainty on a collection of singular historical testimonies, which, considered as historical testimony, would not even warrant that degree of certainty that we get with respect to any event mentioned in the newspapers; it charges further that faith's certainty rests on the accident that all this testimony happens to have been preserved – that it rests in part on the preservation of this testimony on a piece of paper, and in part through the skill and honesty in transferring what is written on one piece of paper onto another piece of paper – and, finally, that its certainty rests on the accurate grasp of the sense of those dead words and letters. But in fact it never even occurs to faith to link its certainty to that kind of testimony and those kinds of contingencies. In its certainty, faith stands in an unencumbered relation to its absolute object. It is a pure knowing of that object, and it never lets letters, paper, or copyists interfere with its consciousness of the absolute essence; it does not mediate itself with the absolute essence by those kinds of things. Rather, this consciousness is the self-mediating ground of its knowing. It is spirit itself which is its own testimony, just as much in the inner of singular consciousness as it is through the universal presence of the faith of everyone in it. However much faith wishes to substantiate itself, or if it wishes at the very least to confirm for itself the topics about which the Enlightenment speaks, and if it wishes to do this by drawing on what is historical, and if furthermore it seriously thinks and acts as if something really depended on its doing so, then so has it already let itself be seduced by the Enlightenment. Its efforts to ground itself or to bolster itself in this way only amounts to testimony that attests to its infection by the Enlightenment.

555. There is still the third aspect to all this, the relation, as a doing, of consciousness to absolute essence. This doing is that of sublating the particularity of the individual, or sublating the natural mode of its being-for-itself. Out of this sublating, there emerges, to it, the certainty that it is pure self-consciousness through its own doing, i.e., that it is certain of being at one with the essence as a singular individual consciousness existing-for-itself. – While in this doing purposiveness and purpose are distinguished, and while pure insight likewise conducts itself negatively in relation to this doing and thus denies itself in the same way that it did in the other moments, it must, with regard to purposiveness, exhibit itself as a complete folly, as insight combined with intention, the correspondence of ends with means, appears to it as an other, as being instead insight's opposite. – However, with regard to the purpose, it makes badness, consumption of goods, and possession its purpose, thus proving itself to be the most impure intention, while pure intention, as an other, is equally impure intention.

556. Accordingly we see that with regard to purposiveness, the Enlightenment finds it simply fatuous when the believing individual seeks to give himself the higher consciousness 302of not being fettered to natural consumption and gratification by actually denying himself natural consumption and gratification, and by proving through his deed that in his contempt for those things, he is not lying but that his contempt for them is true. – Likewise, the Enlightenment finds it fatuous for the individual to absolve himself of his determinateness (of his being absolutely singular, of his excluding all others, and of his possessing property) by giving up his property. What he shows in truth is that he is not really serious about thinning himself out. Instead, he shows that he is so lofty that he rises above the natural necessity of thinning himself and in this absolutely thinned out being-for-itself, he shows that he denies that the others are the same as himself. – Pure insight finds both of these things to be purposeless¹⁰³ as well as wrong – that is, it is purposeless to deny oneself pleasures and give away a possession in order to prove that one is free from pleasure and possession of property. On the contrary, insight will therefore declare him to be a fool, who in order to eat employs the means for actually eating. Insight also thinks it is wrong to deny oneself a meal and to give away butter and eggs not for money, or even to give away money for butter and eggs; what is wrong is just to give them away and get nothing in return at all. It declares a meal, or the possession of things of that sort, to be an end in itself; as a result, it in fact declares itself to be a very impure intention since what essentially matters to it are such possessions and acts of consumption. As pure intention, it again asserts the necessity of rising above natural existence and rising above any covetousness over the means for such existence. It only finds it both foolish and wrong that this elevation should be demonstrated through the deed, or that this pure intention is in truth a deception which both pretends and demands to be an inner elevation but which takes on the affectation that it is gratuitous, foolish, and even wrong to be serious about actually putting this into practice and demonstrating its truth. – Pure insight thus disowns itself as pure insight, for it disowns the immediately purposive doing as pure intention; and it disowns itself as pure intention, for it disowns the intention to prove itself to be liberated from the purposes of singular individuality.

557. So does the Enlightenment make itself known to faith.¹⁰⁴ It comes on the scene in such a bad light precisely because through the relationship to an other, it gives itself a negative reality, or it exhibits itself as the opposite of itself. However, pure insight and pure intention must give this relationship to themselves, for this relationship is their actualization. – This actualization at first appeared as negative reality. But perhaps its positive reality is better constituted, so let us see how it fares. – However much all prejudice and superstition have been banished, still the question arises: What next? What is the truth that the Enlightenment has disseminated in their place? – It has already declared that its positive content lies in its eradication of 303error, for that alienation of itself is equally its positive reality. – In what was for faith absolute spirit, the Enlightenment grasps whatever sort of determination it discovers there only to be wood, stone, and so forth, or to be singular, actual things. While in general it comprehends all determinateness in this way, which is to say, it conceives of every content and every fulfillment of content as finite, or as a human essence and as representational thought, absolute essence turns out, to itself, to be a vacuum to which no determinations and no predicates can be married.¹⁰⁵ Such a marital consummation would be in itself a punishable offence, and it is precisely that kind of thing which has produced the monstrosities of superstition. Reason, pure insight, is itself, of course, not empty, as the negative of itself is for it and is its content. On the contrary, it is rich but only in singularity and limitations. To allow nothing of that sort either to be attributed to absolute essence or to be made to accord with the absolute essence is its own insightful way of life, which knows so well how to put itself and its wealth of finitude in their proper places and how to deal with the absolute in a dignified manner.

558. Confronting this empty essence as a second moment of the positive truth of the Enlightenment stands the singular individuality per se, that of consciousness and all being, as absolute being-in-and-for-itself that is excluded from an absolute essence. Consciousness, which in its very earliest actuality is sensuous-certainty and opinionating,¹⁰⁶ returns from the whole course of its experience back to this point and is again a knowing of the pure negative of itself, or of the sensuous things, i.e., existing things which indifferently confront its being-for-itself. However, here is no immediate natural consciousness; rather, to itself, it has become such a consciousness. At first abandoned to every entanglement into which it was plunged in the course of its unfolding, it is now led back to its first shape by pure insight, and it has learned from experience that this first shape is a result of its unfolding. Grounded on the insight into the nullity of all other shapes of consciousness (and thus into the nothingness of everything beyond sensuous-certainty), this sensuous-certainty is no longer only a view¹⁰⁷ but is instead the absolute truth. This nothingness of everything that goes beyond sense certainty is, to be sure, only a negative proof of this truth. However, it is not capable of producing any other proof, for the positive truth of sensuous-certainty in its own self is precisely the unmediated being-for-itself of the concept itself as the object, indeed, as the object in the form of otherness – that it is utterly certain to every consciousness that it is and that there are other actual things external to it and that in its natural existence it, as well as these things, is in and for itself, or is absolutely.

559. 304The third moment of the truth of the Enlightenment is finally the relationship which the singular essence bears to the absolute essence, which is the relation of the first two moments. Insight, as the pure insight of the equal, or, the unrestricted, also goes beyond the unequal, namely, finite actuality, or goes beyond itself as mere otherness. For the other-worldly beyond of this otherness, it has the void to which it therefore relates sensuous actuality. Both aspects of the matter do not enter into the determination of these relationships as content, for the one is the void, and therefore a content is present only through the other, sensuous actuality. However, the form of the relation, in the determination of which the aspect of the in-itself lends a hand, can be construed arbitrarily, for the form is the negative in itself and for that reason is what is self-opposed. It is being as well as nothing, is the in-itself as well as the opposite, or, what comes down to the same thing, the relation of actuality to an in-itself as an other-worldly beyond is just as much a negating as it is a positing of that actuality. Finite actuality can thus in effect be taken precisely as one needs to take it. The sensuous is thus now positively related to the absolute as the in-itself, and sensuous actuality itself is in itself. The absolute makes it, takes care of it, and looks after it. In turn, actuality is also related to it as it is related to the opposite, to its non-being. According to this relation, sensuous actuality is not in itself but rather only for an other. However much in the preceding shape of consciousness the concepts of the opposition were determined as the good and the bad, still in pure insight they will become the even purer abstractions of being-in-itself and being-for-an-other.

560. However, both approaches, the positive as well as the negative relation of the finite to the in-itself, are in fact equally necessary, and everything is therefore just as much in itself as it is for an other, or everything is useful. – Everything hands itself over to others, now lets itself be used by others, and is for them; and now, so to speak, everything puts up a good fight, is unaccommodating to others, is for itself, and, for its own part, uses the other. – For people, as the things that are conscious of this relation, it turns out that this is their essence and their stance. As he immediately is, as natural consciousness in itself, the person is good; as a singular individual, he is absolute; and what is other is for him; indeed, since, for him as a self-aware animal, the moments have the meaning of universality, everything is for his enjoyment and his delight, and, as he comes out of the hand of God, he walks the earth as if he were in a garden planted for him. – He must have also plucked the fruit of the tree of knowing of good and evil. 305In that he possesses a utility that distinguishes him from every other being, for, quite contingently, his good nature in itself is also constituted so that the excess of delight does him harm, or, instead, his singular individuality also has its other-worldly beyond in it, and it can go beyond itself and destroy itself. To prevent this, reason is for him a useful means for properly restricting this going-beyond, or rather, for preserving himself when he does in fact go beyond the determinate, for this is the power of consciousness. The enjoyment on the part of the conscious, in itself universal essence must not itself be, according to variety and duration, a determinate but rather a universal enjoyment. The measure thus signifies this determination, namely, that it is to prevent pleasure in its variety and duration from being cut short, which is to say, such a measure is determined as immoderation. – As everything is useful for man, man is likewise useful, and his determination consists in making himself a universally usable member of the troop and being of use for the common interest. As much as he looks out for himself is just as much as he must also give away to others, and as much as he gives to others is just as much as he is to look out for himself; or, “Scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.” But wherever he ends up, he is in the right place; he makes use of others and is himself made use of.

561. Different things are useful to each other in different ways, but all things have this useful reciprocity through their essence, namely, that they are related to the absolute in a twofold manner – the positive way, as a result of which they are in and for themselves, and the negative way, as a result of which they are for others. The relation to the absolute essence, or to religion, is thus among all utilities the most useful, for it is pure utility itself. It is the stable existence of all things, or their being-in-and-for-itself, and the pitfall of all things, or their being for others.

562. Of course, this positive result of the Enlightenment is for faith as much a horror as is the Enlightenment's negative conduct towards faith. This insight into the absolute essence that sees nothing in it but the absolute essence itself, the être suprême, or the void – this intention that everything in its immediate existence is in itself, or, is good, that finally the relation of the singular conscious being to the absolute essence, religion, is to be exhaustively expressed in the concept of utility is, to faith, something utterly abhorrent. This, the Enlightenment's own wisdom, necessarily appears to faith at the same time as shallowness itself and as the very confession of shallowness because it consists in knowing nothing of absolute essence, or, what amounts to the same thing, in knowing only this entirely banal truth about it, that it is only the absolute essence. Quite the contrary, to faith, what the Enlightenment knows as the highest is nothing but finitude, indeed, it knows this finitude and the knowing of such finitude as the true.

563. Faith has the divine right of absolute self-equality, or of pure thinking, against the Enlightenment, and it suffers quite 306a wrong from the Enlightenment, for the Enlightenment distorts faith in all its moments and makes those moments into something quite different from what they are within faith. However, the Enlightenment has only a human right against faith and for its own truth, for the wrong it commits is the right of inequality, and it consists in inverting and altering a right that belongs to the nature of self-consciousness in regard to the simple essence, or to thinking. However, while the Enlightenment's right is the right of self-consciousness, it will not only also retain its own right, so that two equal rights of spirit would be left facing off against each other with neither of them satisfying the claims of the other, but rather it will also assert absolute right because self-consciousness is the negativity of the concept, which is not only for itself but also overlaps with its opposite, and faith itself, because it is consciousness, will not be able to deny the Enlightenment its right.

564. For the Enlightenment does not conduct itself with regard to the faithful consciousness in terms of any distinctive principles of its own, but rather does so with the principles which faith has in itself. The Enlightenment only brings together faith's own thoughts, which, to the faithful consciousness, come undone without its being aware of it. The Enlightenment only reminds faith that in one of its thoughts, there are others that it also has, but that it is always forgetting one of those thoughts when it has the other one. Contra faith, the Enlightenment proves precisely as a result that as pure insight, the Enlightenment sees the whole in one determinate moment, and it thus brings the self-relating opposition to that moment; in inverting one moment into the other, the Enlightenment then brings out the negative essence of both thoughts, namely, the concept. For that reason, it appears to faith as distortion and lies because it points out the otherness of faith's moments. For this reason, to faith, the Enlightenment immediately seems to make of those moments something other than they are in their singularity. However, this other is just as essential, and it is in truth present in the faithful consciousness itself, but only in that faith does not think about it but has the other somewhere else. Hence, that other is neither alien to faith nor can it be denied by faith.

565. However, the Enlightenment itself, which reminds faith of the opposition within each of its various isolated moments, is no more enlightened about itself. It conducts itself purely negatively towards faith insofar as it excludes its own content from its own purity, and it takes that content to be the negative of itself. Hence, it cognizes itself neither in this negative, nor in the content of faith, nor on these grounds does it bring the two thoughts into contact with each other, the thought which it brings along and the thought that it brings along in opposition to the first one. Since it does not cognize that what it condemns in faith are immediately its own thoughts, it itself is in the opposition of both moments, one of which, namely, the one that is in every case opposed to faith, only bestows recognition 307on it, separating itself, however, from the other exactly in the way that faith does. The Enlightenment thus does not bring out the unity of both as the unity of both, i.e., the concept, but, to it, the concept emerges for itself, or, the Enlightenment encounters it only as present, for in itself this is just the very realization of pure insight. The pure insight whose essence is the concept initially comes to be, to itself, as an absolute other, and it denies itself, for the opposite of the concept is the absolute opposite. It then comes back round to itself, to its concept, from out of this otherness. – However, the Enlightenment is only this movement; it is the still unconscious activity of the pure concept which, to be sure, comes back round to itself as object but which takes this object for an other and which is also not even aware of the nature of the concept, namely, that the concept is non-differentiated which absolutely separates itself. – Thus, as against faith, insight is the power of the concept insofar as insight is both the movement and the relating of the moments which lie apart in faith's consciousness; it is an [act of] relating in which the contradiction in those moments comes to light. Therein lies the absolute right of the authority¹⁰⁸ which insight exercises over faith, but the actuality on which it brings this authority to bear lies precisely in this, that the faithful consciousness is itself the concept, and that it thus itself recognizes and accepts the opposition that insight brings to it. For that reason, insight keeps its right against faith because what it affirms in faith is what is necessary to faith itself and what faith has in its own self.

566. At first the Enlightenment asserts the moment of the concept to be a doing of consciousness. What it asserts against faith is just this – that faith's absolute essence is an essence of faith's consciousness as a self, or that this absolute essence is supposed to be brought out through consciousness. Its absolute essence is, to the faithful consciousness, precisely as it is as faith's in-itself, at the same time not like some alien thing which would just be there in it, some kind of “who knows where it came from and how it got there,” but rather, faith's confidence consists only in finding itself as this personal consciousness within its absolute essence, and its obedience and service consist in engendering that essence as its absolute essence through faith's own doing. In effect the Enlightenment only reminds faith of this when faith starkly declares that the in-itself of the absolute essence is the other-worldly beyond of the doing of consciousness. – However, while, to be sure, the Enlightenment brings up faith's one-sidedness concerning the opposing moment of faith's own doing in contrast to what is,¹⁰⁹ which is all that faith thinks about here, and does not bring together its own opposing thoughts, the Enlightenment isolates the pure moment of doing and declares faith's in-itself to be only something brought out by consciousness. However, the isolated doing opposed to the in-itself is a contingent doing, and, as what representational thought does, it is an engendering of fictions – representations which are not in itself, and so this is the way in which the Enlightenment regards the content of faith. – But, 308conversely, pure insight states the very opposite. While insight affirms the moment of otherness which the concept has in it, it expresses the essence of faith as that which does not concern consciousness, which is an other-worldly beyond to consciousness, something alien and unknown to it. To faith, the essence, on the one hand, is exactly what it places its trust in and in which it has certainty of itself, whereas, on the other hand, the essence is inscrutable in its ways and unattainable in its being.

567. Furthermore, the Enlightenment asserts a right contra the faithful consciousness that faith itself concedes when the Enlightenment takes the object of the faith's veneration to be stone and wood, or otherwise regards it as a finite, anthropomorphic determinateness. For since it is this estranged consciousness in that it has an other-worldly realm beyond actuality together with a pure this-worldliness to that other-worldly beyond, so is this point of view on sensuous things in fact also present in it, according to which sensuous things count in and for themselves. However, faith does not bring together these two thoughts of what-is-existing-in-and-for-itself, what to it at one time is the pure essence and at another time an ordinary thing of sense. – Even its pure consciousness is affected by this last point of view, for the differences in its supersensible realm, because it lacks the concept, are a series of self-sufficient shapes, and their movement is an event, which is to say that those shapes only are in representational thought and bear in themselves the mode of sensuous being. – For its part, the Enlightenment isolates as well actuality as an essence forsaken by spirit, the determinateness as an unmoved finitude which would neither be a moment in the spiritual movement of the essence itself, nor would it be not nothing, nor would it also be something existing in and for itself. Rather, it would be a vanishing.

568. It is clear that the same is the case with regard to the ground of knowing. The faithful spirit itself bestows recognition on a contingent knowing, for it has a relation to contingencies, and the absolute essence itself is for it in the form of a represented, ordinary actuality. Thus, the faithful consciousness is also a certainty which does not have the truth in its own self, and it avows itself to be an inessential consciousness of this kind, or to be on the this-worldly side of the self-assuring and self-authenticating spirit. – However, in its spiritually immediate knowing of the absolute essence, the faithful consciousness forgets this moment. – But the Enlightenment, which reminds faith of this, again only thinks of contingent knowing, and it forgets the other – it only thinks of the mediation that comes about through an alien third term, and it does not think of that within which the immediate is, to itself, itself the third term through which it mediates itself with the other, namely, with itself.

569. Finally, in its view of what faith does, the Enlightenment finds that faith's dismissal 309of possessions and consumption is something both wrong and without purpose.¹¹⁰ – As far as that wrong is concerned, the Enlightenment is on this point in accord with the faithful consciousness itself. The faithful consciousness recognizes the actuality of possessing property and of keeping hold of it and consuming it. In claiming its property, it behaves in an even more isolated and stubborn manner, just as it has even more crudely thrown itself into its consumption, since its religious doing – that of giving up possessions and the consumption of them – falls into the other-worldly side of this actuality, and it purchases freedom for itself on that side. In fact, through this opposition, this service of sacrifice of both natural drives and consumption has no truth; both the retention and the sacrifice occur together side by side. The sacrifice is only a sign that the actual sacrifice has been accomplished in only a small degree and consequently that it in fact only represents it.

570. With regard to purposiveness, the Enlightenment finds it simply inept either to discard a possession in order both to know and to prove that one is liberated from possession per se or to renounce an enjoyment in order both to know and prove that one is liberated from enjoyment. The faithful consciousness itself takes the absolute doing to be a universal doing; to itself, not only is the doing of its absolute essence, as its object, a universal doing; the singular consciousness is also supposed to prove itself to be entirely and universally liberated from its sensuous essence. However, casting off a single possession or renouncing a single enjoyment is not this universal action; and while in the action the purpose, which is a universal purpose, and the execution of the purpose, which is singular, would essentially have to be present to consciousness in their inadequacy to each other, that action proves itself to be the sort of action in which consciousness has no share, and this action thereby in effect proves to be too naive even to be an action at all. It is simply too naive to fast in order to prove oneself freed from the pleasures of the table, and it is too naive to remove the body of some other pleasure, as Origen did, in order to show that one has dismissed pleasure. The action itself proves to be an external and singular doing. However, desire is inwardly rooted and is universal; its pleasure neither disappears when the instrument for obtaining pleasure disappears, nor does it disappear through individual abstention.

571. However, for its part the Enlightenment here isolates the inner, the non-actual with regard to actuality just as with regard to faith's contemplation and devotion it had tenaciously clung to the externality of thinghood in contrast to the inwardness of faith. The Enlightenment puts all essentiality into the intention, into thoughts, and as a result it spares itself from actually accomplishing the liberation from natural purposes. On the contrary, this inwardness is itself what is formal, and it has its fulfillment in the natural drives, which as a result are justified precisely in that they indeed are inward, that they belong to the universal being, nature.

572. 310The Enlightenment therefore has an irresistible authority over faith for the reason that faith itself finds within its own consciousness the moments which the Enlightenment itself has validated. If the effect of this force is examined more closely, then its comportment with respect to faith seems to disrupt the beautiful unity of trust and faith's immediate certainty; it seems to pollute its spiritual consciousness with the lower thoughts of sensuous actuality and through the vanity of the intellect, of self-will, and of self-fulfillment, to destroy faith's heart, which is motionless and secure in its submission. However, in fact the Enlightenment marks instead the beginning of the sublation of the unthinking separation, or instead the separation which is itself devoid of the concept, which is present in faith. The faithful consciousness weighs and measures by a double standard. It has two sorts of eyes and ears, two tongues and languages, and it doubles all its representational thoughts without ever comparing these ambiguities. Or, faith lives within two sorts of perception, one of which is that of the slumbering, utterly conceptless consciousness, and the other that of the waking consciousness, which lives purely in sensuous actuality. Moreover, it keeps a separate set of account books in each of them. – The Enlightenment illuminates that heavenly world with representations drawn from the sensuous world, and it points out to faith this finitude which faith cannot deny because faith is self-consciousness, and because faith is the unity to which both kinds of representations belong and within which they do not come undone from one another, for both kind belong to the same indivisible simple self into which faith has passed over.

573. Faith has thereby lost the content that fulfilled its element, and it descends into weaving a kind of dull stupefaction within spirit itself. Faith has been banished from its own realm, or rather this realm has been sacked and plundered, while the waking consciousness in itself ripped up all the differentiation and dispersal within that realm, claimed those parts as the earth's property, and returned them to the earth that owns them. However, faith is not for that reason satisfied, for through this illumination, what has sprouted everywhere is only a singular essence, such that what speaks to spirit is only an essenceless actuality and a finitude forsaken by spirit. – While faith is without content and cannot remain in this emptiness, or while it goes beyond the finite, which is the sole content, and finds only emptiness, it is a pure longing. Its truth is an empty other-worldly beyond for which there is no longer any adequate content to be found since everything now stands in a different relation. – With that, faith has in fact become the same as the Enlightenment, namely, the consciousness of the relation between the finite existing in itself and a predicate-less, unknown and unknowable absolute. The only difference is that the Enlightenment is satisfied Enlightenment, whereas faith is the unsatisfied Enlightenment. Nonetheless, it is still to be seen whether the Enlightenment can remain in its satisfaction. The longing on the part of the former tarnished spirit which mourns the loss of its spiritual world lurks in the background. The Enlightenment itself has this stain of unsatisfied longing in it – as the pure 311object in its empty absolute essence – as doing and movement in its going beyond its individual essence to an unfulfilled other-worldly beyond – and as an object brought to fulfillment in the selflessness of utility. The Enlightenment will sublate this stain. In the closer examination of the positive result, which, to the Enlightenment, is the truth, it will turn out that the stain is in itself already sublated.

b. The Truth of the Enlightenment

574. The stupefied weaving by spirit that no longer has any differences within itself, has thus moved into a realm beyond consciousness, which in contrast has now become clear to itself. – The first moment of this clarity, in its necessity and condition, is as a result determined, so that the pure insight, or the insight which is in itself the concept, actualizes itself. It does this as it posits otherness, or the determinateness, in it. In this manner, it is negative pure insight, i.e., negation of the concept. This negation is just as pure, and it has thereby become the pure thing, the absolute essence, which otherwise has no further determination. If it is more closely determined, then insight is the absolute concept, the differentiating of differences that are no longer differences, of abstractions or pure concepts which no longer support themselves but which have a firm hold and a difference only through the movement as a whole. This distinguishing of what is not distinguished thereby consists exactly in the absolute concept's making itself its own object, and, over and against that movement, in its positing itself as the essence. The essence thereby dispenses with that aspect of the matter in which abstractions or differences are kept apart from each other, and hence it becomes pure thinking as a pure thing. – This is therefore just that former dull, unconscious weaving of a cloud of stupefaction in spirit itself, the same one into which faith sank when it lost all differentiated content. – This is at the same time the former movement of pure self-consciousness which was supposed to be the absolute, alien, other-worldly beyond. Because this pure self-consciousness is a movement within pure concepts, within differences that are no differences, pure self-consciousness actually collapses into that unconscious weaving of its own stupefaction, i.e., into pure feeling or pure thinghood. – It is the concept alienated from itself – for the concept still remains here at the stage of this alienation – but it does not cognize this same essence of both aspects, of the movement of self-consciousness and its absolute essence – it does cognize the same essence of both, which is in fact their substance and stable existence. While it does not cognize this unity, so does the essence count for the concept only in the form of an objective other-worldly beyond, whereas 312the differentiating consciousness, which in this way has the in-itself external to itself, counts as a finite consciousness.

575. The Enlightenment itself falls into conflict with itself over that absolute essence just as it had previously done with faith, and it now divides itself into two factions. One faction proves itself to be victorious as a result of breaking up into two factions, for in that breakup it points to the very principle it combats, and it thus shows both that it has that principle in its own self and that it thereby has sublated the one-sidedness within in which it formerly appeared. The interest that it shared with the other now falls entirely within itself, and it forgets the other because that interest finds within itself the opposition with which it engages. However, at the same time, the opposition has been elevated into the higher, victorious element in which it manifests itself in a clarified form. Thus, the discord which arises in one faction, and which seems to be a misfortune, proves to be its good fortune after all.

576. The pure essence itself has no difference in it. It comes to such a difference in this way: What become prominent are two such pure essences for consciousness, or a twofold consciousness of the pure essence. – The pure absolute essence is only in pure thinking, or rather it is pure thinking itself, and it is thus utterly the other-worldly beyond of the finite, or of self-consciousness, and is only the negative essence. However, in this manner it is just being, the negative of self-consciousness. As the negative of self-consciousness, it is also related to self-consciousness. It is external being, which in its relation to self-consciousness, within which the distinctions and determinations fall, receives in it the differences among being tasted, being seen, and so on. The relationship is thus that of sensuous-certainty and perception.

577. If one starts with this sensuous being into which that former negative other-worldly beyond necessarily passes, and one then abstracts from those determinate modes of the relation of consciousness, what remains is pure matter as both the dull weaving together of its own stupefaction and motion within itself. It is thereby essential to think about whether pure matter is only what is left over when we abstract from seeing, feeling, tasting, and so forth, which is to say, matter is not what is seen, tasted, felt, and so on. It is not matter that is seen, felt, or tasted, but the color, a stone, salt, and so on. Matter is instead pure abstraction, and, as a result, what is present is the pure essence of thinking, or pure thinking, or pure thinking itself as the absolute lacking all predicates, undetermined and without differences within itself.

578. One Enlightenment dubs the absolute essence the former predicate-less absolute which is in thinking as the other-worldly beyond of the actual consciousness which was its starting point. – The other Enlightenment calls the other matter. If they were to be differentiated as nature and spirit, or as God, the unconscious weaving together of its own stupefaction within itself would still lack the wealth of developed life which is required for there to be nature, and spirit or God, and it would lack the consciousness distinguishing itself within itself. As we saw, both 313are quite plainly the same concept. The difference lies not in the thing at issue but simply in the various points of departure for both formations,¹¹¹ and it lies in each sticking to its own point in the movement of thinking. If they were to set those points aside, their thoughts would meet up with each other, and they would recognize¹¹² that what one of them professes to be a horror and the other professes to be a folly are really one and the same thing. For one of them, the absolute essence is in its pure thinking, or it is immediately for pure consciousness, and it is external to finite consciousness; it is the negative other-worldly beyond of finite consciousness. If it were to reflect on the matter, namely, that in part that former simple immediacy of thinking is nothing but pure being, and that in part, what is negative for consciousness is at the same time related to consciousness, or that in the negative judgment, the “is” (the copula) by the same token holds together two separate items – then the result would be that this other-worldly beyond would have the determination of an external existent in relation to consciousness, and it would thereby be the same as what is called pure matter. The absent moment of the present would thereby be gained. – The other Enlightenment starts from sensuous being and then abstracts from the sensuous relation of tasting, seeing, and so forth; it then turns sensuous being into the pure in-itself, into absolute matter, into something neither felt nor tasted; in this way, this being has become the predicate-less simple, the essence of pure consciousness. It is the pure concept existing in itself, or pure thinking inwardly turned into itself.¹¹³ In its consciousness, this insight does not take the reverse step from what is existing, which is a pure existent, to what has been only thought,¹¹⁴ which is the same as the purely-existing,¹¹⁵ or, it does not go from the purely positive to the purely negative; yet while the positive is purely, utterly through negation, the purely negative, as pure, is to itself in itself self-equal,¹¹⁶ and, as a result, it is positive. – Or, it is that these two have not gone as far as the concept of Cartesian metaphysics, namely, that being and thinking are in themselves the same, and they have not arrived at the thought that being, pure being, is not a concrete actuality, but is rather pure abstraction. Conversely, pure thinking, self-equality, or essence, is in part the negative of self-consciousness and is thereby being, and as immediate simplicity, it is in part likewise nothing but being. Thinking is thinghood, or thinghood is thinking.

579. The essence here has estrangement in itself in such a way that there are two ways of considering it. In part, the essence must have the difference in its own self, and in part, precisely by having the difference in its own self, both ways of considering it merge into one way, since the abstract moments of pure being and of the negative, within which they are differentiated, are united in the object of these two approaches. – The universal common to both is the abstraction of the pure trembling within itself, or pure thought-thinking-itself. This simple motion rotating on its own axis has to pull itself apart into separate moments because it is 314only by distinguishing its moments that it is itself motion. This difference of the moments leaves the unmoved behind as the empty husk of pure being which is no longer actual thinking and which no longer has life within itself, for, as difference, it is all content. However, the movement, which posits itself as external to that unity, is thereby the flux of the moments which do not return back into themselves, those of being-in-itself, of being-for-an-other, and of being-for-itself – actuality in the way in which it is the object for the actual consciousness of pure insight – utility.

580. As bad as utility may look to faith or to sentimentality, or even to that abstraction which calls itself speculation and which fixes on the in-itself, it is nonetheless in utility that pure insight finalizes its realization and is, to itself, its object, an object which insight now no longer disavows and which for insight is no longer valued as the void, or as the pure other-worldly beyond. This is so because pure insight is, as we saw, the existing concept itself, or the pure self-equal personality which is distinguishing itself within itself in such a way that each of the differences is itself the pure concept, which is to say, is immediately not distinct. It is simple pure self-consciousness which is just as well in an immediate unity for itself as it is in an immediate unity in itself. Its being-in-itself is thus not a lasting being, but, within its differences, it immediately ceases to be “something.” However, such a being which has no support is not immediately in itself but is essentially for an other which is the power that absorbs it. But this second moment, which is opposed to that first one, or to the being-in-itself, disappears just as immediately as does the first. That is to say, as being only for others, it is instead disappearance itself, and it is being-returned-into-itself, or being-for-itself which is posited. But as self-equality, this simple being-for-itself is instead a being, or it is thereby for an other. – The nature of pure insight in the unfolding of its moments, or as object, expresses itself as utility. Utility is something stably existing in itself, or a thing. This being-in-itself is at the same time only a pure moment; it is thereby absolutely for an other, but it is just as much only for an other as it is in itself, and these opposing moments have thus returned back into the inseparable unity of being-for-itself. However much utility is indeed the expression of the concept of pure insight, still it is not the concept of pure insight as such but of pure insight as representational thought, or as insight's object. Utility is only the restless flux of those moments, one of which is indeed that of being-returned-into-itself, although only as being-for-itself, i.e., as an abstract moment standing off to one side with regard to the others. Utility itself is not the negative essence, these moments in their opposition and at the same time undivided in one and the same respect, or, to have them as thinking, in the way they are 315as pure insight. The moment of being-for-itself is indeed in utility, but not in the sense that it extends over¹¹⁷ the other moments, being-in-itself and being-for-an-other, and thereby would be the self. In utility, pure insight thus has as its object its own distinctive concept in its pure moments, and it is the consciousness of this metaphysics although not yet its comprehension. It has not yet itself arrived at the unity of being and concept. Because utility still has the form of an object for insight, insight has a world. To be sure, it has a world no longer existing in and for itself, but nonetheless it is still a world which it distinguishes from itself. However, while at the pinnacle of the concept, the oppositions have themselves begun to come out, the next stage will be for them to totally collapse, and the Enlightenment shall then experience the fruits of its deeds.

581. If the attained object is viewed in relation to this entire sphere, then the actual world of cultural formation thus summed itself up in the vanity of self-consciousness – in being-for-itself, which still has its content in its fogginess, and which is still the singular concept and not yet the concept which is for itself universal. However, when that concept has returned into itself, it is pure insight – that is, it is pure consciousness as the pure self, or negativity, just as faith is the same pure consciousness as pure thinking, or positivity. In that self, faith has the moment which completes it – but, foundering through this supplementation, it is now in pure insight that we see both moments, as the absolute essence, which is purely thought, or the negative – and then as matter, which is the positive existent. – This culmination still lacks the actuality of self-consciousness, which belongs to the vain consciousness – the world from out of which thinking raised itself up to itself. What was lacking is attained in utility insofar as pure insight attains positive objectivity in utility. As a result, pure insight is an actual consciousness satisfied within itself. This objectivity now constitutes its world, and it has become the truth of the entire previous world, of the ideal as well as of the real world. The first world of spirit is the unfolded realm of spirit's self-dispersing existence and of the thinned-out certainty of itself just as nature disperses its life into an infinite diversity of shapes without the genus of all the shapes being present. The second world contains the genus and is the realm of being-in-itself, or the truth opposed to that certainty. However, the third world, which is that of utility, is the truth which is just as much the certainty of itself. The realm of the truth of faith lacks the principle of actuality, or it lacks the certainty of itself as being this singular individual. However, actuality, or the certainty of itself as this singular individual, lacks the in-itself. In the object of pure insight, both worlds are united. Utility is the object insofar as self-consciousness sees through it and has the 316singular certainty of itself, its enjoyment (its being-for-itself) within it. In this way, self-consciousness insightfully looks into it,¹¹⁸ and this insight contains the true essence of the object (something which is seen through, or is for an other). This insight is thus itself true knowing, and self-consciousness just as immediately has the universal certainty of itself, or has its pure consciousness in this relationship in which truth as well as presence and actuality are therefore united. Both worlds are reconciled, and heaven is transplanted to the earth below.

III. Absolute Freedom and Terror

582. Consciousness has found its concept in the principle of utility. However, the concept is still partly an object, and, for that very reason, is still partly purpose, a purpose in whose possession consciousness does not yet immediately find itself. Utility is still a predicate of the object, not of the subject itself, or it is not the subject's immediate and sole actuality. It is the same thing which a short while ago appeared in the following way. Being-for-itself had not yet proven itself to be the substance of the rest of the moments. If it had, then utility would be immediately nothing but the self of consciousness, and utility would thereby have the self in its possession. – However, this retraction of the form of the objectivity of utility has already taken place in itself, and out of this internal upheaval, the actual upheaval of actuality is brought forth, the new shape of consciousness, absolute freedom.

583. In fact, what is now present is nothing more than an empty semblance of objectivity which separates self-consciousness from possession. In part this is so because all the stable existence and validity of the determinate members of the organization of the actual world and the world of faith have, as such, returned into this simple determination as their ground and their spirit, but in part it is because this objectivity has nothing more of its own for itself and is instead pure metaphysics, the pure concept, or knowing of self-consciousness. From the being-in-and-for-itself of utility as the object, consciousness cognizes that its being-in-itself is essentially being for others. Being-in-itself, as what is devoid of a self, is in truth something passive, or what is for another self. However, the object is for consciousness in this 317abstract form of pure being-in-itself, is for consciousness pure in-sight,¹¹⁹ whose differences lie in the pure form of concepts. – However, the being-for-itself, into which being for an other returns, or the self, is not a self distinct from the I. It is not the self that belongs exclusively to what is called “object.” This is so because consciousness as pure insight is not a singularly individual self which could be confronted by the object which would likewise have its own self. Rather, it is the pure concept, the gazing of the self into the self, absolutely seeing-itself-as-doubled. The certainty of itself is the universal subject, and its knowing concept is the essence of all actuality. However much utility had thus been only the flux of the moments, was thus still an object for knowing and which did not make its return into its own unity, still the flux now ceases to be this, for knowing is itself the movement of those abstract moments. It is the universal self, the self of itself as well as of the object, and, as the universal self, it is the unity of this movement returning into itself.

584. Thereby spirit as absolute freedom is now present. It is the self-consciousness which grasps itself so that its certainty of itself is the essence of all the spiritual social estates of the real world as well as those of the supersensible world, or, conversely, that essence and actuality are the knowing consciousness has of itself. – It is conscious of its pure personality and therein of all spiritual reality, and all reality is only spiritual. The world is to it quite simply its will, and this will is the universal will. Indeed, this will is not the empty thought of the will, which is posited as lying in a tacit or in a represented¹²⁰ consent; rather, it is posited as lying in a real universal will, the will of all singular individuals as such. For the will is in itself the consciousness of personality, or of each of them, and it is supposed to be this genuine actual will as the self-conscious essence of each and every personality such that each, undivided from the whole, always does everything, and what emerges as a doing of the whole is the immediate and conscious doing on the part of each.

585. This undivided substance of absolute freedom elevates itself to the throne of the world without any power capable of resisting it. For while consciousness alone is in truth the element within which the spiritual essence, or the spiritual powers, have their substance, so has their whole system, which organizes itself and sustains itself by means of the division into separate social estates, collapsed after singular consciousness has grasped the object as having no other essence than that of self-consciousness itself, or that it is the concept absolutely. What made the concept into an existing object was its differentiation into isolated, stably existing social estates, but while the object becomes the concept, there is no longer anything stably existing in it.¹²¹ Negativity has permeated all of its moments. It comes into existence in such a way that each individual consciousness elevates itself out of the sphere assigned to it and no longer finds its essence and its labor within this particularized social estate. Instead, it grasps its self as the concept of the will, 318and it grasps all the social estates as the essence of this will; thus it is only able to realize itself in a labor which is a total labor. In this absolute freedom, all the social estates, which are the spiritual essences into which the whole divides itself, are erased. The individual consciousness that belonged to any such group and which exercised its will and which found its fulfillment there, has sublated its boundaries, and its purpose is now the universal purpose, its language the universal law, its work the universal work.

586. The object and the difference have here lost the meaning of utility, which was a predicate of all real being. Consciousness does not begin its movement in it as something alien from which it principally returns into itself, but rather, to consciousness, the object is consciousness itself, and the opposition thus consists solely in the difference between singular and universal consciousness. However, to itself, the singular individual is itself immediately that which had only the semblance of opposition; it is universal consciousness and will. The other-worldly beyond of this, its actuality, hovers over the corpse of the vanished self-sufficiency of real being, or the being of faith, and it hovers there only as an exhalation of stale gas, an exhalation of the empty être suprême.

587. After the sublation of the differentiated spiritual social estates and of the restricted lives of individuals as well as those of both of their worlds, what is present is only the movement of universal self-consciousness within itself as an interplay of self-consciousness in the form of universality and personal consciousness. The universal will takes an inward turn and is a singular will, which is confronted by the universal law and universal work. However, this singular consciousness is just as immediately conscious of itself as the universal will; it is conscious that its object is a law given by itself and is a work carried out by itself, and passing over into activity and into creating objectivity, it is thus not making anything which is singular; it is only making laws and state-actions.¹²²

588. This movement is thereby the reciprocation of consciousness with itself in which consciousness lets nothing break loose into a shape that would become a free-standing object confronting it. From this, it follows that consciousness cannot arrive at a positive work, neither to universal works of language nor to those of actuality, nor to the laws and the universal institutions of conscious freedom, nor to the deeds and works of willing freedom. – The work to which freedom giving itself consciousness can arrive would consist in freedom as the universal substance making itself into an object and a lasting being. This otherness would be the difference in the substance itself, the difference according to which it divided itself both into stably existing spiritual social estates and into the ranks of various authoritative powers. In part this difference would be that of these social estates as the mere thought-things of a power broken up 319into legislative, judicial, and executive powers, but in part they would be the real essences which emerged in the real world of cultural formation, and, in examining the content of universal doing itself more closely, they would be the particular social estates of labor which are themselves further differentiated as more specialized estates. – Universal freedom, which in this way would have broken itself up into its various parts and by doing so would have made itself into an existing substance, would thereby be free from singular individuality and could apportion the plurality of individuals to its different parts. However, the doing and being of personality would thereby find itself restricted to a branch of the whole, to one kind of doing and being. Posited in the element of being, personality would mean a determinate personality, and it would in truth cease to be universal self-consciousness. This universal self-consciousness would not let itself be deceived about the actual through the mere idea of obedience to self-given laws which would assign to it only a part of the whole, nor would it be deceived by representation¹²³ in legislation and in the universal doing – it would not let itself be deceived about the actuality of giving itself the law and accomplishing the universal itself and not only some singular piece of work. This is so because where the self is only represented and imagined,¹²⁴ it is not actual, and where it is by proxy, it is not.

589. Just as individual self-consciousness is not to be found in this universal work of absolute freedom as existing substance, just as little is it to be found in the real deeds and individual actions of the will of absolute freedom. For the universal to reach the point of actually doing something, it must gather itself up into the One of individuality and put a singular consciousness at the head, for the universal will is only an actual will in a self that is One.¹²⁵ However, as a result, all other singular individuals are excluded from the totality of this deed, and they only have a restricted share in it, so that the deed could not be a deed of actual universal self-consciousness. – Universal freedom can thus produce neither a positive work nor a positive deed, and there remains for it only the negative doing. It is only the fury of disappearing.

590. However, the highest actuality opposed to absolute freedom, or instead the sole object which is yet to come to be for it, is the freedom and singularity of actual self-consciousness itself, for that former universality, which does not let itself be summoned to the reality of organic articulation and which has the purpose of sustaining itself in undivided continuity, differentiates itself within itself at the same time because it is movement, or consciousness, full stop. In fact, on account of its own abstraction, it actually divides itself into equally abstract extremes, into the simple, unbending cold universality and into the discrete, absolute and hard headstrongness and the obstinate isolation of actual 320self-consciousness. After it has finished eliminating the real organization and is now stably existing for itself, this is its sole object – an object that no longer has any other content, possession, existence, and external extension but is rather only this knowing of itself as an absolutely pure and free singular self. This object can be grasped solely in its abstract existence as such. – Since both of these are indivisibly absolutely for themselves¹²⁶ and thus cannot call on any part to serve as a mediating middle to connect them, the relation is that of wholly unmediated pure negation, namely, it is that of the negation of the singular individual as an existent within the universal. The sole work and deed of universal freedom is in fact death, namely, a death which has no inner extent and no inner fulfillment, for what is negated is the unfulfilled empty dot¹²⁷ of the absolutely free self. It is therefore the coldest, emptiest death of all, having no more meaning than chopping off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water.

