a. The Spiritual Animal Kingdom and Deceit, or the Matter at Hand

This individuality real in itself is at first once more a singular and determinate one; hence absolute reality, which is what it knows itself to be, has for it, in the manner in which it grows conscious of that reality, the form of the abstract universal, and this form, void of fulfillment and of content, amounts to no more than this category thought emptily. — What remains to be seen is how this concept of individuality real in itself gains determination in its moments, and how individuality's own concept of itself steps into consciousness for it.

The concept of this individuality, as being, as such, all reality for itself, is at first a result; it has not yet exhibited its movement and its reality, and is here posited immediately as simple being-in-itself. Negativity, however, being nothing other than what shows itself as movement, attaches to the simple in-itself in the guise of determinateness; and so being, the simple in-itself, takes on a determinate compass. Individuality accordingly makes its entrance as a nature originally determinate, — as an original nature, since it is in itself, — as originally — determinate, since the negative attaches to the in-itself, which is thereby a quality. Yet this restriction upon being leaves the doing of consciousness unrestricted, since that doing is here a consummated self-to-self relating; what has been sublated is precisely the relation to something other, which would have restricted it. Nature's original determinateness thus amounts to no more than a simple principle, — to an element at once universal and transparent, in which individuality stays every bit as free and equal to itself as it unfolds its distinctions there unimpeded, and in which, throughout its actualization, it is pure interplay with itself. Just as indeterminate animal life breathes its breath into, say, the element of water, of air, or of earth, and within these into further determinate principles, immerses all its moments in them, yet, that limitation of the element notwithstanding, keeps them in its power and keeps itself in its own oneness, and as this particular organization remains the same universal animal life.

This determinate original nature of a consciousness that stays free and entire within it shows up as the sole and directly given content of whatever counts as the individual's purpose; it is determinate content, granted, yet it is content at all only so long as we isolate being-in-itself for consideration; in truth, though, this content is reality shot through with individuality, the actuality which consciousness, as a singular, has upon itself, and which stands posited to begin with as being, not yet as doing. For doing, on one side, that determinateness is no barrier that doing would seek to overstep, since, taken as a quality that simply is, it supplies the plain coloring of the element within which doing moves; on the other side, negativity is determinateness only where being is concerned, whereas doing is itself nothing but negativity; in the individuality that acts, then, determinateness has been dissolved into negativity as such, into the epitome of every determinateness.

Now, in doing and in the consciousness of doing, this simple original nature passes over into the difference proper to doing. It is present first as an object, and indeed as an object such as still belongs to consciousness, as a purpose, and so as opposed to an actuality present at hand. The other moment is the movement of that purpose which had been represented as at rest, namely actualization, purpose set in relation to actuality taken as wholly formal, and with this the representation of transition as such, or the means. Lastly, the third is the object no longer as purpose, of which the doer is immediately conscious as its own, but as it stands outside the doer and is, for it, an other. — These various sides must now, though, be held to in keeping with the concept of this sphere, so that one and the same content persists throughout them and no difference creeps in: not between individuality and being as such, nor of purpose as against individuality qua original nature, nor as against the actuality present at hand, nor again of the means as against individuality qua absolute purpose, nor of the actuality brought about as against purpose, or original nature, or means.

To begin with, then, individuality's originally determinate nature, its immediate essence, has not yet been posited as something that does, and under that description it goes by the name of a particular aptitude, talent, character, and so on. Such a peculiar tincture of spirit must be viewed as the one and only content of the purpose itself, and as reality and nothing besides. Were one to represent consciousness as passing beyond this tincture, bent on bringing some further content into actuality, one would be representing it as a nothing that labors into nothingness. — This original essence furnishes more than the purpose's content; in itself it is also that actuality which otherwise shows up as the given stuff on which doing works, as an actuality already found there and awaiting formation in the doing. For doing is only the pure translating of being out of the form of the not-yet-exhibited into that of the exhibited; the being-in-itself of that actuality opposed to consciousness has sunk to a mere empty semblance. This consciousness, in resolving upon action, is accordingly not thrown off course by the semblance that the actuality present at hand puts up, and it has likewise to gather itself, out of any drifting among empty thoughts and purposes, back onto the original content of its essence. — This original content is admittedly only for consciousness once consciousness has actualized it; but the difference between something that for consciousness is only within consciousness, and an actuality that is in itself outside it has fallen away. — Only that there may be for it what it is in itself must consciousness act; acting, in other words, is precisely spirit's becoming as consciousness. It comes to know from its actuality, then, what it is in itself. The individual cannot, therefore, know what it is before it has brought itself to actuality through doing. — But it seems on this account unable to determine the purpose of its doing before it has done; yet at the same time, being consciousness, it must have the action before it beforehand as wholly its own, that is, as purpose. The individual setting about action therefore looks to be caught in a circle where either moment presupposes the other in advance, and so to be without any starting point, since it learns what its original essence is, the essence that has to serve as its purpose, only out of the deed, and yet, in order to do anything, must have the purpose beforehand. For just that reason, however, it must make a start immediately and, in whatever circumstances it finds itself, move on into activity without further pondering over beginning, means, and end; for its essence, its nature as it is in itself, is all of these at once: beginning, means, and end. As beginning, that nature lies ready in the circumstances of acting, and whatever interest the individual takes in something is already the answer given to the question whether there is anything to do here and what it is. For what looks like an actuality already found there is in itself the individual's own original nature, which carries only the semblance of a being — a semblance grounded in the concept of a doing that splits itself in two — but which, being its nature originally, gives voice to itself in the interest the individual takes in it. — The how, that is, the means, is in the same way determined in and for itself. Nor is talent anything else than determinate original individuality regarded as the inner means, or as the purpose's transition into actuality. What forms the actual means, though, the real transition, is talent taken in unity with the nature of the matter as that nature is present in the interest; talent supplies, within the means, the side of doing, the nature of the matter the side of content, and both are individuality itself, as the interpenetration of being and doing. What is present at hand, then, is circumstances found already there, which in themselves are the original nature of the individual; then the interest, which posits them precisely as its own or as purpose; finally the linking and sublation of this opposition in the means. This linkage still falls inside consciousness itself, and the whole just surveyed forms but one term of an opposition. What still lingers of this semblance of opposedness gets sublated by the transition itself, by the means; — for the means constitutes the unity of outer and inner, the reverse of that determinateness which belongs to it qua inner means, so that it sublates that determinateness and posits this unity of doing and being as outer as well, as individuality itself grown actual, individuality, that is, posited for its own self as what is. In this way the whole action steps outside itself neither as the circumstances, nor as purpose, nor means, nor as work.

With the work, though, a difference among the original natures appears to set in; the work is something determinate, exactly as the original nature it voices is determinate, for, released from doing as actuality that is, it carries negativity upon it as quality. Consciousness, however, determines itself over against the work as that which bears determinateness upon itself as negativity as such, as doing; over against that determinateness of the work it is thus the universal, so that it can compare the work with others and on that basis take the individualities themselves to be various; the individual whose work reaches out further is taken as an energy of will more powerful, or as a nature of greater wealth, one, that is, whose original determinateness is less confined; — another, by contrast, as a nature weaker [and] more scanty. Set against this inessential difference of magnitude, the pair good and bad would state a difference that is absolute; here, however, no such difference occurs. Take it the one way or the other, what we have is equally a doing and a bustling about, an individuality exhibiting and voicing itself, and hence everything is good, and there would strictly be no saying what the bad might be. What one would call a bad work is nothing but the individual living of a determinate nature that actualizes itself therein; only the comparing thought would spoil it into a bad work, and that thought is an empty affair, since it reaches past what the work essentially is, an individuality voicing itself, and searches in it, and demands of it, one knows not what besides. — That thought could bear only on the difference cited a moment ago; but such a difference, being one of magnitude, is in itself inessential, and it counts as inessential here because what would stand compared would be individualities, or works, that differ; and these have nothing to do with one another; each relates solely to itself. The original nature alone is the in-itself, the one thing that could be laid down as a standard for judging the work and the work for judging it; yet the two answer to each other exactly: nothing is for individuality that is not also through it, or, put otherwise, no actuality exists that is not individuality's nature and its doing, and no doing or in-itself of individuality exists that is not actual, and it is these moments alone that admit of comparison.

Hence there is in general neither exaltation, nor lament, nor remorse; for all such things come from the thought that imagines to itself another content and another in-itself than the original nature of the individual and its execution present in actuality are. Whatever it does and whatever befalls it, this it has done, and this it is itself; all it can have is the consciousness of purely translating its own self out of the night of possibility into the daylight of the present, translating the abstract in-itself over into the sense that belongs to actual being, together with the certainty that what meets it in the daylight is none other than what lay asleep in that night. Being conscious of this unity is admittedly a comparing too, yet what gets compared bears no more than the semblance of opposition; a semblance belonging to form, one which, for reason's self-consciousness, that individuality is on its own account actuality, counts as nothing more than semblance. Since the individual knows that in its actuality it can find nothing other than actuality's unity with itself, or only the certainty of itself in actuality's truth, and that it therefore always attains its purpose, it can only experience joy in itself.

Such is the concept that consciousness forms of itself when it is certain of itself as the absolute interpenetration of individuality with being; the question now is whether experience bears that concept out for it, and whether its reality tallies with the concept. Reality as consciousness confers it upon itself is the work; in the work the individual is, for itself, what it is in itself, and does so in a way such that the consciousness for which the individual thus comes about is, within the work, not particular consciousness but the universal one; in the work consciousness has set itself out into the element of universality at large, into the space of being that is void of determinateness. Consciousness as it withdraws from its work really is the universal, — since within this opposition it becomes the absolute negativity, or the doing, — set over against its work, which is the determinate one; consciousness therefore reaches out past itself qua work, and is itself that space void of determinateness which finds no filling in its work. If a moment ago their unity did maintain itself within the concept, that happened precisely through the work's being sublated qua work that is. Yet the work is to be, and it must be seen how, within the work's being, individuality will keep the work's universality intact and will find its way to satisfaction. — First of all the work that has come to be is to be considered for itself. Along with everything else it has taken up individuality's whole nature; its being is on that account itself a doing, one in which all differences penetrate one another and dissolve; the work is thus flung out into a subsistence where the original nature's determinateness does indeed turn outward against other determinate natures, encroaches upon them as they encroach upon it, and loses itself as a vanishing moment within this universal movement. While within the concept of individuality real in and for itself all the moments, namely circumstances, purpose, means, and actualization, stand equal to one another, and the original determinate nature holds good merely as a universal element, once that element turns into objective being its determinateness qua determinateness breaks into daylight in the work, and wins its truth in being dissolved. Looked at more closely, that dissolution presents itself thus: within this determinateness the individual has made itself actual as this one; but determinateness furnishes not merely actuality's content, it furnishes actuality's form as well, or rather actuality at large just is this determinateness of standing opposed to self-consciousness. From this side actuality shows itself as that which has vanished out of the concept, as a merely alien actuality found already there. The work is, that is, it exists for other individualities, and for these it is an actuality that is alien, one in whose room they have to install their own if they are to give themselves, by way of their doing, the consciousness of their unity with actuality; or else their interest in that work, posited through their own original nature, differs from the interest peculiar to this work, which is thereby made into something else. The work, then, is on the whole a perishable thing, snuffed out by the counterplay of other forces and interests, and it exhibits individuality's reality as vanishing rather than as brought to completion.