591. In its self-achievement, the wisdom of the government, the intellect¹²⁸ of the universal will, resides in the banality of this syllable. The government is itself nothing but a self-appointing point, or the individuality of the universal will. The government, willing and achieving, starts out from a single point and which at the same time wills and accomplishes a determinate order of things and a determinate action. It thereby excludes, on the one hand, the remaining individuals from its deed, and, on the other hand, as a result, it constitutes itself as the kind of government which is a determinate will and which is opposed as a result to the universal will. It therefore cannot present itself as anything other than a faction. It is only the victorious faction which is called the government, and exactly because it is a faction, there is the immediate necessity of its overthrow; and that it is the government, conversely, makes it into a faction and makes it guilty. However much the universal will puts on record that the government's actual action is the crime that the government has committed against the universal will, still the government for its part has nothing determinate and outwardly apparent through which the will opposing the government would prove to be guilty; for what stands opposed to the government as the actual universal will is only the non-actual pure will, the intention. Becoming a suspect thus takes the place of being guilty, or it has the same significance and effect as being guilty, and the outward reaction against this actuality, which lies in the simple innerness of the intention, consists in the arid destruction of this existing self in which there is nothing left to take away except for its existence itself.

592. It is in its distinctive works that absolute freedom becomes an object to itself and in which self-consciousness experiences what this freedom is. In itself freedom is precisely this abstract self-consciousness which within itself erases all difference and any stable existence of difference. As this abstract self-consciousness, it is to itself the 321object, and the terror of death is the intuition of its negative essence. However, absolutely free self-consciousness finds its reality to be totally other than what its concept of itself was, namely, that the universal will is supposed to be only the positive essence of personality, and that personality is supposed to know itself only positively within the universal will, or to know itself as preserved. Rather, for self-consciousness here, which, as pure insight, utterly separates its positive from its negative essence – the predicate-less absolute as pure thinking and as pure matter – what is present here is the absolute transition of one into the other in its actuality. – As absolutely positive actual self-consciousness, the universal will, because it is this self-conscious actuality raised to pure thinking or to abstract matter, completely changes over into the negative essence, and proves just as much to be the sublation of thinking-thinking-itself,¹²⁹ or of self-consciousness.

593. As the pure self-equality of the universal will, absolute freedom thus has the negation in it but as a result has the difference as such in it, and it develops this again as actual difference. For in the self-equal universal will, pure negativity has the element of stable existence, or the substance within which its moments realize themselves, and it has the matter which it can put to work in its determinateness, and to the extent that this substance has shown itself to be the negative for individual consciousness, the organization of the spiritual social estates again takes shape, the organization to which the multitude of individual consciousnesses are apportioned. These individuals, who have felt the fear of their absolute lord and master – death – now again acquiesce in negation and difference, order themselves into the various social estates, and return to partitioned and restricted works. However, as a result, they return back to their substantial actuality.

594. Coming out of this tumult, spirit might have been hurled back to its starting-point, the ethical world and the real world of cultural formation, which had again entered people's hearts, refreshed and rejuvenated. Spirit would then have had to run through this cycle of necessity all over again, and it would have to repeat it continually if the result were only the complete permeation of self-consciousness and substance – a permeation in which self-consciousness has experienced the negative force of its universal essence directed at itself and would have wanted to know itself and to have come round to itself not as this particular self-consciousness but rather only as the universal self-consciousness, and thus it would also have been able to bear the objective actuality of the universal spirit excluding consciousness as particular. – However, in absolute freedom, there was neither the consciousness which is immersed in the diversity of existence, nor the consciousness which sets itself determinate purposes and thoughts, nor the valid external world, even a world of actuality or thinking reciprocating 322with each other, but rather the world utterly in the form of consciousness as the universal will (and just as much self-consciousness) constricted into the simple self from out of all the expanse of existence or all the variety of ends and judgments. The cultural education and formation which self-consciousness had arrived at in reciprocity with that essence is thus the last and the most sublime of that kind. It consists in seeing its pure, simple actuality immediately disappear and pass away into empty nothingness. In the world of cultural formation itself, it does not get around to intuiting its negation or alienation in this form of pure abstraction. Rather, its negation is the fulfilled negation: It is either honor and wealth, which it gains in the place of the self which it has alienated from itself – or it is the language of spirit and insight, at which the disrupted consciousness arrives; or it is the heaven of faith or the utility of the Enlightenment. All these determinations are lost in the loss that the self experiences in absolute freedom. Its negation is the meaningless death, the pure terror of the negative that has neither anything positive nor anything fulfilling in it. – However, at the same time this negation in its actuality is not alien; it is neither the universal necessity which resides in the other-worldly beyond in which the ethical world comes to an end, nor is it the individual contingency of private possession or the moods of the property owner, which the disrupted consciousness sees itself to be dependent upon – rather, it is the universal will, which in this, its final abstraction, has nothing positive and thus can give nothing in return for the sacrifice. – However, precisely for that reason this will is unmediated oneness with self-consciousness, or it is the purely positive because it is the purely negative, and within its inner concept the meaningless death, the unfulfilled negativity of the self, changes over suddenly into absolute positivity. For consciousness, the immediate unity of itself with the universal will, its demand to know itself as this determinate point in the universal will, transforms itself into the utterly opposite experience. What vanishes for it there is the abstract being, or the immediacy of that substance-less point, and this vanished immediacy is the universal will itself, which it now knows itself to be to the extent that it is sublated immediacy, or pure knowing or pure will. It thereby knows that will to be itself, and it knows itself to be the essence, but not as the immediately existing essence, neither knowing the universal will as the revolutionary government, or as anarchy striving to constitute anarchy, nor does it know itself as the center of this faction or its opposite. Rather, universal willing is its pure knowing and willing, and it is the universal will 323as this pure knowing and willing. It does not lose itself there, for pure knowing and willing are instead itself as the atomic point of consciousness. It is thus the reciprocity of pure knowing with itself. Pure knowing as the essence is the universal will, but this essence is only pure knowing itself. Self-consciousness is thus the pure knowing of the essence as pure knowing. Furthermore, as the singular self, self-consciousness is only the form of the subject, or actual doing which is known by it as form. In the same way objective actuality, as being, is for it utterly selfless form, for objective actuality would be the not-known; however, this knowing knows knowing to be the essence.

595. Absolute freedom has thus offset the opposition which the will had between itself as the universal will and as the singular will. The self-alienated spirit, driven to the peak of its opposition in which pure willing and the purely willing subject are still differentiated, now reduces that opposition to a transparent form and comes round to itself therein. – Just as the realm of the actual world passes over into the realm of faith and insight, absolute freedom passes over from its self-destroying actuality into another land of self-conscious spirit, and in this non-actuality, freedom counts as the truth, and spirit refreshes itself in the thought of this truth insofar as spirit is thought and remains so. Spirit knows this being which is enclosed within self-consciousness to be the perfected and completed essence. What has emerged is a new shape, that of the moral spirit.

C. Spirit Certain of Itself: Morality

596. The ethical world showed that its fate and its truth were only the departed spirit in that world, the singular self. However, this person of the law has its substance and its fulfillment outside of that ethical world. The movement of the world of cultural formation and of faith sublates this abstraction of the person, and through the perfected alienation and the highest abstraction, the substance initially, to the self of spirit, comes to be the universal will and then finally comes into spirit's own possession. Here knowing thus finally seems to have become completely the same as its truth, for its truth is this knowing itself, and all opposition between both aspects has vanished, in fact, not for us, or in itself, but for self-consciousness itself. That is to say, self-consciousness has itself gained mastery over the opposition of consciousness. 324This latter rests on the opposition between the certainty of itself and the object, but now the object is, to itself, the certainty of itself. It is knowing – just as the certainty of itself as such certainty no longer has any purposes of its own, and thus no longer is in the determinateness [of opposition] but rather, is pure knowing.

597. To self-consciousness, its knowing is therefore the substance itself. For it, this substance is as much immediately in one undivided unity as it is absolutely mediated. Immediate – just like ethical consciousness, it both knows its duty and does its duty, and it belongs to it as it does to its own nature. However, it is not character, as is the ethical consciousness, which on account of its immediacy is a determinate spirit and which belongs only to one of the ethical essentialities and has the aspect of not knowing. – It is absolute mediation, like the culturally forming consciousness and the faithful consciousness, for the movement of the self is essentially that of sublating the abstraction of immediate existence and becoming, to itself, universal – but it does this neither through purely alienating and disrupting itself and actuality, nor does it do this by running away. Rather, it is, to itself, immediately current in its substance, for this substance is the intuited pure certainty of itself. And it is this very immediacy which is its own actuality, which, since the immediate is being itself, is itself all actuality, and, as pure immediacy refined and purified by absolute negativity, this immediacy is pure being, is being as such, or is all being.

598. The absolute essence is thus not exhausted in being the determination of the simple essence of thinking. Rather, the absolute essence is all actuality, and this actuality is only as knowing. What consciousness could not know would have no sense and could be no power for it. Both all objectivity and the world have retreated into its willing which is fully aware of itself.¹³⁰ It is absolutely free in knowing its freedom, and it is this very knowing of its freedom which is its substance, its purpose, and its sole content.

a. The Moral Worldview

599. Self-consciousness knows duty as the absolute essence. It is bound only by duty, and this substance is its own pure consciousness. For self-consciousness, duty cannot assume the form of something alien. However, moral self-consciousness, when resolved in that way within itself, 325is not yet posited and regarded as consciousness. The object is immediate knowing, and, as so purely permeated by the self, it is not an object. However, because it is essentially mediation and negativity, self-consciousness has in its concept the relation to an otherness and is thus consciousness. On the one hand, because duty constitutes its sole essential purpose and is the object of self-consciousness, this otherness is a completely meaningless actuality for it. Because this consciousness is so entirely resolved within itself, it relates itself freely and indifferently to this otherness, and existence, on the other hand, is completely free-standing vis-à-vis self-consciousness, only relating itself to itself. The more free-standing self-consciousness becomes, the more free-standing is the negative object of its consciousness. The object is thereby a world perfected within itself with an individuality all its own; it is a self-sufficient whole of laws peculiar to itself as well as a self-sufficient operation of these laws and their free realization – a nature as such, whose laws and activities belong to itself, a nature which, as an essence, is as unconcerned with moral self-consciousness as moral self-consciousness is unconcerned with it.

600. Out of this determination, there is a moral worldview which develops and gives shape to itself. This moral worldview consists in the relation between moral being-in-and-for-itself and natural being-in-and-for-itself. Lying at the basis of this relation is the complete indifference and the self-sufficiency of both nature and of moral purposes and activities with respect to each other, and, on the other side of the coin, there is the consciousness of the sole essentiality of duty and of the complete non-self-sufficiency and inessentiality of nature. The moral worldview contains the development of the moments which are contained in this relation between such entirely conflicting presuppositions.

601. At first, it is moral consciousness as such which is presupposed. Duty counts, to itself, as the essence, and, to itself, the essence is actual and active; in its actuality and in its deed, the essence fulfills duty. However, at the same time for this moral consciousness the free-standingness¹³¹ of nature is presupposed, or moral consciousness experiences nature as unconcerned with giving moral consciousness the consciousness of the unity of its actuality with that of nature itself, and it thus learns from experience that nature might allow it to be happy but then again it might not. By comparison, the non-moral consciousness finds, perhaps by chance, its actualization in places where the moral consciousness sees only an occasion for acting but does not see itself thereby obtaining happiness either in the execution of the action or in the enjoyment of its achievement. Hence, the moral consciousness finds all the more reason for both bewailing such a state of affairs where there is no fit between itself and existence and for lamenting the injustice which both limits it to having its object only as pure duty and which fails to let it see this object and itself actualized.

602. 326Moral consciousness cannot renounce happiness and leave this moment out of its absolute purpose. The purpose, which is expressed as pure duty, essentially contains in it this singular self-consciousness. Both the individual conviction and the knowing of this conviction constituted an absolute moment of morality. This moment in the purpose which has objectively come to be, or in the duty fulfilled, is the singular consciousness intuiting itself as actualized, or it is the gratification which does not thereby immediately lie in the concept of morality regarded as disposition¹³² but which does lie in the concept of the actualization of morality. However, gratification also thereby lies in morality as a disposition, for the disposition does not aim at remaining a disposition in contrast to action; it aims at action, or at actualizing itself. The purpose, expressed as both the whole and the consciousness of its moments, therefore amounts to the following. Duty fulfilled is supposed to be just as much a purely moral action as it is a realized individuality, and nature, as the aspect of singularity in contrast with abstract purpose, is supposed to be at one with this purpose. – As necessary as the experience of the disharmony between the two aspects is, it is because nature is free-standing that duty alone is the essential, and nature, in contrast to duty, is devoid of a self.¹³³ That former purpose, which is constituted in its entirety by the harmony, contains within itself actuality itself. It is at the same time the thought of actuality. The harmony of morality and nature, or – as nature would come into view only insofar as consciousness experiences its unity with it – the harmony of morality and happiness is conceived¹³⁴ as necessarily existing, or it is postulated. For making that demand expresses that something is thought of as existing which is not yet actual, or a necessity not of the concept as concept but of being. However, the necessity is at the same time essentially a relation by way of the concept. The demanded being therefore does not belong to the representational thinking of a contingent consciousness; rather, it lies in the concept of morality itself, whose true content is the unity of pure and singular consciousness. It pertains to the latter, to singular consciousness, that this unity is supposed to be for it an actuality, that what is happiness in the content of the purpose is in its form existence as such. – For that reason this demanded existence, or the unity of both, is neither a wish, nor, when it is taken as purpose, is it something whose attainment would still be uncertain. Rather, the purpose is a demand of reason, or an immediate certainty and presupposition of reason.

603. It is not that this first experience and this postulate are the only ones, but rather a whole sphere of postulates is opened up. Nature, namely, is not only this wholly free-standing external mode in which consciousness, as a pure object, 327would have to realize its purpose. Consciousness is in its own self essentially that for which this other free-standing actuality is, i.e., it is itself contingent and natural. This nature which to consciousness is properly its own is that of sensibility, which, in the shape of willing as impulses and inclinations has its own determinate essentiality for itself, or it has individual purposes, and it is thus opposed to the pure will and its pure purposes. But in contrast to this opposition, the relation of sensibility to pure consciousness, or its absolute unity with it, is to pure consciousness instead the essence. Both of these, pure thinking and the sensibility of consciousness, are in themselves One consciousness, and pure thinking is precisely that for which and within which this pure unity is. However, for it as consciousness, the opposition is between itself and its impulses. In this conflict between reason and sensibility, the essence for reason consists in the dissolution of the conflict, and as a result the unity of both emerges, a unity which is not the original unity, or the unity that consists in both existing in one individual. The unity which emerges is that which arises out of the known opposition of both of them. Such a unity is initially actual morality, for contained within it is the opposition through which the self is consciousness, or through which the self is first actual, or is in fact the self and at the same time the universal. Or, it is the sort of mediation which, as we see, is essentially morality. – While of the two moments in the opposition, sensibility is purely and simply otherness, or the negative, whereas the pure thinking of duty is the essence from which nothing can be given up, then it seems that the unity which is engendered can only be brought about by the sublation of sensibility. However, since sensibility is itself a moment of this coming-to-be, or it is the moment of actuality, then for the expression of the unity, one will initially have to content oneself with a turn of phrase, more or less to the effect that sensibility is supposed to conform to morality. – This unity is equally a postulated being; it is not there¹³⁵ because what is there is consciousness, or the opposition of sensibility and pure consciousness. However, the unity is at the same time not an in-itself like the first postulate, in which free-standing nature constitutes one aspect. Hence, the harmony of nature with moral consciousness belongs to the sphere outside of the latter. Here it is nature which is in its own self, and the issue here has to do with morality as such, with a harmony which is the acting self's very own harmony. Thus, consciousness itself both has to bring about this harmony and to be making constant progress in morality. However, the culmination of this progress has to be put off to infinity, since if that culmination were actually to arrive, moral consciousness would be sublated. This is so because morality is only moral consciousness as the negative essence for which sensibility is only of negative significance, is only not in accordance with pure duty. But in that harmony, morality as consciousness vanishes, or its actuality 328vanishes in the way that in moral consciousness, or in actuality, its harmony vanishes. For that reason, the culmination is not actually to be reached, but rather, it is only to be thought of as an absolute task, which is to say, a task which remains purely and simply a task. Nonetheless, at the same time its content is to be thought as what purely and simply must be, and it must not remain a task. Now, in this aim, one is to represent consciousness as sublated, or, for that matter, not sublated. In the dark remoteness of the infinity to which the attainment of the aim consequently has to be postponed, there is no clear distinction to be made as to which of these views is to be held. Strictly speaking, the determinate representation of this progress should be of no interest and ought not to be sought because it leads to contradictions – contradictions lying in a task which is both to remain a task and which is yet to be fulfilled, and in a morality which is no longer supposed to be consciousness and no longer supposed to be actual. However, the thought that a perfected morality would contain a contradiction would harm the holiness of moral essentiality, and absolute duty would then appear as something non-actual.

604. The first postulate was the harmony of morality and objective nature, the final purpose of the world; the other was the harmony of morality and the sensuous will, the final purpose of self-consciousness as such. The former is thus the harmony in the form of being-in-itself, and the latter is the harmony in the form of being-for-itself. However, the mediating middle that combines these two extreme final ends, as they have been conceived, is the movement of actual acting itself. They are harmonies whose moments have not yet become objects in their abstract differentiatedness from each other. This occurs in actuality, in which the aspects appear in real consciousness, where each comes on the scene as the other of the other. The postulates thereby arising contain, as before, only the separated harmonies in themselves and existing for themselves, which are now harmonies existing in and for themselves.

605. As the simple knowing and willing of pure duty in acting, moral consciousness is related to an object opposed to its simplicity – related to the actuality of the diverse cases, and as a result it has a diverse moral relationship to that actuality. According to the content, what emerges here is the plurality of laws, and according to the form, what emerges are the contradictory powers of knowing consciousness and of the unconscious. – At the outset, with regard to the plurality of duties, what counts for the moral consciousness is only the pure duty within them. The many duties, as many, are determinate and as such are thus nothing holy for moral consciousness. However, at the same time and necessarily through the concept of acting, which itself encompasses a diverse actuality and thus a diverse moral relation, those many duties 329must be regarded as existing in and for themselves. Furthermore, since they can only be within a moral consciousness, they are at the same time within a consciousness other than that for which there is only pure duty as that which is holy and which is in and for itself.

606. It is thus postulated that there is to be another consciousness which sanctifies those duties or which knows them and wills them as duties. The first consciousness supports pure duty indifferently with respect to all determinate content, and duty is only this indifference with respect to content. But the other consciousness contains the equally essential relation to acting and the necessity of determinate content. While duties count, to itself, as determinate duties, the content as such is, to itself, just as essential as the form through which the content is a duty. This consciousness is thereby the kind in which the universal and the particular are utterly at one, and its concept is thus the same as the concept of the harmony of morality and happiness. This is so because this opposition equally well expresses the separation of the self-equal moral consciousness from that actuality which, as multiple being, militates against the simple essence of duty. However much the first postulate expresses only the existing harmony between morality and nature because nature is therein this negative of self-consciousness, the moment of being, still this in-itself is in contrast now posited essentially as consciousness. For what exists now has the form of the content of duty, or is the determinateness in the determinate duty. The in-itself is thus the unity of the sort of items which are as simple essentialities, as essentialities of thinking, and which thus only are within a consciousness. This latter consciousness is thus now a lord and ruler of the world who generates the harmony of morality and happiness and at the same time sanctifies duties as a plurality of duties. In turn, that means this much: For the consciousness of pure duty, the determinate duty cannot be immediately sanctified. Because the determinate duty, in the service of actual action which is a determinate action, is likewise necessary, so does its necessity fall outside of that consciousness into another consciousness, which is thereby what mediates the determinate and the pure duty and is the reason why that specific duty also counts as valid.

607. However, in actual action, consciousness conducts itself as this self, as a completely singular individual. It is directed towards actuality as such and has this actuality for its purpose, for it wants to accomplish something. Duty as such thus falls outside of itself into another essence, the consciousness and the holy lawgiver of pure duty. To the acting consciousness, precisely because it is acting consciousness, the other of pure duty is immediately valid. This pure duty is thus the content of another consciousness, and this pure duty is only mediately holy for the acting consciousness, namely, within that other consciousness.

608. Because it is hereby posited that the validity of duty as the holy in and for itself 330falls outside of actual consciousness, this consciousness as such thereby stands off to one side as incomplete moral consciousness. According to its knowing, it therefore knows itself to be the sort whose knowing and conviction is incomplete and contingent. Just as much according to its willing, it knows itself to be the sort whose purposes are affected by sensibility. According to its unworthiness, it thus cannot look on happiness as necessary but rather as something contingent, and it can only expect happiness to issue from grace.

609. However, even though its actuality is incomplete, duty nonetheless counts as the essence for its pure willing and knowing. In the concept, inasmuch as the concept is opposed to reality (or is the concept in thinking), consciousness is thus completed. However, the absolute essence is just something thought,¹³⁶ what is postulated as an other-worldly realm beyond actuality. It is therefore the thought within which morally imperfect knowing and willing count as perfected, and as taking this imperfection to have full weight, it thereby also apportions happiness according to worthiness, namely, according to the desert ascribed to the imperfect consciousness.

610. With that, the moral worldview is completed, for in the concept of moral self-consciousness, the two aspects, those of pure duty and actuality, are posited as being in a single unity, and as a result both the one as well as the other are each posited not as existing in and for themselves but as a moment, or as sublated. In the last part of the moral worldview, it is for consciousness that this comes to be. That is to say, consciousness posits pure duty as lying in another essence than itself, i.e., it posits pure duty as something which it partly has as something represented and which it partly has as something which is not valid in and for itself, but it is the non-moral consciousness which instead counts as completed. It likewise posits itself as having an actuality which is unsuited to duty, which is sublated, and which, as sublated, or as lying in the representation of the absolute essence, no longer contradicts morality.

611. However, for the moral consciousness itself, its moral worldview does not mean that moral consciousness develops its own concept within that worldview and makes that concept its object to itself. It neither has a consciousness concerning this opposition of form nor a consciousness concerning this opposition, whose parts, according to their content, it neither relates nor compares with each other. Rather, it rolls onward in its development without being the concept holding those moments together. This is so because it only knows the pure essence, or the object insofar as the object is duty and insofar as it is the abstract object of its pure consciousness, as pure knowing or as itself. It therefore conducts itself only thinkingly, not comprehensively.¹³⁷ Hence, the object of its actual consciousness is, to itself, not yet transparent; it is not the absolute concept, which alone grasps otherness as such, or which grasps its absolute 331opposite as itself. To be sure, its own actuality as well as that of all objective actuality counts, to itself, as the inessential, but its freedom is the freedom of pure thinking, which for that reason has at the same time emerged as confronting nature as something which is itself just as free-standing. Because both are in the same way within it, the free-standing character of being and the inclusion of this being within consciousness, its object comes to be an existing object which at the same time is only [an object of] thought. In the last part of its intuition, the content is essentially posited in such a way that its being is something represented, and this combination of being and thinking, expressed as what it in fact is, is representing.

612. When we regard the moral worldview in such a way that this objective mode is nothing but the concept of moral self-consciousness itself which it makes objective to itself, what results from and through this consciousness about the form of its origin is another shape of its exposition. – The first, which is the starting-point, is actual moral self-consciousness, or that there is such a self-consciousness at all. This is so because the concept posits moral self-consciousness as subsumed under the following determination, that, to the concept, all actuality, full stop, has an essence only insofar as such actuality conforms to duty, and that the concept posits this essence as knowing, i.e., as being in immediate unity with the actual self. This unity is thus itself actual; it is an actual moral consciousness. – The latter now, as consciousness, represents its content to itself as an object, namely, as the final purpose of the world, as the harmony of morality with all actuality. However, while representing this unity as object and not yet the concept which has power over the object as such an object, this unity is, to itself, a negative of self-consciousness, or the unity falls outside of self-consciousness. It does this as an other-worldly beyond to its actuality, but at the same time as the sort of unity that is also existent even though only as it is thought.

613. To self-consciousness, which as self-consciousness is something other than the object, what remains is the non-harmony between the consciousness of duty and actuality, in fact its own actuality. The proposition thus now goes in this way: There is no morally perfected actual self-consciousness – and, since the moral per se only is insofar as it is completed, for duty is the pure unmixed in-itself, and since morality consists only in an adequacy to this purity, the second proposition itself goes like this: There is no moral actuality.

614. But, third of all, while it is one self, it is in itself the unity of duty and actuality; this unity thus becomes, to itself, the object as perfected morality – however, as an other-worldly beyond of its actuality – but an other-worldly beyond that nonetheless ought to be actual.

615. In this goal of the synthetic unity of the first two propositions, self-conscious actuality as well as duty is only posited as a sublated moment. 332This is so because neither of them is singular; rather, each of them, in their essential determination as free-standing from the other, are, as they are in the unity, thereby no longer free-standing from the other, and are thus sublated. Thus, according to the content, each of them becomes the object which counts as object for the other, and, according to the form, this reciprocal exchange is at the same time only representationally thought.¹³⁸ – Or, the actually non-moral, because it is just as much pure thinking and sublimely stands above its actuality, is within representational thought nonetheless moral and is taken to be entirely valid. In this way, the first proposition, namely, that there is a moral self-consciousness, is produced, but it is combined with the second, namely, that there is none, that is, there is a moral self-consciousness but only in representational thought; or there is indeed no moral self-consciousness, but it is accepted as one by another self-consciousness.

b. Dissemblance

616. In the moral worldview, we see on the one hand consciousness itself consciously create its object; we see that the object is neither something we come upon as alien, nor do we see the object coming to be for consciousness in any kind of unconscious way. Rather, throughout all of this, consciousness conducts itself according to a reason, on the basis of which it posits the objective essence. It thus knows this objective essence as itself, for it knows itself as active consciousness, which creates the essence. It thereby seems to achieve its repose and its satisfaction, for these can only be found where it no longer needs to go above and beyond its object because this object no longer goes above and beyond it. However, on the other side of the coin, it itself instead posits the object as external to itself, as its other-worldly beyond. But this existent-in-and-for-itself is at the same time equally posited as the sort of entity which is not free-standing with regard to self-consciousness but which is supposed to be for the purpose of and to be through self-consciousness.

617. The moral worldview is thus in fact nothing but the elaboration of this fundamental contradiction according to its various aspects. It is, to use a most appropriately Kantian phrase here, a whole nest of thoughtless contradictions. Consciousness conducts itself in this development in such a way that it fixes one moment, and from there immediately passes over to an other, and then sublates the first. However, as soon as it has now put forth this second moment, it also again dissembles about this moment and instead makes the opposite into the essence. At the same time, it is also conscious both of its contradiction and 333of its dissembling, for it passes over from one moment immediately in relation to itself into the opposite. Because a moment has no reality at all for it, it posits that very moment as real, or, what amounts to the same thing, in order to affirm one moment as existing in itself, it affirms the opposite as what is existing in itself. It thereby confesses that it is in fact serious about neither of them. This calls for closer examination of the various moments of this vertigo-inducing movement.

618. First, let us just put off to one side the presupposition that there is an actual moral consciousness for the reason that the presupposition is immediately made without any reference to what came before. Let us turn to the harmony of morality and nature, the first postulate. It is supposed to be in itself, not for actual consciousness and not currently. Rather, the present is instead only the contradiction between the two. In the present, morality is accepted as extant,¹³⁹ and actuality is so positioned that it is not supposed to be in harmony with morality. However, actual moral consciousness is an acting consciousness, and just therein consists the actuality of its morality. However, in acting itself, that stance is immediately made into a matter of dissemblance, for acting is nothing but the actualization of the inner moral purpose, nothing but the bringing forth of an actuality determined through the purpose, or of the harmony of moral purpose and actuality itself. At the same time, the completion of the action is for consciousness; it is the present of this unity of actuality and purpose. And because in the completed action consciousness actualizes itself as this singular individual, or intuits existence returned into it, so at the same time is also contained in it that form of the actuality which is called gratification and happiness. – Acting therefore in fact immediately fulfills what had been put forward as not taking place at all, or what was only supposed to be a postulate, only an other-worldly beyond. Consciousness therefore expresses through its deed that it is not serious about its own postulating, because what the action means is instead that it brings into the present what is not supposed to be in the present. And as the harmony is postulated for the sake of the action – which is to say, that what is supposed to become actual through action must be that way in itself, for otherwise the actuality would not be possible – the connection between acting and the postulate is so constituted that, for the sake of acting, i.e., for the sake of the actual harmony of purpose and actuality, this harmony is posited as not actual, as an other-worldly beyond.

619. While acting does take place, the inadequacy of the purpose and of actuality [to each other] is therefore not taken seriously at all; but in contrast, it does seem 334that acting itself is taken seriously. However, the actual action is in fact only the action of a singular consciousness; therefore it is only itself something singular, and the work is only something contingent. However, the purpose of reason as the all-comprehensive universal purpose, is nothing less than the whole world itself, a final end which goes far beyond the content of this individual action and thus is to be placed altogether beyond all actual acting. Because the universally best ought to be put into practice, nothing good is done. However, in fact the nothingness of actual acting and the reality only of the whole end, which are now put forward, are according to all the aspects again a matter of dissemblance. Moral action is not something contingent and restricted, for it has pure duty for its essence; this pure duty constitutes the single entire end; and the action, as the actualization of that end, is the accomplishment of the entire absolute end, whatever other restrictions there may be on the content. Or, if actuality is again taken to be nature, which has its own laws and which is opposed to pure duty so that duty cannot realize its law within nature, then while duty as such is the essence, this in fact has nothing to do with the accomplishment of pure duty, which is the entire end, for that accomplishment would instead have as its end not pure duty but instead what is opposed to it, actuality. However, that it is not supposed to have anything to do with actuality is again a matter of dissemblance, for according to the concept of moral action, pure duty is essentially an active consciousness. By all means, action should be taken; the absolute duty ought to be expressed in the entirety of nature; and the moral law should become the natural law.

620. If we allow this highest good to count as the essence, then consciousness is not at all serious about morality. This is so because in the highest good, nature does not have a different law from that of morality. Moral acting itself thus breaks down, for there is action only under the presupposition of a negative which is to be sublated through the action. However, if nature is in accordance with ethical laws, then these ethical laws would be violated by action, or by the sublation of what exists. – In that assumption about the essential condition, there is the admission that there is a condition in which moral action is superfluous and does not take place at all. Seen from this aspect, the postulate of the harmony between morality and actuality – of a harmony posited by the concept of moral action which is to bring the two into agreement – is expressed in the following way: Because moral acting is the absolute purpose, then the absolute purpose is that moral acting would not at all be said to be present.

621. If we collect these moments together in which consciousness has rolled forward in its morally representational thinking,¹⁴⁰ it becomes clear that it again sublates each of those representational thinkings into its opposite. It starts from the position that for it morality and actuality 335do not harmonize, but, to itself, it is not serious about it, for in the action this harmony is for it in the present. However, to itself, it is also not serious about this action, for it is something singular, for it has such a lofty purpose, the highest good. But this is again only a dissemblance about what is really at issue, for in that dissemblance all action and all morality would fall by the wayside. Or, it is that, to itself, it is not genuinely serious about moral action, but rather it holds that what is most desirable, the absolute, is that the highest good be put into practice and that moral action be superfluous.

622. On the basis of this result, consciousness must advance further in its contradictory movement, and again it necessarily dissembles about the sublating of moral action. Morality is the in-itself; for morality to come about, the final end of the world cannot be realized, but rather, moral consciousness must be for itself, and it must find that it confronts a nature which is opposed to it. However, in its own self it must be completed, and this leads to the second postulate of the harmony of itself and the nature which is immediately in it, namely, sensibility. Moral self-consciousness puts forward the view that its purpose is pure purpose, independent of inclinations and impulses so that the pure purpose has eliminated within itself sensibility's purposes. – Yet this proposed sublation of the sensuous essence is again made into a matter of dissemblance. Moral consciousness acts, brings its purpose into actuality and self-conscious sensibility, which ought to be sublated, is precisely the mediating middle between pure consciousness and actuality. – It is the former's instrument, or organ, for its realization, and it is what is called impulse, inclination; hence, it is not really serious about sublating inclinations and impulses, for it is just these which are the self-actualizing self-consciousness. However, they should also not be suppressed, but rather, only to be in accordance with reason. They are also in accordance with reason, for moral action is nothing but self-realizing consciousness giving itself the shape of an impulse, which is to say, it is immediately the current harmony of impulse and morality. However, impulse is in fact not only this empty shape which might have within itself a spring of action other than itself and by which it could then be impelled. This is so because sensibility is a nature which contains in its own self its own laws and springs of action, and thus morality cannot be serious about the driving force for the drives or the angle of inclination for inclinations. For, while these latter have their own fixed determinateness and distinctive content, the consciousness with which they were to conform would instead be in accordance with them, and this is a conformity which moral self-consciousness refuses to tolerate. The harmony between the two thus is only 336in itself and is postulated. – In moral action, the current harmony of morality and sensibility had been put forth as a view, but now even this is a matter of dissemblance. The harmony is an other-worldly beyond of consciousness, lying somewhere off in a foggy distance in which there is no longer anything which can be accurately differentiated or comprehended, since the comprehension of this unity, which we just attempted to provide, itself failed. – However, within this in-itself, consciousness gives itself up altogether. This in-itself is its moral completion within which the struggle of morality and sensibility has ceased, and the latter is in accordance with the former in a way which cannot be grasped. – For that reason, this completion is again only a dissemblance about what is really at issue, for in that completion morality would instead be abandoned, since morality is only consciousness of the absolute purpose as pure purpose, and therefore as opposing all other purposes. Morality is just as aware of the activity of this pure purpose as it is aware of its elevation above sensibility, aware of the intrusion of sensibility, and aware of the opposition and struggle with sensibility. – Consciousness itself immediately expresses that it does not take this moral completion seriously by its dissemblance about the way this culmination is put off into infinity, which is to say, by asserting that this completion is never completed.

623. What is valid is thus instead only the in-between state of incompletion, a state that nonetheless is supposed to be at least progress towards completion. Yet it also cannot be this progress, for progress in morality would really be progress towards its own downfall. The aim would be the nothingness mentioned above, or the sublation of morality and of consciousness itself; however, to get ever nearer and nearer to nothing is to decrease. Besides, to make progress as such (as well as to decrease as such) would equally make the assumption that there are differences of quantity within morality, yet there can be no such kind of talk in morality. In morality, as the consciousness which takes ethical purpose to be pure duty, there cannot be any thinking at all of diversity, least of all of the superficial difference of quantity. There is only one virtue, only one pure duty, only one morality.

624. While it is therefore not serious about moral completion but rather about the intermediate state, i.e., as was just discussed in the case of non-morality, we return to the content of the first postulate by way of another route. That is to say, one cannot see how for this moral consciousness happiness is going to be demanded on the basis of its worthiness. It is well aware that it is not perfect and that it thus cannot in fact demand happiness as a matter of desert, as something of which it is worthy. Rather, it can only require that happiness be given as freely bestowed grace, which is to say, it can only demand happiness in and for itself as that kind of happiness. It can hope for such happiness, not on the basis of that absolute ground but only in accordance with a fortuitousness and a kind of arbitrary free choice. – Non-morality expresses therein just what it is – namely, that it is concerned not 337about morality but about happiness in and for itself without reference to morality.

625. On the basis of this second aspect of the moral worldview, the other assertion is also sublated, namely, the one about the first aspect in which the disharmony between morality and happiness is presupposed. – It wants indeed to have learned from experience that in this present state of affairs the moral person often fares badly, whereas in contrast the immoral person is often happy. Yet the intermediate state of incomplete morality, which has turned out to be essential, clearly shows that this perception, this supposed experience, is only a matter of dissemblance about what is really at issue. For since morality is not completed, which is to say, since morality in fact is not, just what exactly is there in the learning experience to the effect that the moral person fares badly? – While it has come to light at the same time that what is at issue is happiness in and for itself, it turns out that the appraisal which asserts that “things go well for the non-moral person” did not intend to imply that anything wrong took place. When morality as such is incomplete, the designation of an individual as immoral in itself falls by the wayside and has therefore only an arbitrary ground. As a result, the sense and content of the judgment of experience is only that happiness in and for itself should not have been granted to some people, which is to say, the judgment is envy which helps itself to the cloak of morality. The reason, however, why so-called good fortune should be apportioned to others is that of good friendship, which does not begrudge it and which wishes that this grace, this accident of good fortune, be given both to them and to itself.

626. Morality is therefore not completed in moral consciousness. This is what is now being proposed, but the essence of moral consciousness is just to be completed purity, and incomplete morality is thus impure, or is immorality. Morality itself thus is in another essence than in that of actual consciousness, and this other is a holy moral legislator. – The morality which is not completed in consciousness, the very morality which is the basis for this postulating, initially signifies the morality which, as it is posited within consciousness as actual, stands in relation to an other, or to an existence, and thus acquires in it otherness, or difference, within which a variegated plurality of moral commands arises. However, at the same time, moral self-consciousness holds these many duties to be inessential, for it is concerned only with the one pure duty, and for self-consciousness, this plurality of duties, insofar as they are determinate duties, has no truth. They thus can have their truth only in an other, and although they are not holy for self-consciousness, they are made holy through a holy law-giver. – Yet this is itself again only dissemblance about what is at issue. This is so because, to itself, moral self-consciousness is absolute, and duty purely and simply is only that which self-consciousness knows to be duty. However, it knows 338only pure duty as duty; what, to itself, is not holy is not holy in itself, and what is not holy in itself cannot be made holy by the holy being.¹⁴¹ Moral consciousness is also not really serious about permitting something to be made holy by another consciousness than itself, since, to itself, the utterly holy is only that which is made holy through itself and is holy in moral consciousness. – It is thus not any more serious about the claim that this other being is a holy being, for in that holy being¹⁴² something should have arrived at essentiality, which, for moral consciousness, i.e., in itself, has no such essentiality.

627. However much the holy essence had been postulated so that duty would have its validity within it, not as pure duty but as a plurality of determinate duties, still this must again be a matter of dissemblance, and the other being¹⁴³ alone would have to be holy only insofar as it is only the pure duty in it which has validity. In fact, pure duty too has validity only in another being¹⁴⁴ and not in moral consciousness. Although in the latter, it is pure morality alone which seems to be valid, still this moral consciousness must be taken in another way, for it is at the same time a natural consciousness. Within natural consciousness, morality is affected and conditioned by sensibility and thus is not in and for itself. Rather, it is a contingency of free willing, but as pure willing within natural consciousness, it is a contingency of knowing. Hence morality is in and for itself in another being.¹⁴⁵

628. This being¹⁴⁶ is therefore here the purely completed morality for the reason that within it morality does not stand in any relation to nature and to sensibility. Yet the reality of pure duty is its actualization in nature and sensibility. Moral consciousness posits that its incompletion lies in the following, namely, that within it morality has a positive relation both to nature and to sensibility, since, to itself, what counts as an essential moment of morality is that morality purely and simply should only have a negative relation both to nature and sensibility. On the other hand, the purely moral being,¹⁴⁷ because it stands sublimely above the struggle with nature and sensibility, does not stand in a negative relation to either of them. In fact, to itself, what thus remains is only the positive relation to them, i.e., what remains is precisely what had counted as incomplete, as immoral. However, as entirely separated from actuality in such a way that it would lack any positive relation to actuality, pure morality would be an unconscious, non-actual abstraction in which the concept of morality and the thinking of pure duty together with both willing it and then acting on that duty, would all be utterly sublated. This purely moral being¹⁴⁸ is thus again dissembling about what is really at issue, and it too is to be given up.

629. However, in this purely moral being,¹⁴⁹ the moments of the contradiction, within which this synthetic representational thinking has roamed about, now draw closer together to each other, as do the opposing alsos succeed each other, one after the other, without its bringing these thoughts together. One opposite is always letting itself be displaced by the other to 339such a degree that consciousness here has to give up its moral worldview and retreat back into itself.

630. For that reason, consciousness recognizes¹⁵⁰ that its morality is incomplete. It does this because it is affected by a sensibility and a nature opposed to itself which in part itself obfuscates morality as such and in part gives rise to a whole host of duties through which consciousness falls into dilemmas in concrete cases of actual action. Each case is the concretion of a plurality of moral relations in the way that an object of perception per se is a thing of many qualities. While the determinate duty is the purpose, it has a content, and its content is a part of the purpose, and hence morality is not pure. – Morality therefore has its reality in another being.¹⁵¹ However, this reality amounts to nothing but the following. Morality is here supposed to be in and for itself – for itself, i.e., it is supposed to be the morality of a consciousness; and in itself, which is to say, it is supposed to have existence and actuality. – In the former, initially incomplete consciousness, morality was not put into practice; in such a case, morality is the in-itself in the sense that it is a thought-thing,¹⁵² for it is associated¹⁵³ with nature and sensibility, and with the actuality of being and of consciousness. That actuality constitutes its content, and the morally null is nature and sensibility. – In the second case, morality is present as completed and not as a thought-thing which has not been put into practice. However, this completion precisely consists in morality's having actuality as well as free-standing actuality in a consciousness, in having existence per se, in its not being empty but rather in having a fulfilled content. – Which is to say, the completion of morality is posited in the following way. What was just now determined as morally null is now in morality's own interior and is present in morality itself. It is at one time supposed to be what has validity purely and simply as a non-actual thought-thing of pure abstraction, but it is equally as much supposed to have no validity at all in this mode. Its truth is supposed to consist in its being opposed to actuality, to be wholly free-standing from it, to be empty, and therein again to be actuality itself.

631.The syncretism of these contradictions, which lie side by side in the moral worldview, collapses into themselves as the difference on which such syncretism rests, namely, that between what would be necessarily thought and posited, and what at the same time would also be inessential, becomes itself a difference that no longer even resides in the words themselves. In the end, what is posited as diverse, or is posited as being both a nullity and as real, is one and the same, namely, existence and actuality. And what is absolutely supposed to be only as the other-worldly beyond of actual being and of actual consciousness, and is equally supposed to be in consciousness and, as an other-worldly beyond, the utterly null, is pure duty and the knowing of it as that of essence. The consciousness which makes this distinction which is no distinction, the consciousness which at the same time states that actuality is both nullity 340itself and the real, which also states that pure morality is both the true essence and is utterly essence-less, now declares that the thoughts which it had previously separated are linked together, and it declares its own lack of seriousness about this determination and expression of the moments of the self and the in-itself. Instead, what it declares to be absolutely outside of consciousness is what it keeps enclosed within the self of self-consciousness, and, it states that the absolutely thought,¹⁵⁴ or, the absolute in-itself, is for that very reason what has no truth at all. – It becomes clear to consciousness that when it assembles all these moments so that they are separate from each other, it is really dissembling, and that if it were to keep on doing this, it would be hypocrisy. However, as pure moral self-consciousness, it flees from this inequality between its representational thinking and its essence, flees from this untruth which declares that what counts to it as untrue is in fact true, and with abhorrence, it flees back into itself. It is a pure conscience that spurns such a moral worldview. It is, as turned inwardly into itself, the simple self-certain spirit which, without the mediation of those representations, immediately and conscientiously acts and has its truth in this immediacy. – However much this world of dissemblance is nothing but the development of moral self-consciousness in its moments, and however much it is thus the reality of that moral self-consciousness, still through its retreat inward into itself, moral self-consciousness will, according to its essence, not become anything else. This inward return into itself is instead only the consciousness that has arrived at this, that its truth is a feigned truth. It would always have to pretend that this feigned truth is its truth, for it would have to express itself and exhibit itself as an objective representation, but it would know that this is only dissemblance. It would thus in fact be hypocrisy, and that disdain for such dissemblance would itself already be the first expression of hypocrisy.

c. Conscience; the Beautiful Soul, Evil, and its Forgiveness

632. The antinomy of the moral worldview, that there is a moral consciousness and that there is none – or that the validity of duty is an other-worldly beyond of consciousness, and conversely that this validity only comes about in consciousness – was summarized in the representation of non-moral consciousness 341counting as moral, its contingent knowing and willing being accepted as sufficiently important, and in the idea of happiness being granted to it as a matter of grace. Moral self-consciousness did not put this self-contradictory representation onto itself; rather, it shifted it off into a being¹⁵⁵ which, to itself, is other than itself. However, taking what it must think to be necessary and then positing it outside of itself is just as much a contradiction according to the form as the former was a contradiction according to the content. However, because in itself it is what appears to be contradictory and within whose separation and its ever reoccurring dissolution the moral worldview meanders around, it is in itself the same pure duty as pure knowing. It is nothing but the self of consciousness, and the self of consciousness is being and actuality – likewise, what is supposed to be the other-worldly beyond of actual consciousness is nothing but pure thinking and therefore is in fact the self, so self-consciousness for us, or in itself, returns back into itself, and it knows that being¹⁵⁶ to be itself and to be that in which the actual is at the same time pure knowing and pure duty. It itself is to itself what is fully valid in its contingency and which knows its immediate singular individuality as pure knowing and action, as true actuality and harmony.

633. This self of conscience, spirit immediately certain of itself as absolute truth and being, is the third self which has developed out of the third world of spirit and which in short order may be compared with those that preceded it. The totality or actuality which showed itself to be the truth of the ethical world is that of the self of the person; its existence consists in its being recognized. As the person is the substance-less self, so is the substance-less self's existence likewise abstract actuality; the person counts as valid in fact immediately. The self is the immediately motionless point in the element of its being; that point is not detached from its universality, and the two are therefore not in movement and in relation to each other. Within that point, the universal is without any differentiation, and neither the content of the self nor the fulfillment of the self comes about in and through the self. – The second self is the world of cultural formation which has achieved its truth, or it is the spirit of estrangement which has given itself back to itself – absolute freedom. In this self, the former initial immediate unity of singular individuality and universality come undone from each other. The universal, which remains equally a pure spiritual essence, a being recognized, or universal will and knowing, is the object and content of the self and its universal actuality. However, it does not have the form of free-standing existence apart from the self; within this self, it thus is not brought to fulfillment, and it reaches no positive content, no world at all. Moral self-consciousness, to be sure, lets its universality go and be free-standing so that this universality becomes a nature of its own and moral self-consciousness equally holds fast to the universality's being sublated within moral self-consciousness. However, it is only the dissembling game of shifting back and forth between these two determinations. 342As conscience, it has within its certainty of itself the content for the formerly empty duty as well as for the empty law¹⁵⁷ and the empty universal will. Because this self-certainty is equally the immediate, moral self-consciousness has existence itself.

634. Having arrived at this, its truth, moral self-consciousness therefore forsakes, or rather sublates instead the separation within itself out of which the dissemblance arose, the separation of the in-itself from the self, of pure duty as pure purpose from actuality as a nature and as a sensibility opposed to pure purpose. Having thus returned into itself, it is concrete moral spirit, which in the consciousness of pure duty does not give itself an empty standard which would be opposed to actual consciousness. Rather, pure duty, as well as the nature opposed to it, are both sublated moments. In its immediate unity, spirit is a moral essence actualizing itself, and its action is immediately a concrete moral shape.

635. A case calling for action is present, and it is an objective actuality for the knowing consciousness. As conscience, it knows the case in an immediately concrete manner, and at the same time the case is only as conscience knows it. Knowing is contingent insofar as it is something other than its object, but spirit certain of itself is no longer either such a contingent knowing or such a creation within itself of thoughts which themselves might differ from actuality. Rather, while the separation between the in-itself and the self has been sublated, the case is immediately within the sensuous-certainty of knowing as the case is in itself, and the case only is in itself in the way it is in this knowing. – Acting as actualization is thereby the pure form of willing. It is the mere reversal of actuality as a case which exists into an actuality which has been done, the conversion of the mere mode of objective knowing into the mode of knowing about actuality as something brought forth by consciousness. Just as sensuous-certainty is immediately incorporated, or rather is reversed, into the in-itself of spirit, this other reversal is also simple and unmediated; it is a transition through the pure concept without there being any alteration of content which would be determined by way of the interest of the consciousness which knows it. – Furthermore, conscience does not break up the circumstances of the case into a variety of duties. It does not conduct itself as the positive universal medium within which the many duties, each for itself, would acquire undisplaceable substantiality so that either no action could take place at all, because every concrete case contains opposition per se (and moral cases contain oppositions among duties), such that there would thus always be one aspect, one duty which would be violated in the determination of action – or, if action does take place, one of the conflicting duties would actually be violated. 343Conscience is instead the negative One, that is, the absolute self which erases all these diverse moral substances. It is simple action in accordance with duty, an action which does not fulfill just this or that duty but rather knows and does what is concretely right. Hence, in the first place conscience is moral acting as acting, into which the previous consciousness of morality, itself devoid of any deeds, has made its transition. – The concrete shape of the deed may be analyzed by different consciousnesses into a variety of properties, i.e., in this instance into a variety of moral relations, and these may be each expressed either as absolutely valid, as each must be if it is supposed to be a duty, or else as a matter up for comparison and testing. In simple moral action on the part of conscience, duties are buried so that all these individual essences are immediately aborted, and the kind of justificatory jiggling which undermines duty simply does not occur in the unwavering certainty of conscience.

636. In conscience there is just as little of the former uncertainty of consciousness, flittering here and there, which at one time posits so-called pure morality as external to itself and as residing in some other, holy being, and it then posits itself as the unholy being.¹⁵⁸ At another point, it then again posits moral purity as residing within itself, and it then posits that the linkage of the sensuous to the moral resides in the other being.¹⁵⁹

637. It disavows all the moral worldview's stances and dissemblances in that it disavows the consciousness which takes duty and actuality to be contradictory. According to this latter stance, I act morally while I am conscious to myself of accomplishing only the pure duty and of nothing else, and this means, in effect, while I do not act. But while I actually do act, I am conscious to myself of an other, of an actuality, which is there before me and of an actuality which I want to bring about, so I have a determinate end, and I fulfill a determinate duty; there is something other therein than the pure duty which was alone supposed to be kept in view. – On the other hand, conscience is the consciousness about what is going on when the moral consciousness expresses pure duty as the essence of its action [and] this pure purpose is dissemblance about the crux of the matter. This is so because the crux of the matter is this, that pure duty consists in the empty abstraction of pure thinking and that it has its reality and content only in a determinate actuality, the actuality of consciousness itself, not in the sense that is a thought-thing but rather in the sense that it is a singular individual. Conscience has its truth for itself in the immediate certainty of itself. This immediate concrete certainty of itself is the essence. If that self-certainty is considered according to the opposition of consciousness, then its own immediate singular individuality is the content of moral action, and the form of moral doing is this very self as pure movement, namely, as knowing, or as one's own conviction.

638. 344If this knowing is given a closer look according to its unity and the meaning of its moments, then we see that moral consciousness took itself only to be the in-itself, or to be essence, but as conscience, it now grasps its being-for-itself, or its own self. – The contradiction of the moral worldview dissolves itself, i.e., the difference which lay at its basis shows itself to be no difference, and it converges into pure negativity. However, this is precisely the self, that is to say, a simple self which is as much pure knowing as it is knowing of itself as this singularly individual consciousness. This self thus constitutes the content of what was formerly the empty essence, for it is the actual, which no longer has the significance of being, within its own laws, a self-sufficient nature alien to the essence. As the negative, it is the difference of the pure essence, a content, indeed, the kind of content which is valid in and for itself.

639. Furthermore, as self-equal pure knowing, this self is the universal pure and simple, such that it is just this knowing as its own knowing, as conviction, which is duty. Duty is no longer the universal confronting the self. Rather, duty is known to have no validity when it is separated in that way. The law now exists for the sake of the self and not the other way around, not the self existing for the sake of the law. But for that reason law and duty do not signify being-for-itself alone. Rather, they also signify being-in-itself, for on account of its self-equality, this knowing is just the in-itself. In consciousness this in-itself separates itself from that former immediate unity with being-for-itself; facing off in that way, this in-itself is being, being for others. – Duty, as duty deserted by the self, is now known to be only a moment. It has sunken from meaning the absolute essence, to meaning only “being,” which is not the self, which is not for itself, and is thus a being for others. However, for that very reason, this being for others remains an essential moment because the self, as consciousness, constitutes the opposition between being-for-itself and being for an other, and now duty, in its immediate actuality, is no longer merely abstract pure consciousness.

640. This being for others is thus the substance existing-in-itself, differentiated from the self. Conscience has not abandoned pure duty, or the abstract in-itself; rather, pure duty is the essential moment in its conducting itself as universality towards others. Conscience is the common element of self-consciousnesses, and self-consciousness is the substance in which the deed has stable existence and actuality, the moment of coming-to-be-recognized by others. Moral self-consciousness does not have this moment of being recognized,¹⁶⁰ of pure consciousness which is there,¹⁶¹ and as a result it is not acting 345self-consciousness, not actualizing self-consciousness. Its in-itself is, to itself, either the abstract non-actual essence, or it is being as an actuality which is not spiritual. However, the existing actuality of conscience is the kind of actuality that is a self, i.e., an existence conscious of itself, the spiritual element of coming-to-be-recognized. Hence, the doing is only the translation of its singular content into the objective element within which it is universal and is recognized, and it is just this, that the content is recognized, which makes the deed into an actuality. The action is recognized and thereby actual, because the existing actuality is immediately linked with conviction, or knowing, or because the knowing of its purpose is immediately the element of existence, universal recognition. This is so because the essence of the action, duty, consists in the conviction which conscience has about that duty; this conviction is precisely what is the in-itself; it is universal self-consciousness in itself, or being-recognized,¹⁶² and is thereby actuality. What is done out of the conviction of duty is therefore immediately the kind of deed which has stability and existence.¹⁶³ Thus, there is no longer any idle chatter about good intentions not coming to pass, or about things going badly for the good man. Rather, what is known as duty is carried out completely and becomes actual precisely because what is dutiful is what is universal for all self-consciousnesses, is what is recognized and what is thus existent. But taken separately and alone, without the content of the self, this duty is being for others, is transparent and its meaning is only that of a vacuous essentiality as such.

641. If we look back to the sphere where spiritual reality first emerged, we see that its concept was there the expression of individuality as what was supposed to be the in-and-for-itself. However, the shape which immediately expressed this concept was the honest consciousness which set itself in pursuit of the abstract crux of the matter. This crux of the matter was there a predicate, but in conscience it is for the first time the subject which has posited all the moments of consciousness as residing in it and for which all of these moments, namely, substantiality as such, external existence, and the essence of thinking, are contained in this certainty of itself. The crux of the matter has substantiality per se in ethical life, it has external existence in cultural formation, it has the self-knowing essentiality of thinking in morality, and in conscience it is the subject which in its own self knows these moments. However much the honest consciousness only grasps the vacuous crux of the matter, still conscience, in contrast, attains it in its fullness, something which conscience gives it by way of itself. Conscience is this power as a result of its knowing the moments of consciousness to be moments, and as their negative essence, it rules over them.

642. 346If conscience is regarded in relation to the singular determinations of the opposition which appears in acting and in relation to its consciousness about the nature of those determinations, then it conducts itself foremost as a knower vis-à-vis the actuality of the case in which action is to take place. Insofar as the moment of universality exists in this knowing, it is part and parcel of the knowing of conscientious action that it comprehensively grasp the actuality before it in an unrestricted manner and that it thus accurately knows the circumstances of the case and takes everything into consideration. However, since it is acquainted with universality as a moment, this knowing of these circumstances is thus the kind of knowing which is fully aware that it does not comprehensively grasp them, or it is aware that it is not therein conscientious. The genuinely universal and pure relation of knowing would be a relation to something non-oppositional, to itself. However, through the opposition which essentially lies within itself, acting relates itself to a negative of consciousness, to an actuality existing in itself. Vis-à-vis the simplicity of pure consciousness, the absolute other, or the multiplicity in itself, this actuality is an absolute plurality of circumstances which infinitely divides itself and spreads out backwards into its conditions, sideways into its juxtapositions, and forwards into its consequences. – The conscientious consciousness is fully aware of this nature of the crux of the matter and of its relation to it. It knows that it is not acquainted with the case in which it acts according to the terms of the universality demanded of it, and it knows that its pretense of conscientiously weighing all the circumstances is an empty matter. However, this acquaintance with and weighing of all the circumstances is not entirely absent; yet it is present only as a moment, as something which is only for others, and its incomplete knowing, because it is its own knowing, counts for it as sufficiently complete knowing.

643. It conducts itself in the same way with the universality of the essence, or with the determination of the content through pure consciousness – Conscience, striding forth into action, relates itself to the various aspects of the case. The case breaks up into separate elements, just as does the relation of pure consciousness to it, whereby the multiplicity of the case is a multiplicity of duties – Conscience knows that it has to choose among them and to decide, for none of them are absolute in their determinateness or in their content. Rather, only pure duty is absolute. However, in its reality, this abstractum has arrived at the point of signifying the self-conscious I. As conscience, spirit certain of itself is motionless within itself, and its real universality, or its duty, lies in its pure conviction of duty. This pure conviction as such is just as empty as pure duty; it is pure in the sense that there is nothing in it, that no determinate content is a duty. But action is supposed to occur, and it must be determined by the individual. Moreover, spirit certain of itself, in which the in-itself has arrived at the significance of the self-conscious I, knows that it has this determination, this content, in the immediate certainty of its own self. As determination and content, 347this certainty is natural consciousness, i.e., the impulses and inclinations. – Conscience cognizes no content as absolute for it because conscience is the absolute negativity of everything determinate. It makes its determination from itself alone, but the circle of the self into which determinateness as such falls is that of so-called sensibility, and in order to have a content provided by its immediate certainty of itself, it finds nothing else present but sensibility itself. – Everything which in previous shapes had exhibited itself as good or bad, or as law and right, is an other than the immediate certainty of itself. It is a universal which is now a being for an other, or, looked at otherwise, it is an object which, mediating consciousness with itself, comes between consciousness and its own truth and dissociates consciousness from itself instead of it, the object, being the immediacy of consciousness – However, to conscience, the certainty of itself is the pure immediate truth, and this truth is thus its immediate certainty of itself represented as content, i.e., the arbitrary free choice of the singular individual and the contingency of his unconscious natural being.

644. At the same time this content counts as moral essentiality, or as duty because, as was already shown in the testing of laws, pure duty is utterly indifferent to every content and is compatible with any content. Here moral essentiality has at the same time the essential form of being-for-itself, and this form of individual conviction is nothing but the consciousness of the emptiness of pure duty. The consciousness that this is only a moment, or that its substantiality is a predicate which finds its subject in the individual whose arbitrary free choice gives pure duty content, can tie every content to this form and can attach its conscientiousness to any content. – An individual increases his property in a certain way. It is a duty that each should see to the maintenance of himself and his family, and it is no less a duty that he see to the possibility of his becoming useful to his neighbors and of doing good to all those who stand in need. The individual is aware that this is a duty, for this content is immediately contained in his certainty of himself; furthermore, he clearly sees that he has fulfilled his duty in this case. Others may hold that this particular way of fulfilling one's duty is deceitful; they hold tight to a different aspect of the concrete case, but he holds tight to this aspect of the case as a result of his awareness that the increase of property is a pure and absolute duty. – In that way, what others call outrageous behavior and wrong-doing is here just fulfilling the duty of affirming one's self-sufficiency with respect to others; what they call cowardice is here the duty of preserving one's life and the 348possibility of being useful to one's neighbors; what those others call courage instead violates both duties. However, cowardice need not be so inept as not to know that the maintenance of life and the possibility of being useful to others are duties – it need not be so inept as not to have the conviction of the dutifulness of its action and not to know that dutifulness consists in knowing; otherwise, it would be committing the clumsy mistake of being immoral. Because morality lies in the consciousness of having fulfilled one's duty, this consciousness will not be lacking when the acting is called “cowardice” any more than when the acting is called “courage.” The abstractum called “duty” is capable of each and every content – it thus knows what it does as duty, and while it knows this, and knows that the conviction of duty is dutifulness itself, it is thus recognized by others. As a result, the action counts as valid and has actual existence.

645. Against this freedom, which inserts any kind of arbitrary content into the universal passive medium of pure duty and pure knowing, it is of no help to assert that another content ought instead to have been introduced at that point. This is so because whatever the content may be, each content bears the flaw of determinateness in itself, a flaw from which pure knowing is free; pure knowing can disdainfully scorn this determinateness as easily as it can incorporate each and every determinateness. Every content in this respect, being determinate, stands on the same footing with every other, even if it seems to have exactly the character of having sublated the particular within itself. It might seem that while in actual cases, duty per se estranges itself into opposition and, as a result, into the opposition of individuality and universality, the duty whose content is the universal itself immediately has, as a result, in its own self the nature of pure duty, and that therefore form and content are here completely adequate to each other such that, e.g., acting for the common good¹⁶⁴ is thus preferable to acting for the individual's good. Yet this universal duty, as the substance existing in and for itself, is that which is present as law and right and which is valid independently of the singular individual's knowing and conviction as well as his own immediate interest. It is thus that against whose form morality per se directs itself. However, as to what concerns its content, this too is something determinate to the extent that the common good is opposed to the singular individual. Thus, its law is one from which conscience knows itself to be utterly free, and it bestows on itself the absolute privilege to add, pare, and neglect, as well as to fulfill – Furthermore, according to the nature of the opposition itself, the former difference between duty versus the singular individual and duty versus the universal is thus not something fixed and final. Instead what the singular individual does for himself benefits the universal as well. The more he looks after himself, the more there is not only the greater possibility that he can be useful to others but rather his actuality itself consists only in his living and existing in interrelation with others. His individual gratification essentially 349signifies that he puts what is his own at the disposal of others and that he helps them to secure their own gratification. In the fulfillment of his duty to singular individuals and thus in the fulfillment of his duty to himself, the duty to the universal is also fulfilled. – Balancing and comparing duties, which would here make an entrance, would lead into calculating the advantage which would accrue to the universal from an action. However, morality would thereby in part fall prey to the necessary contingency of insight. In part, though, it is precisely the essence of conscience to cut itself off from this calculating and balancing of duties and to come to a decision solely on its own without relying on any reasons of that sort.

646. In this way conscience acts and sustains itself in the unity of its being-in-itself and its being-for-itself, in the unity of pure thinking and individuality, and it is spirit which is certain of itself which has its truth in its own self, inside its own self, within its knowing, and therein has its knowing of duty. As a result, it sustains itself therein, so that what is positive in the action, that is, which is the content as well as the form of duty and is the knowing of duty, is that which belongs to the self in the self's certainty of itself. However, whatever with its own in-itself wishes to face off against the self is what counts only as untrue, only as sublated, only as a moment. Hence, what counts is not universal knowing but rather conscience's acquaintance with the circumstances. It inserts into duty as universal being-in-itself the content that it takes out of its natural individuality, for the content is what is in its own self present. Through the universal medium in which it is, this content becomes the duty that it carries out, and the empty pure duty is precisely thereby posited as sublated, or posited as a moment. This content is its sublated emptiness, or the fulfillment. – But conscience is likewise free from every content; it absolves itself from every determinate duty which is supposed to be a law, and in the force of its certainty of itself, it has the majesty of absolute autarky, to bind and to undo. – This self-determination is immediately for that reason sheer dutifulness. Duty is knowing itself, but this simple selfhood is the in-itself, for this in-itself is pure self-equality, and this pure self-equality is within this consciousness.

647. This pure knowing is immediately being for others, for as pure self-equality, it is immediacy, or being. However, this being is at the same time the pure universal, the selfhood of All; or acting is recognized and hence is actual. This being is the element as a result of which conscience immediately stands in the relation of equality to every self-consciousness, and the meaning of this relation is not the selfless law, but that of the self of conscience.

648. 350That this right, what conscience does, is at the same time a being for others means that an inequality seems to have been introduced into conscience. The duty which it fulfills is a determinate content, and that content is indeed the self of consciousness, and in that respect, that content is its knowing of itself, its equality with itself. But when it is fulfilled, when it is placed into the universal medium of being, this equality is no longer knowing, is no longer this differentiating which just as immediately sublates its own differences. Rather, in being placed into [the sphere of] being, the difference is posited as stably existing, and the action is a determinate action, unequal to the element of everyone's self-consciousness and thus is not necessarily recognized. Both sides, the acting conscience and the universal conscience, which is the consciousness that bestows recognition¹⁶⁵ on this action as its duty, are equally free from the determinateness of this doing. On account of this freedom, the relation between the two within the common medium of their interrelation is instead a relationship of complete inequality through which consciousness, for which the action is, finds itself in complete uncertainty about the self-certain spirit which acts. This spirit acts, it posits a determinateness as existent. Others stick to this being as sticking to its truth, and in sticking to it, they are therein certain of this spirit. In that respect, this spirit has expressed what counts, to itself, as its duty. Yet it is free from any determinate duty; it is beyond the point where the others think it is actually supposed to be, and this medium of being itself¹⁶⁶ and of duty as existing in itself counts to it only as a moment. What this spirit has thus placed before them, it has again also dissembled about, or, instead, what it has done is to immediately dissemble, for its actuality is, to itself, not this duty and this proposed determination. Rather, actuality is what it has within its absolute self-certainty.

649. The others thus do not know whether this conscience is morally good or evil; or instead, not only can they not know this, they must also take it to be evil, for just as it is free from the determinateness of duty and from duty as existing in itself, likewise so are they. What it proposes to them, they know themselves to dissemble about it. It is the kind of thing through which only the self of an other is expressed, not their own self. Not only do they know themselves to be free from it, they must dissolve it in their own consciousness, and, for the sake of sustaining their own selves, they must nullify it through judging and explaining.

650. Yet conscience's action is not only this determination of being which is abandoned by the pure self. What is supposed to count and be recognized as duty is what it is solely through the knowing and conviction that it is duty, through the self's knowing itself in the deed. If the deed ceases to have this self in it itself, it ceases to be what alone is its essence. Abandoned by this consciousness, its existence would be an ordinary, common actuality, and the action would appear to us as a way of achieving one's pleasure and desire. What ought to be there¹⁶⁷ is here essentiality alone as a result of its being known as individuality's 351giving voice to itself. This being-known is what is recognized and is what as such that is recognized is supposed to have existence.

651. The self enters into existence as a self. The spirit certain of itself exists as such for others. It is not immediate action which is valid and actual; what is recognized is not the determinate, not the existent-in-itself; rather, it is solely the self knowing itself as such a self. The element of stable existence is universal self-consciousness. What enters into this element cannot be the effect of the action; the effect does not endure there and acquires no lastingness. Rather, it is only self-consciousness that is what is recognized and which achieves actuality.

652. Here again we see language as the existence of spirit. Language is self-consciousness existing for others. It is self-consciousness which as such is immediately present,¹⁶⁸ and as this self-consciousness, it is universal. Language is the self severing itself from itself, the self which, as the I = I, becomes objective to itself, in this objectivity likewise sustaining itself as this self, coalescing with others, and which is their self-consciousness. The self interrogates itself just as it is interrogated by others, and this interrogation is just existence which has become a self.

653. The content that language has acquired here is no longer the inverted and inverting, disrupted self of the world of cultural formation. Rather, it is spirit which has returned into itself, is certain of itself, certain within itself of its truth, or certain of its recognition and certain as the spirit which is recognized as this knowing. The language of ethical spirit is the law, the simple commandment, and it is the lament, which is more that of shedding a tear over necessity. Moral consciousness conversely is still mute, remains shut off and at odds with itself within its own interiority,¹⁶⁹ for as yet the self does not have any existence within that interiority. Rather, existence and the self initially stand in an external relation to each other. However, language emerges as the mediating middle between self-sufficient and recognized self-consciousnesses, and the existing self is immediately universal, multifaceted, and, within this multifacetedness, it is simple recognition.¹⁷⁰ The content of conscience's language is the self knowing itself as essence. This alone is that to which it gives voice, and this giving voice is the true actuality of the doing, is the validity of the action. Consciousness gives voice to its conviction, and this conviction is that solely within which the action is a duty. It also solely counts as duty as a result of its having given voice to the conviction, for universal self-consciousness is free from action that is only existent determinate action. To itself, the action as existence counts for nothing. Rather, what counts is the conviction that the action is a duty, and this is actual in language. –To realize the action 352does not mean here that one translates its content from the form of a purpose, or from being-for-itself, into the form of abstract actuality. What it means is that one translates it from the form of immediate certainty of itself which knows its own knowing, or its being-for-itself, as the essence, into the form of an assurance that consciousness has a conviction about its duty, and that as conscience, duty knows from its own self¹⁷¹ what duty is. This assurance thus assures that consciousness is convinced that its conviction is the essence.

654. Whether the assurance that it acts from conviction of duty is true, or whether it actually is duty that is done – these questions or doubts have no meaning when they are directed against conscience. – To ask whether the assurance is true would presuppose that the inner intention could be different from the one put forward, i.e., that the willing of the singular self could be separated from the duty, from the willing of the universal and pure consciousness. The latter could be put into words, but it is the former which would be the true motive of the action. But this difference between universal consciousness and the singular self is just what has been sublated, and whose sublation just is conscience. The immediate knowing of the self which is certain of itself is law and duty; its intention, as a result of being its own intention, is what is right, and the only requirement is that it should both know this and state its conviction that its knowing and willing are right. Giving voice to this assurance sublates the form of its particularity, and it therein recognizes the necessary universality of the self. While it calls itself conscience, it calls itself pure self-knowing and pure abstract will, i.e., it calls itself the universal knowing and willing which bestows recognition on others and which is equal to them, for they too are just this pure self-knowing and willing and for that reason, it is also recognized by them. In the willing of the self certain of itself, in this knowing that the self is the essence, lies the essence of the right. – Whoever therefore says that he is acting from conscience is speaking the truth, for his conscience is the knowing and willing self. However, it is essential that he should say this, for this self must at the same time be a universal self. It is not universal in the content of the action, for this content is on account of its determinateness in itself indifferent. Rather, the universality lies in the form of the action, and it is this form which is to be posited as actual. It is the self which as such a self is actual in language, which testifies to itself being the true, and which just in doing so recognizes all other selves and is recognized by them.

655. Therefore, conscience, in the majesty of its sublimity rising above determinate law and every content of duty, puts any content it likes into its knowing and willing. Conscience is the moral genius who knows the inner voice of his immediate knowing to be the divine voice, and as he is in this knowing, he just as immediately knows existence, he is the divine creative power who has the 353vitality of life within its concept. He equally conducts a worship service within himself, for his action is the intuiting of his own divinity.

656. This solitary worship service is at the same time essentially the worship service of a religious community, and pure inward self-knowing and pure inward self-interrogation advance into becoming moments of consciousness. The intuition of itself is its objective existence, and this objective element is the declaring of its knowing and willing as a universal. Through this declaring, the self becomes what is established and valid, and the action becomes the executive deed. The actuality and stable existence of its doing is universal self-consciousness, but the declaration of conscience posits the certainty of itself as the pure self and, as a result, as the universal self. Others allow the action to count as valid on account of this speech within which the self is expressed and is recognized as the essence. The spirit and the substance of their bond is thus the reciprocal assurance of both their mutual conscientiousness and their good intentions; it is the rejoicing over this reciprocal purity, the refreshment received from the glory of knowing, declaring, fostering, and cherishing such excellence. – Insofar as this conscience still differentiates its abstract consciousness from its self-consciousness, it has only a hidden life in God. God is, to be sure, immediately current to its spirit and its heart, to its own self, but what is revealed, namely, its actual consciousness and the mediating movement of this consciousness, is, to itself, something other than the hidden inwardness and the immediacy of the essence which is at the current moment. Yet in the consummation of conscience the difference between its abstract consciousness and its self-consciousness sublates itself. It knows that abstract consciousness is just this self, this its being-for-itself certain of itself, that in the immediacy of the relation of the self to the in-itself, which, posited as external to the self, is the abstract essence and is hidden from the self, the diversity [of this] is sublated. This is so because that relation is a mediating relation in which the items which are related are not one and the same, but rather, each is an other for each other, and it is only within some third [term] that each is at one with the other. However, the immediate relation in fact means nothing other than the unity. Consciousness, risen above the unthinking mode that holds these differences which are themselves no differences at all nonetheless to be differences, knows the immediacy of the presence of the essence within itself to be the unity of the essence and its own self; it knows its own self therefore to be the living in-itself; and it knows this, its knowing, to be the religion that, as intuited or existent knowing, is the speaking of the religious community about its spirit.

657. With that, we see self-consciousness returned back into what is innermost to itself, for which all externality as such has vanished – it has returned into the intuition of the 354“I = I,” within which this I is all essentiality and existence. It is immersed within this conception of itself, for it has been driven to the apex of its extremes, indeed in such a way that the differentiated moments through which it is real, or is still consciousness, are not only for us as these pure extremes but rather are what it is for itself, and what is in itself to itself, and what is existence to itself, all of which have evaporated into abstractions that no longer either have any hold on this consciousness itself nor any substance for it. Everything which hitherto had been the essence for consciousness has receded into these abstractions. – Refined into this purity, consciousness is in its poorest shape, and this poverty, which constitutes its sole possession, is in itself a disappearing. This absolute certainty in which substance has been dissolved is the absolute untruth which collapses into itself. It is absolute self-consciousness within which consciousness is swallowed up.

658. Taken as this submersion of consciousness inside of itself, the substance existing-in-itself is, for consciousness, knowing as its knowing. As consciousness, it is separated into the opposition between itself and the object, an opposition which, to itself, is the essence. But this object is precisely what is completely transparent, it is its own self, and its consciousness is only the knowing of itself. All life and all spiritual essentiality have receded into this self and have lost their diversity from the I-self. The moments of consciousness are therefore these extreme abstractions, neither of which holds its ground but each of which loses itself in the other and generates the other. It is the flux of the unhappy consciousness with itself, but which takes place this time inside itself, so that this time it is conscious of being the concept of reason, something which the unhappy consciousness was only in itself. Thus, as consciousness, absolute certainty of itself is immediately turned around into a fading tone, into the objectivity of its being-for-itself, but this created world is its speech, which it has just as immediately heard and whose echo is all that returns to it. That the echo returns to it does not thus mean that consciousness is therein in and for itself, for the essence is, to itself, no in-itself but rather just itself. Nor does it have existence, for what is objective does not arrive at being a negative of the actual self, just as this self does not arrive at actuality. It lacks the force to relinquish itself,¹⁷² lacks the force to make itself into a thing and to sustain being. It lives with the anxiety that it will stain the splendor of its innerness through action and existence. Thus, to preserve the purity of its heart, it flees from contact with actuality, and it steadfastly perseveres in its obstinate powerlessness to renounce its own self, a self which has been tapered to the final point of abstraction. It stably exists in its powerlessness to give itself substantiality, or to transform its thinking into being and to entrust itself to absolute difference. The hollow object which it generates to itself it thus now fills 355only with the consciousness of emptiness. It is a yearning which only loses itself as it becomes an essenceless object, and as it goes beyond this loss and then falls back on itself, it only finds itself as lost. – In this transparent purity of its moments it becomes an unhappy, so-called beautiful soul, and its burning embers gradually die out, and, as they do, the beautiful soul vanishes like a shapeless vapor dissolving into thin air.

659. This silent coalescence of the feeble essentialities of evaporated life is, however, still to be taken in the other meaning of the actuality of conscience and in the appearance of its movement, and conscience is to be examined as acting. – In the preceding, the objective moment in this consciousness determined itself as universal consciousness, and the knowing which knows itself as this self was differentiated from other selves. The language in which all of them mutually recognize each other as acting conscientiously, this universal equality, falls apart into the inequality of singular being-for-itself, and each consciousness is equally reflected out of its universality and utterly into itself. Through this, the opposition of singular individuality vis-à-vis other individuals and vis-à-vis the universal necessarily makes its entrance, and it is this relationship and its movement which is now to be examined. – Or this universality and duty has the utterly opposed meaning of determinate singular individuality exempting itself from the universal, for which pure duty is only the universality which has made its appearance on the surface and which has turned back outwards. Duty is only a matter of words and counts as a being for others. Conscience, initially directed only negatively towards duty as this determinate, present duty, knows itself to be free from it, but while conscience fills empty duty with a determinate content taken from its own self, it has the positive consciousness that it, as this self, makes itself its own content. As empty knowing, its pure self is without content and without determination. The content which it gives to its self is taken from its own self as this determinate self, or from itself as a natural individuality, and in speaking of the conscientiousness of its action, it is indeed conscious of its pure self, but in the purpose of its action as actual content of the action, it is conscious of itself as this singular individual and of the opposition between that which it is for itself and what it is for others, conscious of the opposition between universality, or duty, and consciousness of its being reflected from out of universality.

660. However much the opposition into which conscience enters when it acts, expressing it within its innerness, still it is also at the same time the inequality directed outwards in the element of its existence, the inequality of its particular singularity vis-à-vis other singular individuals. – Its particularity consists therein, that both moments 356constituting its consciousness, the self and the in-itself, each count as having unequal value; that certainty of itself is the essence vis-à-vis the in-itself or vis-à-vis the universal, which only counts as a moment. Confronting this inward determination is thus the element of existence or the universal consciousness, to which universality, duty, is instead the essence; in contrast, singular individuality, which is for itself vis-à-vis the universal, only counts as a sublated moment. To this adherence to duty [the universal consciousness], the first consciousness counts as evil because it is the inequality between its inwardly-turned-being and the universal, and while the latter at the same time also pronounces its doing as equality with itself, as duty and conscientiousness, to the universal consciousness it counts as hypocrisy.

661. The movement of this latter opposition is initially the formal establishment of equality between what evil is within itself and what it pronounces; it must come to light that it is evil and thus that its existence is equal to its essence. The hypocrisy must be unmasked. – This return of inequality, which is present within hypocrisy, into equality is not something which has already taken place, so that hypocrisy, as people commonly say, as a result demonstrates its respect for both duty and virtue by seeming to be both of them and then using that semblance as a mask to hide itself from its own consciousness no less than from the consciousness of others, and in which recognition of the opposition would in itself contain the equality and agreement of the two. – Yet at the same time, hypocrisy is just as much beyond this verbal recognition and is reflected into itself; and in using the existent-in-itself only as a being for others, hypocrisy's own contempt for what exists-in-itself and the exhibition of its total lack of essence¹⁷³ is there for all to see. For what lets itself be used as an external instrument shows itself as a thing which has within itself no proper weight of its own.

662. This equality is also brought about neither by the evil consciousness in its one-sided insistence on itself nor by the judgment of the universal. – However much the former denies itself vis-à-vis the consciousness of duty, and however much it asserts that what the latter pronounces to be wickedness, absolute inequality with the universal, is instead as an action according to inner law and conscience, still there remains in this one-sided assurance of equality its inequality with the other, for this other neither believes his assurance nor does it give it any recognition. Or, since the one-sided insistence on one extreme dissolves itself, evil would as a result confess to being evil, but in so doing would immediately sublate itself and thus would not be hypocrisy, nor would it have unmasked itself as such hypocrisy. It in fact confesses to being evil through its assertion that it acts according to its own inner law and conscience in opposition to what is recognized as universal. If this law and conscience were not 357the law of its singular individuality and its own arbitrary free choice, then it would not be something inward, not be something its own, but instead be what is universally recognized. Whoever for that reason says that he acts with regard to others according to his own law and his own conscience is saying in fact that he is mistreating them. However, actual conscience is not this insistence on knowing and willing which opposes itself to the universal; rather, the universal is the element of its existence, and its language pronounces its doing as a recognized duty.

663. The insistence on the part of the universal consciousness that it make its own judgment is even less so the unmasking and dissolution of hypocrisy. – While universal consciousness proclaims hypocrisy to be bad, vile, etc., in making such a judgment, it appeals to its own law just as the evil consciousness appealed to its own law. This is so because the former law comes on the scene in opposition to the latter, and as a result it comes on the scene as a particular law. It therefore has no advantage over the other law; on the contrary, it legitimizes this other law, and in its zeal, it does exactly the opposite of what it intends to do – which is to say that it shows that what it called true duty and which is supposed to be universally recognized, is what is not universally recognized, and thereby it concedes to the other an equal right of being-for-itself.

664. However, this judging has at the same time another aspect to it by which it becomes the introduction to the dissolution of the present opposition. – Consciousness of the universal does not conduct itself as actual and as acting with regard to the first consciousness – for this latter is instead the actual – but rather it conducts itself in opposition to the first consciousness, as what is not caught in the opposition of individuality and universality. It remains within the universality of thinking, conducts itself as interpreting,¹⁷⁴ and its first action is only that of judgment. Through this judgment, it now places itself, as was just noted, alongside the first consciousness, and through this equality, the latter comes to an intuition of itself in this other consciousness. This is so because the consciousness of duty conducts itself as apprehending, passive consciousness, and it is thereby in contradiction with itself as the absolute willing of duty, and in contradiction with itself as that which determines itself quite simply by its own self. It preserves itself well in its purity, for it does not act; it is the hypocrisy which wants to know that its judging is to be taken as the actual deed and which, instead of proving its uprightness in action, proves it by means of speaking about its splendid dispositions. It is thus constituted in entirely the same way as is the one that is reproached for taking its duty to consist in its talking about its duty. In both of them, the aspect of actuality is equally distinguished from that of speech; in one, through the self-interested ends of action, and in the other, through the lack of action at all, action of which the necessity lies in talking about duty itself, for duty without deeds has no meaning at all.

358665. However, judging is also to be regarded as a positive action on the part of thought, and it has a positive content, and through this aspect, the contradiction which is present in the apprehending consciousness and its equality with the first consciousness become even more complete. – The acting consciousness pronounces its determinate doing to be duty, and the judgmental consciousness cannot deny it this, for duty itself is the form capable of all content, contentless form – or, it is concrete action which is in its own self diverse in its many-sidedness. It has both the universal aspect, which is the aspect taken as duty, and just as much in it as the particular aspect, which constitutes the individual's share and interest. Now, the judging consciousness stops short neither at the former aspect of duty nor the agent's knowing that this is his duty, the relationship and the standing of his actuality. Rather, it holds on to the other aspect, spins the action off into the inward realm, and explains the action according to an intention and a self-serving motive which is different from the action itself. As every action is capable of being considered from the point of view of dutifulness, equally so can every action be considered from the point of view of particularity, for as an action it is the actuality of an individual. – This assessment thus puts the action outside of its existence and reflects it into the inner, or into the form of its own particularity. If the action is accompanied by fame, then it knows this inwardness to be a craving for fame. – If the action is wholly in conformity with the social estate of the individual, if it does not go beyond that status, and if this individuality's social estate is not an external determination tacked onto him but is the very conduit by which this universality fills itself out, and if as a result the individuality shows himself to be fitting for an even higher social estate, then the judgment knows his inwardness as ambition for honor, and so forth. While in the action itself, the agent achieves an intuition of himself in [the realm of] objectivity, or he arrives at a feeling for his own self in his existence and thus obtains gratification, the judgment knows his inwardness to be a drive towards his own happiness, even if this happiness were to consist only in inner moral vanity, in the enjoyment of a consciousness of his own excellence, and in the foretaste of a hope for a future happiness. – No action can escape being judged in such a way, for duty for duty's sake, this pure purpose, is the non-actual. It has its actuality in what individuality does, and as a result, the action has the aspect of particularity in itself. – No man is a hero to his valet, but not because that man is not a hero, but rather because the latter is – a valet, a person with whom the hero deals not as a hero but as someone who eats, drinks, gets dressed, in general in the singularity of the hero's needs and ideas.¹⁷⁵ For that kind of judgmental assessment, there is no action for which such judgmental assessment cannot oppose the aspect of the singularity of individuality to the 359action's universal aspect, and there is no action in which it cannot play the part of the moral valet towards the actor.

666. The judging consciousness is itself thereby base because it divides up the action, and it both brings out and holds onto the action's inequality with itself. Furthermore, it is hypocrisy because he pretends that such judgment is not only another manner of being evil but is rather itself the rightful consciousness of action. In his non-actuality and in the vanity he has in being such a faultfinder,¹⁷⁶ he places himself far above the deeds it excoriates, and he wants to know that his speech, which is utterly devoid of any deeds, is to be taken as a superior actuality. – In thereby making himself equal to the agent about whom it is so judgmental, the judging consciousness is thus known¹⁷⁷ by that consciousness to be the same as himself. The latter consciousness not only finds himself to have been taken by the former, the judging consciousness, as somebody alien and unequal to him, but rather instead finds that the judging consciousness, according to his own constitution, is equal to himself. Intuiting this equality and giving voice to it, he confesses this to the other, and he equally expects that the other, just as he has in fact placed himself on an equal plane to him, will reciprocate his speech and in that speech will pronounce their equality so that recognitional existence¹⁷⁸ will make its appearance. His confession is not an abasement, nor a humiliation, nor is it a matter of his casting himself aside in his relationship with the other, for this declaration is not something one-sided through which he would posit his inequality with the other, but rather it is solely on account of the intuition of his equality with the other that he gives voice to himself, that in his confessions he gives voice on his own part to their equality, and he does this because language is the existence of spirit as the immediate self. He thus expects that the other will contribute his own part to this existence.