So it is that in its work consciousness sees the opposition of doing and being arise, an opposition that in consciousness's earlier shapes served at once as the beginning of doing, whereas here it is merely a result. In fact, however, it likewise lay at the ground when consciousness, as individuality real in itself, set about acting; for the determinate original nature was presupposed to the acting as the in-itself, and pure accomplishing for the sake of accomplishing had that nature as its content. But pure doing is the form equal to itself, and to that form the original nature's determinateness is on this account unequal. Here as elsewhere nothing hangs on which of the two we name concept and which reality; the original nature is what is thought, the in-itself, as against the doing wherein it first acquires reality; or, put the other way, the original nature constitutes the being both of individuality as such and of individuality as work, while doing is the original concept, absolute transition, or becoming. This inadequacy between concept and reality, an inadequacy lodged in the concept's own essence, is what consciousness undergoes in its work; there, accordingly, it becomes for itself what it truly is, while the empty concept it had of itself disappears.

Within this basic contradiction of the work, in which the truth of this individuality real in itself consists, every side of that individuality steps forward once more as contradictory; or rather the work, being the whole individuality's content as brought out of the doing that is the negative unity and holds all the moments captive, and set forth into being, now releases them; and in the element of subsistence they grow indifferent to one another. Concept and reality thus part company, the one as purpose, the other as what constitutes the original essentiality. Whether the purpose has a true essence, or whether the in-itself gets made into purpose, is a matter of contingency. In the same way concept and reality once again step apart, the one as transition into actuality, the other as purpose; or, what comes to the same, whether the means that voices the purpose gets chosen is contingent. And finally, taking these inner moments together, whether or not they possess a unity among themselves, the individual's doing is once more contingent as against actuality at large; luck decides, and it decides in favor of an ill-determined purpose and ill-chosen means quite as readily as against them.

If, then, what thus arises for consciousness on its work is the opposition between willing and accomplishing, between purpose and means, and again between these inner ones taken together and actuality itself, everything covered by the phrase the contingency of its doing taken in itself, all the same its unity and its necessity are no less at hand; this latter side overreaches the former, and the experience of doing's contingency is itself no more than a contingent experience. What the necessity of doing consists in is this, that purpose stands related without qualification to actuality, and that unity is the very concept of doing; one acts because doing, in and for itself, is what actuality essentially is. In the work, admittedly, there shows itself the contingency that being-accomplished has as against willing and accomplishing, and this experience, which seems bound to count as the truth, stands in contradiction with the concept of action just given. Should we take this experience's content in its full compass, however, that content is the vanishing work; what maintains itself is not the vanishing, for the vanishing is itself actual and bound up with the work, and vanishes along with it; the negative perishes together with the positive of which it is the negation, and perishes in its own right.

That the vanishing should itself vanish is something already contained in the concept of individuality real in itself; for whatever it is that the work vanishes into, or whatever on the work vanishes, and whatever was to lend what has been called experience its ascendancy over the concept individuality holds of itself, is objective actuality; but that actuality is a moment which, even within this consciousness itself, retains no truth of its own, that truth lying solely in the unity of actuality with doing, and the true work consists in nothing else than that unity of doing and being, of willing and accomplishing. For consciousness, then, on the strength of the certainty underlying its acting, the actuality opposed to that certainty is itself something which is merely for it; to consciousness as a self-consciousness gone back into itself, for which every opposition has fallen away, no opposition can arise any longer in this shape of its being-for-itself as against actuality; instead, the opposition and the negativity that surface on the work bear not just on the work's content, or on the content of consciousness, but on actuality as such, and with that on the opposition which exists only through actuality and upon it, and on the work's vanishing. Consciousness accordingly reflects itself, out of its perishable work, back into itself, and holds fast to its concept and its certainty as what is and what abides, in the face of the experience of doing's contingency; what it undergoes is in truth its own concept, wherein actuality figures only as a moment, as something for it, not as the in-and-for-itself; it undergoes actuality as a moment that vanishes, so that actuality is valid for it merely as being at large, whose universality is one and the same with doing. That unity is what the work truly is; it is the matter at hand, which asserts itself without qualification and is experienced as what abides, independently of the matter that consists in the contingency of individual doing as such, of circumstances, of means, and of actuality.

The matter at hand is opposed to these moments only insofar as they are supposed to count in isolation, but essentially, as the interpenetration of actuality and individuality, it is their unity; it is just as much a doing, and as doing pure doing as such, and thereby just as much the doing of this individual, and this doing, as still belonging to the individual in opposition to actuality, is purpose; likewise it is the transition out of this determinateness into the opposed one; and finally an actuality which is present for consciousness. What the matter at hand voices, accordingly, is that spiritual essentiality wherein all these moments stand sublated so far as they were valid on their own account, and are therefore valid only as universal ones, and wherein consciousness finds its certainty of itself to be an objective essence, a matter; an object to which self-consciousness has given birth as to what is its own, and which does not thereby stop being a free object in its own right. — The thing of sense-certainty and of perceiving now has its significance for self-consciousness solely through self-consciousness; on this rests the difference between a thing and a matter. — A movement corresponding to that of sense-certainty and perception will be run through on the matter.

In the matter at hand, then, as the interpenetration of individuality and objectivity itself that has become objective, self-consciousness has arrived at its true concept of itself, or has come to the consciousness of its substance. As it stands here, this consciousness of substance has only just come about and is on that account an immediate one, and that is the determinate way in which spiritual essence is on hand at this stage, not yet having ripened into substance truly real. Within this immediate consciousness of it, the matter at hand takes the form of simple essence, an essence that, being universal, holds all its various moments inside itself and belongs to them, yet is also once more indifferent toward them qua determinate moments and free on its own account, and that, as this free, simple, abstract matter at hand, is valid as the essence. Taken singly, the moments belonging to the original determinateness, that is, to the matter of this individual, to its purpose, to the means, to the doing itself, and to actuality, count for such a consciousness on one side as singular moments which it may forsake and surrender for the sake of the matter at hand; on the other side, all of them have the matter at hand for their essence only in this sense, that the matter at hand, as their abstract universal, is to be found upon each one of these several moments and can serve as their predicate. The matter at hand is not itself the subject as yet; those moments are what counts as subject, since it is on the side of singularity at large that they fall, whereas the matter at hand as yet amounts only to what is simply universal. It is the genus that discovers itself throughout all these moments as so many species of it, and is just as free of them.

We call a consciousness honest when it has, for one thing, reached the idealism voiced by the matter at hand, and, for another, possesses what is true in that matter taken as this formal universality; a consciousness whose sole concern is always the matter at hand, which therefore knocks about among the matter's various moments or species, and which, failing to reach the matter in one of them or under one signification, gets hold of it precisely thereby under another, so that it does in fact always win the satisfaction that, by its own concept, was to be its portion. Let matters turn out as they may, it has accomplished and attained the matter at hand, since the matter, being that universal genus of those moments, is predicate of them all.

Should it fail to bring some purpose to actuality, it has at least willed that purpose, which is to say that it turns purpose qua purpose, that pure doing which accomplishes nothing, into the matter at hand; and it can accordingly put the case to itself, and take comfort, by saying that something at any rate got done and bustled about. Since the universal has the negative, or vanishing, under it, the work's annihilating itself is likewise its own doing; it goaded the others into that, and it still finds satisfaction in the vanishing of its actuality, much as naughty boys enjoy their own selves in the box on the ear they receive, namely as the cause of it. Or if it has not even tried to carry out the matter at hand and has done nothing at all, then it did not want to; the matter at hand is for it precisely the unity of its resolve and of reality; it asserts that actuality would be nothing other than its own wanting. — Finally, if something interesting to it has come about without any doing on its part, then this actuality is for it the matter at hand precisely in the interest it finds in it, even though the actuality was not brought forth by it; if it is a piece of luck that has befallen it personally, it insists on this as its deed and merit; if it is some world event that otherwise does not concern it, it makes that event just as much its own, and deedless interest counts for it as the party it has taken for or against the event, and as having fought it or upheld it.

As is plain, the honesty of this consciousness, and equally the satisfaction it meets with on every side, in fact rests on this: that it fails to bring the thoughts it entertains about the matter at hand into connection. The matter at hand is for it quite as much its own matter as it is no work at all, or the pure doing and the empty purpose, or else an actuality without deed; each signification in turn is made subject of this predicate, and each in turn is forgotten. Now, in the mere having-willed, or else in the not-having-wanted, the matter at hand carries the signification of the empty purpose and of the merely thought unity of willing with accomplishing. Consolation over the purpose's annihilation, on the score of having at least willed it or at least done something pure, together with the satisfaction of having handed the others a task, elevates pure doing, or the utterly bad work, into the essence; for what deserves to be called bad is what is no work whatever. And in the lucky event of coming upon actuality ready-made, this being-without-deed becomes the matter at hand.

The truth of this honesty, however, is that it is not so honest as it looks. For it cannot be thoughtless enough actually to leave these several moments lying apart in this fashion; it must rather be immediately conscious of the opposition between them, seeing that they are related to one another without qualification. Pure doing is essentially the doing of this individual, and this doing is just as essentially an actuality, or a matter. Conversely, actuality is essentially only as its doing, just as it is only as doing as such; and its doing, just as it is doing as such, is at the same time also actuality. So while it looks as though its concern were only with the matter at hand qua abstract actuality, there is present in this the further fact that its concern is with the matter as its own doing. But equally, while it is concerned only with doing and bustling about, it is not in earnest about that either; rather, it is concerned with a matter, and with the matter as its own. And finally, while it seems to want only its own matter and its own doing, it is again concerned with the matter as such, or with the actuality that endures in and for itself.

Just as the matter at hand and its moments appear here as content, so too they are just as necessarily present as forms on consciousness. They make their entrance as content solely so as to disappear again, each yielding its place to the next. Their presence, then, must have the determinateness of the sublated; and so present, they are sides of consciousness itself. The matter at hand is there as the in-itself, or as consciousness's reflection into itself, whereas the way the moments crowd one another out finds expression upon consciousness in this, that they are posited upon it not in themselves but only for another. Consciousness exposes one moment of the content to the daylight and represents it for others; yet consciousness stands at the same time reflected out of that moment into itself, and the opposed moment is no less present within it; this latter it holds back for itself, as its own. Nor, for that matter, is there any particular one of them that would be solely put outside while another would be kept purely within; consciousness rather alternates between them, since it has to make the one no less than the other into what is essential both for itself and for the other party. The whole is individuality and the universal interpenetrating in movement; but since for this consciousness the whole is on hand merely as the simple essence, and hence as the abstraction of the matter at hand, its moments fall, in their separateness, outside the matter and away from one another; and as a whole it gets exhausted and exhibited only through the separating alternation of putting on show and holding back for itself. Given that in this alternation consciousness holds one moment as its own and as essential within its reflection, while it holds another only outwardly upon itself or for the others, what sets in is a game individualities play with each other, in which they find themselves and one another alike deceiving and deceived.

An individuality, then, sets about carrying something out; it thereby seems to have made something into a matter; it acts, in acting comes to be for others, and it seems to be concerned with actuality. The others therefore take its doing for an interest in the matter as such, and for the purpose that the matter be carried out in itself; indifferently whether by the first individuality or by them. So when they either exhibit this matter as one they have already brought off, or, failing that, offer their help and give it, that first consciousness has in fact already moved on from where they take it to stand; what interests it in the matter is its own doing and bustling about, and once they notice that this was the matter at hand, they find themselves fooled. — Yet their hurrying up to lend a hand was in truth nothing but a wish to see and display their doing rather than the matter at hand; that is, they meant to deceive the other exactly as they now protest at having been deceived themselves. — Now that it has come out into the open that one's own doing and bustling about, the play of one's own forces, counts as the matter at hand, consciousness seems to be pursuing its essence for itself and not for the others, and, concerned only with the doing as its own and not as a doing of the others, to be leaving the others just as free in their matter. But they are mistaken again; consciousness is already out of the place where they supposed it to be. It is not concerned with the matter as this singular matter of its own, but with the matter as matter, as something universal that is for all. It meddles, then, in their doing and their work, and where the work can no longer be taken out of their hands, it makes itself a party to it at least by busying itself with passing judgment; should it set upon the work the stamp of its approval and praise, what is meant is that in praising the work it praises along with it its own magnanimity and restraint in having spoiled the work neither as work nor by its censure. In taking an interest in the work, what it enjoys therein is its own self; and by the same token the work that it censures is welcome to it, precisely because that same enjoyment of its own doing is thereby procured for it. Those, however, who take themselves to be deceived by such meddling, or who give themselves out as deceived, were rather bent on deceiving in just the same fashion. They pass off their doing and bustling about as something existing only for themselves, wherein they had as their purpose nothing but themselves and their own essence. Yet in doing something, and so exhibiting themselves and bringing themselves before the daylight, they give their pretension the lie by the very deed, the pretension of meaning to shut out daylight itself, universal consciousness, and everyone's participation; actualization is on the contrary a putting of what is one's own on display within the universal element, whereby it becomes, and is meant to become, the matter of all.

It is therefore just as much a deceit of itself and of the others if what is supposedly at issue is only the pure matter; a consciousness that opens up some matter rather learns from experience that the others come rushing up, like flies to milk just set out, and want to know themselves busy with it; and they learn from it that what concerns it is likewise not the matter as an object, but the matter as its own. If, on the other hand, the essential element is supposed to be only the doing itself, the employment of forces and capacities, or this individuality's giving utterance to itself, then reciprocally the same experience arises: all bestir themselves and reckon that the invitation extends to them, and what gets opened up, rather than a pure doing or a singular doing peculiar to one person, proves to be something that holds just as much for others, that is, a matter at hand. What occurs is the same in either case; it merely carries a different sense from the one assumed in it and meant to be valid. Both sides come to be experienced by consciousness as moments of equal essentiality, and therein it experiences what the nature of the matter at hand is: neither a mere matter, one that would stand over against doing in general and against singular doing, nor a doing standing over against subsistence, one that would be the genus free of these moments as its species, but rather an essence, the being of which is the doing of the singular individual as well as of all individuals, and the doing of which is immediately for others, hence a matter, and which is a matter only as the doing of All and of Each; the essence, namely, which is the essence of every essence, the spiritual essence. Consciousness experiences that none of those moments is subject, but that each rather dissolves in the universal matter at hand; the moments of individuality, which for the thoughtlessness of this consciousness counted one after another as the subject, gather themselves together into the simple individuality that, as this one, is just as immediately universal. With this the matter at hand loses the relationship of predicate as well as the determinateness of a lifeless, abstract universality; it is instead substance shot through with individuality, the subject in which individuality is present just as much as itself, or as this individual, as it is present as all individuals, and the universal that has being only as this doing of All and of Each, having its actuality in the fact that this consciousness knows it to be at once its own singular actuality and the actuality of All. That pure matter at hand is precisely what was determined earlier on as the category, where being is the I and the I is being, though as thinking that still holds itself apart from actual self-consciousness; here, by contrast, the moments belonging to actual self-consciousness, whether we name them its content, its purpose, its doing and its actuality, or name them its form, being-for-itself and being for another, are posited together with the simple category itself as being one, and it is for that reason all content at the same time.

b. Law-Giving Reason

Considered in its simple being, the spiritual essence is pure consciousness, and it is this self-consciousness. The individual's originally-determinate nature no longer carries its positive significance, namely that in itself it is the element and the purpose of that individual's activity; it is nothing more than a sublated moment, and the individual is a self; as universal self. Conversely, the formal matter at hand finds its fulfillment in an individuality that acts and differentiates itself within itself; for it is the differences belonging to that individuality which make up the content of the universal in question. The category is in itself in that it is the universal of pure consciousness; and it is no less for itself, for the self of consciousness counts equally as a moment of the category. The category is absolute being, for the universality in question is simple self-equality of being.

For consciousness, then, the object has this significance: to be the true; it is and is valid in the sense that, in and for its own self, it is and is valid; it is the absolute matter, one that is no longer afflicted by the opposition between certainty and its truth, between the universal and the singular, between the purpose and the reality that belongs to it, but whose existence is self-consciousness in its actuality and its doing; this matter is accordingly the ethical substance; the consciousness of it is ethical consciousness. For that consciousness its object is valid equally as the true, for it brings self-consciousness and being together into one unity; it is valid as the absolute, since self-consciousness neither can nor wants to move out beyond this object any longer, being at home with itself in it; it cannot, for the object is all being and power; — it does not want to, for the object is the self, or the will belonging to this self. Regarded in its own self as object, it is the real object, since it has the difference of consciousness upon it; it partitions itself into masses, and these masses are the absolute essence's determinate laws. Yet these masses do not muddy the concept, since within the concept those moments, being and pure consciousness and the self, remain enclosed, — a unity which constitutes the essence of these masses and which, within this difference, no longer permits these moments to step apart from one another.

Laws or masses of this kind, belonging to the ethical substance, are acknowledged immediately; no question may be raised about their origin and their warrant, and no other ground may be sought, since anything other than the essence that is in and for itself could only be self-consciousness taken by itself; yet self-consciousness is nothing but this essence, since it is itself this essence's being-for-itself, and the essence counts as the truth for precisely this reason, that it is just as much the self of consciousness as it is its own in-itself, or pure consciousness.

In knowing itself as a moment of this substance's being-for-itself, self-consciousness gives expression to the law's existence within it in this way: what is right and good is immediately known to sound reason. As immediately as reason knows it, just so immediately is it also valid for reason, and reason says immediately: this is right and good. And precisely this; what is meant are determinate laws, a matter at hand that is fulfilled and rich in content.

What offers itself so immediately must be taken up and examined with equal immediacy; just as with what sense-certainty immediately pronounces to be, so also with the being that this immediate ethical certainty addresses, or with the immediately existing masses of the ethical essence, one has to see how they are constituted. Examples of a few such laws will show this, and if we take them as pronouncements made by knowing sound reason, we have no need to bring in beforehand the moment that, in their case, would have to be brought to bear once they are regarded as immediate sensuous laws.

"Everyone ought to speak the truth." — With a duty pronounced in this unconditional way, a condition will immediately be conceded; if he knows the truth. The commandment will accordingly now run as follows; everyone ought to tell the truth, each time in accordance with his acquaintance and conviction regarding it. Sound reason, precisely this ethical consciousness to which what is right and good is immediately known, will also declare that the condition was all along bound up with its universal pronouncement in such a way that this is how it had meant the commandment. By that, however, it in fact concedes that it had rather already violated the commandment in the very act of pronouncing it; what it spoke was this; everyone ought to speak the truth; yet it meant instead that he should speak it in keeping with his acquaintance and conviction regarding it; which means that it spoke in one way and meant another; and to speak in one way while meaning another is not to speak the truth. The untruth, or clumsiness, once corrected now expresses itself thus: everyone is to speak the truth in keeping with whatever acquaintance and conviction regarding it he has at the time. — But with that, what was to be universally necessary and in itself valid, which the proposition set out to pronounce, has instead been inverted into complete contingency. For whether the truth gets spoken is left to the accident of my being acquainted with it and able to become convinced of it; and nothing further has been said than that what is true and what is false are to be spoken indiscriminately, just as it happens that someone is acquainted with, means, and comprehends them. This contingency of the content possesses universality merely by virtue of the propositional form in which it finds expression; yet a proposition that is ethical holds out the prospect of a universal and necessary content, so that through the contingency of that content it contradicts itself. — Suppose, finally, that the proposition is corrected in this way: that the contingency of acquaintance and conviction concerning the truth should drop away and that the truth ought likewise to be known; such a commandment would then stand in direct contradiction to what was taken as the starting point. Sound reason was supposed at the outset to have the capacity to pronounce the truth immediately; but now the claim is that it ought to know the truth, which is to say that it does not know how to pronounce it immediately. — Regarded from the side of the content, the content has fallen away in the demand that one ought to know the truth; for that demand has to do with knowledge as such: one ought to know; what gets demanded is thus rather what is free of all determinate content. But what was under discussion here was a determinate content, a difference within the ethical substance. Only, that substance's immediate determination is a content which turned out instead to be a complete contingency, and which, once raised into universality and necessity, so that knowledge is what gets pronounced as the law, rather vanishes.

Another famous commandment runs: Love your neighbor as yourself. It is addressed to the singular in its relationship to singulars, and asserts it as a relationship of the singular to the singular, or as a relationship of feeling. Love that is active, — since love that is inactive has no being at all, and is therefore surely not what is intended, — sets out to separate what is evil from a human being and to bestow good upon him. To that end one must distinguish what in him is the evil, what counts against this evil as the good that serves the purpose, and what his welfare consists in generally; which is to say, I must love him with understanding; love without understanding will do him harm, perhaps more harm than hatred. Beneficence that is understanding and essential, however, has its richest and most important shape in the state's understanding universal doing, — a doing beside which the doing of a singular, as a singular, becomes something so trifling in general that speaking of it is scarcely worth the effort. That doing, moreover, has such great power behind it that should the singular deed set itself in opposition to it and try either to be outright crime on its own account or, out of love for someone else, to cheat the universal out of the right and the share it has in him, the deed would be useless altogether and would be destroyed beyond resistance. What is left to beneficence, in so far as it is feeling, is only the significance of an altogether singular deed, of a help in emergency that is as contingent as it is momentary. Contingency determines not merely the occasion for it, but also this: whether it amounts to a work at all, and whether it is not immediately dissolved again and, indeed, inverted into evil instead. This acting for the welfare of others, then, which gets pronounced to be necessary, is so constituted that it may perhaps be able to exist and perhaps not; that, should the occasion happen to present itself by chance, it is perhaps a work, perhaps good, perhaps not. This law accordingly has no more of a universal content than did the first one considered, and it fails to express, as an absolute ethical law ought to, anything that is in and for itself. Or: laws of this sort get no further than the ought and possess no actuality; what they are is not laws but only commandments.