667. But following on the admission of the one who is evil – I am he – there is no reciprocation of an equal confession. This was not what was meant by the judgment, no, quite the contrary! The judging consciousness repels this community from itself and is the hard heart which is for itself and which rejects any continuity with the other. – The scene is hereby reversed. The one who confessed sees himself repulsed and sees the other as in the wrong, sees the other as somebody who refuses his own inwardness making the step into the existence of speech and as somebody who contrasts the beauty of his own soul to the soul of the one who is evil. He sees the judging consciousness as somebody who sets his own stiff-necked self-consistent character in opposition to the confessing consciousness, and he sees the utter silence of someone who keeps himself locked up within himself, who refuses to be cast aside vis-à-vis an other. What is posited here is the highest indignation of the spirit certain of itself, for, as this simple knowing of the self, this spirit intuits itself in others, namely, it does so in such a way that the external shape of this other is not, as it was in material wealth, the essenceless itself, not a thing. On the contrary, it is thought, knowing itself which is contrasted with that spirit; it is this absolutely fluid continuity of pure 360knowing which refuses to put itself into communication with him – with him, who in his confession had already renounced his separate being-for-itself and had posited himself as sublated particularity and thereby posited himself in continuity with the other, posited himself as the universal. But the other retains in its own self its non-communicative being-for-itself; in the one confessing, it retains just the same non-communicative being-for-itself, which the latter has already cast off. In that way, the hard heart shows itself to be the consciousness forsaken by spirit, the consciousness denying spirit, for it does not recognize¹⁷⁹ that in its absolute certainty of itself, spirit has a mastery over every deed and over all actuality, and that spirit can discard them and make them into something that never happened. At the same time, the hard heart does not recognize¹⁸⁰ the contradiction it commits when it does not let the discarding that took place in speech be the true discarding, whereas it itself has the certainty of its spirit not in an actual action but in its innerness and has its existence in the speech in which its judgment is phrased. It is therefore just the hard heart itself which is putting obstacles in the way of the other's return from the deed into the spiritual existence of speech and into the equality of spirit, and through its hardness of heart, it engenders the inequality which is still present.

668. Inasmuch as the self-certain spirit as a beautiful soul does not now possess the force to relinquish¹⁸¹ itself of the self-knowing holding onto itself, it cannot arrive at an equality with the consciousness it has repulsed, and thus it cannot arrive at the intuited unity of itself in an other, and it cannot arrive at existence. Hence, the equality comes about only negatively, as a spirit-less being. The beautiful soul, lacking all actuality, caught in the contradiction between its pure self and its necessity to empty itself into being and to turn itself around into actuality, in the immediacy of this opposition to which it adheres – in an immediacy which is alone the mediating middle and the reconciliation of an opposition which has been intensively raised to the point of its pure abstraction, and which is itself pure being or empty nothingness – is thus, as the consciousness of this contradiction in its unreconciled immediacy, shattered into madness and melts into a yearning, tubercular consumption. It thereby in fact gives up its severe adherence to its being-for-itself but engenders only the spiritless unity of being.

669. The true, namely, the self-conscious and existing conciliation,¹⁸² is according to its necessity already contained in the preceding. The breaking of the hard heart and its elevation to universality is the same movement which was expressed in the consciousness that confessed. The wounds of the spirit heal and leave no scars behind; it is not the deed which is imperishable, but rather the deed is repossessed by spirit into itself; the aspect of singular individuality, whether present in the deed as intention or as existing negativity and 361limitation to the deed is what immediately vanishes. The actualizing self, the form of its action, is only a moment of the whole, and is equally the knowing which through judgment determines and assigns the difference between the singular and the universal aspects of action. The former evil consciousness posits this relinquishing of itself, or posits itself as a moment enticed into a confessional existence through the intuition of itself in an other. However, to this other, the latter consciousness, its one-sided, unrecognized judgment must break, just as to the former, its one-sided, unrecognized existence of particular being-for-itself has to break. As the former exhibits the power of spirit over its actuality, the latter exhibits the power of spirit over its determinate concept.

670. However, the latter renounces the divisive thought and the rigidity of its being-for-itself holding fast to itself for the reason that it in fact intuits itself in the first agent. This first subject, which casts its actuality aside, makes itself into a sublated This,¹⁸³ and as a result exhibits itself in fact as universal. It turns out of its external actuality back into itself as essence, and the universal consciousness thus cognizes itself therein. – The forgiveness it extends to the first is the renunciation of itself, of its non-actual essence, an essence which it equates with this other consciousness which was actual action, and it bestows recognition as good on what thought had determined acting to be, namely, evil; or, instead, it lets go of this difference between determinate thought and its determining judgment existing-for-itself, just as the other lets go of its own, existing-for-itself, determining of action. – The word of reconciliation is the existing spirit which immediately intuits in its opposite the pure knowing of itself as the universal essence, intuits it in the pure knowing of itself as singular individuality existing absolutely inwardly¹⁸⁴ – a reciprocal recognition which is absolute spirit.

671. Absolute spirit comes into existence only at the point where its pure knowing of itself is the opposition and flux of itself with itself. Knowing that its pure knowing is the abstract essence, it is this duty knowingly¹⁸⁵ in absolute opposition to the knowing that knows itself, as the absolute singular individuality of the self, as the essence. The former is the pure continuity of the universal which knows singular individuality knowing itself as the essence as nullity in itself, as evil. However, the latter is the absolute discretion which knows itself absolutely in its pure oneness, and it knows the universal as the non-actual and as what is only for others. Both aspects are refined into this purity within which, in the aspects themselves, there is no longer existence devoid of self, no longer the negative of consciousness, but rather within which that former duty is the self-consistent character of its knowing-of-itself. This evil has its purpose just as much in its inwardly-turned-being¹⁸⁶ and its actuality in its speech. The content of this speech is the substance of its stable existence; the speech is the assurance of spirit's certainty in its inward turn. – Each of these self-certain spirits has no 362other end than its pure self and has no other reality and existence other than just this pure self. However, they are still different, and the difference is absolute because it is posited as lying in this element of the pure concept. The difference is also absolute not only for us but also for the concepts themselves which stand in this opposition. For these concepts are indeed determinate against each other, but at the same time they are in themselves universal such that they fill out the whole range of the self, and this self has no other content than this, its own determinateness, a determinateness which neither goes beyond the self nor is more restricted than it, for one of them, namely, the absolutely universal, is just as much pure self-knowing as is the other, the absolute discretion of singular individuality, and both are only this pure self-knowing. Both determinatenesses are thus the pure, knowing¹⁸⁷ concepts whose determinateness itself is immediately knowing, or whose relationship and opposition is the I. For-each-other, they are thereby these utter opposites. It is the completely inner which has entered into confrontation with itself and has entered into existence. They constitute pure knowing, which, through this opposition, is posited as consciousness. But it is still not yet self-consciousness. It has its actualization in this opposition's movement, for this opposition is instead itself the indiscrete continuity and equality of the “I = I.” Each of the I's, for itself just through the contradiction of its pure universality which at the same time strives against its equality with the other and separates itself from it, sublates itself in its own self. Through this relinquishing,¹⁸⁸ this knowing, which is estranged in its own existence, returns back into the unity of the self. It is the actual I, the universal self-knowing in its absolute opposite, in the existing knowing that has taken the inward turn, which, according to the purity of its separated inwardly-turned-being, is itself the completed universal. The reconciling yes, in which both I's let go of their opposed existence, is the existence of the I extended into two-ness, which therein remains the same as itself¹⁸⁹ and which has the certainty of itself in its complete self-relinquishing and in its opposite. – It is the God that appears¹⁹⁰ in the midst of those who know themselves as pure knowing.

¹ sichselbstgleiche, bleibende Wesen.

² gedachte.

³ Sichselbstgleichheit. This would perhaps be better rendered here as “self-consistency.”

⁴ Einzelnen.

⁵ Existenz.

⁶ Reich der Bildung.

⁷ Einsicht. This could also be rendered as “intelligence,” in keeping with some eighteenth-century usage.

⁸ nur gedachte.

⁹ Werk. Here the meaning is “work,” and not “labor” (Arbeit).

¹⁰ Massen.

¹¹ Gemeinwesen.

¹² Gegenschein. This word occurs in English dictionaries as a loan word from German, and it literally means “counter-glow” (as I have rendered it here instead of leaving it as “Gegenschein”). It is sometimes rendered as “opposition-effect.” It is a diffuse, faint light which is sometimes visible at a spot in the night sky at the point at which the sun is focused on the opposite side of the earth; it is believed to be sunlight which is reflected by dust particles in the atmosphere.

¹³ The word for “people” and “nation” here is the same German word, Volk. In other writings, however, Hegel distinguishes between a “Nation” and a “Volk.”

¹⁴ der existiert und gilt.

¹⁵ The first “existence” in the sentence is “Existenz,” whereas the second “existence” in the sentence is “Dasein.”

¹⁶ das Element.

¹⁷ Wesen.

¹⁸ unwirkliche.

¹⁹ das unmittelbare natürliche Gewordensein.

²⁰ Wesen.

²¹ Recht.

²² Betätigung.

²³ das Element.

²⁴ Sich-erkennen.

²⁵ Bestimmung.

²⁶ Anerkennung.

²⁷ an ihm selbstbestimmten Maßstab der Prüfung.

²⁸ zusammengeschlossen. Hegel plays with the “schließen” in Zusammenschließen to highlight the way in which this also indicates how the terms of a syllogism and an inference come together in the conclusion.

²⁹ das Element.

³⁰ für sich Wesen zu haben.

³¹ anerkennen.

³² This is a quote from Sophocles’ Antigone.

³³ Gesinnung. Alternatively this could be rendered “attitude,” or “cast of mind.”

³⁴ Selbstwesen.

³⁵ Gemeine. Although the most basic meaning is that of a community, Hegel uses it in another of its senses, namely, a religious community. He also uses Gemeinde more frequently to mean the same thing. In one place (paragraph 803), he uses the phrase, “religiöse Gemeine.”

³⁶ Geltenden.

³⁷ Selbstwesens.

³⁸ Selbstwesen.

³⁹ Personen. In this context, this means something more like “legal persons” or “normative persons.”

⁴⁰ abgeschiedene.

⁴¹ anerkanntes.

⁴² geltende.

⁴³ Bewegung.

⁴⁴ erkannten.

⁴⁵ außer sich. Alternatively, this could be rendered as “beside itself,” or “frantic.”

⁴⁶ erkennt.

⁴⁷ Entäußerung.

⁴⁸ Entwesung. Alternatively, this could be rendered as “disinfestation.”

⁴⁹ Entäußerung.

⁵⁰ für sich.

⁵¹ bei sich selbst bleibende Einheit.

⁵² begreift.

⁵³ Anerkanntsein.

⁵⁴ gedachten Substanz. Alternatively, it might be rendered “conceptually commemorated substance,” depending on one's interpretation of the text.

⁵⁵ eine Art; alternatively, a “species.”

⁵⁶ gemeinte.

⁵⁷ Gegliederung.

⁵⁸ Massen.

⁵⁹ erkennt.

⁶⁰ des Gedachten.

⁶¹ Das Individuum reflektiert sich…in sich selbst.

⁶² das gedachte Allgemeine.

⁶³ Vorstellen.

⁶⁴ zum allgemeinen besten. This is also one of the German translations of Rousseau's term, “intérêt commun” in his Du Contrat Social (“Il y a souvent bien de la différence entre la volonté de tous et la volonté générale; celle-ci ne regarde qu'à l'intérêt commun, l'autre regarde à l'intérêt privé, et n'est qu'une somme de volontés particulières: mais ôtez de ces mêmes volontés les plus et les moins qui s'entre-détruisent, reste pour somme des différences la volonté générale”), Chapter III: “Si la Volonté Générale peut errer.”

⁶⁵ Existenz.

⁶⁶ ist sonst nicht da. Hegel is here, as elsewhere in the Phenomenology, playing with the German word for existence, Dasein, which is literally rendered here as “is there.”

⁶⁷ da ist.

⁶⁸ Daseiendes.

⁶⁹ Existenz.

⁷⁰ Geistigkeit. This could also be rendered here as “mindedness.”

⁷¹ setzt. Alternatively it could be rendered, “posits.”

⁷² Gewalt: but also violence or power.

⁷³ unumschränkter Monarch. The phrase is also the German expression for “absolute monarch.” I have rendered it more literally so as not to confuse this with Hegel's other use of “absolute.”

⁷⁴ ein Gemeintes.

⁷⁵ gemeint.

⁷⁶ Existenz.

⁷⁷ Anerkanntsein.

⁷⁸ Mitteilung.

⁷⁹ Bestimmung.

⁸⁰ mitteilt.

⁸¹ Geist.

⁸² Geistes der Bildung.

⁸³ Selbstwesen.

⁸⁴ das rein Gedachte.

⁸⁵ nicht gedachten Wirklichkeit.

⁸⁶ Begeistung.

⁸⁷ bei sich selbst.

⁸⁸ Gemeine; “parish.”

⁸⁹ gegenständlichen.

⁹⁰ als Gebildetes.

⁹¹ ohne Reflexion in sich selbst.

⁹² Moment der Reflexion in sich.

⁹³ in sich reflektierten Negativität.

⁹⁴ This is another quotation from Diderot's Rameau's Nephew.

⁹⁵ bei sich selbst.

⁹⁶ erkennt.

⁹⁷ Gedachte.

⁹⁸ Wechselbalg.

⁹⁹ eines Vorgestellten.

¹⁰⁰ vorstellig.

¹⁰¹ begriffen.

¹⁰² wirklicher.

¹⁰³ unzweckmäßig.

¹⁰⁴ gibt…sich…zu erfahren.

¹⁰⁵ Hegel plays here on beigelegt (“attributed”) and Beilager (“marital consummation”).

¹⁰⁶ Meinung.

¹⁰⁷ Meinung.

¹⁰⁸ Gewalt.

¹⁰⁹ das Sein.

¹¹⁰ unzweckmäßig.

¹¹¹ Bildungen.

¹¹² erkennen.

¹¹³ das reine Denken in sich selbst.

¹¹⁴ Gedachten.

¹¹⁵ das Reinseiende.

¹¹⁶ sich in sich selbst gleich.

¹¹⁷ übergreift.

¹¹⁸ es sieht ihn auf diese Weise ein.

¹¹⁹ Einsehen. This is not Einsicht (“insight”) but is related, meaning the act of “seeing-into,” that is, coming to understand, realizing that something is the case, or coming to an insight.

¹²⁰ repräsentierte.

¹²¹ ist nichts Bestehendes mehr an ihm. The “it” could refer either to the “concept” or to the “object.”

¹²² Staatsaktionen. This could be rendered more colloquially as “a great fuss.”

¹²³ Repräsentation.

¹²⁴ repräsentiert und vorgestellt.

¹²⁵ das Eines ist.

¹²⁶ für sich.

¹²⁷ unerfüllte Punkt.

¹²⁸ der Verstand.

¹²⁹ Sich-selbst-denkens.

¹³⁰ wissenden Willen.

¹³¹ Freiheit der Natur.

¹³² Gesinnung.

¹³³ das Selbstlose.

¹³⁴ gedacht.

¹³⁵ ist nicht da.

¹³⁶ dies Gedachte.

¹³⁷ Es verhält sich also nur denkend, nicht begreifend.

¹³⁸ vorgestellt ist.

¹³⁹ vorhanden.

¹⁴⁰ Vorstellen.

¹⁴¹ Wesen.

¹⁴² Wesen.

¹⁴³ Wesen.

¹⁴⁴ Wesen.

¹⁴⁵ Wesen.

¹⁴⁶ Wesen.

¹⁴⁷ Wesen.

¹⁴⁸ Wesen.

¹⁴⁹ Wesen.

¹⁵⁰ erkennt.

¹⁵¹ Wesen.

¹⁵² Gedankendinges.

¹⁵³ vergesellschaftet.

¹⁵⁴ Gedachte.

¹⁵⁵ Wesen.

¹⁵⁶ Wesen.

¹⁵⁷ Recht.

¹⁵⁸ Wesen.

¹⁵⁹ Wesen.

¹⁶⁰ Anerkanntseins.

¹⁶¹ da ist.

¹⁶² Anerkanntsein.

¹⁶³ Bestand und Dasein.

¹⁶⁴ allgemeine Beste.

¹⁶⁵ anerkennende.

¹⁶⁶ Medium des Seins selbst.

¹⁶⁷ da sein.

¹⁶⁸ vorhanden: “at hand,” or “available.”

¹⁶⁹ bei sich in seinem Innern.

¹⁷⁰ Anerkanntsein.

¹⁷¹ aus sich selbst.

¹⁷² Kraft der Entäußerung.

¹⁷³ Wesenlosigkeit.

¹⁷⁴ auffassendes.

¹⁷⁵ Vorstellung.

¹⁷⁶ Gut- und Besserwissens.

¹⁷⁷ erkannt.

¹⁷⁸ anerkennende Dasein.

¹⁷⁹ erkennt.

¹⁸⁰ erkennt.

¹⁸¹ Entäußerung.

¹⁸² Ausgleichung.

¹⁸³ aufgehobenen Diesen.

¹⁸⁴ der absolut in sich seienden Einzelheit.

¹⁸⁵ wissende Pflicht.

¹⁸⁶ In-sich-sein.

¹⁸⁷ wissenden.

¹⁸⁸ Entäußerung.

¹⁸⁹ sich gleich bleibt.

¹⁹⁰ der erscheinende Gott.

(CC) Religion

VII. Religion363

672. In the previous shapes, which broadly differentiated themselves into consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit, there is something else which has also come forth, namely, religion as the consciousness of absolute essence, yet it was to be found there only according to the standpoint of consciousness that is aware of the absolute essence. However, the absolute essence in and for itself, the self-consciousness of spirit, has not appeared in those forms.

673. Consciousness, to the extent that it is the understanding, already becomes consciousness of the supersensible, or consciousness of the inner of objective existence. However, the supersensible, the eternal, or whatever else one may call it, is devoid of self.¹ Initially, it is only the universal which is still some distance removed from spirit knowing itself as spirit. – Following that was self-consciousness, which had its completion in the shape of the unhappy consciousness, which itself is only the grief of spirit as it struggled and then failed to force itself outwards again towards objectivity. The unity of singular self-consciousness with what is its unchangeable essence, towards which singular self-consciousness brings itself, thus remains an other-worldly beyond for self-consciousness. – Both the immediate existence of reason, which emerged for us from out of that grief, and reason's own distinctive shapes have no religion, because the self-consciousness of those shapes knows or seeks itself in the immediate present.

674. In contrast, in the ethical world we saw a religion, namely, the religion of the netherworld; that religion is belief in the frightful, unfamiliar night of fate and in the Eumenides of the departed spirit – the former is pure negativity in the form of universality, the latter the same negativity in the form of singular individuality. In the latter form, the absolute essence is indeed therefore the self and is current just as the self is not other than current. Yet the singular self is this singular ghostly shadow, which has universality, which is itself fate, as separated from itself. It is indeed a shadow, a sublated This, and thereby a universal self. However, that former negative meaning has still not changed into this latter positive meaning, and thus the sublated self at the same time still immediately means this particular and essenceless self. – However, fate without the self remains the night devoid of consciousness, which neither arrives at difference within itself, nor to the clarity of knowing-itself.

675.364 This faith in the nothingness of necessity and in the netherworld becomes faith in heaven, because the departed self must unite itself with its universality, must hammer apart what it is within that universality that the self contains and in that way become clear to itself. However, we saw this realm of faith unfold its conceptless content only within the element of thinking, and for that reason, we saw it perish in its fate, namely, in the religion of the Enlightenment. In the religion of the Enlightenment, the supersensible other-worldly beyond of the understanding is again established, but in such a way that self-consciousness stands satisfied in this-worldliness, and it knows the empty supersensible other-worldly beyond, which is neither cognizable nor frightful, neither as a self nor as power.

676. In the religion of morality, it is finally re-established that the absolute essence is a positive content, but that content is conjoined with the negativity of the Enlightenment. The content is being, which is likewise taken back into the self and remains closed up within it, and it is a differentiated content, whose parts are likewise immediately negated as they are set up. However, the fate into which this contradictory movement descends is the self which is conscious of itself as the fate of essentiality and actuality.

677. Within religion, spirit knowing itself is immediately its own pure self-consciousness. Those shapes of spirit that have been examined – the true spirit, self-alienated spirit, and spirit certain of itself – together constitute spirit in its consciousness, which, confronting its world, does not cognize itself in that world. However, within conscience, spirit subjugates itself just as it has subjugated its objective world per se; it also subjugates its representational thought and its determinate concepts, and it is now self-consciousness existing at one with itself.² Within the latter, spirit for itself, represented as object, signifies the universal spirit which contains all essence and all actuality within itself; however, it is not in the form of free-standing actuality or in the form of self-sufficient phenomenal³ nature. Spirit has, to be sure, a shape, or the form of being, as it is an object of its consciousness. However, because in religion this consciousness is posited as having the essential determination of self-consciousness, the shape it takes is completely transparent to itself, and the actuality that it contains is enclosed in it, or is sublated in it, exactly in the manner in which we say “all actuality.” It is universal actuality, the actuality that has been thought.⁴

678. While in religion, the underlying consciousness of spirit's determination does not therefore have the form of free-standing otherness, its existence is distinct from its self-consciousness, and its genuine actuality falls outside of religion. There is, to be sure, one spirit of both, but its consciousness does not embrace both together, and religion appears as one part of existence, as one part of various doings and strivings, whose other part is the life in spirit's actual world. Just as we now know that both spirit in its world and spirit conscious of itself as 365spirit, or spirit in religion, are the same, so does the consummation of religion therein consist in each of them becoming the same as the other, and not only so that religion occupies itself with spirit's actuality, but, conversely, so that that spirit, as spirit conscious of itself, to itself, becomes actual and becomes the object of its consciousness. – To the extent that spirit in religion thinks of itself representationally, it is indeed consciousness, and the actuality implicit within religion is the shape and the garment of its representation. However, in this kind of representational thought, actuality does not receive its full due, namely, that it is not only a garment, it is also a free-standing self-sufficient existence. Conversely, because actuality lacks consummation within itself, it is a determinate shape that does not attain what it is supposed to exhibit, namely, spirit conscious of itself. For that spirit's shape to express spirit itself, the shape would have to be nothing else but spirit itself; spirit would have had to appear to itself or would have to be actual in the way spirit is in its essence. Solely as a result, what would have been achieved might seem to demand the very opposite, namely, that the object of its consciousness have at the same time the form of free-standing actuality. However, the spirit which is object, to itself, only as absolute spirit is the spirit which is, to itself, an equally free-standing actuality as it remains therein conscious of itself.

679. While initially self-consciousness and consciousness proper, religion and spirit in its world, or the existence of spirit, are differentiated, the latter consists in the whole of spirit insofar as its moments are exhibited as each coming undone from the others and each presenting itself for itself. However, the moments are consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit – spirit, namely, as immediate spirit which is not yet the consciousness of spirit. Their totality, taken all together, constitutes the worldly, secular⁵ existence of spirit per se; spirit per se contains the previous shapes in the universal determinations, in the moments just cited. Religion presupposes the whole course of the development of those moments, and it is their simple totality, or their absolute self. – In addition, in relation to religion, the course those moments travel is not to be represented as taking place in time. Only the whole spirit is in time, and the shapes, which are shapes of the whole spirit as such, exhibit themselves in a sequence, one after the other, for only the whole has genuine actuality, and the whole thus has the form of pure freedom with regard to others, which expresses itself as time. However, the moments of spirit as a whole (consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit) have, because they are moments, no existence distinct from each other. – Third, just as spirit was distinguished from its moments, so too is their isolated determination to be distinguished from these moments themselves. We saw each of those moments in its own 366course of development again differentiate itself in its own self and diversely shape itself, as, for example, sense certainty and perception were differentiated in consciousness. These latter aspects come undone from each other in time, and they belong to a particular whole. – For, through determination,⁶ spirit descends from its universality to singular individuality. This determination, or the mediating middle, is consciousness, self-consciousness, etc. However, the shapes of these moments constitute singular individuality. Hence these exhibit spirit in its singular individuality, or actuality, and they differentiate themselves in time although the succeeding shapes retain in themselves the preceding shapes.

680. However much religion is thus the consummation of spirit, into which, as their ground, the singular moments of spirit (consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit) both return and have returned, still together they constitute the existing actuality of the whole spirit, which is only as the differentiating movement of its aspects returning back into themselves. The coming-to-be of religion per se is contained in the movement of the universal moments. However, while each of these attributes was exhibited not only as it determines itself in general, but also in the way that each is in and for itself, i.e., as each runs its course within itself as a whole, so too has not only the coming-to-be of religion as such thereby emerged, but rather those complete courses of development of singular aspects contain at the same time the determinatenesses of religion itself. The whole spirit, the spirit of religion, is again the movement from its immediacy to the arrival at the knowing of what it is in itself or immediately is, and it is to reach the point where the shape in which it appears for the consciousness of it will be completely the same as its essence, and where it intuits itself as it is. – In this coming-to-be, spirit therefore itself is in determinate shapes that constitute the differences of this movement, and at the same time, determinate religion thereby just as much has a determinate actual spirit. However much therefore consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit belong to spirit knowing itself per se, still the determinate forms (which have each specifically developed themselves within consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit) belong to the determinate shapes of self-knowing spirit. For its actual spirit, the determinate shape of religion picks out from among the shapes of each of its moments the one that corresponds to it. The one determinateness of religion overlaps all aspects of its actual existence and stamps them all with its common character.

681. In this way, the shapes which have thus far come on the scene are now ordered differently from the way they appeared in their own series. A few short remarks about this are necessary before we go any further. 367 – In the series which was under examination, each moment, going deeper and deeper into itself, formed itself into a whole with its own distinctive principle, and cognition was the depth, or the spirit, within which the moments, which have no stable existence for themselves, had their substance. However, from this point on, this substance has stepped out [into view]; this substance is the depth of spirit certain of itself, which does not allow the singular principle to isolate itself and to make itself into a whole within itself. Rather, collecting all these moments within itself and holding them all together, this substance advances within this total wealth of its actual spirit, and all of its particular moments communally take into themselves and receive into themselves the same determinateness of the whole. – This self-certain spirit and its movement are their genuine actuality and the being-in-and-for-itself which corresponds to each single one. – However much, therefore, one of the previous series in its forward movement through the nodes [of the whole series] marked a regression within the series but then again continued out of those regressions in a single longitude,⁷ still henceforth, it is, as it were, broken at these nodes, these universal moments, and it falls apart into many lines, which, gathered together into one coil, at the same time symmetrically unite themselves so that the same differences, within which each moment itself gave itself a shape, all meet together. – In addition, it is clear from the entire exposition as to how this co-ordination of the general directions represented here is to be understood; it is equally clear that it would be superfluous to remark that these differences are essentially to be taken only as moments and not as parts of the process of coming-to-be. In actual spirit, they are attributes of its substance, but in religion, they are instead only predicates of the subject. – Likewise, in themselves or for us, all forms are indeed both contained within spirit and within each spirit. However, what is solely at issue in spirit's actuality per se has to do with the specific determinateness which is there for spirit within its consciousness, or the determinateness in which spirit expresses its own self, or in which shape spirit knows its essence.

682. The difference which was made between actual spirit and the spirit that knows itself as spirit, or between itself as consciousness and as self-consciousness, is sublated within the spirit that knows itself according to its truth; its consciousness and its self-consciousness have counter-balanced each other. However, as religion is here initially immediate, this difference has not yet returned into spirit. It is only the concept of religion which is posited. In the concept, the essence is self-consciousness, which, to itself, is all truth and which contains all reality within that truth. As consciousness, this self-consciousness has itself for its object; spirit, knowing itself only immediately, is, to itself, therefore spirit in the form of immediacy, and the determinateness of the shape in which it appears to itself is that of being. This being is indeed suffused⁸ neither with sensation nor with 368diverse matter, nor with any other set of one-sided moments, purposes, and determinations; rather, it is to be suffused with spirit itself, and it is to know itself as all truth and actuality. In this way, this suffusing, fulfillment⁹ is not the same as its shape, and spirit as essence is not the same as its consciousness. Spirit is initially actual as absolute spirit, while, to itself, just as it is in the certainty of itself, so is it also in its truth, or, while the extremes into which spirit as consciousness partitions itself are, for one another, in the shape of spirit. The shape adopted by spirit as the object of its consciousness remains suffused with the certainty of spirit just as it remains suffused with its substance, and by dint of this content what disappears is the descent of the object into pure objectivity, into the form of the negativity of self-consciousness. The immediate unity of spirit with itself is the fundament, or pure consciousness, internal to which consciousness comes undone. In this way, enclosed within its pure self-consciousness, spirit is not in religion as the creator of a nature per se. Rather, what it brings out in this movement are its shapes as spirits, which together constitute the completeness of its appearance, and this movement itself is the coming-to-be of its complete actuality through its singular aspects, or through its incomplete actualities.

683. The first actuality of spirit is the concept of religion itself, or religion as immediate and thus as natural religion; within it, spirit knows itself as its object in a natural, or immediate shape. However, the second actuality is necessarily that of spirit knowing itself in the shape of sublated naturalness, or the naturalness of the self. This is therefore religion as art, for the shape elevates itself into the form of the self through the engendering of consciousness, the result of which is that this consciousness intuits in its object its own doing, or the self. Finally, the third actuality sublates the one-sidedness of the first two; the self is an immediate self just as much as immediacy is the self. However much in the first case, spirit is in the form of consciousness and in the second in the form of self-consciousness, still in the third case, it is in the form of the unity of both. It has the shape of being-in-and-for-itself, and while it is therefore represented as it is in and for itself, this is the revealed religion. However, although spirit indeed arrives at its true shape in revealed religion, the very shape itself and the representational thought¹⁰ of it are still the aspect which has not been overcome. Spirit must pass over from that aspect into the concept in order to fully dissolve the form of objectivity in the concept, the concept which likewise includes its opposite within itself. At that point, spirit has grasped the concept of itself as we have just grasped it, and its shape, or the element of its existence, is, because it is the concept, spirit itself.

A. Natural Religion369

684. Spirit knowing spirit is consciousness of itself, and it is, to itself, in the form of the objective; it is – and is at the same time being-for-itself. It is for itself, it is the aspect of self-consciousness, and, indeed, it is so in contrast to the aspect of its consciousness, or of its relating-itself-to-itself-as-object. In its consciousness, there is the opposition and, as a result, there is the determinateness of the shape in which it appears to itself and knows itself. It is this determinateness which is alone at issue in the examination of religion, for its unshaped essence, or its pure concept, has already emerged. However, the difference between consciousness and self-consciousness falls at the same time within the latter. The shape of religion does not contain the existence of spirit, neither as a free-standing nature apart from thought, nor as a free-standing thought apart from existence; rather, the shape of religion is both that of existence contained within thought and that of a thinking which, to itself, exists there.¹¹ – It is according to the determinateness of this shape in which spirit knows itself that one religion differentiates itself from another; yet it is to be noted at the same time that the exhibition of this, namely, its knowing of itself according to this singular determinateness, does not in fact exhaust the whole of an actual religion. The series of different religions, which will result from this, will again only exhibit the different aspects of a single religion, indeed of each religion. Moreover, the representational thoughts¹² which seem to mark off one actual religion from another appear in each and every one of them. Yet, at the same time, the diversity must also be regarded as a diversity of religion. While spirit is situated within the difference of its consciousness and its self-consciousness, the movement has the goal of sublating this basic difference and of giving the form of self-consciousness to the shape which is the object of consciousness. However, this difference is not already sublated as a result of the shapes which that consciousness contains also having the moments of the self in themselves and God being represented as self-consciousness. The represented self is not the actual self. For it, like every other more precise determination of the shape, to belong in truth to this shape, then in part it must be placed into this shape by self-consciousness and in part the lower determination must show itself to be both sublated and to be conceptually comprehended¹³ by the higher. For what is represented only ceases to be something represented, ceases to be alien to spirit's knowing, when the self has engendered it and when it therefore both intuits the determination of the object as its own determination and, in doing so, intuits itself within that object. – At the same time and through this activity, the more ignoble determination has vanished, for the doing is 370the negative which is carried out at the expense of an other. In as much as that more ignoble determination is still to be found, it has withdrawn into inessentiality just as, in contrast, in those cases where the more ignoble determination still predominates, the higher determination itself is also to be found, and one determination void of self¹⁴ has its place alongside all the others. Hence, however much the various representational thoughts¹⁵ internal to a singular religion do indeed display the whole movement of its forms, still the character of each of those representations is determined by the particular unity of consciousness and self-consciousness, which is to say, because the latter has thereby grasped within itself the determination of the object of the former and has, through its own doing, completely appropriated that determination, and because it knows it as the essential determination with regard to the others. – The truth of faith in a determination of the religious spirit shows itself therein, namely, that the actual spirit is constituted in the same way as the shape in which spirit intuits itself in the religion – in the way, for example, that the incarnation of God, which is to be found in Oriental¹⁶ religion, has no truth because its actual spirit lacks that reconciliation. – This is not the place to turn back from the totality of determinations to the individual determinations and to show in what shape the completeness of all the others is contained within both itself and its particular religion. The higher form, when placed back under a more ignoble one, is deprived of its meaning for self-conscious spirit; it only superficially belongs to spirit and its representational thought.¹⁷ It is to be examined within its own distinctive meaning only where it is the principle of this particular religion and where it proves its worth through its actual spirit.

a. The Luminous Essence

685. Spirit, as the essence that is self-consciousness – or as the self-conscious essence, which is all truth and knows all actuality as itself – is, in contrast to the reality which it gives itself in the movement of its consciousness, initially only its concept, and this concept, in contrast to the daytime of the development, is the night of its essence and, in contrast to the existence of its moments as self-sufficient shapes, it is the creative secret of its birth. This secret has its revelation within itself, for existence has its necessity in this concept because this concept is spirit knowing itself and thus has within its essence the moment of being consciousness and of representing itself objectively. – It is the pure 371I, which in its relinquishing¹⁸ has the certainty of itself in itself as the universal object, or this object is for the I the permeation of all thinking and all actuality.

686. In the first, immediate estrangement of self-knowing absolute spirit, its shape has the determination that corresponds to immediate consciousness, or to sensuous-certainty. It intuits itself in the form of being, but not that of the spiritless being suffused with contingent determinations of sensation; rather, it is the being suffused with spirit. It likewise includes within itself the form which was to be found in immediate self-consciousness, the form of the master in contrast to the self-consciousness of spirit retreating from its object. – This being suffused with the concept of spirit, is therefore the shape of the simple relation of spirit to itself, or the shape of shapelessness. In virtue of this determination, this shape is the pure, all-containing, luminous essence of the sunrise, which suffuses everything and which preserves itself in its formless substantiality. Its otherness is the equally simple negative, darkness; the movements of its own self-relinquishing, its creations in the unresisting elements of its otherness, are all effusions of light, and in their simplicity they are at the same time both its coming-to-be-for-itself and its return out of its existence, or the shapes of consuming streams of fire. The difference that it gives itself no doubt thrives and proliferates in the substance of existence, and it shapes itself into the forms of nature; however, the essential simplicity of its thinking wanders here and there without any constancy, sometimes enlarging its boundaries to a measureless extent, and then, in its own sublimity, it brings its own beauty, which it has heightened into splendor, into dissolution.

687. The content, which this pure being develops, or its perceiving, is thus an essenceless byplay in this substance, which only rises without setting into itself, without becoming a subject and securing its differences through the self. Its determinations are only attributes that do not flourish into self-sufficiency; rather, they remain only names of the many-named One. This One is clothed with the manifold forces of existence and with the shapes of actuality as if they were selfless ornaments. They are only heralds of its power, and they lack any will of their own, any intuitions of its glory, and any voices in its praise.

688. However, this life in revel must determine itself into being-for-itself and must give stable existence to its vanishing shapes. Immediate being, in which it places itself over and against its consciousness, is itself the negative power that dissolves its differences. It is therefore in truth the self, and spirit therefore passes over into it in order to know itself in the form of the self. Pure light 372scatters its simplicity as an infinity of forms and exhibits itself as a sacrifice to being-for-itself so that the singular individual may wed himself to the stable existence in its substance.

b. Plants and Animals

689. Self-conscious spirit, which has taken an inward turn from out of the shapeless essence, or which has elevated its immediacy to that of the self as such, determines its simplicity as a manifoldness of being-for-itself and is the religion of spiritual perception, within which it falls apart into an innumerable plurality of weaker and stronger, richer and poorer spirits. This pantheism, which is initially the motionless stable existence of these spiritual atoms, becomes a hostile movement within itself. The innocence of the flower religion, which is only a representation of the self void of any self, passes over into the seriousness of warring life, into the guilt of animal religion; the motionless being and the impotence of intuiting individuality passes over into destructive being-for-itself. – It does not help to have taken the death of abstraction away from the things of perception and to have elevated them into the essence of spiritual perception; the ensouling of this spiritual realm has that death through the determinateness and the negativity in it which make it encroach on the innocent indifference of that religion. It is through this determinateness and negativity that the dispersal into the manifoldness of the motionless shapes of plants becomes a hostile movement in which the hatred of their being-for-itself gradually wears itself out. – The actual self-consciousness within this dispersed spirit is a multitude of thinned-out and unsociable spirits of different peoples, who, in their hatred, battle with each other to the death and become conscious of determinate shapes of animals as their essence, for they themselves are nothing more than animal spirits, segregating themselves from their conscious animal life, bereft of universality.

690. However, in this hatred, the determinateness of purely negative being-for-itself gradually wears itself out, and through this movement of the concept, spirit enters into another shape. The sublated being-for-itself is the form of the object, a form which is brought forth by the self, or which is the engendered self instead wearing itself out, i.e., the self as it becomes a thing. Hence, the laborer retains the upper hand over these animal spirits which are only tearing each other apart, the very laborer whose doing is not only negative but rather is a steady hand and is positive. Therefore, the consciousness of spirit is henceforth 373the movement that is above and beyond immediate being-in-itself as well as abstract being-for-itself. While the in-itself is, through opposition, debased into a determinateness, it is no longer absolute spirit's own form; rather, the in-itself is an actuality which finds its consciousness opposed to itself as a common existence, and it then sublates that actuality; it is likewise not only this sublating consciousness but also its representation, which engenders being-for-itself laid out in the form of an object. Nonetheless, this bringing forth is not yet a consummate activity; rather, it is a conditioned activity and is the forming of what is present at hand.

c. The Artisan

691. Spirit therefore here appears as the artisan, and his doing, whereby he brings forth himself as object, although not yet having taken hold of the thought of himself, is an instinctive kind of working, much like bees building their cells.

692. The first form, because it is the immediate one, is the abstract form of the understanding, and the work is not yet in its own self suffused by spirit. The crystals of the pyramids and of the obelisks, simple combinations of straight lines with even surfaces and equal relations of parts in which the incommensurability of roundness is abolished, are the works of this artisan of rigorous form. On account of the bare intelligibility of the form, the form is not its meaning in its own self, not the spiritual self. Those works therefore either only receive spirit into themselves as an alien, departed spirit which has abandoned its living permeation with actuality, and which, being itself dead, comes to reside in these lifeless crystals: – Or they relate themselves externally to spirit as something which is there¹⁹ externally and not as spirit itself – to spirit as the light rising in the east, which casts its meaning on them.

693. The separation from which the laboring spirit originates, the separation between being-in-itself, which becomes the material which it processes, and being-for-itself, which is the aspect of the laboring self-consciousness, has, to itself, become objective in its work. Its further endeavor has to set itself to sublating this separation of soul and body, to clothing and shaping the soul in its own self and ensouling the body. Both aspects, while they are brought closer to each other, thereby retain with regard to each other the determinateness of represented spirit and its enveloping 374shell; spirit's oneness with itself contains this opposition of singular individuality and universality. While in its aspects the work brings itself closer to itself, something else happens at the same time, namely, the work comes closer to the laboring self-consciousness, and, in the work, the latter arrives at knowing itself as it is in and for itself. However, in this way the work initially only constitutes the abstract aspect of the activity of spirit, which does not yet know its content within itself; rather, it knows this content in its work, which is a thing. The artisan himself, the whole spirit, has not yet appeared; rather, the artisan is still the inner, hidden essence, which as a whole is present only as broken apart into the active self-consciousness and the object it has brought out.

694. Therefore, the surrounding habitation, or the external reality, which has initially been elevated only to the abstract form of the understanding, is worked up by the artisan into a more ensouled form. The artisan employs plant life for this purpose, which, unlike the way it had been in that previous, powerless pantheism, is itself no longer holy. Instead, it is taken up by the artisan, who grasps himself as the essence existing-for-itself, as something to be used, and he repositions it back to being an external aspect, an ornament. However, it is not put to such use without alteration; at the same time, the laborer of that self-conscious form destroys the transience of this life which the immediate existence of this life has in itself, and he brings its organic forms nearer to the more rigorous and universal forms of thought. The organic form, which, if left to itself, thrives in its particularity, is on the one hand subjugated by the form of thought, and, on the other hand, the artisan elevates these straight-lined and level shapes into a more ensouled curvature that becomes the root of free architecture.

695. This dwelling, the aspect of the universal element, or the aspect of the inorganic nature of spirit, also now includes within itself a shape of singular individuality that brings nearer to actuality the spirit which had formerly been either external or internal to existence but which had been isolated from existence. By doing so, he makes the work more equal to active self-consciousness. The worker at first resorts to the form of being-for-itself per se, to the shapes of animal life. He proves that he is no longer immediately conscious of himself in animal life by constituting himself as the productive force versus animal life and, in that life, by knowing himself as his own work. The result is that the animal shape is at the same time both sublated and becomes the hieroglyph of another meaning, the hieroglyph of thought. Hence, this shape is also no longer solely and entirely used by the worker; rather, it becomes blended with the shape of thought, with the human shape. Still, the work lacks the shape and existence in which the self exists as self. – It also still lacks in its own self the pronouncement of itself as locking within itself an inner meaning; it lacks language, the element in which 375the diffusing sense itself is present. Hence, the work, even when it is wholly purified of what is animalistic and even when it bears in it the shape of self-consciousness alone, is still the soundless shape that needs the rays of the rising sun in order to have a sound, which, although brought out by the light, is also only sound and not language, and which only points to an external self, not to the inner self.

696. Standing over and against this external self is the other shape, which announces that it has in it an inner. Nature, returning back into its essence, deposes its living, isolating, self-disorienting manifoldness in all its movement, and it lowers it into an inessential casing which is the covering of the inner. This inner is at first still the simple darkness, the unmoved, the black formless stone.

697. Both illustrations contain inwardness and existence – the two moments of spirit; and both illustrations contain both moments at the same time in opposed relationships, the self as inner as well as outer. Both are to be united. – The soul of the humanly formed statuary column does not yet come out of the inner, is not yet language, the existence that is inner in its own self– and the inner of multiform existence is still without sound, still undifferentiated within itself, still separated from its outer to which all differences belong. – The artisan thus combines both of them in his blending of the natural and self-conscious shapes. These ambiguous essences are riddles to themselves, are the conscious wrestling with the unconscious, the simple inner with the multiply shaped outer, the darkness of thought paired with the clarity of expression. Now these ambiguous essences burst out into the language of a deeper, but scarcely comprehensible, wisdom.

698. Within this work, instinctual labor ceases, namely, the labor which, in opposition to self-consciousness, brought forth the unconscious work, for within it, the activity of the artisan, which constitutes self-consciousness, encounters an equally self-conscious, self-expressing inner. Within that activity, the artisan has worked his way up to the estrangement of his consciousness, an estrangement in which spirit encounters spirit. In this unity of self-conscious spirit with itself, to the extent that it is, to spirit, the shape and object of its consciousness, its blending with the unconscious mode of the immediate natural shapes purify themselves. These monstrosities in shape, speech, and deed dissolve into a spiritual shape – into an outer which has taken an inward turn – and into an inner that in itself expresses itself from out of itself, is a thought that begets itself, preserves the shape appropriate to itself, and is itself a lucid existence. Spirit is artist.

B. The Art-Religion376

699. Spirit has elevated its shape, in which it is for its consciousness, into the form of consciousness itself, and it brings forth such a shape to itself. The artisan has abandoned the synthetic labor, the mixing of the alien forms of thought and the natural; while the shape has won the form of self-conscious activity, he has become a spiritual laborer.

700. If we then ask which spirit is the actual spirit that has its consciousness of its absolute essence in the art-religion, it turns out that it is the ethical, or the true spirit. The ethical spirit is not only the universal substance of all singular individuals; rather, while for actual consciousness it has the shape of consciousness, what this amounts to is that, as it itself has individualization, it is known by those singular individuals as their own essence and work. For them, it is neither the luminous essence in whose unity the being-for-itself of self-consciousness is contained only negatively, only transitorily, and in which self-consciousness intuits the lord and master of its actuality, nor is it the restless way that self-hating peoples consume themselves, nor is it the subjection of those peoples to castes, which together constitute the semblance of the organization of a consummated whole but for which the universal freedom of individuals is missing. Rather, it is a free people, within whom the ethos²⁰ constitutes the substance of each individual, a substance whose actuality and existence each and every singular individual knows to be his own will and deed.

701. However, the religion of ethical spirit is its elevation above its actuality; it is the return from its truth into the pure knowing of itself. While an ethical people lives in immediate unity with its substance and does not have the principle of the pure singular individuality of self-consciousness in themselves, their religion initially comes on the scene in its consummation in its divorce from its stable existence. This is so because the actuality of the ethical substance rests in part on its motionless unchangeableness as opposed to the absolute movement of self-consciousness, and it is thus based on this self-consciousness not yet having taken the inward turn from out of its motionless ethos and its firm trust in that ethos. In part, that actuality rests on its organization into a plurality of rights and duties, as well as the actuality being distributed into the mass of the estates²¹ and various particular doings all of which collaborate to form the whole – hence it rests on the singular individual's contentedness with the limitation of his existence and with his not yet having grasped the unbounded thought of his free self. However, that immediate motionless trust in the substance recedes back 377into self-trust and self-certainty, and the diversity of rights and duties, as well as the bounded act, is the same dialectical movement of the ethical as it is of the plurality of things and their determinations – a movement which only finds its rest and cohesion in the simplicity of spirit certain of itself. The consummation of ethical life in free self-consciousness and the fate of the ethical world is therefore the individuality that has taken the inward turn, the absolute levity of ethical spirit which has dissolved within itself all of the fixed differences of its stable existence and the social estates of its own organic structure, and, now possessed of self-certainty, has arrived at a boundless joyfulness and the freest enjoyment of itself. This simple certainty of spirit within itself has a double meaning, that of motionless stable existence and solid truth, as well as that of absolute unrest and the passing of ethical life. However, it turns around into the latter, for the truth of ethical spirit is only this substantial essence and trust, within which the self does not know itself as free singular individuality, and which thus in this inwardness, or within the self's coming to be free, meets its downfall. While its trust is therefore broken, and while the substance of the people is therefore shattered, spirit, which was the mediating middle of the two unstably existing extremes, henceforth stands out as the extreme of self-consciousness grasping itself as essence. This is spirit certain within itself, which mourns over the loss of its world, and now, from out of the purity of the self, engenders its own essence, elevated above actuality.

702. In such epochs, absolute art comes on the scene; prior to this, art is instinctual labor, which, immersed in existence, works itself both out of it and into it; it does not have its substance in a free ethical life and thus the laboring self also does not have free spiritual activity. Later, spirit goes beyond art in order to gain a higher portrayal of itself – namely, not only that of the substance born from the self, but to be this self as an object in its presentation. It is not only to give birth to itself from its concept; it is to have its concept as its shape so that the concept and the created work of art mutually know each other as one and the same.

703. While ethical substance has thus withdrawn from its existence into its pure self-consciousness, this withdrawal is the aspect of the concept, or the activity with which spirit engenders itself as object. This aspect is pure form because the singular individual in ethical obedience and service has thereby worked off every non-conscious existence and every fixed determination just as the substance itself has become this fluid essence. This form is the night in which substance was betrayed and when it made itself into a subject. It is from out of this night of pure certainty of itself that the ethical spirit is resurrected as a shape freed from nature and its immediate existence.

704.378 The existence of the pure concept into which spirit has fled from its body is an individual that spirit elects to be the vessel for its anguish. Spirit is in this individual as his universal and as his power, from which he suffers violence – as his pathos, thanks to which his self-consciousness lost its freedom. However, that positive power of universality is subjugated by the pure self of the individual as the negative power. This pure activity, aware of its captive force, wrestles with the shapeless essence. Becoming its master, this negative activity has turned its pathos into its own material and has given itself its content, and this unity emerges as a work, as the universal spirit both individualized and represented.

a. The Abstract Work of Art

705. The first work of art exists as immediate, abstract, and singular. For its own part, it has to move itself from this immediate and objective mode into the contrary mode of self-consciousness, just as, on the other hand, self-consciousness, which is for itself in the cult, aims at sublating the difference which it initially gives itself contrary to its own spirit, and it thereby engenders a work of art enlivening itself in its own self.

706. The first manner in which the artistic spirit keeps its shape and its active consciousness at furthest remove from each other is the immediate shape, so that the shape is there²² as a thing as such. – In itself, the shape falls apart into the difference between singular individuality, which has the shape of the self in it, and universality, which, with reference to the shape, exhibits the inorganic essence as its environs and dwelling. Through the elevation of the whole into the pure concept, this shape attains its pure form, which belongs to spirit. It is neither the crystal, which belonged to the understanding and which houses the dead or which is illuminated by the soul external to it, nor is it the mingling of the forms of nature and of thought initially arising out of plants, whose activity is in here still an imitation. Rather, the concept strips off the root, branches, and leaves still clinging to those forms and purifies them into structures in which the crystal's straight lines and surfaces are elevated into incommensurable relationships in such a way that the ensouling of the organic is incorporated into the abstract form of understanding and, at the same time, its essence – incommensurability – is preserved for the understanding.

707. However, the indwelling god is the black stone drawn out of its animal encasing which is penetrated with the light of consciousness. The 379human shape strips off the animal shape with which it was intermingled. For the god, the animal is only a contingent disguise; the animal walks alongside its true shape and no longer counts for itself as valid. Its meaning has degenerated into that of something other, into a mere sign. As a result, the shape of the god in its own self strips off even the neediness of the natural conditions of animal existence, and it hints at those internal preparations of organic life which are merged into its surface and which belong only to this surface. – However, the essence of the god is the unity of the universal existence of nature and of self-conscious spirit, which, in its actuality, appears as confronting nature. At the same time, being at first a singular shape, its existence is one of the elements of nature just as its self-conscious actuality is a singular spirit of a people. However, in this unity, the former is the element which is reflected into spirit; it is nature transfigured by thought and united with self-conscious life. For that reason, the shape of the gods has its natural element as that which is sublated, as an obscure memory within itself. The desolated essence and convoluted strife among the free-standing, existing elements, the unethical realm of the Titans, is conquered and banished to the fringes of the actuality that has become clear to itself, to the muddy boundaries of the becalmed world which is to be found in spirit. These ancient gods, in which the luminous essence mates with the darkness and particularizes itself initially as heaven, earth, the ocean, the sun, the blind typhonic fire of the earth, etc., are replaced with shapes which in themselves only have the dark reminiscent echo of those earlier Titans and which are no longer natural beings²³ but rather the clear ethical spirits of self-conscious peoples.

708. This simple shape has thus eliminated in itself the unrest of infinite isolation – the unrest of its own as well as that of the element of nature, which only conducts itself necessarily as the universal essence, but which in its existence and in its movement conducts itself contingently. It is also the unrest of a people, which, dispersed into the doings belonging to particular social estates and into individual points of self-consciousness, has an existence composed of manifold meanings and doings – and has gathered itself up into a motionless individuality. Hence, the moment of unrest stands over and against this individuality – the essence over and against self-consciousness, which, as the birthplace of that unrest, reserves nothing for itself other than to be pure activity. The artist gave entirely to his works what belonged to the substance, but in his own works he gave no actuality to himself as a determinate individuality; he could as a result only confer perfection on the work by relinquishing himself²⁴ of his particularity, disembodying himself and rising to the abstraction of a pure doing. – In this first immediate creation, the work and his self-conscious activity that were separated have not yet been reunified. The work is thus not what is actually ensouled; rather, it is a 380whole only in combination with its coming-to-be. What is common to works of art, namely, that a work of art is created in consciousness and is made by human hands, is the moment of the concept existing as concept, which stands over and against the work. And if this concept, taken as the artist or the spectator, is unselfish enough to declare the work of art to be in its own self absolutely ensouled, and if he forgets himself doing or viewing [the work], then in opposition to this, the concept of spirit must be firmly kept in our grasp; it is the concept which cannot dispense with the moment of being conscious of itself. But this moment stands over and against the work because the concept in this, its first estrangement, gives the two aspects, in regard to and in opposition with each other, their abstract determinations of doings and thing-beings.²⁵ Their return into the unity from which they originated has not yet come about.

709. In his work the artist therefore experiences that he has brought forth no essence equal to himself. To be sure, there is a consciousness which comes back to him from his work, in the sense that an admiring multitude honors it as the spirit which is their essence. However, this ensouling, as it only returns his self-consciousness to him as admiration, is really a confession to the artist that the ensouled work is not equal to him. While his work comes back to him in general as enthusiasm, he does not therein find the ache of his own cultural formation and creation, the strenuousness of his work. The multitude may also still render judgment on the work, or they may bring it offerings, or, in whatever way they can, endow it with their own consciousness – if they, in their acquaintance with the work, place themselves above it, then the artist knows how much greater his deed is than their understanding and talk. If they place themselves beneath it and recognize in it an essence which dominates them, he knows himself as the master craftsman²⁶ of that essence.

710. The work of art thus demands another element of its existence; it demands that the god have another way of coming to light other than that in which, in the depths of his creative night, the god falls down into the very opposite, into externality, into the determination of a thing lacking self-consciousness. This higher element is language – an existence which is immediately self-conscious existence.²⁷ Just as the singular individual self-consciousness is there²⁸ in language, it likewise immediately is there as a universal contagion. Complete particularization of being-for-itself is at the same time the fluidity and the universally communicated unity of the multiple selves; it is the soul existing as soul. The god which therefore has language as an element of his shape is the work of art ensouled in its own self, which immediately has pure activity in its existence, which, as a thing, had existed over and against it.²⁹ Or, self-consciousness remains immediately at one with itself³⁰ in its essence becoming objective. As thus being at one with itself³¹ within its essence, it is pure thinking, or it is the devotion whose inwardness at the same time has existence in the hymn. The hymn contains within itself the singular individuality of self-consciousness, and, in being heard, this singular individuality is there at the same time as universal singular individuality. Devotion, kindled in every individual, is the spiritual stream 381which in the multiplicity of self-consciousnesses is conscious of itself as the same doing in each and all, and as simple being. As this universal self-consciousness of each and all, spirit has in one unity its pure inwardness as well as the being for others and the being-for-itself of the singular individuals.

711. This language is distinguished from another language of the god, which is not that of universal self-consciousness. The oracle, both in the case of the god of the art-religion as well as those of the preceding religions, is the necessarily first language of the god, for it lies within the god's concept that the god is the essence of nature as well as spirit and thus does not have only natural but also spiritual existence as well. To the extent that as this moment first lies in the god's concept and is not yet realized in religion, language is for religious self-consciousness the language of an alien self-consciousness. The self-consciousness which still remains alien to its own religious community³²is not yet there in the way its concept requires. The self is the simple and, as a result, utterly universal being-for-itself, but that self, which is separated from the self-consciousness of the religious community, is only at first a singular individual self. – The content of this, its own singular language, results from the universal determinateness within which absolute spirit as such is posited in its religion. – The universal spirit of the sunrise, which does not yet have its existence particularized, pronounces the essence in the equally simple and universal propositions whose substantial content is sublime in its simple truth, but which, on account of this universality, appears at the same time trivial to the self-consciousness which is pressing further in its cultural formation.

712. The further cultured self, which raises itself to being-for-itself, stands above the pure pathos of substance, is the master craftsman³³ above the objectivity of the rising sun of the luminous essence, and knows that simplicity of truth, as existing-in-itself, which does not possess the form of contingent existence through an alien language, but instead is as the sure and unwritten law of the gods, a law which lives eternally, and of which nobody knows whence it came. – Just as the universal truth revealed by the luminous essence has here returned into the inner, or the lower, and it has thereby been absolved from the form of contingent appearance, so in contrast in the art-religion, because the shape of the god has assumed consciousness and therewith singular individuality per se, the god's own language, which is the spirit of an ethical people, is the oracle, who knows the particular affairs of the people and who makes known [to them] what is useful for those affairs. However, the universal truths, because they are known as existing-in-themselves, vindicate knowingly thinking,³⁴ and the language of the universal truths is no longer alien but is its very own. Just as that wise man of antiquity 382searched within his own thinking for what was supposed to be good and beautiful but then left it to his daemon to know about the petty contingent content of what he wanted to know, for example, whether it was good for him to keep company with this or that person, or good for one of his acquaintances to go on a journey, and other such insignificant things, so too the universal consciousness takes its knowing about the contingent from birds or trees or the fermenting earth, whose vapor takes away from self-consciousness all its level-headedness. For what is contingent is the impulsive, the alien, and ethical consciousness thus also lets itself, for example, with a roll of the dice, determine itself in an impulsive and alien manner concerning these things. However much the singular individual through his intellect determines himself and however much he selects what is advantageous for him through deliberation, still it is the determinateness of his particular character which is the ground of this self-determination; this determinateness is itself contingent, and that knowing supplied by his intellect about what is advantageous for the singular individual is therefore precisely the same kind of knowing as that gained from the oracle or the casting of lots. The only difference is that the person who queries the oracle or who casts lots thereby expresses the ethical disposition of indifference towards the contingent, whereas, in contrast, the former person treats what is in itself contingent as an essential interest of his thinking and knowing. However, what is higher than both is to make deliberation into the oracle itself for a contingent doing; it is also to know that this deliberate action itself is contingent on account of its relation to the particular and to what is advantageousness.

713. The true self-conscious existence, which is spirit in the language that is not that of an alien and thus accidental, non-universal self-consciousness, is itself the work of art which we previously saw. The work of art stands in contrast to the thing-like character of the statuary column. Just as the statuary column is motionless existence, language is disappearing existence; just as with the statuary column, objectivity is set free and lacks its own immediate self, by contrast, in language, objectivity remains too much embedded into the self, reaches too meager a shape, and, like time, it is, as it is there, no longer immediately there.

714. The movement of both sides constitutes the cult. In that movement, the divine shape which moved in the purely sentient elements of self-consciousness and the divine shape which was motionless in the elements of thinghood have each mutually abandoned their distinctive determination, and the unity, which is the concept of their essence, comes into existence. In the cult, the self gives itself the consciousness of the divine essence descending from out of its otherworldliness towards it, and this divine essence, which previously was not actual and is only objective, as a result receives the genuine actuality of self-consciousness.

715. This concept of the cult is in itself already contained and is present in the flow of the hymnal song. This hymnal devotion is the immediate and pure 383satisfaction of the self through itself and within itself. It is the purified soul, which, in this purity is immediately only essence and is at one with the essence. On account of its abstraction, the soul is not consciousness distinguishing its object from itself; it is thus only the night of its existence and the site prepared for its shape. The abstract cult consequently elevates the self up to the point where it is to be this pure divine element. The soul consciously completes this purification; nonetheless, the soul is not yet the self that has descended into its depths and knows itself to be evil; rather it is an existent self, a soul that cleanses its externality by washing it, which dons white clothing, and whose inwardness passes through the imagined³⁵ path of labor, punishment, and reward, or through the very path itself of cultural formation which empties itself of its particularity, the very path by which it arrives at the dwellings and the community of the blessed.

716. This cult is only at first a secret completion, i.e., is only a represented³⁶ completion and not an actual one; it must be actual action, for an non-actual action is self-contradictory. Authentic consciousness elevates itself as a result into its pure self-consciousness. The essence has within itself the significance of a free object, and through the actual cult, the object reverts back into the self – and to the extent that the object has in pure consciousness the significance of the pure essence dwelling in an other-worldly realm beyond actuality, this essence descends through this mediation from its universality into singular individuality, and it thus merges itself with actuality.

717. How both sides enter into action is determined in the following way. For the self-conscious aspect, to the extent that it is actual consciousness, the essence exhibits itself as actual nature; on the one hand, nature belongs to the essence as its possession and property, and it counts as existence not existing-in-itself. – On the other hand, nature is essence's own immediate actuality and singular individuality, which essence just as well regards as non-essence and as sublated. At the same time, for its pure consciousness, that external nature signifies the opposite, namely, the essence existing-in-itself, with regard to which the self sacrifices its inessentiality just as, conversely, the inessential aspect of nature sacrifices itself. As a result, the action is a spiritual movement because it is this double-sidedness, that is, it is to sublate the abstraction of essence just as devotion determines the object, and it is the actual just as it is the actor who determines the object and himself, raising both up to and into universality.

718. The action of the cult itself thus begins with the pure sacrificial dedication of a possession, which the owner, without any apparent advantage to himself, pours out or 384lets rise up in smoke. Standing before the essence of his pure consciousness, he thereby renounces all possession and right of property and consumption, renounces personality and the reversion of his doing into his self, and instead reflects the action off into the universal, or into the essence, rather than into himself. – But conversely the existing essence equally perishes therein. The animal offered up is the sign of a god; the fruits consumed are the living Ceres and Bacchus themselves – in the former, the powers of the higher law, which have blood and actual life, die, but in the latter, what perishes are the powers of the lower law, which bloodlessly are in possession of the secret, cunning power. – The sacrifice of the divine substance, insofar as it is a doing, belongs to the side of self-consciousness, and for this actual doing to be possible, the essence must have already in itself sacrificed itself. It has therein done this in that it has given itself existence and made itself into a singular animal and into the fruit of the earth. This renunciation, which the essence has already in itself completed, the acting self presents in existence and for its consciousness, and it replaces that former immediate actuality with the higher actuality, namely, that of himself. The unity which has arisen, which is the result of sublated singular individuality and of the separation of both sides, is not that of only negative fate; rather, it has a positive meaning. What was sacrificed to the abstract essence of the netherworld is just given away, and what that meant was that the reflection of possession and being-for-itself into the universal is differentiated from the self as such. However, at the same time this is only a trifling part, and the other act of sacrifice is only the destruction of what cannot be used and is instead the preparation of the offering for a meal, the feast that cheats the action out of its negative significance. The person making the offering reserves for his consumption the greatest share from that first offering and what is useful from the latter offering. This consumption is the negative power that sublates the essence as well as singular individuality, and this consumption is at the same time the positive actuality in which the objective existence of the essence is transformed into self-conscious existence, and the self has consciousness of its unity with the essence.

719. Incidentally, this cult is indeed an actual action, but its significance lies for the most part only in devotion. What belongs to this devotion is not objectively brought out, just as the result in consumption robs itself of its existence. As a result, the cult goes further and, as a result, initially replaces this defect by giving its devotion an objective stable existence, as the cult is the common work, or the work of each and every singular individual, which produces a dwelling and adornment for the honor of the god. – As a result, the objectivity of the statuary column is in part sublated, for it is through this consecration of his gifts and his labors that the laborer disposes the god to favor him, and he intuits 385his self as belonging to the god. In part, this doing is also not the artist's singular labor, but rather this particularity is dissolved in universality. However, it is not only the honor of the god which comes about, and the blessing of his favor does not flow only in representational thought³⁷ onto the worker. Rather, the meaning of the work is also the converse of the first meaning, which was that of self-relinquishing and of the honor rendered to that which is alien. The dwellings and halls of the god are for the use of man, the treasures preserved there are his own in times of need; the honor that the god enjoys in his ornamentation is the honor of a magnanimous people rich in the arts. At the festivals, the people equally adorn both their own dwellings and garments as well as their own accomplishments with graceful items. In this manner, they receive from a grateful god a reciprocation for their gifts, and they receive the proofs of his favor, in which the people bound themselves to the god through their labors, not in the hope and then in a belated actuality, but rather in attestation of the god's honor; and in the offering of gifts, the people immediately have the enjoyment of their own wealth and finery.

b. The Living Work of Art

720. The people who approach their god in the cult of the art-religion are an ethical people, who know their state and its actions as the will and accomplishment of their own self. This spirit, confronting this self-conscious people, is thus not the luminous essence, which, being selfless, does not contain the certainty of the singular individual within itself but is instead only their universal essence and the dominating power in which they disappear. What the religious cult of this simple shapeless essence therefore gives back to those who belong to it is generally only that they are the people of their god; the cult secures for them only their stable existence and their simple substance as such, but not their actual self, which is instead repudiated, for they revere their god as empty depth but not as spirit. However, the cult of the art-religion does without that former abstract simplicity of essence, and it thus also does without its depth. But the essence which is immediately at one with the self is in itself spirit and the knowing truth,³⁸ although not yet the known truth, or the truth knowing itself in its own depth. Because here the essence thus has the self in it, its appearance is friendly towards consciousness, and in the cult, this consciousness receives not only the universal authorization of its stable existence but also its self-conscious existence in the cult, 386just as, conversely, the essence does not have the self-less actuality in an outcast people whose substance is only recognized, having only self-less actuality, but rather, it has actuality within the people whose self is recognized³⁹ in its substance.

721. Satisfied in its essence, self-consciousness thus leaves the cult, and the god takes up residence in self-consciousness as its site. This site is for itself the night of substance, or its pure individuality, but is no longer the tension-filled individuality of the artist, which has not yet reconciled itself with its essence, which itself is objectively coming to be. Rather, it is the satisfied night which has its pathos in itself, free of need, because it has returned from out of intuition, from out of the sublated objectivity. – This pathos is for itself the essence of the sunrise, but which has henceforth within itself turned inward and become the sunset; self-consciousness and thereby existence and actuality has its sunset, its downfall, in its own self. – Here it has run its course through the movement of its actualization. Depreciating itself from its pure essentiality into an objective force of nature and into the expressions of this force, it is an existence for the other, for the self by which it is consumed. The silent essence of self-less nature attains in its fruits the level where it, nature, in preparing itself and in being digested, offers itself up to self-like life; it is in its utility, or in its being able to serve as food and drink, that it attains its highest perfection. This is so because in that kind of utility, it has the possibility of a higher existence, and it comes into contact with spiritual existence. – In its metamorphosis, the spirit of the earth has in part developed into a silently powerful substance, and in part into spiritual ferment. There it flourishes as the feminine principle of nurturance, and here as the masculine principle of the self-impelling force of self-conscious existence.

722. In this consumption, that sunrise of the luminous essence is disclosed for what it is; it is the mystery of such consumption. This is so because the mystical is neither the concealment of a secret, nor is it ignorance. Rather, it consists in the self knowing itself to be at one with the essence and the essence therefore being revealed. Only the self is revealed to itself, or what is revealed is revealed only in the immediate certainty of itself. However, it is in such certainty that the simple essence was posited by the cult. As a useful thing, it not only has existence that is seen, felt, smelt, and tasted; it is also the object of desire, and, by actually being consumed, it becomes one with the self and as a result is completely given over to this self and revealed to it. – That which is said to be obvious to reason or to the heart is in fact still secret, for it still lacks the actual certainty of immediate existence, as well as the certainty regarding what is objective and the certainty of consumption, which in religion is not only an unthinkingly immediate certainty but rather at the same time is the certainty of the self which knows itself purely.

723.387 Through the cult what has hereby been revealed to self-conscious spirit within itself is the simple essence, as the movement in part of the essence's departing from its nocturnal concealment upward into consciousness, in part to be its silently nurturing substance, in part as the movement of its likewise disappearing again into the night of the netherworld, into the self, and that of lingering above that netherworld only with silent maternal yearning. – However, the radiant impulse is the multiply named⁴⁰ luminous essence of the sunrise and its reveling life, which, having equally been drained of its abstract being, has at first entered into the objective existence of the fruits of the earth, and then, surrendering itself to self-consciousness, has arrived at its genuine actuality – it now roams about as a throng of madly rapturous women, the unrestrained revel of nature in a self-conscious shape.

724. But what has been betrayed to consciousness is still only absolute spirit, the spirit of this simple essence and not the spirit in its own self as spirit; or, what has been betrayed is only immediate spirit, the spirit of nature. Its self-conscious life is thus only the mystery of bread and wine, of Ceres and Bacchus, not that of the other genuinely higher gods, whose individuality encompasses within itself self-consciousness as such as an essential moment. Spirit as self-conscious spirit has not yet sacrificed itself to it, and the mystery of bread and wine is not yet the mystery of flesh and blood.

725. This unstable revel of the gods must bring itself to rest as an object, and the enthusiasm that did not make it to consciousness must produce a work that confronts it, just as the statuary column previously confronted the enthusiasm of the artist, a work which was indeed perfected, however, not as a lifeless self in its own self but rather as a living self. – One such cult is the festival which man gives in his own honor but which does not yet place into the cult the meaning of the absolute essence, for it is the essence, not yet spirit that is first revealed to it. The essence is revealed to him not as the sort of essence which essentially assumes human shape. However, this cult lays the ground for this revelation, and it lays out its moments one by one. So what is here is the abstract moment of the living embodiment of essence just as formerly there was the unity of both in an unconscious enthusiastic rapture. In place of the statuary column, man thus places himself as the shape educated and elaborated for perfectly free movement, just as the statue is the perfectly free state of motionless being. However much every singular individual knows at least how to play the part of a torchbearer, still one of them stands out from the rest, he who is the shaped movement itself, the smooth elaboration and fluent force of all the members. – He is an ensouled, living work of art, who pairs his beauty with strength, and to whom, as the prize for his power, is accorded the adornment with which the statuary column was honored; moreover, instead of the honor due to the god set in stone, he is accorded the honor of being among his 388people the highest bodily representation of their essence.

726. In the two portrayals that have just come before us, the unity of self-consciousness and spiritual essence are both present. What is still lacking in them is any equilibrium. In bacchanalian enthusiasm, the self is external to itself,⁴¹ but in beautiful embodiment, it is the spiritual essence. That former dullness of consciousness together with its furious stammering must be incorporated into the clear existence of the latter embodiment, and the spiritless clarity of the latter embodiment must be incorporated into the inwardness of the former bacchanalian enthusiasm. The completed element within which inwardness is external just as externality is likewise inward is, again, language; however, it is neither the language of the oracle, which is entirely contingent and singular in its content, nor is it the hymn of feeling sung only in praise of a singular god; nor is it the contentless stammer of the bacchanalian frenzy. Rather, it has attained its clear and universal content. It has attained its clear content, for the artist has worked himself out of his initial, entirely substantial enthusiasm into a definite shape, into his own existence which is permeated and given over in all its emotional stirrings by the self-conscious soul. – It has attained its universal content, for in this festival, which is to the honor of man, the one-sidedness of the statuary columns vanishes, those statues which only contained a single national spirit, a determinate character of divinity. The beautiful fencer is indeed the honor of his particular people, but he is an embodied singular individual in which the comprehensiveness and seriousness of meaning, along with the inner character of the spirit which underlies the particular life, interests, needs, and mores of his people, has met its downfall. In this self-relinquishing into complete embodiment, spirit has cast off the particular impressions and echoes of nature, which, as the actual spirit of the people, it encompassed within itself. Its people thus are, to themselves, no longer conscious of their particularity in that spirit, but rather, are instead conscious of casting off this particularity and of the universality of their human existence.

c. The Spiritual Work of Art

727. The spirits of [different] peoples, which become conscious of the shape of their essence in a particular animal, merge into one spirit; in that way, the particular beautiful spirits of a people combine themselves into one pantheon whose element and abode is language. 389The pure intuition of itself as universal humanity in the actuality of the spirit of a people, has the form that it combines itself with other spirits of a people, with whom it constitutes through nature one nation, combining into a common undertaking, and for this work, it fashions an entire people and thereby an entire heaven. This universality which spirit arrives at in its existence is, though, only this first universality which initially originates from the individuality of ethical life, not yet having overcome its immediacy, not having fashioned one state out of these separate tribes. The ethical life of the actual spirit of a people rests partly on the immediate trust of the singular individuals in the whole of their people, partly in the immediate participation which all, irrespective of differences of estate, take in the resolutions and business of their government. Within the union, initially not that of a lasting order but rather only for a common action, that freedom of participation of each and all is temporarily set aside. This first communal endeavor is thus more of an assembly of individualities than it is the dominion of abstract thought, which would rob singular individuals of their self-conscious participation in the willing and acts of the whole.

728. The assembly of the spirits of different peoples constitutes a circle of shapes, which now deals with the whole of nature as well as with the whole ethical world. They too are under the supreme command of one of them rather than under his sovereign rule.⁴² For themselves, they are the universal substances of what the self-conscious essence is in itself and what it does. This, however, constitutes both the force and at least initially the focal point for the sake of which those universal essences endeavor and which initially seems to link their dealings only in an accidental fashion. However, the return of the divine essence into self-consciousness already contains the ground which fashions the focal point for those divine forces; it initially conceals their essential unity under the form of a friendly, external relation between both worlds.

729. The same universality that corresponds to this content also necessarily has the form of consciousness, and it is in this form that it comes on the scene. It is no longer the actual doing of the cult; rather, it is a doing which has not yet been elevated to the concept but instead only to that of representational thought, to the synthetic linkage of self-conscious and external existence. This representational thought's existence, language, is the first language, the epic as such, which contains universal content, or universal at least in the sense of the completeness of the world even though not in the sense of the universality of thought. The bard is the singular and the actual, and from whom, as the subject of this world, the world is created and by whom it is borne. His pathos is not the anesthetic power of nature; rather, it is Mnemosyne, the reflection and 390inwardness which has come to be, the memory of an earlier immediate essence. He is the organ vanishing within its content; what counts is not his own self but his muse, his universal song. But what in fact is present here is the syllogism, in which the extreme of universality, the world of the gods, is combined with that of singularity, the bard, by the mediating middle of particularity. The mediating middle is the people in its heroes, who, like the bard, are singular people but only as representationally thought,⁴³ and they are as a result universal, like the free extreme of universality itself, namely, the gods.

730. In this epic, what thus comes about in itself in the cult, the relation of the divine to the human, presents itself as such to consciousness. The content is an action of the essence conscious of itself. Acting disturbs the rest of the substance and arouses it; it thereby divides its simplicity and opens it up to the diverse world of natural and ethical forces. The action is the violation of the peaceful earth; it is the trench ensouled through blood, which provokes the departed spirits, who, thirsting for life, receive it in the doings of self-consciousness. The dealings, which are at issue in the universal endeavor, acquire two aspects, the self-like⁴⁴ aspect, accomplished by the totality of actual peoples along with the individualities who are the heads, and the universal aspect accomplished by their substantial powers. However, the relation between the two was previously determined so that it is the synthetic combination of the universal and the singular, or is representational thinking. It is on this determinateness that the assessment of this world hangs. – The relationship between the two is, as a result, an intermingling of both of them, a relationship which inconsistently divides the unity of the doing and which needlessly tosses the action from one side to the other. The universal powers have the shape of individuality and thereby have in them the principle of acting; their having an effect hence appears as a doing which originates wholly from out of them, an activity which is equally as free as those originating from the people. Hence, one and the same thing has been done by the gods as well as having been done by men. The seriousness of those former powers is a farcical superfluity, since this latter is in fact the force of the acting individuality – whereas the effort and labor of the latter is again a useless effort, since it is the former who direct everything. – The ephemeral mortals, who are nothing, are at the same time the powerful self which brings into subjection the universal essence, offends the gods, provides actuality for them, and provides the gods with an interest in doing something; just as, conversely, these powerless universalities, which nourish themselves on their gifts from mankind and only get something to do through people, are the natural essence and the basic material of all events and are equally the matter of ethical life and the pathos of doing. 391However much their elemental natures are initially brought into actuality and into an activated relationship through the free self of individuality, still they are equally as much the universal that withdraws itself from this bond, which remains unrestricted in its destiny, and which through the invincible elasticity of its unity extinguishes the point-like singleness of the actor and his figurations, preserves itself in its purity, and dissolves all that is individual in its fluidity.

731. Just as the gods fall into this contradictory relation with the self-like nature confronting them, their universality just as much comes into conflict with their own determination and its relations to others. They are the eternal beautiful individuals, motionless in their own existence, removed from all transience and from alien power. – However, they are at the same time determinate elements, particular gods, who stand in relation to others. However, according to the opposition it involves, that relationship to others is a battle with those others, a comic self-forgetfulness about their own eternal nature. – That determinateness is rooted in the stable existence of the divine, and in its limitation it has the self-sufficiency of the whole individuality, through which their characters at the same time lose the sharpness of their very distinctiveness, and in their multiple meanings, they blend together with each other. – One purpose of activity, and their activity itself, since their activities are directed against an other and, as a result, against an unconquerable divine force, is a contingent and empty bravado, which itself likewise dissipates into nothing and transforms the apparent seriousness of action into a harmless, self-assured game without result and with no success. However much in the nature of their divinity, the negative, or determinateness, only appears as the inconsistency of their activity and as the contradiction between purpose and success, and however much that former self-sufficient self-assurance outweighs that determinateness, as a result the pure force of the negative confronts them as their final power, namely, as that against which they are without recourse. They are the universal and the positive with regard to the singular self of mortals, which cannot hold out against their power, but for that reason, the universal self, as the conceptless void of necessity, hovers over them and over this whole world of representational thought to which the entire content belongs – an event to which they relate selflessly and in sorrow, for these determinate natures are not to be found within this purity.

732. However, this necessity is the unity of the concept, which subjugates the contradictory substantiality of the singular moments; it is that in which the inconsistency and contingency of their acts is brought into order, and the game which is made up of their actions receives its seriousness and value in the actions themselves. The content of the world of 392representational thought plays its game unbound and on its own⁴⁵ within the mediating middle of its movement; it gathers round the individuality of a hero, who in his strength and beauty feels his life broken and who mourns the early death he sees ahead of him. For the singular individuality which is firm and actual within itself is expelled into an extremity, estranged in its moments which have not yet been found and are not yet united. The one singular individual, the abstract non-actual, is the necessity which does not participate in the life of the mediating middle, any more than does the other, the actual singular individual, the bard, who keeps himself outside of the mediating middle and who, in his performance,⁴⁶ comes to his end. Both extremes must converge on the content; the one extreme, necessity, has to suffuse itself with the content, and the other, the language of the bard, must have a share in it; and the content which was formerly left to itself must preserve in its own self the certainty and the fixed determination of the negative.

733. This higher language, that of tragedy, combines more closely the dispersal of the moments of the essential world and the world of action. According to the nature of the concept, the substance of the divine comes undone into its shapes, and their movement is likewise in conformity with the concept. With regard to form, language here ceases to be that of narrative since it has entered into the content just as the content has ceased to be that of representational thought. The hero is himself the speaker, and the performance⁴⁷ shows the listener, who is at the same time also an onlooker, self-conscious people who know their own rights and purposes, the power and the will of their determinateness, and who know how to state those things. They are artists who do not express unconsciously, naively, and naturally what is external to their decisions and commencements, as is the case in the language which accompanies ordinary doings in actual life. Rather, they express the inner essence, they demonstrate the right of their action, and the pathos to which they belong is reflectively asserted and determinately expressed in its universal individuality, free from contingent circumstances and the particularities of personalities. Finally, these characters exist as actual people who take on the personae of the heroes and exhibit it to them in actual speech, not as a narrative, but in their own words. Just as it is essential for a statuary column to be made by human hands, the actor is likewise essential to his mask – not as an external condition, from which artistic considerations must abstract; or, to the extent that such an abstraction has to be made, it amounts to saying that art does not yet contain within itself the true, genuine self.

734. The universal basis upon which the movement of these shapes proceeds, a movement which the concept itself has brought out, is the consciousness of the initial representational language and its self-less, sundered contents. It is the common people per se 393whose wisdom finds utterance in the chorus of the elders, and it is in the powerlessness of the chorus that the common people find their representatives, because they themselves constitute only the positive and passive material for the individuality of the government confronting them. Lacking the power of the negative, the chorus is unable to hold together and to restrain the wealth and the colorful fullness of the divine life; instead, it allows that life to come undone, and in its hymns of honor it praises each singular moment as a self-sufficient god, now praising this one, now that one, then now again another. However, where it feels the seriousness of the concept as the concept proceeds through these shapes and leaves them all in rubble as it does so, and where it comes to see how badly things go for its praised gods when they venture out on the ground where the concept rules, then it is not itself the negative power which actively intervenes there. Rather, it restricts itself to the self-less thought of such power, to the consciousness of an alien destiny, and it surrounds itself with the empty wish for reassurance and with feeble talk about appeasement. In its fear of the higher powers which are the immediate arms of the substance, in its fear of their struggles with each other and of necessity's simple self, something which crushes those powers as well as the living beings bound up with them – in its compassion for the living, whom it knows at the same time to be the same as itself, there is for it only the idle terror of this movement, the equally helpless regret, and, in the end, the empty calm of resignation to necessity, whose work is grasped neither as the necessary action of the character nor as the activity of the absolute essence within itself.

735. On the basis of this spectatorial consciousness as the indifferent soil of representational thinking, spirit does not come on the scene in its dispersed multiplicity but rather in the simple estrangement of the concept. Its substance thus shows itself only as ripped asunder into its two extreme powers. These elemental universal essences are at the same time self-conscious individualities – heroes who put their conscious life into one of these powers, who have in these powers their determinateness of character, and who constitute the activity and actuality of these powers. – This universal individualization descends again, as will be remembered, to the immediate actuality of real existence and presents itself before a crowd of spectators, who have in the chorus their counterpart, or instead have in it their own performance⁴⁸ giving voice to itself.

736. The content and movement of spirit, which is here an object to itself, has been already examined as the nature and realization of the ethical substance. In its religion, spirit attains a consciousness about itself, or it puts itself before its consciousness in its purer form and its simpler figuration. However much therefore 394the ethical substance, through its concept and according to its content, has estranged itself into two powers, which were determined as divine and human law, or the law of the netherworld and the law of the higher world – the former was that of family, the latter was that of state power – the first was the feminine, the other the masculine character – still the previously multiply formed circle of gods, wherein each wavered in their determinations, limits itself to these powers, which through this determination are brought nearer to genuine individuality. This is so because the previous dispersal of the whole into multiple and abstract forces, which appear substantialized, is the dissolution of the subject that comprehends them only as moments within its own self, and individuality is thus only the superficial form of that essence. Conversely, a further difference of characters than that just mentioned is to be attributed to the contingent and, in itself, external personality.

737. At the same time, the essence divides itself according to its form or its knowing. As consciousness, acting spirit faces up to the object on which it is active, and which is thereby determined as the negative of the knowing subject. As a result, the knowing subject is situated in the opposition between knowing and not knowing. He takes his purpose from his character and knows it as the ethical essentiality; however, through the determinateness of his character, he knows only the one power of substance, and, for him, the other power is concealed. The current actuality is thus both an other in itself and an other for consciousness. In this relation, what the higher and lower law continue to mean are the power which knows and which reveals itself to consciousness and the power which conceals itself and lies in ambush. The one is the aspect of light, the god of the oracle, which, according to its natural moment, has sprung forth from the all-illuminating sun, who knows all and reveals all – Phoebus and Zeus, who is his father. However, the commands of this truth-speaking god, along with his proclamations about what is, are instead deceptive, for within its concept, this knowing is immediately not-knowing, because in acting, consciousness is in itself this opposition. He who had the power to unlock the riddle of the sphinx itself, trustingly, as with childlike confidence, is sent to ruin through what the god reveals to him. This priestess through whom the beautiful god speaks is none other than the ambiguous⁴⁹ sisters of fate, who, by their promises, drive the one who trusted them into crime, and who, by the two-faced character of what they gave out as a certainty, deceive the one who had relied on the obvious meaning of what they said. The consciousness which is purer than the latter, which believes the witches and is more reflectively prudent and more thorough than the former, which puts its trust in the priestess and the beautiful god, thus delays taking any revenge based on the revelation of the crime, a revelation made by his father's spirit, that the father had been 395murdered; it contrives to bring about still other proofs – for the reason that the spirit making the revelation might possibly be the devil.

738. This mistrust is well grounded for the reason that the knowing consciousness places itself into an opposition between the certainty of itself and the objective essence. The right of the ethical, namely, that actuality is nothing in itself in opposition to the absolute law, learns from experience that its knowing is one-sided, that its law⁵⁰ is only a law of its character, and that it has grasped only the one power of substance. Action itself is this inversion of what was known into its contrary, into being; it turns the law of character and knowing into the law of their opposite, with which the former is bound up in the essence of the substance – it turns it into the Erinyes of that other power and character which was aroused into hostility. This lower law sits with Zeus on the throne and enjoys equal standing with the revealed law and the knowing god.⁵¹

739. The divine world of the chorus is restricted to these three essences by the acting individuality. The one is the substance, which is the power presiding over both the hearth and home and the spirit of familial piety as much as it is the universal power of the state and of the government. While this difference belongs to the substance as such, in representational thought the difference is not individualized into two distinct shapes but rather has in actuality the two persons of its characters, whereas the difference between knowing and not-knowing falls in each and every one of the actual self-consciousnesses – and it is only in abstraction, in the element of universality, that it portions itself out into two individual shapes. For the self of the hero only has existence as a whole consciousness and hence is essentially the whole difference which belongs to the form, but the hero's substance is determinate, and only one side of the difference of content belongs to him. Hence, of the two aspects of consciousness, which in actuality have no separate individuality belonging to each on its own, each receives in representational thought its own particular shape – the one is that of the revealed god, the other is that of the self-concealing Erinyes. In part, both enjoy equal honor, but in part, the shape of the substance, Zeus, is the necessity of the relation of both to each other. The substance is the relation, that knowing is for itself, but it has its truth in the simple; and that the difference, through which actual consciousness is, has its ground in the inner essence which is erasing it; and because the self-clear conscious assurance of certainty has its confirmation in forgetfulness.

740. Consciousness unlocked this opposition by acting. In acting according to revealed knowing, it experiences the deceptiveness of that knowing, according to the content; in submitting to one of the attributes of substance, it violates the other, and as a result gives the latter a right against itself. Following the god that knows, it has on the contrary seized hold of what is not revealed, and it did penance for having trusted that knowing whose double-sided 396ambiguity, for this is its very nature, must have been also available for it and must have been a warning to it. The fury of the priestess, the inhuman shape of the witches, the voices of trees and birds, the dream, and so on, are not the ways in which truth appears; rather, they are warning signs of deception, of not being reflectively prudent, of the singularity and the contingency of knowing. Or, what amounts to the same thing, the opposite power, which consciousness has violated, is present as declared law and the legality validly in force, whether it be the law of the family or that of the state; consciousness, on the other hand, pursued its own knowing and hid from itself what was revealed. However, the truth of those powers emerging into opposition with each other is the result of each having an equal right, and for that reason, in their opposition which acting brings forth, of their being equally wrong. The movement of acting itself demonstrates their unity in the mutual downfall of both powers and of the self-conscious characters. The reconciliation of the opposition with itself is the Lethe of the netherworld in death – that is, the Lethe of the upper world in the form of absolution not from guilt, for consciousness cannot deny that it acted, but rather absolution from the crime itself and the absolution's atoning appeasement. Both are forgetfulness, the disappearance of actuality and of the doings on the part of the powers of substance, of their individualities and of the powers of the abstract thought of good and evil, for none of them is for itself the essence. Rather, the essence is the motionlessness of the whole within itself, the unmoved unity of Fate, motionless existence, and thereby the inactivity and lack of liveliness of the family and government; and it is the equal honor and thereby the indifferent irreality⁵² of Apollo and the Erinyes, and the reversion of their spiritualization⁵³ and activity into simple Zeus.