In fact, however, it emerges from the very nature of the matter itself that a universal absolute content has to be renounced; for whatever determinateness is posited in the simple substance, whose essence lies precisely in being this simple, is inadequate to that substance. The commandment, in its simple absoluteness, itself pronounces immediate ethical being; and the difference that makes its appearance in it is a determinateness, hence a content standing beneath the absolute universality that this simple being has. Since an absolute content must therefore be renounced, all that can belong to the commandment is formal universality, that is, the requirement that it not contradict itself; for universality without content just is formal universality, and absolute content itself says no more than a difference that is none, or contentlessness.

What law-giving is left with, then, is universality in its pure form, or really the tautology of consciousness, which steps over against the content and is a knowledge whose object is not the existent or proper content, but rather the essence of that content, its self-equality.

The ethical essence is thus not immediately a content in its own right, but only a criterion of whether some content is fit to be law or not, in that it does not contradict itself. Law-giving reason has been demoted to a reason that is merely testing.

c. Law-Testing Reason

For the simple ethical substance, a difference within it is a contingency, and in the case of the determinate commandment we saw it step forward as a contingency belonging to knowledge, to actuality, and to doing. The comparison of that simple being with the determinateness which does not correspond to it was something that occurred in us; and in the course of it the simple substance revealed itself as formal universality, that is, as pure consciousness, which confronts the content in freedom from it and constitutes a knowledge of the content qua determinate. In this way this universality stays what the matter at hand had been. In consciousness, however, it is something different; it is, namely, no longer the inert genus devoid of thought, but is related to the particular and counts as that particular's power and truth. — To begin with, this consciousness seems to be the very testing that we were just now, and its doing seems able to be nothing but what has gone before, namely a matching of what is universal against what is determinate, from which, as before, the two would prove unsuited to each other. Here, though, the content stands in a different relationship to the universal, because the universal has acquired another meaning; it is formal universality, and of this the determinate content is capable, since within such universality the content comes under consideration only as it bears on itself. In the testing that we ourselves performed, the universal and solid substance stood opposed to the determinateness, and that determinateness developed into contingency on the part of the consciousness that the substance had entered. Here one member of the comparison has disappeared; the universal is no longer the substance that has being and is valid, nor what is right in and for itself, but is simple knowledge, or a form that holds a content up against nothing but itself and looks to see whether it is tautologous. Laws are no longer handed down but tested; and for the consciousness that tests, the laws already lie there as given; it takes their content up just as it simply stands, without going into any consideration of the singularity and contingency that cling to that content's actuality, as we did, but instead halts at the commandment qua commandment and relates itself to it just as simply as the commandment is its standard.

This testing, however, does not reach far, and for just this reason: since the standard is tautology and is indifferent toward the content, it admits the one content into itself quite as readily as the opposite. — The question runs: is there to be, in and for itself, a law that property exist; in and for itself, that is, and not on grounds of usefulness for other purposes; for ethical essentiality consists precisely in this, that the law be equal to itself alone and, through this equality with itself, be grounded in its own essence rather than be something conditioned. Taken in and for itself, property involves no self-contradiction; it is a determinateness that is isolated, or posited as equal to nothing but itself. Non-property, the ownerlessness of things, or a community of goods, is exactly as little self-contradictory. That a thing should belong to no one, or to whoever first seizes possession of it, or to everyone together, with each receiving what his need requires or an equal portion, is a simple determinateness, a formal thought, exactly like its opposite, property. — Of course, if the ownerless thing is regarded as a necessary object of need, then it must necessarily pass into some singular individual's possession; and making the thing's freedom into the law instead would be contradictory. Nor, however, does the ownerlessness of the thing mean an absolute ownerlessness; the thing is rather supposed to come into possession in keeping with the need of the singular individual, and this not so that it may be stored up but so that it may be immediately used. But providing for need in a manner left wholly to contingency contradicts the nature of the conscious being, which is all that is at issue here; for such a being has to represent its need to itself under the form of universality, has to take care of its existence as a whole, and has to gain for itself a lasting good. Thus the thought that a thing falls by chance to the nearest self-conscious life in accordance with that life's need turned out not to agree with itself. — In a community of goods, where provision would be made in a universal and lasting way, either each receives as large a share as he requires, and then this inequality stands in contradiction with the essence of consciousness, for which the equality of singular individuals is the principle. Or, following the latter principle, distribution is made equally, and then the share lacks the relation to need which alone is its concept.

Yet if non-property comes to look contradictory in this way, that is solely because it was not allowed to stand as a simple determinateness. The same happens to property once it is resolved into moments. The singular thing which belongs to me as property therewith counts as something universal, made fast, enduring; that, however, runs counter to its nature, since its nature lies in being used up and in vanishing. It counts at the same time as what is mine, which all the others recognize and shut themselves out from. But my being recognized contains, rather, my equality with everyone, which is exclusion's opposite. — What I possess is a thing, that is to say, a being for others in general, since to be only for me is something entirely universal and indeterminate; that I possess it stands in contradiction with its universal thinghood. Property, then, is in contradiction with itself on all sides quite as much as non-property is; each of the two bears within it these opposed and mutually contradicting moments of singularity and universality. — But each of these determinatenesses, when represented simply, as property or as non-property, with no further development, is as simple as the other, which is to say that it does not contradict itself. — The standard for law that reason possesses within itself thus suits anything whatever equally, and with that it is really no standard at all. — It would be an odd state of affairs, too, were tautology, the proposition of contradiction, conceded for the cognition of theoretical truth to be nothing but a formal criterion, that is, something wholly indifferent as between truth and untruth, and yet supposed for the cognition of practical truth to be something more.

In the two moments considered just now, in which the previously empty spiritual essence gets filled out, both the positing of immediate determinatenesses on the ethical substance and then the knowledge that asks of them whether they are laws have sublated themselves. The upshot accordingly seems to be that there can be no determinate laws and no knowledge of them either. Yet substance is consciousness of itself as the absolute essentiality, and as such it can give up neither the difference within it nor the knowledge of that difference. The nullity that law-giving and law-testing turned out to have means this, that both of them, taken singly and in isolation, are merely moments of the ethical consciousness with nothing to hold them up; and the movement in which the two make their appearance carries the formal sense that in it the ethical substance exhibits itself as consciousness.

Insofar as the two moments spell out more closely what the consciousness of the matter at hand is, they may be taken as forms of honesty, which, having once busied itself with its formal moments, now busies itself with a content of the good and the right that is supposed to be, and with a testing of such fixed truth, and which takes itself to possess in healthy reason and judicious insight the force and validity of the commandments.

Without this honesty, however, it is not as the essence of consciousness that the laws count, and no more does testing count as a doing that goes on within consciousness; instead, these moments, in stepping forward each on its own immediately as an actuality, express, the first an invalid setting-up and being of actual laws, the second an equally invalid release from those laws. Qua determinate law, the law carries a contingent content, — and what that means here is that it is the law of a singular consciousness and has an arbitrary content. So that immediate law-giving is the tyrannical sacrilege which turns caprice into law and ethical life into obedience toward caprice, — toward laws which are merely laws without being commandments as well. And likewise the second moment, so far as it stands isolated, the testing of laws, signifies the setting in motion of what cannot be moved and the sacrilege of a knowledge which argues itself loose from the absolute laws and takes them for a caprice foreign to it.

Under both forms these moments stand in a negative relationship to the substance, that is, to the real spiritual essence; or, put otherwise, within them the substance has not yet attained its reality, consciousness still keeping it in the form of consciousness's own immediacy, so that it is so far only a willing and knowing on the part of this individual, or the ought of an unactual commandment, together with a knowledge of formal universality. Now that these modes have sublated themselves, however, consciousness has withdrawn into the universal, and with that the oppositions have disappeared. The spiritual essence is actual substance precisely because these modes are not valid in their singleness but only as sublated; and the unity within which they count for no more than moments is consciousness's self, which, now that it is posited in the spiritual essence, renders that essence actual, filled out, and self-conscious.

For self-consciousness, then, the spiritual essence is at the outset law which has being in itself; the universality that belonged to testing, being the formal universality that did not have being in itself, has been sublated. It is likewise an eternal law that finds its ground not in the will of this individual; rather it is in and for itself, the absolute pure will of all, and this will bears the form of immediate being. Neither is it a commandment that merely ought to be; on the contrary, it is and is valid; the universal I belonging to the category is what it amounts to, an I which is actuality immediately, and the world is nothing more than this actuality. But since this law that has being is valid without qualification, the obedience of self-consciousness is not the service owed to a master whose orders would be so much caprice, and in which it would not cognize itself. The laws are, instead, thoughts belonging to its own absolute consciousness, which it itself immediately has. Nor does it believe in them either, for faith does indeed look upon the essence as well, but upon an alien essence. Ethical self-consciousness is immediately at one with the essence through the universality of its self; faith, in contrast, takes its start from the singular consciousness, and is that consciousness's movement of forever going toward this unity without ever reaching the presence of its essence. — The former consciousness, by contrast, has sublated itself as singular, this mediation has been carried out, and it is only by its having been carried out that such consciousness is the immediate self-consciousness of the ethical substance.

So the difference of self-consciousness from the essence is transparent through and through. In consequence the differences within the essence itself are not contingent determinatenesses; because essence and self-consciousness form a unity, and inequality could arise from self-consciousness alone, these differences are the masses of an articulation permeated by the life of that unity, spirits that are clear to themselves and not split in two, unblemished heavenly shapes which in their differences maintain the unprofaned innocence and concord of their essence. — Toward them self-consciousness is, in the same way, a simple and clear relationship. They are, and nothing more, — this is what constitutes its consciousness of its relationship. Thus for the Antigone of Sophocles they count as the unwritten and infallible right of the gods, which lives not merely today and yesterday but everlastingly, and nobody knows whence it appeared. They are. Should I inquire into how they arose and narrow them down to the point at which they originated, I have already passed beyond them; for from that moment on it is I who am the universal, and they that are conditioned and restricted. If they are to legitimate themselves to my insight, then I have already shaken their unshakable being-in-itself, and I regard them as something that may be true and may equally well not be true for me. Ethical conviction consists precisely in this, that one stands unswervingly fast by what is right and refrains from all moving, shaking, and tracing it back. — Someone lodges a deposit with me; it is another person's property, and I recognize it as such because that is how it is, and I hold myself unwavering within this relationship. Were I to hold on to the deposit for myself, I would commit no contradiction at all by the principle of my testing, namely tautology; for in that case I would no longer take it to be another person's property, and holding on to something that I do not take to be another person's property is entirely consistent. Altering the view is no contradiction, for what matters is not the view qua view but the object and the content, and it is this that is supposed not to contradict itself. To the same degree that I am able — as indeed I do whenever I give something away — to replace the view that something is my property with the view that it is another person's property, without incurring any guilt of contradiction thereby, I am equally able to travel the road in the reverse direction. — Hence something is not right on the grounds that I find it free of self-contradiction; rather, because it is the right, it is right. That something is the property of the other lies at the foundation; I have no reasoning to carry on about it, nor am I to seek out all sorts of thoughts, connections, and considerations or let them come to mind; I am to think neither of law-giving nor of testing; by such movements of my thought I would displace the relationship just named, seeing that in fact I could, as I pleased, fit the opposite quite as well to my indeterminate tautological knowledge and so make that into the law. Whether this determination or its opposite is the right one is instead settled in and for itself; left to myself I could make whichever one I wanted into the law, or just as easily neither, and once I set about testing I am already traveling an unethical road. Because the right is for me in and for itself, I stand within the ethical substance; the substance is thus the essence of self-consciousness, while self-consciousness is its actuality and existence, its self and will.

VI. Spirit

Reason is spirit inasmuch as the certainty that it is all reality has been raised to truth, and inasmuch as reason is conscious of itself as its own world and of the world as itself. — How spirit comes to be was exhibited by the movement immediately preceding, in which consciousness's object, the pure category, raised itself to the concept of reason. Within reason that observes, this pure unity of I and being, of the for-itself and of being-in-itself, carries the determination of the in-itself, or of being, and reason's consciousness finds itself. The truth of observing, however, is rather the sublation of this immediate instinct of finding, this unconscious existence that reason has. The category as intuited, the found thing, steps into consciousness as that being-for-itself which belongs to the I, and now, in the objective essence, the I knows itself as the self. But when the category is determined in this way, as being-for-itself set over against being-in-itself, that determination is just as one-sided, a moment that sublates itself. For consciousness, then, the category comes to be determined the way it stands in its universal truth, namely as an essence in and for itself. What makes up the matter at hand, this still abstract determination, is at first only the spiritual essence, and consciousness of it only a formal knowledge that drifts about among its many sorts of content; in fact such consciousness is still marked off from the substance as something singular, and it either lays down arbitrary laws, or supposes that in its knowledge as such it possesses the laws as these are in and for themselves; and it takes itself to be the power that sits in judgment over them. — Or, looked at from the side of the substance, the substance is that spiritual essence which has being in and for itself and is still not consciousness of itself. — But the essence having being in and for itself, which is at the same time actual to itself as consciousness and represents itself to itself, is spirit.

The spiritual essence of spirit has already been given the name ethical substance; spirit itself, though, is ethical actuality. Spirit is the self of actual consciousness, and over against that consciousness spirit, or rather actual consciousness itself, stands as an objective and actual world; yet for the self this world has forfeited every significance of something alien, and the self likewise has forfeited every significance of a being-for-itself severed from the world, whether dependent or independent. The substance and the universal, self-equal, abiding essence — spirit is the unshifted and undissolved ground and starting point of the doing of all, — and their purpose and goal, as the thought in-itself of all self-consciousness. — This substance is equally the universal work that produces itself through the doing of all and of each as their unity and equality, for it is being-for-itself, the self, the doing. As the substance, spirit is the unwavering, just self-equality; but as being-for-itself the substance is the dissolved, self-sacrificing, benevolent essence in which each accomplishes his own work, tears universal being apart, and takes his portion of it for himself. Precisely this dissolving and singularizing of the essence is the moment belonging to the doing and the self of all; this is what moves the substance and is its soul, and it is the universal essence that has been brought about. It is just because the substance is being that has been dissolved in the self that it is no dead essence, but rather actual and living.

Spirit is thus the absolute real essence that carries itself. All the shapes of consciousness so far are abstractions of spirit; they amount to this, that spirit analyzes itself, distinguishes its moments, and lingers with singular ones. This isolating of such moments has spirit itself for its presupposition and its subsistence, or it exists only within spirit, which is existence. So isolated, they carry the semblance that as such they have being; but their onward rolling and their return into their ground and essence showed how they are only moments or vanishing magnitudes; and this essence is precisely that moving and dissolving of these moments. At this point, where what has been posited is spirit, or the reflection of those moments into itself, our own reflection can briefly call them to mind under this aspect; these were consciousness, self-consciousness, and reason. Thus spirit is consciousness as such, comprehending within itself sense-certainty, perceiving, and the understanding, insofar as, in analyzing itself, it holds on to the moment that it is to itself an objective, existing actuality, and abstracts from the circumstance that its own being-for-itself is what this actuality is. Should it instead hold on to the other moment in the analysis, namely that its being-for-itself is its object, then spirit is self-consciousness. Yet as the immediate consciousness of what is in and for itself, as consciousness and self-consciousness unified, spirit is the consciousness that has reason, the one which, as the word having indicates, has its object determined as rational in itself, or as bearing the value of the category, though in such a way that this object does not yet bear the value of the category for the consciousness of it. It is the consciousness from whose consideration we have just now come. Once this reason which spirit has is finally intuited by spirit as a reason that is, or as the reason which is actual within spirit and is spirit's world, then spirit stands in its truth; spirit is spirit, it is that actual ethical essence.

Spirit is the ethical life of a people, insofar as spirit is the immediate truth; the individual which is a world. Spirit has to advance to consciousness of what it immediately is, to sublate that beautiful ethical life, and to reach, by way of a series of shapes, the knowledge of itself. What sets these apart from the preceding ones is that they are the real spirits, actualities in the proper sense, and, in place of shapes merely of consciousness, shapes of a world.

It is as the living ethical world that spirit exists in its truth; as spirit first arrives at the abstract knowledge of its essence, ethical life goes under in the formal universality of right. Spirit, now split in two within itself, sketches out in its objective element, as in a hard actuality, one among its worlds, the realm of culture, and, over against it, in the element that is thought, the world of faith, which is the realm of essence. Both worlds, however, once grasped by the spirit that withdraws into itself out of this loss of itself, grasped by the concept, are thrown into confusion and revolutionized by insight and its diffusion, the Enlightenment; and the realm that had been divided and spread out into the here below and the beyond goes back into self-consciousness, which in morality now grasps itself as the essentiality and grasps essence as actual self, no longer places its world and that world's ground outside itself, but lets everything smolder away within itself, and, as conscience, is the spirit certain of itself.

The ethical world, then, the world torn apart into the here below and the beyond, and the moral worldview are the spirits whose movement and return into the simple self of spirit that is for itself will unfold, and as their goal and result the actual self-consciousness belonging to absolute spirit will step forth.

A. True Spirit, Ethical Life

Spirit, in its simple truth, is consciousness, and it strikes its moments apart from one another. Action divides spirit into the substance and the consciousness of that substance; and it divides the substance just as much as it divides the consciousness. The substance steps forth as universal essence and purpose, set over against itself as singularized actuality; the infinite middle is self-consciousness, which in itself already is the unity of substance and self and now becomes so for itself, joining the universal essence with its singularized actuality, lifting this actuality up into that essence and thereby acting ethically, — and letting that essence down into this actuality, and thereby executing the purpose, the substance that had merely been thought; what it brings forth, as its work and hence as actuality, is the unity of substance with its own self.

As consciousness comes apart, the simple substance has in part taken on the opposition directed against self-consciousness, and in part it thereby exhibits, just as much on its own account, the nature of consciousness, which is to differentiate itself within itself, as a world structured into its masses. So it splits into an ethical essence that is differentiated within itself, into a law that is human and a law that is divine. In the same way, the self-consciousness that steps up over against it assigns itself, in keeping with its essence, to one of these powers, and, as knowledge, splits into non-knowledge of what it is doing and into knowledge of that same doing, which is for that very reason a deceived knowledge. In its deed, then, it undergoes both the contradiction of those powers that the substance had split itself into, along with their mutual destruction, and equally the contradiction between its own knowledge of the ethical life of its acting — and what is ethical in and for itself, and so it comes upon its own downfall. In fact, though, this movement has made the ethical substance into actual self-consciousness, or has made this self into one that exists in and for itself, yet it is precisely in this that ethical life has foundered.

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

The simple substance of spirit divides itself as consciousness. Or: the consciousness whose object is abstract, sensuous being makes its transition into perception, and the same holds for immediate certainty of the real, ethical being; and just as simple being becomes, for sensuous perception, a thing bearing many properties, so the case of acting becomes, for ethical perception, an actuality bearing many ethical relations. In the former case, however, the idle multiplicity of properties draws itself together into the essential opposition of singularity and universality, and even more so in the latter, which is purified, substantial consciousness: there the multiplicity of ethical moments becomes twofold, a law of singularity alongside a law of universality. Yet each of these masses of the substance remains the whole of spirit; if in sensuous perception things possess no other substance than those two determinations, singularity and universality, in the present case the two determinations articulate nothing more than a superficial opposition of the two sides to one another.

Within the essence under consideration here, singularity carries the significance of self-consciousness as such, not that of some singular, contingent consciousness. In this determination, therefore, the ethical substance is the actual substance, absolute spirit realized across the multiplicity of consciousness as it exists; it is the communal being which, for us, already counted as the absolute essence when we entered upon the practical shaping of reason as such, and which now steps forth in its own truth, for itself, as an ethical essence that is conscious, and, further, as the essence for the consciousness that is our object here. Spirit it is: for itself insofar as it maintains itself in the counter-shine of individuals, — and in itself, or substance, insofar as it holds them within itself. In the guise of actual substance it is a people; in the guise of actual consciousness, a citizen of that people. Such a consciousness finds its essence in the simple spirit, finds self-certainty in that spirit's actuality, the people as a whole, and finds immediately therein its truth, hence not in anything unactual, but in a spirit which exists and is valid.

Human law is the name that fits this spirit, since its essential form is that of an actuality conscious of itself. Taken in universality it is the familiar law and the extant custom; taken in singularity it is self-certainty made actual in the individual as such, and as self-certainty in the shape of simple individuality it is government; its truth is validity that lies open in the light of day, an existence which, for immediate certainty, assumes the form of an existence released into freedom.

Over against this ethical power and its manifestness, however, there steps the divine law, a power of another kind. For the ethical state power, as the movement of doing conscious of itself, finds its opposite in what is the simple, immediate essence of ethical life; qua actual universality it is a violence directed against individual being-for-itself; and qua actuality in general it still harbors, in the inner essence, something other than what it is.

It has already been noted that whichever of the two opposed modes of existing the ethical substance takes, that mode contains it entire, with every moment of its content. So, where the communal being is that substance in the guise of actual doing conscious of itself, the other side carries the form of substance as immediate, as merely being. Thus, from one side, it is the inward concept, ethical life as such in its universal possibility, while from the other side it has the moment of self-consciousness in it no less. This moment, giving expression to ethical life within the element of immediacy or of being, or a consciousness of itself that is immediate, a consciousness of itself as essence and equally as this self in another, that is to say, a natural ethical communal being, — is the family. As the unconscious concept still inward, it stands over against its actuality conscious of itself; as the element of the actuality of the people, over against the people itself; as immediate ethical being, over against the ethical life that forms and preserves itself through labor for the universal — the Penates over against the universal spirit.