741. This fate completes the depopulation of heaven, of that intermingling of individuality and essence which is devoid of thought – an intermingling through which this essence's doing appears as inconsistent, contingent, and unworthy of itself. For individuality, when it adheres itself only superficially to essence, is inessential individuality. The expulsion of such essenceless representational thoughts, something demanded by the philosophers of antiquity, thus already begins in tragedy itself because the division of the substance is dominated by the concept, individuality is thereby essential individuality, and the determinations are the absolute characters. The self-consciousness represented in tragedy knows and recognizes on that account only one highest power. This Zeus is known and recognized only as the power of the state or of the hearth and home, and, in the opposition of knowing, only as the father of the knowing of the particular, a knowing that is coming to assume a shape – and as the Zeus of the oath and of the Erinyes, the Zeus of the universal, of the inner which dwells in concealment. The further 397moments are dispersed into representational thought from out of the concept, and the chorus permits them one after the other to be validly in force; those moments are, however, not the pathos of the hero, but rather, to him, they decline into passions – that is, they have declined into accidental essenceless moments, which the self-less chorus indeed praises but which are neither capable of constituting the character of heroes, nor of being enunciated and revered by the chorus as their essence.

742. However, the persons of the divine essence itself, as well as the characters of its substance, merge into the simplicity of the unconscious. As opposed to self-consciousness, this necessity has the determination of being the negative power of all the shapes coming on the scene, of those shapes then not cognizing themselves in it but rather instead meeting their downfall. The self enters the scene only distributed among the characters, not as the mediating middle of the movement. However, self-consciousness, the simple certainty of itself, is in fact the negative power, the unity of Zeus, the unity of the substantial essence and abstract necessity; it is the spiritual unity into which everything returns. Because actual self-consciousness is still distinguished both from substance and from fate, it is in part the chorus, or rather is instead the crowd looking on, which this movement of the divine life as something alien suffuses with fear, or in which this movement, as something close to them, as touching them, brings forth an inactive compassion. Partly to the extent that consciousness acts in unison with the characters and belongs to them, is this union an external one, because the true union, namely, that of self, fate, and substance, is not yet present and available. This union is thus hypocrisy, and the hero who appears before the spectators fragments into both his mask and into the actor, into the persona⁵⁴ and the actual self.

743. The self-consciousness of the heroes must set aside its mask and show itself as knowing itself to be the fate of the gods of the chorus, as well as that of the absolute powers themselves, and as no longer separated from the chorus, from the universal consciousness.

744. For the moment, it is comedy that has the aspect of actual self-consciousness exhibiting itself as the fate of the gods. These elemental essences, as universal moments, are not selves and are not actual. They are, to be sure, outfitted with the form of individuality, but in their case this is only imagined⁵⁵ and does not belong in and for itself to them; the actual self does not have that sort of abstract moment for its substance and content. It, the subject, is thus elevated above that sort of moment as it would be elevated above a singular property, and, wearing this mask, the subject expresses the irony of something that wants to be something for itself. The posturing of the universal essentiality is revealed in the self; 398it shows itself to be trapped in an actuality, and it lets the mask drop exactly as it wants to be something rightful. The self, coming on the scene here with the sense that it is actual, plays with the mask which it once put on in order to be its persona. – However, it just as quickly makes itself come out from this illusion and again come forward in its own nakedness and ordinariness, which it shows not to be distinct from the authentic self, from the actor, nor even from the spectator.

745. This universal dissolution of shaped essentiality itself in its individuality becomes more serious in its content and as a result more wanton and more bitter to the extent that the content has its more serious and more necessary significance. The divine substance unifies within itself the meaning of natural and ethical essentiality. As regards what is natural, actual self-consciousness, in employing what is natural for its adornment, its dwellings, etc., and in feasting on its own sacrificial offerings, shows itself to be the fate to which the secret is betrayed, namely, the explanation of what self-consciousness has to with the self-essentiality⁵⁶ of nature. In the mystery of bread and wine, it makes this self-essentiality of nature, together with the meaning of the inner essence, its own, and in comedy it is particularly conscious of the irony of this meaning itself. – Now, to the extent that this meaning incorporates the ethical essentiality, it in part means “the people” in both of its aspects, that of the state, or the genuine demos, and that of the singularity of family life. However, in part the meaning is that of self-conscious, pure knowing, or the rational thinking of the universal. – That demos, the universal social estate, which knows itself to be master and regent as well as being the understanding and insight which are to be respected, compels and bewitches itself through the particularity of its actuality, and it exhibits the laughable contrast between its own opinion of itself and its immediate existence, between its necessity and contingency, its universality and its ordinariness. However much the principle of its singular individuality, when separated from the universal, makes itself stand out in the genuine shape of actuality, and however much it openly appropriates the polity whose secret harm it is, still what is immediately revealed is the contrast between the universal as a theory and that with which practice is concerned, the contrast between the total emancipation of the immediate singular individuality's purposes from the universal order altogether and the scorn which that singular individuality shows for such order.

746. Rational thinking removes the contingency of shape from the divine essence. It takes the wisdom of the conceptless chorus, which produces all sorts of ethical adages and which allows for the validity of a multitude of laws and determinate concepts of duty and right, and it elevates them into the simple ideas of the beautiful and the good. – The movement of this abstraction is the consciousness of the dialectic which these maxims and laws have in themselves and is thereby the consciousness of the disappearance of the absolute validity in which they had previously appeared. While the 399contingent determination and the superficial individuality which representational thought lent to the divine essentialities now vanishes, those essentialities still have according to their natural aspect only the nakedness of their immediate existence; they are clouds, a disappearing vapor, exactly like those representational thoughts themselves. According to their conceived⁵⁷ essentiality, they have come to be the simple thoughts of the beautiful and the good, thoughts which are suited to being filled out with any kind of content at all. The force of dialectical knowing gives the determinate laws and maxims of action to the pleasure and exuberance of the youth which was – thereby – seduced by such knowing, and it puts weapons of deception into the hands of preoccupied and anxiety-ridden old age, itself restricted to the singularities of life. Through the emancipation from common opinion, which contains their determinateness as content as well as their absolute determinateness, the fixity⁵⁸ of consciousness, the pure thoughts of the beautiful and the good, thus show the comical spectacle to be empty and, as a result, as becoming the game of opinionating and of the arbitrary choices of contingent individuality.

747. Here therefore is the former unconscious fate, which consists in an empty motionlessness and forgetfulness and which is separated from self-consciousness, now united with self-consciousness. The singular self is the negative force through which and in which the gods, as well as their moments, those of existing nature and the thoughts of their determinations, disappear. At the same time, the singular self is not the mere emptiness of disappearance, but rather preserves itself in this nothingness itself, is at one with itself,⁵⁹ and is the sole actuality. The art-religion has completed itself in it and is completely inwardly returned into itself. As a result, singular consciousness, in the certainty of itself, is that which exhibits itself as this absolute power, so has this absolute power lost the form of being something represented, something separated from consciousness per se and thus alien to it, as was the case with the statuary column and also the living embodiment of beauty, or as was the case with the content of the epic and the powers and persons of tragedy. – The unity is also not the unconscious unity of the cult and the mysteries. Rather, the genuine self of the actor coincides with the persona he plays, just as the spectator is perfectly at home with what is represented to him and sees himself playing a role therein. What this self-consciousness intuits is that within itself, whatever assumes the form of essentiality opposed to self-consciousness is instead dissolved in the thinking, existence, and doings of self-consciousness, and it is then abandoned. It is the return of all that is universal into the certainty of itself, and this certainty is thus the complete absence of fear, the essencelessness of all that is alien; it is a healthy well-being as well as a consciousness permitting itself to be so, a well-being that outside of this comedy is not to be found.

C. Revealed Religion400

748. Through the art-religion, spirit has left the form of substance to enter into that of subject, for the art-religion engenders its shape, and it posits, as lying in that shape, doing, or self-consciousness, which itself only vanishes in the fearsome substance and does not grasp itself with any confidence. This incarnation of the divine essence originates in the statuary column, which has in itself only the external shape of the self; however, the inner shape, the self's activity, falls outside of it. In the cult both aspects have become one. In the result of the art-religion, this unity in its completion has at the same time also passed over into the extreme of the self. In spirit, which is completely certain of itself in the singular individuality of consciousness, all essentiality is submerged. The proposition which expresses this exuberance goes this way. The self is the absolute essence; the essence was the substance, and it was that in which the self was accidental; the essence has sunk all the way down into being a predicate, and in this self-consciousness, over and against which there is nothing facing it in the form of essence, spirit has lost its consciousness.

749. This proposition, “The self is the absolute essence,” belongs, as is evident, to the non-religious, actual spirit, and it must be recalled which shape of the actual spirit expresses it. This shape will contain at the same time the movement and the reversal of that which humbles the self into a predicate and elevates substance into subject, so that the converse statement does not in itself, or for us, make substance into subject, or, what is the same thing, does not restore substance so that the consciousness of spirit is led back to its beginning, or to natural religion. Rather, it is to do so in such a way that this reversal is brought about for and through self-consciousness itself. While this self-consciousness consciously forsakes itself, it is preserved in its self-relinquishing, and it remains the subject of the substance, but, as having relinquished itself, it has at the same time the consciousness of this substance; or while, through its sacrifice, it brings out the substance as subject, this subject remains its own self. The point is thereby reached so that, if, in the first of both propositions the subject only disappears into substantiality – and in the second proposition, the substance is only a predicate, and both aspects are present in each of them with an opposed inequality of value – then the union and 401permeation of both natures emerges, in which both, with equal value, are likewise essential as well as being only moments. As a result, spirit is thus equally consciousness of itself as its objective substance just as it is simple self-consciousness which endures within itself.

750. The art-religion belongs to the ethical spirit, which we saw earlier come to an end in the state of legality, i.e., in the proposition: The self as such, the abstract person, is absolute essence. In ethical life, the self is immersed in the spirit of its people; it is universality filled out. However, simple singular individuality elevates itself out of this content, and its levity refines it into a person, into the abstract universality of law. In the latter, the reality of the ethical spirit is lost, and the contentless spirits of individual peoples are collected together into one pantheon, not into a pantheon of representational thought, whose powerless form lets each do as it likes, but rather into the pantheon of abstract universality, of pure thought, which takes their lives and confers on the spiritless self, on the singular person, being-in-and-for-itself.

751. However, through its emptiness, this self has set the content free; consciousness is only within itself the essence; its own existence, the legal recognition of the person, is the unfulfilled abstraction. Therefore, it instead possesses only the thought of itself, or in the way it is there and knows itself as object, it is the non-actual self. Hence, it is only the stoic self-sufficiency of thinking, and as it passes through the movement of the skeptical consciousness, it finds its truth in the shape that was called the unhappy self-consciousness.

752. This self knows the story about what actually counts concerning the abstract person; it likewise also knows the story about what counts concerning the person in pure thought. It knows that what this amounts to is instead a complete loss; it is itself this loss which has become conscious of itself, and it is the self-relinquishing of its knowing of itself. – We now see that the unhappy consciousness constituted the counterpart and the culmination of the consciousness that was perfectly happy within itself, namely, the comic consciousness. All divine essence returns back into this comic consciousness, or it is the complete self-relinquishing of substance. In contrast, the unhappy consciousness is conversely the tragic fate of the certainty of itself that is supposed to be in and for itself. It is the consciousness of the loss of all essentiality in this certainty of itself and of the loss even of this knowing of itself – It is the loss of substance as well as of the self, the pain that expresses itself in the harsh phrase that God is dead.

753. In the state of legality, therefore, the ethical world and its religion have been absorbed into the comic consciousness, and the unhappy consciousness is the knowing 402of this entire loss. Lost to it are both the self-worth of its immediate personality as well as that of its mediated, conceived⁶⁰ self-worth. Likewise, the trust in the eternal laws of the gods fades away, as do the oracles who knew what to do in the particular cases. The statuary columns are now corpses from which the animating soul has escaped, just as the hymns are now words from which belief has fled. The tables of the gods are without spiritual food and drink, and consciousness does not receive back from its games and festivals the joyful unity of itself with the essence. The works of the muse lack the force of the spirit which, from out of the crushing of the gods and of man, has engendered its certainty of itself. They are now what they are for us – beautiful fruit broken off from the tree, a friendly fate passing those works on to us as a gift, in the way a young girl might present that fruit; the actual life in which that fruit existed no longer exists, nor does the tree that bore them, nor the earth and the elements that constituted their substance, nor the climate that constituted their determinateness, nor the alternation of the seasons that governed the process of their coming-to-be. – With those works of art, fate does not give us their world, does not give us the spring and summer of the ethical life in which they bloomed and ripened; rather, it gives us solely the veiled remembrance of this actuality. – In our enjoyment of them, our doing is thus not that of the divine worship, which would result in its complete truth filling out our consciousness. Rather, our doing is external, which wipes off some drop of rain or speck of dust from these fruits, and, in place of the inner elements of the actuality of the ethical that surround it, create it, and give spirit to it, we erect the extensive framework of the dead elements of their outward existence, their language, their history, etc., not in order to live in those elements ourselves, but only to represent them as they were in themselves. However, the young girl who presents us the plucked fruits as a gift is more than the nature that immediately provided them, more than the nature that unfurls into their conditions and elements, into the trees, air, light, etc., while in a higher way she gathers all this together into the gleam of her self-conscious eye and her offertory gesture; just as she is more than that nature, so too the spirit of the fate that provides us with those works of art is more than the ethical life and actuality of that people, for it is the inwardizing-recollecting⁶¹ of the spirit in them that was still alienated,⁶² – it is the spirit of the tragic fate that collects all those individual gods and attributes of the substance into the one pantheon, into the self-conscious spirit conscious of itself as spirit.

754. All the conditions for its emergence are present, and this totality of its conditions constitutes its becoming, its concept, or its emergence existing-in-and-for-itself. – The cycle of the productions of art embraces the absolute substance's forms of self-relinquishing; the absolute substance is in the form of 403individuality, as a thing, as an existing object of sensuous consciousness, – as the pure language, or the coming-to-be of the shape whose existence does not come out of the self and which is a purely vanishing object – as an immediate unity with universal self-consciousness in its inspiration and as a mediated unity in the doings of the cult – as beautiful self-like embodiment, and finally as existence elevated into representational thought and the unfurling of this existence into a world which, in the end, pulls itself together into the universality which is just as much the pure certainty of itself. – These forms, and, on the other side of the coin, the world of the person and legal right, the devastating savagery of the content's elements cast out into free-standing status, as well as both the person of stoicism as it has been thought⁶³ and the untenable disquiet of skepticism, all constitute the periphery of those shapes, which, expectantly and with urgency, stand around the birthplace of spirit becoming self-consciousness, and they have as their focal point the all-permeating pain and yearning of the unhappy self-consciousness and the communal birth pangs of its emergence, – the simplicity of the pure concept, which contains those shapes as its moments.

755. Spirit has two aspects in it, which are represented above as two converse propositions. One is this, that substance relinquishes itself of its own self and becomes self-consciousness; the other, conversely, is that self-consciousness empties itself of itself and makes itself into thinghood, or into the universal self. Both aspects have in this way accommodated each other, and their true union has thereby arisen. The self-relinquishing of substance, its becoming self-consciousness, expresses the transition into the opposite, into unconscious necessity, or, it expresses that it is in itself self-consciousness. Conversely, the self-relinquishing of self-consciousness expresses this, that self-consciousness is in itself the universal essence, or, because the self is pure being-for-itself, which in its opposite remains at one with itself,⁶⁴ it expresses this, that the substance is self-consciousness and, precisely as a result, is spirit. Hence, it can be said of this spirit which has forsaken the shape of substance and entered into existence in the shape of self-consciousness – if one wishes to use the relationships drawn from the process of natural generation – that it has an actual mother but a father who exists-in-itself, for actuality, or self-consciousness, and the in-itself, as substance, are both of its moments, and through their reciprocal self-relinquishing, where each becomes the other, spirit thus enters into existence as their unity.

756. To the extent that self-consciousness one-sidedly grasps only its own self-relinquishing, then if, to itself, its object is thus already just as much Being as it is the self, and if it knows all existence as spiritual essence, then as a result true spirit has not come to be for self-consciousness, insofar as being as such, or substance 404in itself, has not for its part likewise emptied itself of itself and become self-consciousness, for all existence is spiritual essence only from the standpoint of consciousness and not in itself. With regard to existence, spirit is in this manner only imaginary; this imagination is that gushing enthusiasm that reads into nature as well as into history, just as it also reads into the world and into the mythical representational thoughts of the preceding religions, a different inward sense from what they, from within their own appearance, immediately offer to consciousness, and, in the case of those religions, it reads into them a different sense than the self-consciousness whose religions they were actually knew in them. However, this meaning is one that is borrowed, a garment that does not cover the nakedness of the appearance and that warrants neither belief nor veneration. Rather, it remains the murky night of consciousness, the rapture proper to consciousness.

757. If therefore this latter meaning of the objective is not to be mere imagination, it must be in itself, which is to say, for consciousness it must first of all have its source in the concept and must emerge in its necessity. In that way, self-knowing spirit has arisen for us through the cognition of immediate consciousness, or of the consciousness of the existing object through its necessary movement. This concept, which, as the immediate concept, also had the shape of immediacy for its consciousness, has, secondly, given itself the shape of self-consciousness in itself, i.e., precisely according to the necessity of the concept by which being, or immediacy, which is the contentless object of sensuous consciousness, relinquishes itself of itself and, for consciousness, becomes the I. – The immediate in-itself, or the existing necessity itself, is, however, differentiated from the thinking in-itself, or the cognizing of necessity – a difference which at the same time, however, does not lie outside of the concept, for the simple unity of the concept is immediate being itself. The concept is precisely that which is self-relinquishing, or it is the coming-to-be of intuited necessity as it is at one with itself in that necessity, and it knows it and conceptually comprehends it. – The immediate in-itself of spirit, which gives itself the shape of self-consciousness, means nothing other than that the actual world-spirit has arrived at this knowing of itself. At that point, this knowing also then enters into its consciousness for the first time, and as truth. How that came about resulted from the above.

758. This, that absolute spirit has given itself the shape of self-consciousness in itself and thereby also for its consciousness, now appears in the following way. The faith of the world is that spirit is there as a self-consciousness, that is to say, as an actual person, that spirit is for immediate certainty, that the faithful consciousness sees, feels, and hears this divinity. In that way, it is not 405imagination; rather, it is actual in the believer. Consciousness then does not start from its inner, from thought, and then within itself bring together the thought of God with existence; rather, it starts from the immediate present existence and takes cognizance⁶⁵ of God in it. – The moment of immediate being is present and available in the content of the concept in such a way that, in the return of all essentiality into consciousness, the religious spirit has become the simple positive self just as the actual spirit as such was in the unhappy consciousness just as much as this simple self-conscious negativity. As a result, the self of the existing spirit has the form of complete immediacy; it is posited neither as what is conceived,⁶⁶ nor as what is represented, nor as what is produced, as it is with the immediate self in part in natural religion and in part in art-religion. Rather, this God is sensuously intuited immediately as a self, as an actual singular individual person, and only so is he self-consciousness.

759. This incarnation of the divine essence, or that it essentially and immediately has the shape of self-consciousness, is the simple content of absolute religion. In absolute religion, the essence is known as spirit, or religion is the essence's consciousness of itself as being spirit, for spirit is knowing itself in its self-relinquishing; spirit is the essence which is the movement of maintaining the equality with itself in its otherness. However, this is substance insofar as it is in its accidentality equally reflected into itself, but not as indifferent with regard to what is inessential and thus as finding itself existing in something alien. Rather, it is situated therein within itself, which is to say, insofar as it is subject, or self. – In this religion, the divine essence is for that reason revealed. Its being revealed obviously consists in this, that what it is, is known. However, it is known precisely because it is known as spirit, or as essence that is essentially self-consciousness. – Something in its object is kept secret from consciousness if the object is an other for consciousness, or alien to it, and if consciousness does not know the object as itself. This secret ceases to be when the absolute essence as spirit is an object of consciousness, for it is in that way that the absolute essence exists as the self in its relations to it, which is to say, the essence immediately knows itself therein, or it is revealed to itself in the object. It itself is revealed to itself only in its own certainty of itself; the former, its object, is the self, but the self is nothing alien; it is rather the inseparable unity with itself, the immediate universal. The self is the pure concept, pure thinking, or being-for-itself, immediate being, and thereby being for an other, and as this being for an other, it has immediately made an inward return into itself and is at one with itself;⁶⁷ it is therefore what is truly and solely revealed. The gracious, the righteous, the holy, creator of heaven and earth, etc., are predicates of a subject – universal moments that have their foothold in this point and only are in the return of consciousness into thinking. – While they are known, their ground and 406essence, the subject itself, is not yet revealed, and, likewise, the determinations of the universal are not this universal itself. However, the subject itself, and thereby also this pure universal, is manifestly the self, for this self is precisely this inner reflected into itself, which immediately is there and is that self's own certainty, the self for which it is there. This – to be what is revealed according to its concept – is therefore the true shape of spirit, and this, its shape, the concept, is likewise solely its essence and substance. Spirit is known as self-consciousness and is immediately revealed to this self-consciousness, for it is this self-consciousness itself. The divine nature is the same as the human nature, and it is this unity which is intuited.

760. Here therefore consciousness, or the mode in which the essence is for consciousness, or its shape, is indeed the same as its self-consciousness; this shape is itself a self-consciousness. It is thereby at the same time an existing object, and this being likewise immediately signifies pure thinking, the absolute essence. – The absolute essence, which is there as an actual self-consciousness, seems to have descended from its eternal simplicity, but in fact it has thereby achieved for the first time its highest essence. For it is when the concept of essence has first attained its simple purity that it is the absolute abstraction which is pure thinking, and is thereby the pure singular individuality of the self in the way that, on account of its simplicity, it is the immediate, or being. – What is called sensuous consciousness is precisely this pure abstraction; it is this latter thinking for which being is the immediate. The lowest is thus at the same time the highest; the revealed, which has come forth entirely on the surface, is precisely therein what is deepest. What is in fact the consummation of its concept is that the highest essence is seen, heard, etc., as an existing self-consciousness, and through this consummation, the essence immediately is there in the way that it is the essence.

761. This immediate existence is at the same time not solely and merely immediate consciousness; it is religious consciousness. What the immediacy inseparably signifies is not only an existing self-consciousness but also the essence which has been purely conceived,⁶⁸ that is, the absolute essence. What we are conscious of in our concepts, namely, that being is essence, is what the religious consciousness is itself aware of. This unity of being and essence, of thinking which is immediately existence, is the thought of this religious consciousness, its mediated knowing, just as it is equally its immediate knowing, for this unity of being and thinking is self-consciousness and itself is there, or it is the conceived⁶⁹ unity which at the same time has this shape of that of which it is. God is therefore here 407revealed as He is; He is there in the way that He is in itself; He is there as spirit. God is solely attainable in pure speculative knowing, He is only in that knowing, and He is only that knowing itself, for He is spirit, and this speculative knowing is revealed religion's knowing. That knowing knows Him as thinking, or pure essence, and it knows this thinking as being and existence, and knows existence as the negativity of itself, and hence as the self, as this self and a universal self. This is precisely what revealed religion knows. – The hopes and expectations of the preceding world pushed their way towards this revelation, towards the intuition of what the absolute essence is, and towards finding themselves in that revelation. This joy comes to be to self-consciousness, and it takes up the whole world, this joy in viewing oneself in the absolute essence, for it is spirit, it is the simple movement of those pure moments, which it itself expresses: The essence is known as spirit as a result, at first, of its being intuited as immediate self-consciousness.

762. This concept of spirit knowing itself as spirit is itself the immediate, and not yet developed concept. The essence is spirit, or it has appeared, it is revealed. This initial being-revealed is itself immediate; however, the immediacy is likewise pure mediation, or thinking; and it must thus exhibit this as such in its own self. – If it is examined more determinately, then spirit, in the immediacy of self-consciousness, is this singular self-consciousness as contrasted with universal self-consciousness. It is the excluding One, which, for the consciousness for which it is there, still has the undissolved form of a sensuous other. This other does not yet know spirit to be its own, or, just as spirit is a singular self, as well as a universal self, as well as each and every self, spirit is not yet there. Or, the shape does not yet have the form of the concept, i.e., of the universal self, of the self which, in its immediate actuality, is just as much something sublated, is thinking itself, is universality, but which is also equally all those things without losing its immediate actuality therein. – The preliminary and even immediate form of this universality is, however, not already the form of thinking itself, of the concept as concept; it is rather the universality of actuality, the all-ness of the self and is the elevation of existence into representational thought. As in all cases, and to take a specific example, the sublated sensuous this is just the thing of perception but not yet the universal of the understanding.

763. Therefore, this singular individual man, to whom the absolute essence is revealed, brings to culmination in himself as a singular individual the movement of sensuous being. He is the immediately present God; as a result, his being passes over into having-been. Consciousness, for which he has this sensuous presence, ceases to see him and hear him: it has seen him and heard him. As a result of its having only seen and heard him, it becomes itself spiritual consciousness, or just as he previously arose as sensuous existence for consciousness, he has now arisen in spirit. – 408For, as the sort that sensuously sees and hears him, consciousness is itself only immediate consciousness which has not sublated the inequality of objectivity, has not withdrawn itself into pure thinking, but rather knows this objective singular individual but not itself as spirit. In the disappearance of the immediate existence of what is known as absolute essence, immediacy acquires its negative moment; spirit remains the immediate self of actuality, but as the universal self-consciousness of a religious community,⁷⁰ a self-consciousness which is motionless in its own substance just as this substance is the universal subject in the universal self-consciousness. Spirit is not the singular individual for himself but the singular individual together with the consciousness of the religious community; and what the singular individual is for this community is the complete whole of spirit.

764. However, the past and remoteness are only the incomplete form of the way in which the immediate mode is mediated, or is posited universally. This latter is only superficially plunged into the element of thinking, it is as a sensuous mode preserved in that element, and it is not posited as being at one with the nature of thinking itself. It has been only elevated into representational thinking, for this is the synthetic combination of sensuous immediacy and its universality, or of thinking.

765. This form of representing constitutes the determinateness in which spirit is conscious of itself in this, its religious community. This form is not yet the self-consciousness of spirit which has advanced to its concept as concept; the mediation is still incomplete. Therefore, in this combination of being and thinking, there is a defect present, that the spiritual essence is still burdened by an unreconciled estrangement into a this-worldliness and an other-worldly beyond. The content is the true content, but all of its moments, posited as lying in the element of representational thinking, have the character of not having been conceptually comprehended.⁷¹ Rather, they appear as completely self-sufficient aspects which are externally related to each other. For the true content also to obtain its true form for consciousness, the higher cultural formation of the latter is necessary, and its intuition of the absolute substance must be elevated into the concept, and, for consciousness itself, its consciousness must be balanced out with its self-consciousness just as this has come about for us, or in itself.

766. This content is now to be examined in the way it is in its consciousness. – Absolute spirit is content, and so is it in the shape of its truth. However, its truth is not only to be the substance of the religious community, or the in-itself of the religious community, nor also is it only to emerge out of this inwardness into the objectivity of representational thinking.⁷² Its truth is to become the actual self, to reflect itself into itself and to be the subject. This is therefore the movement which spirit accomplishes in its religious community, or this is its life. What this self-revealing spirit is in and for itself is therefore not brought out by having, so to speak, its rich life in the community wound up and then scaled back to its original threads, or even perhaps to the representational thoughts of the first imperfect 409religious community or back to what the actual man said. This scaling back is based on the instinct to get to the concept, but it confuses the origin, as the immediate existence of the concept's first appearance, with the simplicity of the concept. Through this impoverishment of the life of spirit, this tidying up of the religious community's representational thoughts and doings, what thereby emerges is, instead of the concept, mere externality and singularity, the historical mode of immediate appearance, and the spiritless recollection of a fancied singular shape and its past.

767. Spirit is the content of its consciousness initially in the form of pure substance, or it is the content of its pure consciousness. This element of thinking is the movement of its descent into existence, or into singular individuality. The mediating middle between them is their synthetic combination, the consciousness of coming-to-be-other, or of representational thinking as such. The third moment is the return out of representational thought and out of otherness, or is the element of self-consciousness itself. – These three moments constitute spirit; its coming apart in representational thought consists in its therein being in a determinate mode. However, this determinateness is nothing but one of its moments. Its detailed movement therefore is this: To unfold its nature into each of its moments as an element; and while each of these spheres completes itself within itself, this reflective turn into itself is at the same time the transition into the other. Representational thought constitutes the mediating middle between pure thinking and self-consciousness as such, and is only one of the determinatenesses, but at the same time (as has been shown), its character, which is to be the synthetic combination, is diffused throughout all these elements and is their common determinateness.

768. The content which is itself up for examination has partly already turned up as the representational thought of the unhappy and of the faithful consciousness. – However, in the unhappy consciousness it turned up as having the determination of the content which was engendered from out of consciousness and for which it yearns, in which spirit can neither be satiated nor find rest because spirit is not yet in itself its own content, or is not yet its content as its substance. On the other hand, in the faithful consciousness, this content was regarded as the selfless essence of the world, or as the essentially objective content of representational thinking⁷³ – a representational thinking which flees from actuality altogether, and which thus does not have the certainty of self-consciousness, a certainty which is separated from it partly as a conceit of knowing and partly as pure insight. – However, the consciousness of the religious community has the content as its substance, just as the content is the religious community's certainty of its own spirit.

769. Spirit, represented initially as substance in the element of pure thinking, 410is immediately thereby the simple, eternal self-equal essence, which however, does not have this abstract meaning of essence but rather that of absolute spirit. Yet spirit is this, not to be a meaning, not to be the inner, but rather to be the actual. Hence, the simple eternal essence would be spirit only according to empty words if it were to remain in representational thought and in the expression of simple eternal essence. However, because it is an abstraction, simple essence is in fact the negative in itself; indeed, it is the negativity of thinking, or negativity of thought as it is in itself in the essence, i.e., it is the absolute difference from itself, or it is its pure becoming-other. As essence, it is only in itself, or for us, but while this purity is the abstraction itself, or negativity, it is for itself, or it is the self, the concept. – It is thus objective, and while representational thought grasps and expresses as an event what has just been expressed as the necessity of the concept, so it will be said that the eternal essence, to itself, creates an other. However, in this otherness, it has equally immediately reverted into itself again, for the difference is the difference in itself, i.e., the difference is immediately distinguished only from itself, and it is thus the unity reverted into itself.

770. There are therefore three moments to be distinguished: Essence; being-for-itself that is the otherness of essence and for which essence is; and being-for-itself that is self-knowing in an other. The essence intuits only itself in its being-for-itself; in this self-relinquishing, it is only at one with itself,⁷⁴ is the being-for-itself which excludes itself from the essence, is the essence's knowing of itself; it is the word, which, when spoken, relinquishes the speaker and leaves him behind as emptied and hollowed out, but which is likewise immediately interrogated, and it is only this hearing-and-interrogating-of-itself that is the existence of the word. In that way, the differences which are rendered are likewise immediately dissolved as they are rendered, and they are equally immediately rendered just as they are dissolved, and the true and the actual are this very movement circling around within itself.

771. This movement in itself expresses the absolute essence as spirit. The absolute essence which is not grasped as spirit is only the abstract void, just as spirit, when it is not grasped as this movement, is only an empty word. As its moments are grasped in their purity, they are restless concepts, which only are in being themselves their own opposite and being motionless in the whole. However, the community's representational thinking is not this conceptually comprehending thinking, but rather has the content without its necessity and, instead of the form of the concept, it brings the natural relationships of father and son into the realm of pure consciousness. While in that way even in thought it relates to itself representationally, 411the essence is indeed revealed to it, but the moments of this essence, on account of this synthetic representation, separate themselves in part from each other so that they are not related to each other through their own concept. In part, this consciousness retreats away from this, its pure object, and it relates itself only externally to it. The object is then revealed to it by something alien,⁷⁵ and in this thought of spirit, it does not cognize itself and does not cognize the nature of pure self-consciousness. To the extent that the form of representational thinking and those relationships derived from the natural must be surpassed – and to the extent that what must be especially surpassed is taking the moments of the movement which is that of spirit, to be themselves isolated immovable substances or subjects instead of transitional moments – then this surpassing is to be viewed as conceptual compulsion (as was previously noted in regard to another aspect). However, while it is only an instinct, it mistakes itself, tosses out the content together with the form, and, in what ultimately amounts to the same thing, debases the content into a historical representation and an heirloom of the tradition. What is retained therein is only what is purely external in faith and thereby is retained as something dead, devoid of knowing;⁷⁶ and what is inward in faith has vanished, because that would be the concept knowing itself as concept.

772. Absolute spirit, represented in the pure essence, is indeed not the abstract pure essence. Rather, as a result of its being only a moment in spirit, the abstract pure essence has instead declined into an element. However, the exhibition of spirit in this element has, according to the form, in itself the same defect that the essence has as essence. The essence is the abstract, and for that reason it is the negative of its simplicity, is an other. Likewise, spirit in the element of essence is the form of simple unity, which for that reason is equally essentially a coming-to-be-other. – Or, what is the same thing, the relation of the eternal essence to its being-for-itself is the immediately-simple relation of pure thinking; in this simple intuiting of itself in the other, otherness therefore is not posited as such. It is the difference as it is in pure thinking, which is to be immediately no difference, or a recognition of love, in which both are, according to their essence, not opposed to each other. – Spirit, which is expressed in the element of pure thinking, is essentially itself just this, that it is does not exist only in pure thinking; it is also actual, for lying in the concept of spirit is otherness itself, i.e., the sublation of the pure concept which has only been thought.⁷⁷

773. The element of pure thinking, because it is the abstract element, is instead itself the other of its own simplicity, and it thus passes over into the genuine element of representational thinking – the element in which the moments of the pure concept acquire a substantial existence with regard to each other as they are subjects, which for a third subject, do not have the indifference of Being towards each other. Rather, they take a reflective turn into themselves, isolate themselves from each other, and oppose themselves to each other.

774.412 Therefore, the merely eternal or abstract spirit becomes an other to itself, or it enters into existence and immediately into immediate existence. It therefore creates a world. This creating is representational thought's word for the concept itself according to its absolute movement, or it is its word for the simplicity which has been expressed as the absolute, or as pure thinking, and which, because it is abstract thinking, is instead the negative and thereby opposed to itself, or is other: – or, to state the same thing in yet another form, because what is posited as essence is simple immediacy, or being, but which as immediacy, or as being, dispenses with the self and therefore lacks inwardness and is passive, or is being for an other. – This being for an other is at the same time a world. Spirit in the determination of being for an other, is the motionless stable existence of those moments which were formerly enclosed in pure thinking, and it is therefore the dissolution of their simple universality and their splitting up into their own particularity.

775. However, the world is not only spirit thus thrown and dispersed into completeness and its external order. Rather, since spirit is essentially the simple self, this self is likewise present in the world. It is the existing spirit which is the singular individual self which is both conscious and which distinguishes itself from itself as an other, or as a world. – Just as it is thus initially immediately posited, this singularly individual self is not yet spirit for itself; it therefore is not yet as spirit; it can be called innocent, but not, however, good. For it in fact to be the self and to be spirit, it must just as much become an other to itself, just as the eternal essence exhibits itself as the movement of being equal to itself in its otherness. While this spirit is determined initially as immediately existent, or as dispersed into the manifoldness of its consciousness, its coming-to-be-other is knowing taking-the-inward-turn. Immediate existence is converted into thought, or consciousness that is only sensuous is converted into consciousness of thoughts, indeed because thought has emerged from out of immediacy, or because it is conditioned thought, it is not pure knowing, but rather thought which has otherness in it and is thus the self-opposed thought of good and evil. Man is represented in such a manner that this is something that just happened and was not anything that was necessary – it just happened that man lost the form of self-equality by plucking the fruits from the tree of the knowing of good and evil, and that he was driven out of the state of innocent consciousness, out of a nature that offered itself up to him without his having to labor for it, out of paradise, out of the garden of the animals.

776. While this taking-the-inward-turn by existing consciousness immediately determines itself as the becoming-unequal-to-itself, so does evil appear as the first existence of the consciousness that has taken the inward turn; and because the thoughts of good and evil are utterly opposed, and this opposition has not yet been 413dissolved, so this consciousness is essentially only evil. However, at the same time according to this opposition, there is also present the good consciousness opposing the one that is evil and their relationship to each other. – To the extent that immediate existence is converted into thoughts, and insofar as inwardly-turned-being, which is in part itself thinking and is in part the moment of the coming-to-be-other of essence more precisely determined, then the coming-to-be of evil can be shifted back even further out of the existing world and transferred into the first realm of thinking. It can thus be said that it was already the first-born son of light who, by taking the inward turn, was he who fell, but that in his place another was at once created. Such forms of expression as “fallen” as well as that of “the son” belong merely to representational thought and not to the concept, and they both equally devalue the moments of the concept into moments of representational thinking, or they carry representational thinking over into the realm of thought proper. – It is likewise a matter of indifference as to whether a manifoldness of other shapes and forms is to be coordinated with the simple thought of otherness in the eternal essence and the inward turn is then transferred to them. This co-ordination must be endorsed because, as a result, this moment of otherness at the same time expresses diversity, as it should, namely, not as plurality per se, but rather at the same time as determinate diversity, so that one part is the son, who is simple knowing of himself as the essence, while the other part is the self-relinquishing of being-for-itself, which lives only in the praise of essence, and the taking back of the relinquished being-for-itself and the inward-turn of evil can also again be put in this part. Insofar as otherness comes undone into two parts, spirit would be in its moments more determinate, and if the moments were to be enumerated as a four-in-one, or, because the class breaks itself up again into two parts, namely, the part that remained within the good and the part that became evil, spirit might even be expressed as a five-in-one. – However, counting the moments can be viewed as altogether useless, as in part what has been differentiated is itself equally as much only one difference, namely, the thought of difference is itself only one thought, just as it is this which is distinguished, or is the second thing which is distinguished vis-à-vis the first. – However, in part it is useless to enumerate these things, because the thought which grasps the many in one must be broken down out of its universality and distinguished into more than three or four differences – with regards to the absolute determinateness of the abstract One, namely, the principle of number, this sort of universality appears as indeterminateness in relation to number as such, such that one could speak only of numbers per se, i.e., not of the number of differences. It is therefore entirely superfluous to think here of number and enumeration, just as in other respects the mere difference between magnitude and amount is utterly devoid of the concept and says nothing.

777. Good and evil turned out to be determinate differences of thought. 414While their opposition has not yet been dissolved, and while they are represented as the essence of thought, each of which is self-sufficient for itself, so is man the self with no essence and is the synthetic basis of their existence and struggle. However, these universal powers belong just as much to the self, or the self is their actuality. According to these moments, it therefore happens that just as evil is nothing but the inward-turn of the natural existence of spirit, so conversely the good enters into actuality and appears as an existing self-consciousness. – What in the purely conceived⁷⁸ spirit is only intimated as the coming-to-be-the-other of the divine essence here comes closer to its realization for representational thinking. To representational thinking, the coming-to-be-the-other of the divine essence consists in the divine essence humbling itself and renouncing its abstraction and non-actuality. – The other aspect, that of evil, is taken by representational thinking to be an event alien to the divine essence. To grasp evil in the divine essence itself as the divine essence's wrath is the supreme and most severe effort of which representational thinking, wrestling with itself, is capable; an effort which, since it lacks the concept, remains a fruitless struggle.

778. The alienation of the divine essence is therefore posited in its twofold mode. The self of spirit and its simple thought are the two moments whose absolute unity is spirit itself. Its alienation consists in the two moments separating themselves from each other, and in one having an unequal value with regard to the other. This inequality is for that reason twofold, and two combinations emerge, whose common moments are the ones given here. In the one, the divine essence counts as the essential, and natural existence and the self as the inessential, as something to be sublated. On the other hand, in the other, it is being-for-itself which counts as the essential, and the divine in its simplicity counts as the inessential. Their still empty mediating middle is existence per se, the mere commonality of their two moments.

779. The dissolution of this opposition does not so much take place through the struggle between the two moments, which are represented as separate and self-sufficient essences. What lies in their self-sufficiency is that in itself each must in its own self, through its concept, dissolve itself. The struggle initially begins where both cease to be this mixture of thought and self-sufficient existence and where they confront each other only as thoughts, for, as determinate concepts, they essentially are only in that oppositional relation. In contrast, as self-sufficient concepts, they have their essentiality outside of their opposition; their movement is therefore free movement, which belongs properly to themselves. Just as the movement of both is therefore the movement in itself because the movement of both is to be observed in them, so it is that the movement also begins in the one which is determined as existing-in-itself in contrast to the other. This is represented as an act of free will; but the necessity for its self-relinquishing lies in the concept, namely, that what exists-in-itself, which has that determination 415only in opposition, has for that very reason no truly stable existence. – Therefore, it is the one to which what validly counts as the essence is not being-for-itself but the simple itself; and this is the one that relinquishes itself of itself, goes to its death, and as a result reconciles the absolute essence with itself, for in this movement it exhibits itself as spirit. The abstract essence is self-alienated, it has natural existence and self-like actuality. This, its otherness, or its sensuous presence, is taken back again by the second coming-to-be-other, and it is posited as sublated, as universal. As a result, the essence has in that sensuous presence come to be itself. The immediate existence of actuality has thus ceased to be alien, or external, to that essence, as it is what is sublated, or what is universal. Thus, this death is its resurrection as spirit.