Even though the ethical being of the family determines itself as the immediate, the family within itself is not an ethical essence insofar as it is the relationship of nature among its members, or insofar as their relation is the immediate one of singular actual beings; for what is ethical is universal in itself, while this relationship of nature is essentially no less a spirit, and is ethical only as a spiritual essence. We have to see wherein its own distinctive ethical life consists. — First of all, because the ethical is what is universal in itself, the ethical relation among family members is neither a relation of feeling nor the relationship of love. Now it seems that the ethical would have to be located in the relationship of the singular family member to the whole family as substance, such that this member's doing and actuality take the family alone as purpose and content. But the conscious purpose which the doing of this whole has, insofar as that purpose bears on the whole itself, is itself the singular. The acquisition and preservation of power and wealth bears in part merely on need and belongs to desire; in part, in its higher determination, it becomes something merely mediate. Such a determination lies outside the family itself and aims at the truly universal, the communal being; toward the family it is rather negative, and consists in placing the singular outside of it, in subjugating his naturalness and his singularity, and in drawing him toward virtue, toward a life lived in the universal and for it. As for the positive purpose that belongs to the family as its own, this is the singular as such. For this relation to be ethical, however, he may not appear under a contingency, neither the one who acts nor the one on whom the action bears, in the way this happens with some piece of help or some service. What the ethical action has for content must be substantial, whole and universal; it can therefore bear only on the whole singular, or on him as a universal. And this again not in the sense that it is merely represented that a service promotes his whole happiness, while as immediate and actual action it does only something singular to him; — nor in the sense that, as education, in a series of efforts, it really does take him as a whole for its object and bring him forth as its work, where, apart from the purpose that is negative toward the family, the actual action has only a restricted content; — and just as little, finally, in the sense that it is a rescue in an emergency, by which the whole singular is in truth saved; for such a deed is itself an entirely contingent one, its occasion being a common actuality which may just as well be as not be. The action, then, that embraces the whole existence of the blood-relation and takes for its object and content him — not the citizen, since the citizen is no member of the family, nor the one who is to become a citizen and to cease counting as this singular, but rather him, this singular who belongs to the family, taken as a universal essence lifted clear of sensuous, that is, singular actuality — has to do no longer with the living one but with the dead one, who out of the long series of his scattered existence has gathered himself into the one completed shape, and who out of the restlessness of contingent life has risen into the repose of simple universality. — Since he is actual and substantial only as citizen, the singular, insofar as he is not a citizen and belongs to the family, is only the unactual, marrowless shade.

This universality at which the singular as such arrives is pure being, death; it is the immediate natural having-become, not the doing of a consciousness. It falls to the family member as a duty, therefore, to supply this side, so that his ultimate being as well, this universal being, may not be left to nature alone as something devoid of reason, but may instead be something done, in which the right of consciousness is upheld. Or rather the sense of the action is this: since in truth the repose and universality of an essence conscious of itself does not belong to nature, the semblance of such a doing, which nature has arrogated to itself, is to fall away, and the truth is to be established. — What nature did to him is the side from which his becoming universal presents itself as the movement of a being. That movement does indeed fall within the ethical communal being and takes it as its purpose; death is the completion, the supreme labor that the individual as such undertakes on the communal being's behalf. But insofar as the individual is essentially singular, it remains contingent whether his death stood in immediate connection with his labor for the universal and issued from it, and in part, even where it did, death is the natural negativity, the movement of the singular as something that is, a movement in which consciousness makes no return into itself so as to become self-consciousness; or, since the movement of what is consists in its being sublated and arriving at being-for-itself, death is that side of splitting-in-two where the being-for-itself attained differs from the being that entered upon the movement. — Since ethical life is spirit whose truth is immediate, the sides into which its consciousness breaks apart also fall under this form of immediacy, and singularity crosses over into this abstract negativity, which, having neither consolation nor reconciliation in its own self, must essentially receive them by way of an actual and external action. — Blood-relationship, then, supplements the abstract natural movement by supervening upon it with the movement of consciousness, breaking off nature's work and wresting the blood-relation from destruction, or better, since destruction, his becoming pure being, is necessary, by taking the deed of destruction upon itself. — What is thereby brought about is that even the dead, the universal being, becomes something returned into itself, a being-for-itself, or that powerless, purely singular singularity is raised to universal individuality. The dead man, having released his being from his doing or negative one, is empty singularity, merely a passive being for another, given over to every base and reasonless individuality and to the forces of abstract materials, of which the former, by virtue of the life it has, and the latter, by virtue of their negative nature, are now more powerful than he. This dishonoring doing on the part of unconscious desire and of abstract essences the family holds off from him, putting its own doing in place of it, and it gives the kinsman in marriage to the earth's womb, to elemental, imperishable individuality; by this it makes him the companion of a communal being which for its part overpowers and holds bound the forces of the singular materials and the base living things that were breaking loose against him and bent on destroying him.

This final duty, then, constitutes the complete divine law, or the positive ethical action toward the singular. Every other relationship toward him that goes beyond mere love and is ethical falls under the human law, and its significance is negative: to lift the singular above his confinement within the natural communal being to which he belongs as an actual one. Now granted that what human right has as content and as power is the ethical substance in its actuality and conscious of itself, the whole people, whereas divine right and law has the singular who lies beyond actuality, still he is not therefore powerless; his power is the abstract, the purely universal, the elemental individual, which drags back into pure abstraction, as into its own essence, that individuality which tears itself loose from the element and constitutes the people's actuality conscious of itself, being no less the ground of that individuality. — How this power presents itself in the people itself will unfold further on.

Now within the one law, as within the other, there are also differences and stages. For since both essences have in them the moment of consciousness, difference unfolds within them, and this is what constitutes their movement and their own distinctive life. Examining these differences displays the manner in which the ethical world's two universal essences exercise their activity and their self-consciousness, and displays their interconnection and transition into each other as well.

The communal being, the upper law openly valid in the light of the sun, has its actual vitality in government, in which it is an individual. It is the simple self of the ethical substance in its entirety, spirit made actual and reflected into itself. Such simple force does, to be sure, permit the essence to spread itself out into its articulated members and to grant every part subsistence and a being-for-itself of its own. Herein lies the spirit's reality, its existence, and the element of that reality is the family. Yet spirit is likewise the force of the whole, drawing these parts once more together into the negative one, making them feel their non-self-subsistence, and holding them in the consciousness that their life is theirs only within the whole. The communal being may thus organize itself on the one hand into the systems of personal self-subsistence and of property, of the law of persons and of things; and it may likewise articulate the modes of laboring for what are at first singular purposes — acquisition and enjoyment — into associations of their own and make them self-subsistent. The spirit of the universal association is what is simple, the negative essence of these systems that isolate themselves. Lest they root themselves in this isolating and harden, and lest the whole thereby fall apart and the spirit disperse, government must periodically shake them inwardly by means of wars, must thereby injure and throw into confusion the order and the right to self-subsistence that they have arranged for themselves, and must let the individuals who, absorbed in all that, tear loose from the whole and strive after the inviolable being-for-itself and security of the person, feel in that imposed labor their master, death. By thus dissolving the form of subsistence, spirit fends off any sinking out of ethical existence into natural existence, and it preserves the self of its consciousness and raises that self into freedom and into its own force. — So the negative essence proves to be what is properly the power of the communal being, the force by which it preserves itself; and the communal being accordingly draws the truth and confirmation of its own power from the essence of the divine law, from the subterranean realm.

The divine law that holds sway in the family likewise has differences within it, whose relation constitutes the living movement of its actuality. Among the three relationships, however, that of man and wife, that of parents and children, that of siblings as brother and sister, the first is the relationship of man and wife, the immediate cognizing of the one consciousness in the other, and the cognizing of mutual recognizedness. Since it is the natural cognizing of oneself, not the ethical one, it is only the representation and the image of spirit, not actual spirit itself. — The representation, or the image, however, has its actuality in something other than itself; hence this relationship possesses its actuality not within itself but in the child instead, — another whose becoming the relationship is, and in which it vanishes; and this succession of generations rolling onward finds its subsistence within the people. — The piety that man and wife bear toward each other is thus mixed with feeling and with natural relation, and their relationship does not carry its return into itself within itself; and the same holds of the second, the piety of parents and children toward each other. That of the parents toward their children is affected precisely by the emotion of having the consciousness of one's own actuality in the other, and of seeing being-for-itself come to be in the other without getting it back, since it remains an alien actuality of its own; — that of the children toward the parents, conversely, is affected by the emotion of having one's own becoming, or the in-itself, in another that is vanishing, and of attaining being-for-itself and a self-consciousness of one's own only through separation from the origin — a separation in which that origin runs dry.

These two relationships remain caught within the passing-over and the inequality of the sides distributed to them. — It is between brother and sister, however, that the unmixed relationship takes place. The blood in them is one and the same, yet a blood that within them has arrived at its repose and equilibrium. They therefore do not desire each other, nor have they given this being-for-itself to each other or received it from each other; rather, they are free individuality over against each other. As sister, then, the feminine possesses the highest intimation of the ethical essence; it does not attain to consciousness of that essence or to its actuality, since the family's law is the inward essence, the essence that has being in itself, an essence lying outside the daylight of consciousness and remaining inward feeling and the divine that is lifted out of actuality. It is to these Penates that the feminine is tied, intuiting in them partly its universal substance and partly its singularity, yet so that this relation to singularity is not at the same time the natural relation of pleasure. — As daughter, the woman must now watch her parents vanish with natural movement and with ethical repose, since this relationship must be spent before she reaches the being-for-itself she is capable of; in her parents, therefore, she does not intuit her being-for-itself in any positive manner. — The relationships of mother and of wife, however, have singularity partly as something natural belonging to pleasure, partly as something negative that sees in them only its own disappearance, and for just that reason partly as something contingent that can be replaced by another. Within the house of ethical life what these relationships of the feminine rest upon is not this man, not this child, but a man, children in general, — not feeling but the universal. What distinguishes the ethical life of the feminine from that of the man lies precisely here, that in its determination for singularity and in its pleasure the feminine stays immediately universal and remains a stranger to the singularity of desire, whereas in the man the two sides come apart, and since as citizen he possesses the self-conscious force of universality, he purchases with it the right of desire, while keeping himself free of desire at the same time. Because singularity is thus mingled into this relationship of the wife, its ethical life is not pure; yet to the extent that this ethical life is pure, singularity becomes indifferent, and the wife then goes without that moment in which she would cognize herself as this self in the other. — For the sister, however, the brother is simply the calm essence of like rank, and the recognition she has in him stays pure, unmixed with any natural relation; the indifference of singularity and its ethical contingency are accordingly absent from this relationship; instead, the moment of the singular self that recognizes and is recognized is permitted here to make good its right, for it is joined to the equilibrium of the blood and to a relation without desire. For the sister, therefore, a brother's loss admits of no replacement, and her duty toward him stands highest.

At the same time this relationship marks the limit where the family, enclosed within itself, dissolves and passes outside itself. In the brother lies the side on which the family's spirit becomes an individuality that turns toward what is other, making the transition into the consciousness of universality. Leaving behind the family's immediate, elemental and hence properly negative ethical life, the brother sets out to win and to bring forth ethical life that is actual and conscious of itself.

Out of the divine law, within whose sphere he had lived, he crosses over to the human law. The sister, on the other hand, becomes what the wife remains: the one who presides over the house and keeps the divine law. So it is that the two sexes get beyond their natural essence and step forward in their ethical significance, as diversities which share out between them the two differences that the ethical substance confers on itself. If the ethical world's two universal essences find their determinate individuality in self-consciousness that is naturally differentiated, the reason is that ethical spirit unites substance with self-consciousness immediately; — an immediacy which, taken on the side of reality and of difference, thus shows up at once as a natural difference given in existence. — This is the very side that showed up, in the shape of individuality real to itself, within the concept of spiritual essence, under the title of originally determinate nature. Here that moment sheds the indeterminateness which still clings to it there, and sheds the contingent diversity of dispositions and capacities. What we now have is the two sexes in determinate opposition, their naturalness at once taking on the significance of their ethical determination.

Sexual difference, however, together with the difference of ethical content, stays inside the substance's unity, and the movement of that difference is precisely the substance's abiding becoming. The family spirit dispatches the man out into the communal being, where he finds the essence that is conscious of itself; and if the family thereby has in him its universal substance and its subsistence, conversely the communal being owes the formal element of its actuality to the family, and its force and corroboration to the divine law. Neither of the two exists alone in and for itself; in its living movement the human law issues from the divine, what is valid on earth from what is subterranean, the conscious from what lacks consciousness, mediation from immediacy, and it returns just as surely to the point from which it issued. The subterranean power, for its part, possesses its actuality upon the earth; by means of consciousness it turns into existence and into activity.

So the universal ethical essences are, on one hand, substance in its universality and, on the other, substance as singular consciousness; their universal actuality lies in the people and in the family, while the man and the woman furnish their natural self and the individuality that carries them into activity. Within this content of the ethical world the purposes set by the earlier, substanceless shapes of consciousness stand fulfilled before us; what reason apprehended merely as object has turned into self-consciousness, and what self-consciousness held merely within itself is on hand as true actuality. — That which observation knew as something found on hand, in which the self would have no share, is here custom found on hand, yet an actuality that is at once the work and the deed of the one who finds it. — The singular, in search of the pleasure of enjoying his singularity, finds it in the family, while the necessity in which such pleasure perishes is nothing other than his self-consciousness as citizen of his people; — or it is this: knowing the law of the heart to be the law of every heart, knowing the consciousness of the self to be the universal order that is acknowledged; — it is virtue, which enjoys what its own sacrifice has borne as fruit; virtue accomplishes what it aims at, namely to lift the essence out into actual presence, and its enjoyment is this universal life. — Finally, consciousness of the matter at hand is satisfied in the real substance, which positively contains and preserves the abstract moments of that empty category. In the ethical powers it possesses a genuine content, which has taken the place of those substanceless commandments that sound reason wished to hand down and to know; — and along with it a contentful standard, determined in its own self, by which to test, not the laws, but rather what gets done.

The whole is a calm equilibrium of all its parts, each part a spirit at home there, a spirit that looks for its satisfaction in no beyond but possesses it within, for the very reason that it stands within this same equilibrium with the whole. — To be sure, such an equilibrium can be a living one only in that inequality arises within it and is led back to equality by justice. But justice is neither an alien essence located in a beyond, nor is it that unworthy actuality of mutual malice, betrayal, ingratitude and so on, which after the manner of thoughtless chance would execute judgment as an uncomprehended interconnection and as unconscious doing and refraining; rather, as the justice of human right, bringing back into the universal that being-for-itself which steps out of equilibrium, the self-subsistence of the estates and of individuals, justice is the people's government, which is the individuality of the universal essence present to itself, and the very self-conscious will of all. — But the justice that brings back to equilibrium the universal which has become overpowering against the singular is likewise the simple spirit of the one who has suffered wrong; — not decomposed into him who suffered it and an essence lying beyond; he himself is the subterranean power, and it is his Erinys that pursues the revenge; for his individuality, his blood, goes on living in the house; his substance has an actuality that lasts. In the realm of ethical life the only wrong that can be inflicted on the singular is that something purely and simply happens to him. The power that perpetrates this wrong upon consciousness, making it into a mere thing, is nature; the universality at work is not that of the communal being but the abstract universality of being; and in undoing the wrong suffered, singularity turns not against the former, having suffered nothing from it, but against the latter. The consciousness of the individual's blood undoes this wrong, as we have seen, in such a way that what has merely happened becomes rather a work, so that being, the last thing, may also be something willed and thereby gratifying.

In this way the ethical realm is, in its subsistence, an unblemished world defiled by no discord. Its movement, equally, is a calm becoming in which the one power of that realm turns into the other, each of them sustaining and producing the other. We do indeed see it divide into two essences along with their actuality; their opposition, however, is rather the corroboration of the one by way of the other, and at the point where they touch immediately as actual, their middle and element consists in their immediately interpenetrating each other. The one extreme, universal spirit that is conscious of itself, is closed together, through the individuality of the man, with its other extreme, with its force and its element, that is, with unconscious spirit. Conversely, it is in the woman that the divine law has its individualization, or that the unconscious spirit of the singular has its existence, and through her as the middle that spirit climbs up out of its unactuality into actuality, out of what does not know and is not known into the realm of consciousness. What man and woman make up in their union is the active middle of the whole and the element which, split in two into those extremes of divine and of human law, is at the same time the immediate uniting of them, an element which welds those first two syllogisms into one and the same syllogism and which takes the opposed movement — that of actuality descending into unactuality, the human law, which organizes itself into self-subsistent members, going down toward the peril and the corroboration of death; — and that of the subterranean law rising to the actuality of the day and to conscious existence, — the first falling to the man, the second to the woman — and unites it into One.

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

Given how the opposition is constituted within this realm, however, self-consciousness has not yet stepped forward in its right as singular individuality; inside that realm it counts, from the one side, merely as universal will, and from the other as the family's blood; this singular one counts merely as the unactual shade. — As yet no deed has been performed; the deed, however, is the actual self. — It disturbs the ethical world's calm organization and its movement. Within that world, order and the accord of its two essences, each corroborating and completing the other, is converted by the deed into a transition of terms that are opposed, in which each demonstrates its own nullity and the nullity of the other rather than any corroboration; — it turns into the negative movement, that is, into the eternal necessity of terrible fate, a fate that swallows into the abyss of its simplicity the divine law along with the human, and likewise the two self-consciousnesses in which those powers possess their existence, — and which, for us, goes over into the absolute being-for-itself of purely singular self-consciousness.

The ground that this movement starts out from — and upon which it runs its course, is the realm of ethical life; the activity of the movement, however, is self-consciousness. Being ethical consciousness, it is the simple, pure directing of itself upon ethical essentiality, or duty. No arbitrariness resides in it, and no struggle either, no indecision, since the giving of laws and the testing of laws have both been surrendered; for it, ethical essentiality is instead what is immediate, unshakable, and free of all contradiction. It therefore offers neither the sorry spectacle of finding itself caught in a collision of passion with duty, nor the comic one of a collision of duty with duty, — a collision whose content is the very same as the one obtaining between duty and passion; for passion admits of being represented as duty quite as readily, since duty, once consciousness has withdrawn out of duty's immediate substantial essentiality back into itself, turns into something formally universal into which any content whatever fits equally well, as came out above. What makes the collision of duties comic is that it gives voice to the contradiction, namely of an opposed absolute, and hence to something absolute and, immediately, to the nullity of that supposed absolute, or duty. — The ethical consciousness, though, knows what its task is; and it stands decided, be that for belonging to the divine law or to the human one. The immediacy of this decidedness amounts to a being-in-itself, and so carries with it the sense of a natural being as well, as we saw earlier; what allots the one sex to the one law and the other sex to the other is nature, not the contingency of circumstance or of choice, — or, put the other way around, it is the two ethical powers that give themselves their individual existence and realization in the two sexes.

Two things now follow: for one thing ethical life has its essential subsistence in this immediate decidedness, so that for consciousness the one law alone is the essence; for another, the ethical powers possess actuality in the self of consciousness; and by this they take on the meaning of shutting each other out and of standing opposed; — within self-consciousness they are for themselves, whereas within the realm of ethical life they are only in themselves. Since ethical consciousness stands decided for one of the two, it is essentially character; the equal essentiality of the two is not present for it; hence the opposition shows up as an unhappy collision between duty and a merely rightless actuality. Ethical consciousness, being self-consciousness, stands inside this opposition, and as such it also sets out to bring that opposed actuality by violence under the law it belongs to, or else to deceive it. Because each sees the right lying on its own side alone and the wrong on the opposite side, the one of the two that belongs to the divine law catches sight, over on that other side, of a human and contingent violent behavior, while the one assigned to the human law catches sight there of the stubbornness and disobedience of an inward being-for-itself; for the government's commands are the universal, publicly manifest sense that lies in the daylight, whereas what the other law wills is the subterranean sense, shut up in inwardness, a sense that in its existence makes its appearance as the will of singularity and that, contradicting the first, is sacrilege.

In consciousness there thereby arises the opposition of the known to the not-known, and, in the substance, of the conscious to what is unconscious; and the absolute right belonging to ethical self-consciousness enters into strife with the divine right of the essence. To self-consciousness qua consciousness, objective actuality as such has essence; taken according to its substance, however, self-consciousness is the unity of itself with what stands opposed to it; and it is the substance of which ethical self-consciousness is the consciousness; the object, standing opposed to self-consciousness, has for that reason forfeited altogether the meaning of having essence for itself. The spheres in which the object counts merely as a thing disappeared long ago, and so likewise have those spheres in which consciousness fastens something down out of itself and elevates a singular moment into the essence. A force of its own belongs to actuality in the face of such one-sidedness; actuality is leagued with truth against consciousness, and only then does it set before consciousness what the truth is. Ethical consciousness, however, has drained from the bowl of absolute substance a forgetting of every one-sidedness of being-for-itself, of its purposes and of the concepts peculiar to it, and in that Stygian water it has simultaneously drowned every essentiality of its own and all self-subsistent significance belonging to objective actuality. Its absolute right, accordingly, is this: that in acting according to the ethical law it should come upon nothing else in that realization than the fulfilling of that law itself, and the deed exhibit nothing else than what ethical doing is. — Since the ethical is at one and the same time the absolute essence and the absolute power, it can suffer no inversion of its content. If it were the absolute essence alone, without the power, individuality could indeed work an inversion upon it; but individuality, as ethical consciousness, gave up inverting when it gave up one-sided being-for-itself; and in the reverse case bare power would be the thing inverted, inverted by the essence, supposing it were still a being-for-itself of that kind. For the sake of this unity individuality amounts to the substance's pure form, the substance being the content, and doing amounts to the passage out of thought into actuality merely as the movement of an opposition without essence, an opposition whose moments possess no particular content or essentiality differing one from the other. So the absolute right of ethical consciousness lies in this: that the deed, which is the shape its actuality takes, should be nothing other than what it knows.