780. The sublated immediate presence of self-conscious essence is this essence as universal self-consciousness. This concept of the sublated singularly individual self that is the absolute essence thus immediately expresses the constitution of a religious community,⁷⁹ which previously lingered in representational thinking, but which now returns to itself as a return into the self; and thus spirit makes the transition from the second element of its determination, or from representational thinking, into the third, into self-consciousness as such. – If we further examine the way in which representational thinking conducts itself in its advancing movement, we initially see that this is expressed as the divine essence taking on a human nature. In that expression, it has already stated that in itself, both are not separated – just as the divine essence therein relinquishes itself of itself at the very outset, just as its existence takes an inward turn and becomes evil, just as it is not explicitly stated but is contained in the expression that in itself this evil existence is not alien to the divine essence. Absolute essence would be only an empty name if in truth there were an other to it, if there were to be a fall from it. – The moment of inwardly-turned-being instead constitutes the essential moment of the self of spirit. – That this inwardly-turned-being, which is thereby actuality, belongs to the essence itself, this latter, which for us is the concept and to the extent that it is a concept, appears to representationally thinking consciousness as an incomprehensible occurrence; and to representational thinking, the in-itself takes on the form of indifferent being. However, the thought that these moments which seem to be in flight from each other are in fact not separated, namely, the moments of absolute essence and of the self existing-for-itself, also appears to this representational thinking– for it does possess the true content – but this representational thought comes afterwards in the self-relinquishing of the divine essence which becomes flesh. This representational thought is in this manner still immediate and hence not spiritual. It knows the human shape of the essence initially only as a particular and not yet as a universal form; it becomes spiritual for this consciousness in the movement of the shaped essence, which again sacrifices its immediate existence and returns into the essence. The essence, as taking a reflective turn into itself, is spirit. – The reconciliation of the divine essence with the other as such, and, specifically, with the thought of this other, of evil, is thus 416therein representationally thought. – However much according to its concept this reconciliation is expressed as consisting in stable existence, because evil in truth is supposed to be in itself the same as the good, or however much even that the divine essence is in truth the same as nature in its entire extent, still nature is, as separated from the divine essence, only nothingness – and this must be viewed as an unspiritual mode of expression which necessarily gives rise to misunderstandings. – When evil is the same as good, then evil itself is not evil, nor is goodness good, but both have instead been sublated. Evil per se is the inwardly-turned being-for-itself,⁸⁰ and the good is the self-lessly simple. While in this way they are both expressed according to their concept, at the same time the unity of the two becomes clear, for inwardly-turned being-for-itself is simple knowing, and the self-less simple is likewise pure inwardly turned being-for-itself. – If it must thus be said according to this latter concept of good and evil (which is to say, insofar as they are not good and evil) that good and evil are the same, then it must equally be said that they are not the same but rather are utterly different, for simple being-for-itself, or pure knowing, is likewise pure negativity, or the absolute difference in them themselves. – Just these two propositions complete the whole, and the first can only be asserted and secured if one insurmountably and obstinately clings to it when it is confronted by the other. While both are equally right, they are both equally wrong, and their wrong consists in taking such abstract forms as “the same” and “not the same,” “identity” and “non-identity,” to be something true, fixed, actual, and in resting one's case on such abstract forms. Neither the one nor the other has truth; what does have truth is their very movement. In this movement, the simple “the same” is the abstraction and is thereby the absolute difference, while this latter, as the difference in itself, is distinguished from itself and is therefore self-equality. This is what is the case with the this-sameness-with-self⁸¹ of the divine essence, with nature per se, and with human nature in particular. The former is nature insofar as it is not essence; the latter is divine according to its essence. – However, it is spirit in which both abstract aspects are posited as they are in truth, namely, as sublated – a positing that cannot be expressed by the judgment and by the spiritless “is” of the judgmental copula. – Likewise, nature is nothing outside of its essence. However, this nothing itself nonetheless is; it is the absolute abstraction and therefore is pure thinking, or inwardly-turned-being, and, together with the moment of its opposition vis-à-vis spiritual unity, it is evil. The difficulty that occurs with these concepts is due solely to clinging tenaciously to the “is” and forgetting the thinking in which the moments are as much as they are 417not – are only the movement that is spirit. – This spiritual unity is the unity in which the differences are only as moments, or as sublated. It is this unity which came to be for that representationally thinking consciousness in that reconciliation, and, while this unity is the universality of self-consciousness, self-consciousness has ceased to be representational. The movement has returned back into it.

781. Spirit is therefore posited in the third element, in universal self-consciousness; spirit is its religious community. The movement of this religious community, as self-consciousness which has differentiated itself from its representational thought, is that of bringing out what has come to be in itself. The dead divine man, or the human God, is in itself universal self-consciousness; He has to become this for this latter self-consciousness. Or, while this self-consciousness constitutes one side of the opposition in representational thought, namely, the side of evil, which itself takes natural existence and singular being-for-itself to be the essence, this latter aspect, which is represented as self-sufficient and not yet as a moment, must for the sake of its self-sufficiency in and for itself elevate itself to spirit, or it has to exhibit the same movement in its self-sufficiency.

782. This aspect is natural spirit; the self has to pull back from this naturalness and turn inward, which would mean that it would become evil. However, it is already in itself evil; taking-the-inward-turn thus consists in convincing itself that natural existence is evil. The existing coming-to-be-evil of the world and the world's being-evil falls on the side of representationally thinking consciousness, just as does the existing reconciliation of the absolute essence. However, that which was represented according to its form as only a sublated moment falls on the side of self-consciousness as such, for the self is the negative, and is therefore knowing – a knowing that is a pure doing of consciousness within itself. – This moment of the negative must likewise express itself in the content. While the essence is in itself already reconciled with itself and is a spiritual unity in which the parts of the representation are sublated, or are moments, it turns out that each part of the representation here receives a meaning opposite to that which it had before. As a result, each meaning is completed in the other, and only as a result is the content a spiritual content. While the determinateness is just as much its opposite, the unity in otherness, or the spiritual unity, is completed; just as formerly for us, or in itself, the opposite meanings had themselves unified themselves, even the abstract forms of the same and not-the-same, of identity and non-identity have been sublated.

783. However much therefore in representationally thinking consciousness the inwardizing⁸² of natural self-consciousness was existing evil, still the inwardization 418in the element of self-consciousness is the knowing of evil as what is in itself in existence. Thus, this knowing is admittedly a coming-to-be of evil, but it is only the coming-to-be of the thought of evil and is for that reason given recognition as the first moment of reconciliation; for, as a return into itself from out of the immediacy of nature, which is determined as what is evil, it is the forsaking of that immediacy and to die unto sin. It is not natural existence as such that consciousness forsakes but the natural existence that is at the same time known as evil. The immediate movement of taking-the-inward-turn is equally as much a mediated movement. – It presupposes itself, or it is its own ground. The ground for taking-the-inward-turn is, in particular, because nature in itself has already taken the inward turn; on account of evil, man must take the inward turn, but evil is itself taking-the-inward-turn. – For that reason, this first movement is itself only the immediate movement, or is its simple concept, because it is the same as what its ground is. The movement, or the coming-to-be-other, thus still has to come on the scene in its own genuine form.

784. Therefore, other than this immediacy, the mediation of representational thought is necessary. Both the knowing of nature as the untrue existence of spirit and this universality of self which has taken the inward turn are each in themselves the reconciliation of spirit with itself. For the non-conceptually comprehending self-consciousness,⁸³ this in-itself receives both the form of an existent and the form of something represented to it. Therefore, to that self-consciousness, conceptually grasping the matter does not consist in getting a grip on this concept, which knows sublated natural existence to be universal and thus to be reconciled with itself. Rather, it consists in getting a grip on the representational thought that the divine essence is reconciled with its existence through the event of the divine essence's own relinquishing of itself, through its incarnation which has already occurred and its death. – To get a grip on this representation is now to express determinately just what it is in representational thought which only a short while ago was called the spiritual resurrection, or its singular self-consciousness coming to be the universal, or its coming to be the religious community. – The death of the divine man, as death, is abstract negativity, the immediate result of the movement which only comes to an end in natural universality. In spiritual self-consciousness, death loses this natural significance, or it becomes its already stated concept. Death is transfigured from what it immediately means, i.e., from the non-being of this singular individual, into the universality of spirit which lives in its own religious community, dies there daily, and is daily there resurrected.

785. What belongs to the element of representational thought, absolute spirit representing the nature of spirit in its existence as a singular spirit or instead as a particular spirit, is therefore shifted here into self-consciousness itself, into the knowing that sustains itself in its otherness. This self-consciousness thus does not therefore actually die off in the way that the particular is represented to have actually died; 419rather, its particularity dies off in its universality, which is to say, in its knowing, which is the essence reconciling itself with itself. That initially antecedent element of representational thinking is therefore posited here as sublated, or it has returned into the self, into its concept; what was only an existent in the former has become the subject. – precisely by doing so, the first element, pure thinking, and the eternal spirit in it are also no longer an other-worldly beyond to representationally thinking consciousness, nor are they an other-worldly beyond to the self; rather, the return of the whole into itself consists precisely in containing all moments within itself. – The death of the mediator, which has so deeply moved the self, is the sublation of his objectivity, or of his particular being-for-itself; this particular being-for-itself has become universal self-consciousness. – On the other side of the coin and just as a result, the universal is self-consciousness, and the pure, or the non-actual spirit of mere thinking has become actual. – The death of the mediator is the death not only of his natural aspect, or of his particular being-for-itself. What dies is not only the already dead outer shell stripped of essence but also the abstraction of the divine essence, for the mediator is, to the extent that his death has not yet completed the reconciliation, one-sided, which as one-sided knows the simplicity of thinking as the essence in opposition to actuality. This extreme of the self is not yet of equivalent value with the essence; it is only as spirit that the self has that value. The death of this representational thought contains at the same time the death of the abstraction of the divine essence which is not yet posited as a self. That death is the agonized feeling of the unhappy consciousness that God himself is dead. This harsh expression is the expression of the inmost simple-knowing-of-oneself, the return of consciousness into the depth of the night of the I = I which no longer differentiates and knows nothing external to it. This feeling thus is in fact the loss of substance and of the substance taking a stance against consciousness. However, at the same time it is the pure subjectivity of substance, or the pure certainty of its own self which it lacked as object, as immediacy, or as pure essence. This knowing is therefore spirit-giving, as a result of which substance becomes subject, its abstraction and lifelessness have died, and it has become actual, simple, and universal self-consciousness.

786. In this way spirit is therefore spirit knowing itself. It knows itself, and what is, to itself, an object, or its representation, is the true absolute content. As we saw, the content expresses spirit itself. It is at the same time not only the content of self-consciousness and not only an object for self-consciousness; it is, rather, also actual spirit. It is this because it runs through the three elements of its nature, and this movement in and through itself constitutes its actuality. – What moves itself is spirit; it is the subject of the movement, and it is likewise the moving, or the substance through which the subject passes. Just as to ourselves the concept of spirit came to be when we entered into religion, 420namely, as the movement of spirit certain of itself which forgives evil and therein lets go of its own simplicity and rigid unchangeableness, or the movement in which the absolute opposites cognize themselves to be the same, and this cognition bursts forth as the Yes between these extremes – so too the religious consciousness to which the absolute essence is revealed intuits this latter concept, and it sublates the difference between its own self and what it intuits. As it is subject, so too is it substance, and thus is itself spirit just because and to the extent that it is this movement.

787. However, this religious community has not yet reached its completion in this, its self-consciousness. Its content is in the form of representational thinking, and this estrangement also still has in itself the actual spirituality of the religious community, its return from out of its representational thinking, just as the element of pure thinking was itself also burdened with that opposition. This spiritual religious community also does not have a consciousness about what it is; it is spiritual self-consciousness, which, to itself, is not this object, or does not develop into a consciousness of itself; rather, to the extent that it is consciousness, it has those representational thoughts that have been examined. – We see self-consciousness at its last turning point becoming, to itself, inward, and arriving at the knowing of its inwardly-turned-being; we see it relinquish itself of its natural existence and gain pure negativity. However, the positive meaning, that this very negativity, or the pure inwardness of knowing, is just as much the self-equal essence, or that substance has here arrived at absolute self-consciousness, all this is an other for the devotional consciousness. It gets a grip on this aspect, that the pure inwardization of knowing is in itself absolute simplicity, or is the substance, as the representational thought of something which is the way it is not according to its concept but rather as the action of an alien satisfaction.⁸⁴ Or, it is not this for the devotional consciousness: That this depth of the pure self is the power through which the abstract essence is pulled down out of its abstraction and elevated to the self through the power of this pure devotion. – As a result, in relation to the devotional consciousness, the doing of the self retains this negative meaning because the substance's self-relinquishing is for the self an in-itself which the self likewise does not grasp and comprehend, or which it does not find in its doing as such. – While this unity of essence and self has in itself taken place, consciousness also still has this representational thought of its reconciliation, but as a representation. It achieves satisfaction as a result of externally adding to its pure negativity the positive meaning of the unity of itself with essence; its satisfaction thus itself remains burdened with the opposition of an other-worldly beyond. Its own reconciliation therefore enters into its consciousness as something remote, 421something far away in the future, just as the reconciliation which the other self achieved appears as something remote in the past. Just as the singularly individual divine man has a father existing-in-itself and only an actual mother, so too the universal divine man, the religious community, has as its father its own doing and knowing, but for its mother it has eternal love, which it only feels but does not intuit in its consciousness as an actual immediate object. Its reconciliation consequently is in its heart, but it is still estranged from its consciousness, and its actuality is still fractured. What enters into its consciousness as the in-itself, or the aspect of pure mediation, is the reconciliation which lies in the other-worldly beyond, but what appears as current, as the aspect of immediacy and of existence, is the world, which still has to await its transfiguration. The world is indeed in itself reconciled with the essence; and it is indeed known of that essence that it no longer cognizes the object as self-alienated, but cognizes it as the same as itself in its love. However, for self-consciousness, this immediate present does not yet have spiritual shape. The spirit of the religious community is in its immediate consciousness still separated from its religious consciousness, which indeed declares that in itself these two are not supposed to be separated, but that they have become an in-itself which is not realized, or which has not yet become an equally absolute being-for-itself.

¹ selbstlos.

² bei sich seiendes.

³ erscheinenden.

⁴ die gedachte.

⁵ weltlichen.

⁶ Bestimmung; or “its calling,” “its fate.”

⁷ Länge.

⁸ erfüllt.

⁹ Erfüllung.

¹⁰ Vorstellung.

¹¹ Dasein…das sich da ist. Hegel plays on existence and “exists there.”

¹² Vorstellungen.

¹³ begriffen zu sein.

¹⁴ selbstlos.

¹⁵ Vorstellungen.

¹⁶ morgenländischen.

¹⁷ Vorstellung.

¹⁸ Entäußerung.

¹⁹ da ist.

²⁰ Sitte.

²¹ Massen der Stände.

²² da ist.

²³ Naturwesen.

²⁴ sich entäußerte.

²⁵ Ding seins.

²⁶ den Meister.

²⁷ Dasein…Existenz.

²⁸ da ist.

²⁹ Dasein…existierte.

³⁰ bei sich.

³¹ bei sich selbst seiend.

³² Gemeine.

³³ Meister.

³⁴ wissende Denken.

³⁵ vorgestellten.

³⁶ vorgestelltes.

³⁷ Vorstellung.

³⁸ wissende Wahrheit.

³⁹ anerkannt.

⁴⁰ vielnamige; or, equally, “nameless.”

⁴¹ außer sich; or, “beside itself.”

⁴² Oberbefehl…Oberherrschaft.

⁴³ vorgestellte.

⁴⁴ selbstische.

⁴⁵ für sich.

⁴⁶ Vorstellung.

⁴⁷ Vorstellung.

⁴⁸ Vorstellung.

⁴⁹ doppelsinnigen.

⁵⁰ Recht. Alternatively this might be rendered “right” or “law” (as opposed to a particular law, Gesetz).

⁵¹ dem wissenden Gotte.

⁵² Unwirklichkeit.

⁵³ Begeistung.

⁵⁴ die Person.

⁵⁵ eingebildet.

⁵⁶ Selbstwesenheit.

⁵⁷ gedachten.

⁵⁸ das Festhalten.

⁵⁹ ist bei sich.

⁶⁰ der gedachten.

⁶¹ die Er-Innerung.

⁶² veräußerten; or “divested of itself.”

⁶³ gedachte.

⁶⁴ bei sich.

⁶⁵ erkennt.

⁶⁶ als Gedachtes.

⁶⁷ bei sich selbst.

⁶⁸ gedachten.

⁶⁹ gedachte.

⁷⁰ Gemeine.

⁷¹ begriffen.

⁷² Vorstellens.

⁷³ Vorstellens.

⁷⁴ nur bei sich.

⁷⁵ von einem Fremden.

⁷⁶ erkenntnisloses.

⁷⁷ gedachten.

⁷⁸ gedachten.

⁷⁹ Gemeinde.

⁸⁰ insichseiende Für-sich-sein.

⁸¹ Dieselbigkeit.

⁸² Innerlichwerden.

⁸³ nicht begreifende Selbstbewußtsein.

⁸⁴ Genugtuung.

(DD) Absolute Knowing

VIII. 422Absolute Knowing

788. The spirit of revealed religion has not yet overcome its consciousness as such, or, what amounts to the same thing, its actual self-consciousness is not the object of its consciousness. Spirit itself and the moments differentiated in it generally belong to representational thinking and the form of objectivity. The content of the representational thinking is absolute spirit, and the sole remaining issue is that of sublating this mere form, or instead, because the form belongs to consciousness as such, its truth must have already resulted from the shapes consciousness has assumed. – The overcoming of the object of consciousness is not to be taken one-sidedly, as showing that the object is returning into the self, but rather, it is to be taken more determinately, both that the object as such exhibited itself to the self as vanishing, as well as being instead the self-relinquishing of self-consciousness that posits thinghood, and that this self-relinquishing does not only have a negative meaning but rather a positive one as well, and not only for us, or in itself, but also for self-consciousness itself. For self-consciousness, the negative of the object, or its self-sublating, has as a result a positive meaning. Self-consciousness knows this nullity of the object as a result, on the one hand, of self-consciousness relinquishing itself of itself – for in this self-relinquishing, it posits itself as object, or, on account of the inseparable unity of being-for-itself, it posits the object as itself. On the other hand, there is at the same time thereby this other moment, that self-consciousness has equally as well also sublated this self-relinquishing and this objectivity, and it has taken them back into itself; thus in its otherness as such, it is at one with itself.¹ – This is the movement of consciousness, and in that movement, consciousness is the totality of its moments. – Consciousness must likewise conduct itself towards the object according to the totality of its determinations and have come to grips with the object according to each of those determinations. This totality of its determinations makes the object in itself into a spiritual essence, and for consciousness, it becomes this in truth through the grasping of each of its singular determinations as a determination of the self, or through the spiritual conduct mentioned above.

789. The object is therefore in part immediate being, or a thing per se, something which corresponds to immediate consciousness. In part, it is a coming-to-be-the-other of itself, its relation, or being for an other and being-for-itself, the determinateness – which corresponds to perception, – and, in part, it is essence, or the universal – which 423corresponds to the understanding. The object as a whole is the syllogism, or the movement of the universal into singular individuality by way of determination, as well as the converse movement from singular individuality to the universal by way of sublated singularity, or determination. – Consciousness must therefore know the object as itself according to these three determinations. However, we are not speaking here of knowing as a pure conceptual comprehension of the object; rather, this knowing is supposed to be shown only in its coming-to-be, or in its moments according to the aspects which belong to consciousness as such and according to the moments of the genuine concept, or of pure knowing in the form of the figurations of consciousness. For that reason, the object does not yet appear in consciousness as such as the spiritual essentiality in the way that we just expressed it, and the conduct of consciousness in regard to the object is neither that of considering it in this totality as such, nor that of considering it in its purely conceptual form. Rather, it is in part a shape of consciousness per se and in part a number of such shapes that we gather together, in which the totality of the moments of the object and of the conduct of consciousness can be pointed out only as having been dissolved in the totality's moments.

790. Consequently, for the grasp of the object as that grasp is in the shape of consciousness, one needs only to recall the previous shapes of consciousness which have already come before us. – Thus, with regard to the object, insofar as it is immediate and is an indifferent being, we saw observing reason seeking and finding itself in these indifferent things, i.e., as consciously aware of its doing as external doing as much as it is consciously aware of the object only as an immediate object. – We also saw its determination at its highest point expressed in the infinite judgment that the being of the I is a thing. – namely, as a sensuous immediate thing. If the I is called the soul, then it is also represented as a thing, but as an invisible, infallible, etc., thing and therefore in fact not represented as immediate being and not as what is understood to be a thing at all – Taken in that way, that former judgment is spiritless, or instead spiritlessness itself. However, according to its concept, it is in fact the richest in spirit, and this, its inner, which is not yet present in the concept, is what is expressed in the two other moments which are still to be examined.

791. The thing is I: In fact, in this infinite judgment, the thing is sublated. The thing is nothing in itself; it only has any meaning in relationships, only through the I and its relation to the I. – In fact, this moment emerged for consciousness in pure insight and Enlightenment. Things are purely and simply 424useful and are only to be considered according to their utility. – The culturally formed and educated self-consciousness, which traversed the world of self-alienated spirit, has through its self-relinquishing created the thing as itself. It thus still retains itself in the thing, and it knows the thing to have no self-sufficiency, or it knows that the thing is essentially only being for others. Or, because it knows that it has fully expressed the relationship, or what here solely constitutes the nature of the object, the thing thus counts, to the cultured consciousness, as a being-for-itself. It thus expresses sensuous-certainty as absolute truth, but it expresses this being-for-itself as itself a moment which only disappears and passes over into its opposite, into being for an other in the sense of being at the disposal of an other.

792. However, knowing the thing has not yet therein reached its completion. The thing must become known not only according to the immediacy of being and its determinateness, but also as the essence, or as the inner, as the self. This is present in moral self-consciousness. This knows its knowing as the absolute essentiality, or knows being utterly as the pure will or pure knowing. Moral self-consciousness is nothing but just this willing and this knowing; anything else corresponds to only inessential being, i.e., not being existing-in-itself but only its empty husk, inasmuch that in its representational thought of the world, moral consciousness unchains existence from the self, it just as much takes this existence back again into itself. As conscience, it finally no longer switches back and forth between taking a position, then hedging about its position, and then dissembling about existence and the self. Rather, it knows that its existence as such is this pure certainty of itself. The objective element into which it injects itself when it acts, is nothing but the self's pure knowing of itself.

793. These are the moments out of which the reconciliation of spirit with its own genuine consciousness composes itself. For themselves, those moments are singular, and it is their spiritual unity alone which constitutes the force of this reconciliation. However, the last of these moments is necessarily this unity itself, and, as it has become clear, it in fact combines them all into itself. Spirit certain of itself in its existence has as the element of its existence nothing but this knowing of itself: Nothing but its expression that what it does, it does out of the conviction of duty, and that this, its language, is what makes its acting count as valid. – Acting is both the first division existing-in-itself of the simplicity of the concept and the return from out of this division. This first movement rolls over into the second, while the element of recognition posits itself as simple knowing of duty in contrast to the difference and the estrangement which lie in action as such, and, in this manner, it forms an ironclad actuality confronting action. However, in forgiveness we saw how this hardness itself drains itself and then relinquishes itself. 425For self-consciousness, actuality as well as immediate existence therefore have here no other meaning than that they are pure knowing: – as determinate existence, or as a relation, is that which is standing over against itself partly a knowing of this purely singular self and partly a knowing of knowing as universal. At the same time, it is therein posited that the third moment, universality, or the essence, counts only as knowing for each of the two which are confronting the other. They finally sublate the empty opposition which still remains, and they are the knowing of the “I = I”: this singular individual self which is immediately pure knowing, or is the universal.

794. This reconciliation of consciousness with self-consciousness is thereby shown to have been brought about from two sides; at one time in the religious spirit and again in consciousness itself as such. They are differentiated from each other in that the former is this reconciliation in the form of being-in-itself, the latter in the form of being-for-itself. As they have been examined, they initially come undone from each other. In the order in which the shapes of consciousness came before us, consciousness had partly come around to the singular moments of that order and their unification long before religion had given its object the shape of actual self-consciousness. The unification of both aspects has not yet been shown; that unification wraps up this series of shapes of spirit, for in it spirit arrives at the point where it knows itself not only as it is in itself, or according to its absolute content, and not only as it is for itself according to its contentless form, or according to the aspect of self-consciousness. Rather, it knows itself as it is in and for itself.

795. However, this unification has in itself already come to pass, indeed in religion, in the return of representational thought into self-consciousness, but it has not come to pass according to its genuine form, for the religious aspect is the aspect of the in-itself which stands in contrast to that of self-consciousness. The unification thus belongs to this other aspect, which, in that opposition, is the aspect of the reflective turn into itself and is what contains both itself and its opposite not only in itself, or in a general way, but also for itself, or as developed and differentiated. Both the content, as well as the other aspect of self-conscious spirit to the extent that it is the other aspect, are now present in their completeness and have been pointed out. The unification that is still lacking is the simple unity of the concept. This concept is itself also already present in the aspect of self-consciousness, but, just as it previously came before us, it has, like all the other moments, the form of being a particular shape of consciousness. – It is that part of the shape of self-certain spirit which comes to a standstill in its concept and which was called the beautiful soul. The beautiful soul is its own knowing of itself 426in its pure and transparent unity – the self-consciousness that knows this pure knowing of pure inwardly-turned-being as spirit – not only the intuition of the divine but the divine's self-intuition. – While this concept steadfastly holds itself in opposition to its realization, it is the one-sided shape which we saw not only disappear into thin air but also positively relinquish itself and move forward. Through this realization, this steadfast-insistence-on-oneself on the part of that objectless self-consciousness, or the determinateness of the concept in contrast to its fulfillment, is sublated. Its self-consciousness achieves the form of universality and what remains for it is its genuinely true concept, the concept which has attained its realization. That self-consciousness is the concept in its truth, or in the unity with its self-relinquishing. – It is the knowing of pure knowing not as abstract essence, which is what duty is – but the knowing of this pure knowing as an essence which is this knowing, this pure self-consciousness, which is therefore at the same time the genuinely true object, for this concept is the self existing-for-itself.

796. This concept gave itself its fulfillment, on the one hand, in the acting spirit certain of itself, and, on the other hand, in religion. In the latter, it gained the absolute content as content, or in the form of representational thought, of otherness for consciousness. In the former shape, on the contrary, the form is the self itself, for it contains the acting spirit certain of itself, the self putting the life of absolute spirit into practice.² As we see, this shape is that former simple concept, but one which surrenders its eternal essence and is the concept which is there,³ or acts. The concept has its estrangement, or its emerging from behind, in the purity of the concept, for this purity is the absolute abstraction, or negativity. The concept just as much finds the element of its actuality, or its being, in the concept, in pure knowing itself, for this pure knowing is the simple immediacy which is as much being and existence as it is essence. The former is negative thinking, the latter is positive thinking itself. This existence is finally just as much the being-reflected-into-itself either from out of pure knowing – whether as existence or as duty – or from out of being evil. This taking-the-inward-turn constitutes the opposition of the concept and is thereby the appearance on the scene of the non-acting, non-actual pure knowing of essence. However, its coming on the scene in this opposition is its participation in the opposition; the pure knowing of essence has in itself relinquished itself of its simplicity, for it is estrangement, or the negativity that is the concept. Inasmuch as this estrangement is the coming-to-be-for-itself, it is what is evil; insofar as it is the in-itself, it is what remains good. – Now, what initially occurs in itself is at the same time for consciousness and is equally itself doubled, equally as much for consciousness as its being-for-itself, or is its own doing. The same thing which is already posited in itself thus now repeats itself as the knowing of consciousness of it and as a conscious doing. For the other, each gives up the self-sufficiency of determinateness in which it comes on the scene vis-à-vis the other. This giving up of self-sufficiency is the same renunciation of the one-sidedness of the concept 427which in itself constituted the beginning, but it is henceforth its own renunciation, just as the concept which it renounces is its own concept. – As negativity, that former in-itself of the beginning is in truth just as much the mediated in-itself, and it therefore now posits itself as it is in truth; and as the determinateness which each has in itself and for the other, the negative is self-sublating. One of the two parts of the opposition is the inequality between inwardly-turned-being-in-its-singular-individuality⁴ and universality – the other is the inequality between its abstract universality and the self. The former dies unto its being-for-itself, relinquishes itself and confesses; the latter disavows the rigidity of its abstract universality and thereby dies unto its self devoid of liveliness and its unmoved universality. The result is that the former replenishes itself through the moment of universality which is the essence, and the latter replenishes itself through the universality which is the self. Through this movement of acting, spirit – which is only spirit because it is there,⁵ because it elevates its existence into thoughts and thereby into the absolute opposition, and because it then returns into itself just through and in that opposition – comes forth as the pure universality of knowing which is self-consciousness, as the self-consciousness which is the simple unity of knowing.

797. What in religion was content, or the form of representing an other, is here the self's own doing. The concept makes it binding that the content is that of the self's own doing. – For this concept is, as we see, the knowing of the self's doing within itself as all essentiality and all existence, the knowing of this subject as substance and of the substance as this knowing of its doing. – Our sole contribution here is partly to gather together the singular moments, each of which in its principle exhibits the life of the whole spirit, and partly to hold onto the concept in the form of the concept, whose content would already itself have yielded to these moments and to the form of a shape of consciousness.

798. This last shape of spirit is that of absolute knowing, the spirit which at the same time gives to its complete and true content the form of the self, and as a result realizes its concept as well as remaining within its concept in this realization. It is spirit knowing itself in the shape of spirit, or it is comprehending conceptual knowing.⁶ Here truth is not only in itself completely the same as certainty, but it also has the shape of certainty of itself, or it is in its existence, which is to say, for the knowing spirit, in the form of knowing itself. Truth is the content, which in religion is not as yet the same as its certainty. However, this equality consists in the content receiving the shape of the self. As a result, what has come to be the element of existence, or the form of 428objectivity, is for consciousness what the essence itself is, namely, the concept. Spirit, appearing to consciousness in this element, or, what amounts to the same thing here, what is therein engendered by it, is science.

799. The nature, moments, and movement of this knowing have thus turned out to be such that this knowing is the pure being-for-itself of self-consciousness; it is the I, which is this I and no other, and it is just as much the immediately mediated, or the sublated, universal I. – It has a content that it differentiates from itself, for it is pure negativity, or the self-estranging; it is consciousness. In its differences, this content is itself the I, for it is the movement of itself sublating itself, or the same pure negativity which is the I. The I is in that content as differentiated, as having taken a reflective turn into itself. The content is as a result only conceptually comprehended⁷ when, in its otherness, the I is at one with itself.⁸ More determinately stated, this content is nothing but the very movement just spoken of, for the content is the spirit that traverses through itself, indeed for itself as spirit in its having the shape of the concept in its objectivity.

800. However, with regards to the existence of this concept, science does not appear in time and in actuality until spirit has reached this consciousness about itself. As the spirit that knows what it is, it does not exist any earlier, nor does it even exist anywhere at all until after it has completed the labor of compelling its incomplete shapes to provide for its consciousness the shape of its essence, and in this manner to bring its self-consciousness in balance with its consciousness. – The spirit existing in and for itself differentiated into its moments is knowing existing-for-itself, is conceptually comprehending⁹ per se, which as such has not yet reached the substance, or is not in itself absolute knowing.

801. Now, in actuality the substance that is knowing is there earlier than the form, or the conceptual shape¹⁰ of the substance that is knowing. For the substance is the still undeveloped in-itself, or the ground and concept in its still unmoved simplicity, and it is therefore the inwardness, or the self of spirit which is not yet there.¹¹ What is there is the still undeveloped simple and immediate, that is, the object of representational thinking consciousness per se. Cognizing, because it is spiritual consciousness, is that to which what is in itself is only to the extent that it is as being for the self and being of the self, or is concept. For this reason cognizing initially has only a meager object in contrast to which the substance and the consciousness of this substance are richer. The revealedness which the substance has in this consciousness is in fact concealment, for the substance is the still self-less being, and what is revealed is, to it, only the certainty of itself. Hence, initially it is only the abstract moments which belong to substance's self-consciousness. However, while as pure movements these moments impel themselves forward, self-consciousness enriches itself until it has wrested the entire substance from 429consciousness and has absorbed into itself the entire structure of the substance's essentialities, and – while this negative conduct towards objectivity is equally positive, is a positing – it has created these elements from out of itself and has thereby at the same time produced them for consciousness. In the concept which knows itself as the concept, the moments thereby come on the scene prior to the fulfilled whole, whose coming-to-be is the movement of those moments. In contrast, in consciousness the whole is prior to the moments, but not as conceptually comprehended.¹² – Time is the concept itself that is there and is represented to consciousness as empty intuition. Consequently, spirit necessarily appears in time, and it appears in time as long as it does not grasp its pure concept, which is to say, as long as it does not erase time. Time is the pure self externally intuited by the self but not grasped by the self; it is only the intuited concept. As this concept grasps itself, it sublates its temporal form, conceptually comprehends the intuiting, and is conceptually comprehended and conceptually comprehending intuiting.¹³ – Time thus appears as the destiny and necessity of the spirit that is not yet completed within itself. – It appears as the necessity to enrich the participation self-consciousness has in consciousness and to set into motion the immediacy of the in-itself – the form in which the substance is in consciousness – or, conversely, if the in-itself is taken as inwardness, it is to realize and to reveal what is at first inward, or vindicate it for spirit's certainty of itself.

802. For this reason, it must be said that nothing is known that is not in experience, or, as it can be otherwise expressed, nothing is known that is not available as felt truth, as the eternal which is inwardly revealed, as the holy which is the object of faith, or whatever expressions are otherwise put to use. For experience consists in precisely this, namely, that the content – and the content is spirit – is in itself, is substance and is therefore the object of consciousness. However, this substance, which is spirit, is its coming-to-be what it, the substance, is in itself; and it is as this coming-to-be which is taking a reflective turn into itself that spirit is truly in itself spirit. Spirit is in itself the movement which is cognition – the transformation of that former in-itself into for-itself, of substance into subject, of the object of consciousness into the object of self-consciousness, i.e., into an object that is just as much sublated, or into the concept. This transformation is the circle returning back into itself, which presupposes its beginning and reaches its beginning only at the end. – Inasmuch as spirit therefore is necessarily this differentiating within itself, its intuited whole confronts its simple self-consciousness, and since that whole is what is differentiated, it is thus differentiated into its intuited pure concept, into time, and into the content, or into the in-itself. Substance, as subject, has in it the initial inward necessity of exhibiting itself in its own self as what it is in itself,¹⁴ as spirit. The completed objective exhibition is at the same time only the reflection of substance, or substance becoming the self. – Hence, as long as spirit 430has not in itself brought itself to completion as the world-spirit, it cannot attain its completion as self-conscious spirit. For that reason, the content of religion expresses what spirit is earlier in time than science does, but it is science alone which is spirit's true knowing of itself.

803. The movement of propelling forward the form of its self-knowing is the work which spirit accomplishes as actual history. The religious community,¹⁵ inasmuch as it is initially the substance of absolute spirit, is the coarse consciousness which has an existence all the more harsh and barbaric as its inner spirit is deeper, and whose dull and expressionless self has an even more difficult labor in dealing with its essence, with the alien content of its consciousness. Not until it has abandoned the hope of sublating alienness in an external, i.e., alien, manner, does that consciousness in itself (because the sublated alien mode is the return into self-consciousness) appeal to its own world and present time, discover that world to be its own property, and thus will have taken the first step to climb down from the intellectual world, or, instead, to give spirit¹⁶ to the abstract element of the intellectual world with the actual self. On the one hand, through observation, it finds existence as thought, and it conceptually comprehends existence, and, conversely, it finds existence in its thinking. While it has itself initially and abstractly expressed the immediate unity of thought and being, of abstract essence and the self, and while it has expressed the luminous essence more purely, namely, as the unity of extension and being – for extension is a simplicity more equal to pure thought than is light – and has thereby again revived in thought the substance of the easterly dawn, then, at the same time, spirit recoils from this abstract unity, from this self-less substantiality, and affirms individuality against it. However, only after spirit in its cultural formation and education has emptied itself of this self-less substantiality and as a result has made it into existence and infused all existence with it – and after it has arrived at the thought of utility, and in absolute freedom, has it grasped existence as its will. At that point spirit thereby turns around the thoughts lying in its innermost depths and pronounces the essence as the “I = I.” However, this “I = I” is the self-reflecting movement, for while this equality as absolute negativity is the absolute difference, the self-equality of the I confronts this pure difference. This pure difference, which is at the same time as something objective to the self knowing itself, is to be expressed as time, so that just as the essence used to be expressed as the unity of thinking and extension, it could here be interpreted as the unity of thinking and time. However, the self-surrendered difference, namely, time that is unresting and unhalting, instead collapses into itself; it is the objective motionlessness of extension, but this extension is the pure equality with itself, is the I. – Or, the I is not only the self but rather is also the equality of the self with itself. However, this equality is the complete and immediate unity with itself, or 431this subject is just as much substance. Substance solely for itself would be intuition devoid of content, or the intuition of a content which, as determinate, would only be accidental, or devoid of any necessity. The substance would only count as the absolute insofar as the substance was to be thought of, or intuited as, absolute unity, and all content would according to its diversity have to fall outside of substance; it would fall into reflection, which would not belong to substance because substance would then not be subject, would not be itself what is taking a reflective turn into itself and reflecting about itself, or would not be conceived as spirit. However much one were nonetheless to speak of a content, such content would still be, on the one hand, spoken of only in order to cast it into the empty abyss of the absolute content, while on the other hand, it would be externally gathered up from out of sensuous perception. Knowing would seem to have arrived at things, at what is different from itself, and at the differences among multiple things without having conceptually grasped how it got there or from where it came.

804. However, spirit has shown itself to us to be neither the mere withdrawal of self-consciousness into its pure inwardness, nor the mere immersion of self-consciousness into substance and the non-being of its difference. Rather, it has shown itself to be this movement of the self which relinquishes itself of itself and immerses itself in its substance, and which likewise, as subject, has both taken the inward turn into itself from out of that substance and has made its substance into an object and a content, just as it has sublated this difference between objectivity and content. That first reflection from out of immediacy is the subject's differentiating itself from its substance, or it is the concept estranging itself, taking-the-inward-turn, and is the coming-to-be of the pure I. While this difference is the pure doing of the “I = I,” the concept is both the necessity and the sunrise of existence which has that substance for its essence and which stably is for itself. However, the stability of existence¹⁷ for itself is the concept posited into determinateness, and as a result is likewise the concept's movement in its own self, downwards into the simple substance, which, as this negativity and this movement, is initially subject. – Nor does the I have to obstinately hold onto itself in the form of self-consciousness against the form of substantiality and objectivity, as if it were afraid of its self-relinquishing; the force of spirit lies instead in remaining equal to itself in its self-relinquishing, and as what is existing-in and existing-for-itself, being-for-itself is equally as well only to be posited as a moment just like being-in-itself. – Nor is the I a mediating third, which tosses the differences back into the abyss of the absolute difference and in this abyss declares them all to be equal. On the contrary, knowing consists in this seeming inactivity which only examines how the differentiated in its own self moves itself and how it returns back into its unity.

805. Therefore, in this knowing, spirit has brought to a close the movement of giving shape to itself inasmuch as that movement is burdened with the insurmountable differences of consciousness. 432Spirit has won the pure element of its existence, the concept. According to the freedom of its being, the content is the self relinquishing itself of itself, or it is the immediate unity of self-knowing. Considered with regard to the content, the pure movement of this self-relinquishing constitutes the necessity of this content. The diversity of content is as determinate content in sets of relations, not in itself, and its restlessness consists in its sublating itself, or in negativity. Thus, necessity, or diversity, just like free-standing being, is equally the self, and in this self-like form in which existence is immediately thought, the content is the concept. While therefore spirit has attained the concept, it unfolds existence and movement in this ether of its life, and it is science. The moments of its movement no longer exhibit themselves in that movement as determinate shapes of consciousness; rather, as the difference in consciousness has returned into the self, the moments exhibit themselves as determinate concepts and as the organic self-grounded movement of these concepts. However much in the phenomenology of spirit, each moment is both the difference between knowing and truth and the movement in which that difference sublates itself, nonetheless science does not, in contrast, contain this difference and its sublation. Rather, as the moment has the form of the concept, it unites the objective form of truth and that of the knowing self into an immediate unity. The moment does not come on the scene as this movement of passing to and fro from consciousness, or from representational thought, into self-consciousness and then back again; rather, the pure shape liberated from its appearance in consciousness, the pure concept and its further forward movement, depend solely on its pure determinateness. Conversely, to every abstract moment of science, there corresponds a shape of appearing spirit per se. Just as existing spirit is not richer than science, so too spirit in its content is no poorer. To cognize the pure concepts of science in this form, namely, in which they are shapes of consciousness, is what constitutes the aspect of their reality. According to that reality, their essence, the concept, which is posited in that reality in its simple mediation as thinking, breaks up and separates the moments of this mediation and exhibits itself according to their inner opposition.

806. Science contains within itself this necessity to relinquish itself of the form of the pure concept and to make the transition from the concept into consciousness. For self-knowing spirit, just for the reason that it grasps its own concept, is an immediate equality with itself, which in its differences is the certainty of the immediate, or is sensuous consciousness – the beginning from which we started. This release of itself from the form of its own self is the highest freedom and the highest assurance of its knowing of itself.

807. Nonetheless, 433this relinquishing is still incomplete. It expresses the relation of self-certainty to the object, an object which, just by being in the relation, has not yet attained its full freedom. Knowing is acquainted not only with itself, but also with the negative of itself, or its limit. To know its limit means to know that it is to sacrifice itself. This sacrifice is the relinquishing in which spirit exhibits its coming-to-be spirit in the form of a free contingent event, and it intuits outside of itself its pure self as time and likewise intuits its being as space. This final coming-to-be, nature, is its living, immediate coming-to-be. Nature, or relinquished spirit, is in its existence nothing but this eternal relinquishing of its stable existence and the movement which produces the subject.

808. However, the other aspect of spirit's coming-to-be, history, is that knowing self-mediating coming-to-be – the spirit relinquished into time. However, this relinquishing is likewise the relinquishing of itself; the negative is the negative of itself. This coming-to-be exhibits a languid movement and succession of spirits, a gallery of pictures, of which each, endowed with the entire wealth of spirit, moves itself so slowly because the self has to take hold of and assimilate the whole of this wealth of its substance. While its consummation consists in spirit's completely knowing what it is, in spirit knowing its substance, this knowing is its taking-the-inward-turn in which spirit forsakes its existence and gives its shape over to recollection. In taking-the-inward-turn, spirit is absorbed into the night of its self-consciousness, but its vanished existence is preserved in that night, and this sublated existence – the existence which was prior but is now newborn from knowing – is the new existence, a new world, and a new shape of spirit. In that new shape of spirit, it likewise has to begin all over again without prejudice in its immediacy, and, from its immediacy, to rear itself again to maturity, as if all that had preceded it were lost to it and as if it were to have learned nothing from the experience of the preceding spirits. However, that inwardizing re-collection¹⁸ has preserved that experience; it is what is inner, and it is in fact the higher form of substance. However much therefore this spirit begins its cultural formation and education all over again and seems to start only from itself, still it is at the same time making its beginning at a higher level. The realm of spirits, having formed itself in this way in existence, constitutes a sequence in which one spirit replaced the other, and each succeeding spirit took over from the previous spirit the realm of that spirit's world. The goal of the movement is the revelation of depth itself, and this is the absolute concept. This revelation is thereby the sublation of its depth, or its extension, the negativity of this I existing-inwardly-in-itself,¹⁹ which is its self-relinquishing, or its substance – and is its time. In its own self, this self-relinquishing relinquishes itself and, in that way, is in its extension as well as in its depth, in the self. The aim, absolute knowing, or spirit knowing itself as spirit, has its path in the recollection of 434spirits as they are in themselves and are as they achieve the organization of their realm. Their preservation according to their free-standing existence appearing in the form of contingency is history, but according to their conceptually grasped organization, it is the science of phenomenal knowing. Both together are conceptually grasped history;²⁰ they form the recollection and the Golgotha of absolute spirit, the actuality, the truth, the certainty of its throne, without which it would be lifeless and alone; only –

Out of the chalice of this realm of spirits

Foams forth to him his infinity.

¹ bei sich.

² führt…durch.

³ da ist.

⁴ In-sich-in-seiner-Einzelnheit-seins.

⁵ da ist.

⁶ begreifende Wissen.

⁷ begriffen.

⁸ bei sich selbst.

⁹ das Begreifen; conceptually comprehending or grasping.

¹⁰ Begriffsgestalt.

¹¹ noch nicht da ist.

¹² unbegriffne.

¹³ begriffnes und begreifendes Anschauen.

¹⁴ an ihr selbst…an sich.

¹⁵ religiöse Gemeine.

¹⁶ begeisten.

¹⁷ das Bestehen des Daseins.

¹⁸ die Er-Innerung.

¹⁹ insichseienden Ich.

²⁰ begriffne Geschichte.

Appendix Hegel's Advertisement and Hegel's Note to Himself

The following is an advertisement for the Phenomenology which was run originally in the Bamberger Zeitung in July 1807 and was almost certainly written by Hegel himself. Later, the advertisement also appeared in some other literary journals in Germany.

The publishing company of Jos. Ant. Goebhardt in Bamberg and Würzburg has now published the following book, which is available in all good bookstores:

G. W. F. Hegel's System Of Science

Vol. 1, the phenomenology of spirit

Containing gr. 8° 1807. Price 6 Fl.

This volume is the exposition of the coming to be of knowledge. The phenomenology of spirit is supposed to take the place of psychological explanations and also those of abstract discussions about the grounding of knowledge. It examines the preparation for science from a standpoint through which it constitutes a new, interesting philosophy and a “first science” for philosophy. It comprehends within itself the various shapes of spirit as stations on the way through which spirit becomes pure knowledge, that is, absolute spirit. Consequently, the principal sections of this science are examined in terms of the following divisions, which themselves are divided into even more sections: consciousness, self-consciousness, observing and acting reason, spirit itself as ethical, as culturally maturing, and as moral spirit, and finally as religious spirit in its distinct forms. The wealth of the appearances of spirit, which at first glance seem to be only chaotic, is brought into a scientific order, exhibiting them in terms of their necessity and within which the imperfect modes fall into dissolution and pass over into the higher forms which are their proximate truth. They find their final truth at first within religion and then, as the result of the whole, in science.

In the preface, the author explains what the current standpoint regarding the necessity of philosophy seems to amount to; further, he explains the presumptuousness and nonsense of philosophical formulas which belittle contemporary philosophy, and he explains what is at stake in contemporary philosophy and the study of it.

A second volume will contain the system of logic as speculative philosophy and the two other parts of philosophy, namely, the sciences of nature and of spirit.

Hegel's Handwritten Notice to Himself for the Reworking of the Phenomenology for the Second Edition (probable date: Autumn 1831)

Re: Preface

Phenomenology

really the first part

a) Looking ahead, to Science

bringing consciousness to this standpoint

b) Further determining the object for itself,

Logic, behind consciousness

c) distinctive¹ early work,

not to be reworked, – related to the time of its composition – in the Preface:

the abstract absolute prevailed at that time.

¹ Eigentümliche.

Further Reading

This a list of some of the key works that for over more than the last century have played a role in shaping scholarly discussions of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, together with a limited selection of some more contemporary works on the subject.

Appel, K. and T. Auinger. Eine Lektüre von Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes. Frankfurt am Main and New York: P. Lang, 2009.

Baum, M. Die Entstehung der Hegelschen Dialektik. The Author's Habilitations-schrift, Universität Gesamthochschule Siegen, 1980/81. Bonn: Bouvier, 1986.

Baum, M. and O. Pöggeler. Hegel: Einführung in seine Philosophie. Freiburg im Breisgau and München: Alber, 1977.

Becker, W. Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes: Eine Interpretation. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1971.

Beiser, F. C. The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987.

Beiser, F. C. German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781–1801. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Beiser, F. C. Hegel. New York and London: Routledge, 2005.

Bloch, E. Subjekt-Objekt: Erläuterungen zu Hegel. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1951.

Bonsiepen, W. “Einleitung.” In H.-F. Wessels, H. Clairmont, and W. Bonsiepen, eds., Phänomenologie des Geistes. Hamburg: F. Meiner Verlag, 1988, ix–lxiii.

Bowman, B. Hegel and the Metaphysics of Absolute Negativity. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Bowman, B. Sinnliche Gewissheit: Zur systematischen Vorgeschichte eines Problems des deutschen Idealismus. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2003.

Brandom, R. “A Spirit of Trust: A Semantic Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology.” Accessed May 8, 2017, http://www.pitt.edu/~brandom/spirit_of_trust_2014.html

Brandom, R. Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Bubner, R. The Innovations of Idealism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Collins, A. B. Hegel's Phenomenology: The Dialectical Justification of Philosophy's First Principles. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2013.

Denker, A. and M. G. Vater, eds. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: New Critical Essays. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2003.

Derrida, J. Glas. Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.

Dove, K. R. “Hegel's Phenomenological Method.” Review of Metaphysics 23, no. 4(1970): 615–41.

Emundts, D. and R.-P. Horstmann. G. W. F. Hegel: Eine Einführung. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2002.

Fischer, K. Hegels Leben, Werke und Lehre. Heidelberg: Winter, 1901.

Flay, J. C. Hegel's Quest for Certainty. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1984.

Förster, E. The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Forster, M. N. Hegel's Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Franks, P. W. All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Fulda, H. F. G. W. F. Hegel. München: C. H. Beck, 2003.

Fulda, H. F. and D. Henrich. Materialien zu Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973.

Habermas, J. Knowledge and Human Interests. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1971.

Habermas, J. Theory and Practice. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1973.

Halbig, C., M. Quante, and L. Siep, eds. Hegels Erbe. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004.

Harris, H. S. Hegel: Phenomenology and System. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Pub. Co., 1995.

Harris, H. S. Hegel's Development: Toward the Sunlight, 1770–1801. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972.

Harris, H. S. Hegel's Ladder. 2 vols. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Pub. Co., 1997.

Hartmann, K., ed. Die Ontologische Option: Studien zu Hegels Propädeutik, Schellings Hegel-Kritik und Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1976.

Haym, R. and H. Rosenberg. Hegel und seine Zeit: Vorlesungen über Entstehung und Entwickelung, Wesen und Wert der Hegel'schen Philosophie. Leipzig: W. Heims, 1927.

Heinrichs, J. Die Logik der Phänomenologie des Geistes. Bonn: Bouvier, 1974.

Henrich, D. Hegel im Kontext. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010.

Henrich, D. and D. S. Pacini. Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Horstmann, R.-P. Die Grenzen der Vernunft: Eine Untersuchung zu Zielen und Motiven des Deutschen Idealismus. Frankfurt am Main: A. Hain, 1991.

Houlgate, S. An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005.

Houlgate, S. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: A Reader's Guide. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2012.

Hyppolite, J. Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974.

Hyppolite, J. Studies on Marx and Hegel. New York: Basic Books, 1969.

Kaehler, K. E. and W. Marx. Die Vernunft in Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes. Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1992.

Kainz, H. P. Hegel's Phenomenology, Part I: Analysis and Commentary. Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1976.

Kainz, H. P. Hegel's Phenomenology, Part II: The Evolution of Ethical and Religious Consciousness to the Absolute Standpoint. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1983.

Kimmerle, G. Sein und Selbst: Unters. zur kategorialen Einheit von Vernunft u. Geist in Hegels “Phänomenologie des Geistes”. Bonn: Bouvier, 1978.

Köhler, D. and O. Pöggeler, eds. G. W. F. Hegel: Phänomenologie des Geistes. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1998.

Kojève, A. and R. Queneau, eds. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit. New York: Basic Books, 1969.

Labarrière, P.-J. La Phénoménologie de l'esprit de Hegel: introduction à une lecture. Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1979.

Labarrière, P.-J. Structures et mouvement dialectique dans la Phénoménologie de l'esprit de Hegel. Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1968.

Lauer, Q. A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. New York: Fordham University Press, 1976.

Loewenberg, J. Hegel's Phenomenology: Dialogues on the Life of the Mind. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1965.

MacIntyre, A. C. “Hegel on Faces and Skulls.” In MacIntyre, ed., Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972, 219–36.

Marx, W. Das Selbstbewusstsein in Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes. Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1986.

Marx, W. and P. Heath, trans. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: A Commentary Based on the Preface and Introduction. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

McDowell, J. H. Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Merleau-Ponty, M. “Hegel's Existentialism.” In Sense and Non-Sense. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964, 63–70.

Moyar, D. Hegel's Conscience. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Moyar, D. The Oxford Handbook of Hegel. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Moyar, D. and M. Quante, eds. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Guide. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Neuhouser, F. Foundations of Hegel's Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Pinkard, T. P. Hegel: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Pinkard, T. P. Hegel's Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Pinkard, T. P. “Hegel's Phenomenology and Logic: An Overview.” In K. Ameriks, ed.,The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 161–79.

Pippin, R. B. Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Pippin, R. B. Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Pöggeler, O. Hegels Idee einer Phänomenologie des Geistes. Freiburg, München, and Breisgau: Alber, 1973.

Redding, P. Hegel's Hermeneutics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996.

Riedel, M. System und Geschichte: Studien zum historischen Standort von Hegels Philosophie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973.

Rockmore, T. Cognition: An Introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1997.

Russon, J. Infinite Phenomenology: The Lessons of Hegel's Science of Experience. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2016.

Russon, J. Reading Hegel's Phenomenology. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2004.

Russon, J. The Self and its Body in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1997.

Sedgwick, S. S. Hegel's Critique of Kant: From Dichotomy to Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Shklar, J. N. Freedom and Independence: A Study of the Political Ideas of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Siep, L. Anerkennung als Prinzip der praktischen Philosophie: Unters. zu Hegels Jenaer Philosophie d. Geistes. Freiburg im Breisgau and München: Alber, 1979.

Siep, L. Der Weg der “Phänomenologie des Geistes”: ein einführender Kommentar zu Hegels “Differenzschrift” und zur “Phänomenologie des Geistes”. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000.

Siep, L. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Solomon, R. C. In the Spirit of Hegel: A Study of G. W. F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Stern, R. The Routledge Guidebook to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Abingdon and New York:Routledge, 2013.

Stewart, J. The Unity of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: A Systematic Interpretation. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2000.

Taylor, C. Hegel. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

Toews, J. E. Hegelianism: The Path Toward Dialectical Humanism, 1805–1841. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

Vieweg, K. and W. Welsch. Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes: Ein kooperativer Kommentar zu einem Schlüsselwerk der Moderne. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008.

Wahl, J. A. Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel. Paris: Rieder, 1929.

Westphal, K. R. Hegel's Epistemology: A Philosophical Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Pub. Co., 2003.

Westphal, K. R. History and Truth in Hegel's Phenomenology. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979.

Westphal, K. R., ed. The Blackwell Guide to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Westphal, K. R., Method and Speculation in Hegel's Phenomenology. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1982.

Glossary of Translated Terms

German to English

Allgemein

universal, in general

An ihm selbst, an ihr selbst

in its own self

Anderssein

otherness

Anerkennen

recognize, recognition

anschauen, Anschauung

intuit, intuition

an sich

in itself

Ansichsein

being in itself

Arbeit

labor

aufheben, Aufhebung

sublate, sublation

Ausbildung

development, training

Bedeutung

meaning, significance

Bedürfnis

need

Begeistung

spiritualization

begreifen

comprehend, conceptually comprehend

Begreifen

comprehension

Begriff

concept

bei sich

at one with itself

Besonder(s)(e)

particular

Besonderheit

particularity

bestehen

stably exist

Bestehen

stable existence

bestimmen

determine, specify

bestimmt

determinate, definite

Bestimmtheit

determinateness

Bestimmung

determination, destiny

Bewußtsein

consciousness

Beziehung

relation

Bildung

cultural formation

Böse

evil

darstellen

exhibit, present, account, turns out (to be), display, show

Darstellung

exposition, account, display

Dasein

existence (see also Existenz)

Ding

thing

eigentlich

really, authentically, genuinely

eigentümlich

distinctive, peculiar to

Einheit

unity

Einteilung

division, classification

einzeln

singular

Einzelne

the singular individual

Einzelnheit

singular individuality, singularity

Entäußerung

emptying

Entwicklung

development

Entzweiung

estrangement

erfassen

grasp

erkennen

take cognizance, cognize

Erkennen

cognition

erscheinen

appear

Erscheinung

appearance

Existenz

existence (see also Dasein)

Freiheit

freedom

für sich

for itself

Fürsichsein

being for itself

gebildet

culturally mature, culturally formed

gediegen

unalloyed, solid(ity), unmixed

Gefühl

feeling

Gegensatz

opposition

Gegenstand

object

Gegenständlich

objective

Gegenteil

contrary, opposite

Gehalt

content, meaning(ful)

Geist

spirit

geistig

spiritual

gelten

validly in force, valid, in force

Gemeinde (Gemeine)

community, religious community

Gemeinwesen

polity

Gesetz

law

Gesetzgebung

legislation, law-giving

Gesinnung

disposition

Gestalt

shape

Gestaltung

shape, shaping

Gewissen

conscience

Gewißheit

certainty

Gleich, ungleich(heit); sich

equal, unequal, self-equal,

selbst gleich (Sichselbstgleichheit)

self-equality

Gleichbleibende

consistent

Grundsatz

principle, proposition

Gültig

valid

Handeln

act

Handlung

action

Herz

heart

Ich

I

Idee

Idea (capitalized)

Individualität

individuality (see also Einzelheit and Einzelnheit)

Individuell

individual

Individuum

individual

Inhalt

content

Innerlichkeit

inwardness

in sich

within itself

In-sich-gehen

take the inward turn

Insichsein

inwardly turned being

Kennen, Kenntnis

acquaint, acquaintance

Kraft

force

Lehre

doctrine

Macht

power

Masse

social spheres

Materie

matter

Moment

moment

Moral, Moralität

moral, morality

Objekt

object (see also Gegenstand)

Objektiv

objective (see also gegenständlich)

Person

person, legal person

Prinzip

principle

Räsonieren, Räsonnement

merely clever argument, merely clever argumentation

Realität

reality

Recht

law, right

Ruhe, ruhend

motionless, at rest

Sache

subject matter, fact

Sache selbst

the crux of the matter

Schein

seeming to be, semblance

Scheinen

seem to be

Sein

being

Seiende

existent, existing

selbständig

self-sufficient

Selbständigkeit

self-sufficiency

Selbstgefühl

self-feeling, feeling for its own self, self-assurance

selbstlos

self-less

setzen

posit, place

Selbstwesen

independent being

Sitte

ethos, mores

Sittlich

ethical

Sittlichkeit

ethical life

Sollen

ought

Stand

estate

Stände

estates

substantiell

substantial

Substanz

substance

Tat

deed

Tätigkeit

activity (see tun)

(das) Tun

activity, doing

tun

to do

unabhängig

independent

unmittelbar

immediate(ly)

Unterscheiden

differentiate, distinguish

Unterschied

difference, distinction

Verhalten

conduct, relate

Verhältnis

relation

Verhältnisse

relations, sets of relations

vermitteln

mediate

Verkehrung

inversion

verkehrt

inverted

Vermittlung

mediation

Vernunft

reason

Verstand

the understanding, the intellect

verstehen

to understand

verwirklichen

actualize

Verwirklichung

actualization

vorstellen

represent, imagine

Vorstellung

representation, idea

Wahrheit

truth

(das) Wahre

the true

Werden

come-to-be, coming-to-be, becoming

Wesen

essence, being

Wille

the will

Willkür

arbitrary, arbitrary free choice

wirklich

actual

Wirkliches

the actual

Wirklichkeit

actuality

Wirksamkeit

effectiveness

wissen

know

Wissenschaft

science

Zerissenheit

disruption

zufällig

contingent

Zweck

purpose, end, aim

zweckmäßig

purposive, useful

English to German

acquaint, acquaintance

Kennen, Kenntnis

act

handeln

action

Handlung

activity

(see tun) Tätigkeit

activity, doing

(das) Tun

actual

wirklich

actuality

Wirklichkeit

actualization

Verwirklichung

actualize

verwirklichen

appear

erscheinen

appearance

Erscheinung

arbitrary, arbitrary free choice

Willkür

being

Sein

being for itself

Fürsichsein

being in itself

Ansichsein

(independent) being

Selbstwesen

certainty

Gewißheit

cognition, cognizance

Erkennen

come-to-be, coming-to-be, becoming

Werden

comprehend, conceptually comprehend

begreifen

comprehension

Begreifen

concept

Begriff

conduct, relate

Verhalten

conscience

Gewissen

consciousness

Bewußtsein

consist

bestehen

content

Inhalt

content, meaning(ful)

Gehalt

contingent

zufällig

contrary, opposite

Gegenteil

crux of the matter

die Sache selbst

cultural formation; cultural education

Bildung

culturally mature, culturally formed

gebildet

deed

Tat

determinate, definite

bestimmt

determinateness

Bestimmtheit

determination, destiny

Bestimmung

determine, specify

bestimmen

development

Entwicklung

development, training

Ausbildung

disposition

Gesinnung

disruption

Zerrissenheit

distinction

Unterschied

distinctive, peculiar to

eigentümlich

distinguish

Unterscheiden

division, classification

Einteilung

doctrine

Lehre

durable existence

Bestehen

effectiveness

Wirksamkeit

emptying

Entäußerung

essence, being

Wesen

estate

Stand

estates

Stände

estrangement

Entzweiung

ethical

Sittlich

ethical life

Sittlichkeit

ethos, mores

Sitte

evil

Böse

exhibit, present, account, turns

darstellen

out (to be), display, show

existence (see also Dasein)

Existenz

existence (see also Existenz)

Dasein

existent, what exists

Seiende

exposition, account, display

Darstellung

extreme term (in a syllogism)

Extreme

feeling

Gefühl

for itself

für sich

force

Kraft

freedom

Freiheit

grasp

erfassen

heart

Herz

I

Ich

Idea (capitalized)

Idee

immediate(ly)

Unmittelbar

in itself

An sich

in one's own sphere, at

with itself in its own sphere

bei sich

independent

Unabhängig

individual

Individuell

individual

Individuum

singular individual

Einzeln

individuality (see also Einzelheit

Individualität

and Einzelnheit)

singular individuality, singularity

Einzelnheit

intuition

anschauen, Anschauung

inversion

Verkehrung

inwardly turned being

Insichsein

inwardness

Innerlichkeit

know

Wissen

labor

Arbeit

law

Gesetz

law, right

Recht

legislation, law-giving

Gesetzgebung

matter

Materie

meaning, significance

Bedeutung

mediate

Vermitteln

mediation

Vermittlung

merely clever argument, merely

Räsonieren, Räsonnement

clever argumentation

moment

Moment

moral, morality

Moral, Moralität

motionless, at rest

Ruhe, ruhend

need

Bedürfnis

object

Gegenstand

object (see also Gegenstand)

Objekt

objective

Gegenständlich

objective (see also gegenständlich)

Objektiv

on its own

An ihm selbst, an ihr selbst

opposition

Gegensatz

otherness

Anderssein

ought

Sollen

particular

Besonder(s)(e)

particularity

Besonderheit

person

Person

polity

Gemeinwesen

posit, place

Setzen

power

Macht

principle

Prinzip

principle, proposition

Grundsatz

purpose, end, aim

Zweck

purposive, useful

Zweckmäßig

reality

Realität

really, authentically, genuinely

Eigentlich

reason

Vernunft

recognize, recognition

Anerkennen

relation

Beziehung

relation

Verhältnis

relations, sets of relations

Verhältnisse

religious community

Gemeinde (Gemeine)

represent, imagine

Vorstellen

representation, idea

Vorstellung

science

Wissenschaft

seem to be

Scheinen

seeming to be, semblance

Schein

self-feeling, self-assurance

Selbstgefühl

self-less

Selbstlos

self-sufficiency

Selbständigkeit

self-sufficient

Selbständig

shape

Gestalt

shape, shaping

Gestaltung

social spheres

Masse

spirit

Geist

spiritual

Geistig

spiritualization

Begeistung

subject matter, fact

Sache

sublate, sublation

aufheben, Aufhebung

subsistence

Bestehen

substance

Substanz

substantial

Substantiell

(the) substantial thing

(die) Sache selbst

take cognizance, cognize, discern

Erkennen

take the inward turn

In-sich-gehen

the actual

Wirkliches

the individual, singular

Einzelne

the understanding, the intellect

Verstand

the will

Wille

thing

Ding

to do

tun

to understand

Verstehen

inverted

Verkehrt

truth

Wahrheit

unalloyed, solid(ity), unmixed

Gediegen

unity

Einheit

universal, in general

Allgemein

valid

Gültig

validly in force, valid

Gelten

within itself

in sich

Index

absolute alone, 51

absolute freedom and spirit, 339–347

absolute Idea

and abstract universality, 11–12

expressed as spirit, 16

and God and divine cognition form, 13

and immediacy of being, 12

and science, 10–11

as subject, 14–15

absolute knowing, 454–467

absolute power

in self-consciousness, 115–116

understanding, 20–21

abstract universality. See also thinking

and absolute Idea, 11–12

in art-religion, 404–411

and construction, 31–32

and God and divine cognition form, 13

of pleasure, 211–213

and science, 469

action. See also movement

actuality of consciousness, 177

of concept moment in Enlightenment, 329–330

ethical, 258, 267–277

and fate, 272–277

and guilt, 270–272

and knowledge, 268–270

moral, 367–368, 371–373

actuality

and absolute knowing, 462–467

of art-religion, 401–404

and cultural formation, 284–306

and individuality, 235–236

as manifestation of the outer, 198

moral, 355, 385–389

of natural religion, 394–396

religious influence in, 391–394

of spirit, 253–263

and way of the world, 220–221

actualization

of faith in the Enlightenment, 324–327

of rational self-consciousness, 203–209

alienated spirit. See cultural formation

animal kingdom

natural religion in, 397–398

spirit in, 228–236

appearance

and force, 87–95

in inverted supersensible world, 95–97

law of, 92–95

Aristotle, xxix, xlii, 14, 44–45

art-religion

abstract shapes in, 404–411

actuality of, 401–404

living work of, 412–415

spiritual work of, 415–428

beauty

in art-religion, 426–427

and strength, 419

true spirit and, xxxiii

being for others

and absolute knowing, 456

and morality, 369–370

in revealed religion, 441

being of life and self-consciousness, 110–111

being-for-itself

and absolute knowing, 456, 457–458

and consciousness, 55–57, 131–132

and cultural formation, 288–290

force, 83–85

and freedom of self-consciousness, 117–118

and individuality, 226–228

and materialized thinking, 36–38

and morality, 369

in natural religion, 399–401

in observation of nature, 154, 168–169

and perception, 77–79

in phrenology, 195–196, 198

and pleasure, 211–213

and self-consciousness, 111–114

and spiritual substance, 16

in way of the world, 225–226

being-in-and-for-itself

and absolute freedom and terror, 339–340

of truth in the Enlightenment, 325

being-in-itself

and cultural formation, 285–290

and individuality, 226–228

in phrenology, 195–196, 198

and pleasure, 211–213

brain. See skull

certainty

in pure insight, 318–320

in revealed religion, 429

of spirit and morality, 347–348

character, 268–269

clever argumentation

and materialized thinking, 36–38

and speculation, 39–40

cognition. See also knowledge

absolute, 13

coming-to-be of, 26

and familiarity, 20

mistrust of, 49

and phrenology, 199

and speculation, 39–40

types of, 49–51

commands (ethical), 243–246

compassion, 420, 425

comprehension, 72–73, 74. See also understanding

conceit. See self-conceit

concepts

and consciousness, 22

and magnitude, 27–28

natural consciousness, 52–53

in observation, 150–152, 160–162, 202–203

as only way to universality of knowing, 43–44

and philosophical truth, 6

in revealed religion, 433

and science, 33–34

and universal principles and points of view, 21–22

conscience and morality, 365–389

consciousness. See also sensuous-certainty consciousness

and absolute knowing, 454–456

and appearance, 87–93

and concepts, 22

experience of, 57–59

and force, 81–87

and immediate existence of spirit, 22–23

and the intelligilibility of science, 9–10

moral, 359–360

and perception, 68–79

in revealed religion, 432–436

and science, 16–17

threefold union in, 126–135

and truth, 54

unconditional-universal, 79

consumption

in consciousness, 129–135

cult, 410–411, 413

in the Enlightenment, 323–324, 331

governmental, 299

in individuality, 288

and judgment, 290–291

and negative, 113

content

and absolute knowing, 465–466

and logic, 35–36

in revealed religion, 449–451

contradiction

between the law of the heart and individuality, 213–217

in cultural formation, 294, 300–306

moral, 363, 386–388

in self-consciousness, 123

crux of the matter

and cultural formation, 287–288

in faith and pure insight, 308–309

and individuality, 236–242

in morality, 370–371

cult

in art-religion, 409–411

consumption, 410–411, 413

living work of, 412–415

cultural education

taking the individual into science, 18

and universal principles and points of view, 5

cultural formation

and absolute freedom and terror, 345–347

in art-religion, 407–408

and realm of actuality, 284–306

and representational thought, 21–22

spiritual substance of, 281–283

world of, 284

death

and family ethics, 260–261

and the life of spirit, 20, 202–203

as natural negation of consciousness, 112

observing, 200–203

in revealed religion, 448–449

deception. See also crux of the matter

demos, 426

description in observation of nature, 144–145

desire, 210–211

despotism, 315

determinate duties, 352–354, 362–364

determinate individuality, 178–179, 228–234

determinate negation, 33–34, 53

determinate simplicity

and perception, 68–70, 75–76

in revealed religion, 437–438

testing laws with, 247–248

and understanding, 35

determinate thinking

and self-consciousness, 118–120

and skepticism, 120–121

determinateness

of faith in the Enlightenment, 324–325

moral, 373–377

in observation of nature, 146–147

and philosophical truth, 28–29

of property, 71–73

dialectical movement

and consciousness, 57

proof in, 41

and skepticism, 121–123

Diderot, Denis, 304

dissemblance

crux of the matter, 367–368

spirit and morality, 356–365

dogmatism of assurance and science, 266–267

doing. See action

duty

determinate, 352–354, 362–364

moral, 362–363, 371–373

and morality, 369, 370

edification and philosophical truth, 6–8

Enlightenment, the

spirit and, 313–314

and superstition, 314–333

truth of, 333–339

equality

and cultural formation, 290

of faith in the Enlightenment, 327–328

and mathematical truth, 28

moral, 383

essence

in the Enlightenment, 321–324, 333–335

natural religious, 396–397

and self-consciousness, 250–252

of spirit, 253–255

essentiality

in observation of nature, 151–152

and reason, 139

ethical life

action in, 267–277

in art-religion, 401–404

and divine law, 261–262

and family relations, 263–267

and human law, 256–261

and law-giving reason, 242–246

legality in an, 251–252, 277–281

and reason, 206–208

and true spirit, 256

Every one ought to speak the truth (command), 244–245

evil

as falsehood, 24

individual, 273

in revealed religion, 441–448

radical, xxxiii

experience

of consciousness, 57–59

and perception, 71–73, 76

and spiritual substance, 22

and the unhappy consciousness, 125

external purpose. See also purpose

and mathematical truth, 27

in observation of nature, 152–154

faith

moments during the Enlightenment, 321–324

in revealed religion, 433

unsatisfied in the Enlightenment, 331–333

and world of cultural formation, 284

false. See also negative

and the essential determinations of philosophical truth, 28–29

and truth in science, 23–24

familiarity

and cognition, 20

of representational thought, 20–21

and representational thought, 20–21

family

in art-religion, 426

ethics of, 258–267

fate

and action, 272–277

in art-religion, 427–428

flattery

heroism of, 296–303

language of, 301–302

force

and appearance, 87–95

in art-religion, 412–413

being-for-itself and solicited, 83–85

itself, 165–167, 179

mediating middle play of, 86–87

and self-sufficiency, 81–82

simple difference in, 89

stability of, 82–83

and supersensible world, 95–101

freedom

of self-consciousness, 117–118

and spirit, 339–347

gender and ethics, 263–267

gods

represented as subject, 14–15

in spiritual work of art-religion, 415–428

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 304

good

in art-religion, 426–427

in revealed religion, 441–448

spirit and morality, 358–359

and virtue, 222–226

government

and absolute freedom and terror, 343–344

in cultural formation, 293–294

in ethical world, 261–262

guilt, 270–272

happiness, 361–362

Here (in sensuous-certainty consciousness), 62, 64

heroes, 415–428

history

and absolute knowing, 466–467

and truth, 25

honest consciousness

and crux of the matter, 237–239

in testing laws, 249

human law

and ethical life, 256–261

and family ethics, 266–267

hypocrisy, 381–385

Idea and Nous, 35

immediate being

and absolute Idea, 12

in revealed religion, 432–436, 441

immediate unity, 106

individuality

and active consciousness, 176–179

actuality and consciousness, 128–130

being-in-itself, 19

and contradiction with law of the heart, 213–217

and crux of the matter, 236–242

and cultural formation, 285

in the Enlightenment, 325

in family, 258–259

and law-giving reason, 242–246

and physiognomy, 179–190

and reason, 226–228

and self-consciousness actualization, 205–206

and the spiritual kingdom of animals, 228–236

in unhappy consciousness, 124–126

individuality's law, 177

inequality

action, 365, 385–386

in consciousness, 23–24, 248, 381–383

and cultural formation, 290–291

ethical, 273

in self-equality, 266–267

and spirit, 291–300

standard, 55

infinity, 97–100

inorganic nature, 151, 169–170, 200–201

intuition

consciousness, 462, 464

and construction, 31–32

organic nature, 173

self-consciousness, 211, 378–379

self-sufficient, 115

sensuous, 27

as thinking, 13

inversion

in cultural formation, 302–303

in self-certainty, 105–106, 266–267

supersensible world, 95–97

irritability in nature observation, 157–160

itself force

and being, 179

in observation of nature, 165–167

judgment

and cultural formation, 291–292

moral, 382–386

in philosophical prefaces, 4–5

knowledge. See also cognition

absolute, 454–467

coming to be of, 468–469

as coming-to-be of science, 18

in the Enlightenment, 330–346

and familiarity, 20

human and divine ethical, 268–270

and morality, 368–369, 385–389

and natural consciousness, 52–53

of philosophy itself, 5–6

scientific system of, 15–16

sensuous, 31–32

language

in art-religion, 406–409

in cultural formation, 294–295, 303–304

moral, 376–377

and physiognomy, 188–189

laws

and appearance in the supersensible world, 89–91

and ethical life, 256–261

of force, 88–89

of the heart, 213–217

in observation of nature, 148–152

in observation of self-consciousness, 174–179

of physiognomy, 186–188

and reason, 242–252

in supersensible world, 89–91

laws of thought. See logical laws

legality

in an ethical life, 277–281

in revealed religion, 429–431

life

essential to self-consciousness, 113

and reason, 173

liver. See phrenology

logic

and knowing content, 35–36

and the movement of spirit, 23

logical laws, 174–177

Love thy neighbor as thyself (command), 245

luminous essence (natural religion), 396–397

magnitude

and concepts, 27–28

in observation of nature, 168–169

materialized thinking, 37–39

mathematical truth

and external purpose, 26, 27

and space and mathematical units, 27–28

and time, 28

matter

in the Enlightenment, 335–336

as universal being, 150

mediation

and absolute cognition, 13

and individuality, 229–231

language as, 296

morality and spirit, 352

in observation of nature, 154–159

and physiognomy, 183–185

in self-consciousness, 113, 132–135

and simple coming-to-be, 14

and spiritual substance, 16

moment

and absolute knowing, 456–457

in observation of nature, 156, 158–159

in revealed religion, 439–440

and scientific organization, 33–34

monarch power, 296–297

morality

and absolute knowing, 456

and conscience, 365–389

and dissemblance, 356–365

religion of, 389

and spirit, 348–356

movement. See also action

cult, 409–411

dialectical, 41, 57, 121–123

in the Here and Now, 65–67

natural consciousness, 52–53

natural drive, 206–208

natural philosophy, 42–43

natural phrenology, 197

natural religion. See also religion

actuality of, 394–396

luminous essence of, 396–397

plants and animals, 397–398

spirit as artisan, 399–401

negative. See also false

determinate, 53

and determinate simplicity, 33–34

and the first principle of philosophy, 15–16

as inequality between the I and the object, 23

in observation of nature, 170–172

between pure insight and intention, 316–318

and self-certainty, 106

and self-consciousness actualization, 209

nervous system, 190

noble consciousness

and being-in/for-itself, 288–291

in cultural formation, 298–299

Nous, 35

Now (sensuous-certainty consciousness), 62–68

object

perception of, 71

in sensuous-certainty consciousness, 61, 106

observation

concepts, 150–152, 160–162, 202–203

death, 200–203

and phrenology, 199–203

reason, 142–144

of self-consciousness, 153–154, 174–179

spirit, 201

observation of nature

being-for-itself, 154, 168–169

description in, 144–145

determinateness, 146–147

essentiality, 151–152

external purpose, 152–154

irritability, 157–160

itself force, 165–167

laws, 148–152

magnitude, 168–169

mediation, 154–159

moment, 156, 158–159

negative, 170–172

purpose, 152–154

qualitative analysis, 159–160

reflectedness, 163–165

representational thought, 163

reproduction, 158–160

sensibility, 156–160

sensuous perceiving, 145–149

shapes, 161–162

simplicity of reason, 150–151

sublimation, 168–169

universality, 144–145, 147–149, 163, 171–174

oracle

as aspect of light, 421–422

language of, 406–409

organ and physiognomy, 340

organic nature, 151, 154–159, 200

organic properties, 156

other-worldly beyond consciousness, 328–330

outer is an expression of the inner, 197–199

perception

and consciousness of One, 75

determinate simplicity in, 68–70, 75–76

diverse aspects of, 73–74

and experience, 71–73, 76

of objects, 71

sensuous, 68, 70, 77–79, 145–149

philosophical literature, 39–40

philosophical truth

and absolute Idea, 13

aims of prefaces, 4–5

and concepts, 6

and dogmatism, 25

and edification, 6–8

and essential determinations, 28–29

first principle of, 15–16

as form of science, 5–6

hindered by widely accepted truths, 41–42

and logic, 23

and materialized thinking, 39

historical instructions and, 3–4

and reflection, 14

as a result, not an end, 13

and science, 468

as union of historical and mathematical cognition, 26

phrenology, 190–203

physiognomy, 179–190

pleasure, 209–213

polity. See government

power

absolute, 20–21, 115–116

of excellence, 33

of monarch, 296–297

prefaces

comparing other philosophical treatises in, 4–5

not pertinent to philosophical truth, 3–4

priesthood, 315

proof

in the dialectical movement, 41

in mathematical truth, 25–27, 28

and self-certainty, 129

psychological laws, 177–179

pure category and reason, 139–140

pure consciousness, 126–128, 140–142

pure insight

in cultural formation, 306–313

and the Enlightenment, 313–320

purpose. See also external purpose

and being-for-itself, 200

and conscience, 367

of faith and pure insight, 312–313

of family, 258–267

and the law of the heart, 213–217

in observation of nature, 152–154

of pure insight in the Enlightenment, 323–324

and reason, 14

and science, 18

and self-consciousness, 226–228

qualitative analysis, 159–160

rationality

in art-religion, 426–427

and determinate simplicity, 35

and knowledge, 9–10

and self-consciousness actualization, 203–209

reality and reason, 139–140

reason

certainty and truth in, 136–142

and individuality, 226–228

law-giving, 242–246

observing, 142–144

and phrenology, 190–203

and physiognomy, 179–190

and purpose, 14

and self-consciousness, 174–179

and self-consciousness actualization, 203–209

testing laws, 246–252

and virtue in way of the world, 219–226

recognition in self-consciousness, 110

reflectedness

in observation of nature, 163–165

and philosophical truth, 14

religion. See also natural religion; revealed religion

and absolute knowing, 458–459

and faith, 308

and morality, 378–379

revealed, 428–451

and spirit, 388–394

report and construction, 31–32

representational thought

and absolute knowing, 459, 461–462

as analysis of familiarity, 20–21

in art-religion, 424

and cultural formation, 21–22

familiarity of, 19–20

and materialized thinking, 36–38

in observation of nature, 163

in revealed religion, 431, 436–440

reproduction, 158–160

result

individuality as, 228

philosophical truth as, 13

revealed religion. See also religion

and absolute knowing, 454–467

certainty in, 429

consciousness in, 432–436

creating a world, 441

good and evil in, 441–448

in religious community, 446–451

representational thought, 436–440

self as absolute essence in, 428–429

spirit having two aspects in, 431–432

truth in, 436

unhappy consciousness, 429–430

sacrifice

cult, 410–411

and faith, 331

science

and absolute Idea, 10–11

and absolute knowing, 461, 466

and abstract universality, 469

being subject to reproach, 10

coming-to-be of, 18

and concepts, 33–34

and consciousness, 9–10

and cultural education, 18–19

and determinate simplicity, 33–34

and the dogmatism of assurance, 266–267

and edification, 8

and immediate existence of spirit, 22

method of, 29–30, 36–38

and the movement of pure essentialities, 22

philosophy as form of, 5–6

requiring self-consciousness, 16–17

and surface appearance, 51–52

as system for knowing, 15–16

and triplicity, 30–31

and truth or false, 23–25

scientific method

and the dialectical movement, 41

emerging new experience in, 57–58

and mathematics, 29–30

and the philosophical proposition, 36–40

testing the reality of cognition, 54–57

self-certainty

being for themselves, 105

and life cycle, 104–105

and reason, 137–138

and self-consciousness, 102–103

and skepticism, 121–122

stability in living things, 105–106, 266–267

self-conceit, 217–219

self-consciousness

and absolute knowing, 456–457

and being-for/in-itself, 226–228

being-for-itself and freedom of, 117–118

in cultural formation, 298–299

in The Enlightenment, 320

and family ethics, 258–267

moral, 356, 379–381

and non-self-sufficiency, 113–114

in observation of nature, 153–154

and phrenology, 190–203

and physiognomy, 179–190

and reason, 136–137, 174–179

and religion, 389–391

in revealed religion, 431–432, 446–447

and self-sufficiency, 110–112

and skepticism, 120–123

and stoicism, 118–120

in supersensible world, 100–101

truth of, 114–116

and the truth of self-certainty, 102–108

twofold sense of, 108–110

self-consciousness actualization

and the law of the heart, 213–217

pleasure and necessity, 209–213

and reason, 203–209

and self-conceit, 217–219

and virtue, 221–224

and way of the world, 219–221, 224–226

self-equality

in supersensible world, 97–99

and thinking, 266–267

self-sufficiency

and force, 81–82

self-consciousness, 110–112

senses

and coming-to-be of knowledge, 18

philosophy goal to save mankind from, 7–8

sensibility in nature observation, 156–160

sensuous-certainty consciousness. See also consciousness

characterizing, 67–68

immediacy of, 60–61

mediation through the I, 61

movement in the Here and Now in, 64–67

truth in, 106

twofold shape of its being, 61–62

universality in, 106

servitude, 113–115

shadow-boxing, 222–223

shapes

of consciousness, 457–460

in natural religion, 399–401

in observation of nature, 161–162

simplicity

determinate, 33–34

in force, 91–92

in the growth of spirit, 9, 23

of reason in nature observation, 150–151

reflection and truth having, 14

skepticism and self-consciousness, 120–123

skull

and brain, 190–195

bump in, 196–198

solicited force, 83–85

speculation and argumentation, 39–40

speech. See language

spirit

absolute expressed as, 16

and absolute freedom and terror, 339–347

and absolute knowing, 454–467

animal kingdom, 228–236

artisan, 399–401

bodily nature of, 189–190

and the cultural formation of the individual, 18–19

essence of, 253–255

immediate existence of, 22

keeping philosophy focused on, 7–8

new epoch in, 8

observing, 201

only as great as its expression, 8

and self-consciousness, 107

and terror, 344–347

and universal principles and points of view, 21–22

spirit and cultural formation

faith and pure insight, 306–313

substance of, 281–352

world of, 284

spirit and morality

certainty of, 347–348

conscience in, 365–389

dissemblance, 356–365

and ethical life, 256

and religion, 388–394

worldview, 348–356

spirit and The Enlightenment

and insight, 313–314

superstition in, 314–333

truth of, 333–339

spiritual substance

and mediation, 16

as transfigured essentiality, 16

standard in scientific method, 54–58

state power. See government

stoicism

and personality, 278–279

and self-consciousness, 118–120

stubbornness, 117

subject and absolute, 14–15

sublimation

moral, 387–388

in observation of nature, 168–169

of self-consciousness, 109

subterfuge in phrenology, 198

suffering, 272

supersensible world

contradiction in, 97–101

inverted version of, 95–97

law of appearance in, 92–95

law of force in, 88–89

other-worldly beyond of, 87–88

realm of laws in, 89–91

religion in, 388–389

synthetic labor, 401

terror

being-in-and-for-itself, 339–340

and spirit, 344–347

and universality, 340–343

thinking. See also abstract universality

and absolute freedom and terror, 344

determinate, 118–121, 266–267

as manifestation of the inner, 198

materialized, 37–39

and morality, 364–365

in revealed religion, 438–439

thoughts

and cultural formation, 287–288

Stoic, 306–307

triplicity, 30–31

truth

and absolute knowing, 460

and consciousness, 54, 55

everyone should speak, 244–245

hindering philosophy, 41–42

in revealed religion, 436

mathematical, 27–28

and reason, 136–138

moral, 377–378

and self-certainty, 102–108

of self-consciousness, 114–116

unconditional universal consciousness, 79

understanding. See also comprehension

and determinate simplicity, 35

and force, 81–87

in supersensible world, 97–99

unhappy consciousness

as learning experience, 125

and pure consciousness, 126–128

rendering its being-for-itself, 201–202

in revealed religion, 438

singular individuality in, 124–125

unity

and absolute knowing, 464

in art-religion, 414–415

in cultural formation, 295–379

reflected, 106

and the truth of self-certainty, 106–108

universal attraction, 90

universal beneficence, 298–299

universal difference in force, 89

universal humanity, 415–421

universal medium, 73

universality

and absolute freedom and terror, 340–343

and absolute knowing, 456–457

aspects of, 218–219

determinate properties in perception, 70

in morality, 371–372

in observation of nature, 144–145, 147–149, 163, 171–174

and predicate, 39

in revealed religion, 431–432

sensuous, 77–79

in sensuous-certainty consciousness, 66–67, 106

usefulness

in the Enlightenment, 337–338

of truth in The Enlightenment, 325–327

utility. See usefulness

vanity

in cultural formation, 305–306

in The Enlightenment, 338–339

virtue

and self-consciousness actualization, 206, 209

in the way of the world, 219–226

vulgarity, 7–8

way of the world

moral, 357

and spirit, 348–356

virtue and reason in, 219–226

wealth in cultural formation, 299–301

will, 340–341