The ethical essence, however, has cleft itself into two laws, and consciousness, whose relating to the law is undivided, is allotted to one of them only. This simple consciousness stands upon the absolute right that to it, as ethical, the essence should have appeared just as the essence is in itself; and in the same way that essence stands upon the right of its reality, that is, upon being something doubled. Yet this right of the essence does not confront self-consciousness as something located elsewhere; it is rather self-consciousness's own essence; there alone does it possess its existence and its power, and what opposes it is the deed of the latter. For self-consciousness, precisely by being itself as self and stepping forward to the deed, lifts itself clear of simple immediacy and posits the splitting-in-two on its own account. By the deed it surrenders that determinateness of ethical life which consists in being the simple certainty of an immediate truth, and it posits a separation within itself: into itself as the active one and into the actuality that stands over against it and is negative for it. Through the deed, then, it turns into guilt. For that deed constitutes its own doing, and doing constitutes its ownmost essence; and guilt takes on the meaning of crime besides: being simple ethical consciousness, it has turned toward the one law while refusing the other, and it violates the other by what it does. — Guilt is not some indifferent, two-sided essence, as though the deed, in the shape it actually presents in the daylight, might be the doing of one's own self or might just as well not be, as though something external and contingent could get attached to the doing without being part of it, so that on that side the doing would be innocent. On the contrary, doing is itself just this splitting-in-two, namely the positing of itself for itself and, over against that, of an alien external actuality: that such an actuality is, belongs to doing itself and exists through it. So the only innocent thing is not-doing, the sort of being a stone has, and not even that of a child. — In respect of content, however, the ethical action carries the moment of crime within it, since it leaves unsublated the natural apportioning of the two laws between the two sexes and instead, being an undivided directing toward the law, stays inside natural immediacy; and as doing it makes this one-sidedness into guilt, the guilt of laying hold of only the one side of the essence and relating negatively toward the other, that is, of violating it. Just where, within universal ethical life, guilt and crime, doing and action, are to be placed will be stated more determinately later on; this much is immediately plain, that the one who acts and is guilty is not this singular one; for as this self he is nothing but the unactual shade, or he is only as universal self, individuality being merely the formal moment of doing in general, while the content is the laws and the customs, and, for the singular one, the laws and customs of his estate; he is substance as genus, and although through its determinateness the genus does become a species, the species none the less goes on being the universal of the genus. Inside a people, self-consciousness comes down from the universal as far as particularity only, not down to singular individuality, which in its doing would posit an exclusive self, an actuality negative toward itself; its action rests instead on a settled trust in the whole, into which nothing alien mixes itself, no fear and no enmity.

Ethical self-consciousness now comes to experience, in its own deed, the developed nature that actual acting has, and it does so whether it surrendered itself to the divine law or to the human one. In the essence, the law manifest to it is tied together with the law opposed to that one; the essence constitutes the unity of the two; but what the deed has carried out is the one only, and against the other. Since in the essence the one is tied to the other, however, fulfilling the one summons the other forth, and summons it forth in the character the deed conferred on it: as an essence violated, now hostile and demanding revenge. For acting, only one side of the resolve lies in the daylight at all; but the resolve is in itself the negative, which sets over against itself another, something alien to itself as the knowing. Actuality keeps that other side, the side alien to knowledge, hidden within itself, and it does not reveal itself to consciousness in its being in and for itself, — it does not show the son his father in the man who insults him and whom he strikes down; — nor the mother in the queen he takes as his wife. A light-shy power thus stalks ethical self-consciousness, a power that breaks out only once the deed has taken place and catches consciousness in it; for with the deed accomplished, the opposition of the knowing self to the actuality facing it has been sublated. What acts cannot disown the crime and its guilt; — the deed amounts to just this, setting the unmoved into motion and bringing out what was so far locked up in mere possibility, and so in tying the unconscious to the conscious, non-being to being. In this truth, then, the deed steps out into the sunlight; — steps out as that in which something conscious is joined to something unconscious, one's own to what is alien, as the essence split in two, whose other side consciousness comes to experience, and experiences as belonging to itself as well, yet as a power that it has violated and stirred to enmity.

It may happen that the right which lay in ambush is present for the acting consciousness not in the shape peculiar to it, but only in itself, within the inward guilt that belongs to the resolve and to the acting. Yet ethical consciousness is the more complete, and its guilt the purer, where it is acquainted in advance with the law and the power it confronts, takes them for violence and wrong, for an ethical contingency, and commits the crime knowingly, as Antigone does. The accomplished deed inverts its view; the accomplishing pronounces of itself that what is ethical must also be actual; for the purpose of acting is the actuality of the purpose. What acting pronounces is precisely the unity of actuality and substance: it pronounces that actuality is nothing contingent for the essence, but that, leagued with the essence, it is granted to nothing which is not true right. For the sake of this actuality, and for the sake of its own doing, ethical consciousness must take what is opposed to it as its own; it must acknowledge that it is guilty; because we suffer, we acknowledge that we have erred —

This acknowledgment gives expression to the sublated discord between the ethical purpose and actuality; it gives expression to a return to that ethical disposition which knows that only what is right is valid. With this, though, the agent surrenders its character and the actuality of its self, and has gone to ruin. Its being amounts to belonging to its ethical law as to its substance; but in acknowledging what is opposed to it, that law has stopped being substance for it; and what it has arrived at, in place of its actuality, is unactuality, mere disposition. — Substance does indeed make its appearance on individuality, as the pathos of the latter, with individuality appearing as what animates substance and therefore stands above it; yet this pathos is at once the individuality's own character; ethical individuality is immediate and is in itself one with this its universal, it has its existence in that universal alone, and it cannot outlive the ruin which the opposed power inflicts on this ethical power.

It possesses, along with this, the certainty that whatever individuality has that opposed power for its pathos — undergoes no more ill than it has itself dealt out. That the two sides undergo one and the same ruin is the only way in which the movement of the ethical powers against one another, and of the individualities that put them into life and action, has reached its true end. For not one of the powers holds anything over the other by which it would be the more essential moment of the substance. Their equal essentiality and their mutually indifferent subsistence alongside each other is their selfless being; in the deed they are as self-essences, but as differing ones, and this runs counter to the unity of the self and makes up their rightlessness and their necessary ruin. Character likewise belongs, so far as its pathos or substance goes, to one power alone, while on the side of knowledge the one character no less than the other is split in two into a conscious and an unconscious element; and since each character calls this opposition forth on its own, and since through the deed the not-knowing is its work too, each puts itself into the guilt that consumes it. Victory for the one power and its character, and the succumbing of the other side, would thus be no more than a part, an unfinished work, one that presses on without check toward an equilibrium between the two. Absolute right is accomplished only where both sides are subjugated alike, and only then has the ethical substance come forward as the negative power that swallows both sides, that is, as almighty and just fate.

If both powers are taken in their determinate content and in the individualization of that content, the picture of their shaped conflict presents itself, on the formal side, as a conflict of ethical life and self-consciousness with unconscious nature and with a contingency that is there by way of nature, — nature has a right against ethical life, since ethical life is only the true spirit, only in immediate unity with its substance; — and, on the side of content, it presents itself as the discord of the divine and the human law. — The youth departs from the unconscious essence, out of the family's spirit, and becomes the individuality of the communal being; that he nonetheless still belongs to the nature he tore himself from is shown by his emerging in the contingency of two brothers, who with equal right take possession of that communal being; the inequality of earlier and later birth carries no significance for them, entering as they do into the ethical essence, as a difference of nature. The government, however, as the simple soul or the self of the spirit of a people, will not put up with a duality of individuality; and against the ethical necessity of this unity nature steps forward as the contingency of plurality. The two therefore fall into discord, and since their right to the power of the state is equal, that equal right smashes them both, both being equally in the wrong. Regarded in a human way, the crime was committed by the one who, not being in possession, attacks the communal being with the other at its head; the right lies on the side of the one who was able to take hold of the other merely as a singular one, cut off from the communal being, and drove him out in that powerlessness; he laid hands only on the individual as such, and not on the communal being, not on the essence of human right. The communal being, attacked and defended by empty singularity alike, maintains itself, and the two brothers each meet their reciprocal ruin at each other's hands; for the individuality that fastens the danger of the whole to its being-for-itself has thrown itself out of the communal being and dissolves within itself. The one who took its side it will honor; the other, by contrast, who from the walls already proclaimed its devastation, will be punished by the government, the restored simplicity of the self of the communal being, with the loss of the last honor; whoever came to lay violent hands on the highest spirit of consciousness, the community, must forfeit the honor belonging to his whole completed essence, the honor of the departed spirit.

But if in this fashion the universal knocks the pure apex off its pyramid without effort and does carry off the victory over the family, that principle of singularity which rebels against it, it has by that very act let itself in for nothing more than a struggle with the divine law, self-conscious spirit for a struggle with the unconscious; for the unconscious is the other essential power, undestroyed by the first and merely offended. Against the law that holds violence in its hands and lies in the daylight, however, the divine law has for its help toward actual execution nothing but the bloodless shade. Being a law of weakness and darkness, it therefore succumbs at first to the law of the day and of force, since the violence of the former is valid down below and not upon the earth. But the actual, having taken honor and power away from what is inward, has thereby eaten up its own essence. Manifest spirit has the root of its force in the underworld; a people's certainty, sure of itself and assuring itself, holds the truth of the oath that binds all into one only in the unconscious and mute substance of them all, in the waters of forgetting. In this way the accomplishment of manifest spirit changes round into its opposite, and that spirit comes to experience that its highest right is the highest wrong, and its victory rather its own ruin. The dead man whose right has been injured therefore knows how to find, for his revenge, instruments equal in actuality and violence to the power that violated him. Such powers are other communal beings, whose altars dogs or birds befouled with the corpse, a corpse that was not raised into unconscious universality through the restitution owed to it to the elemental individual, but stayed above the earth in the realm of actuality, and that now, as the force of the divine law, receives a self-conscious actual universality. They set out in hostility and lay waste the communal being that has dishonored and broken its own force, namely the piety of the family.

Within this representation the movement of the human and the divine law expresses its necessity in individuals, individuals on whom the universal shows up as a pathos while the movement's activity shows up as individual doing, which lends that necessity the semblance of contingency. Individuality and doing, however, make up the principle of singularity as such, the principle that in its pure universality went by the name of the inner divine law. Taken as a moment of the manifest communal being, it has not merely that subterranean efficacy, or — an efficacy external in its existence, but an existence and a movement equally manifest and actual in the actual people. Once it is taken in this form, what had been represented as a simple movement of individualized pathos acquires another aspect, and the crime, along with the destruction of the communal being founded on it, acquires the form proper to its existence. — The human law, then, in its universal existence the communal being, in its activation generally manhood, in its actual activation the government, is, moves and preserves itself through consuming into itself the separating-off of the Penates, that is, the self-subsistent isolation into families over which womankind presides, and through holding them dissolved in the continuity of its own fluidity. At the same time, though, the family is quite generally its element, and singular consciousness the ground that activates universally. Because the communal being gives itself its subsistence only by disturbing family happiness and by dissolving self-consciousness into the universal, it breeds its own inner enemy out of what it represses and what is at once essential to it, out of womankind in general. Womankind — the everlasting irony of the communal being — uses intrigue to turn the government's universal purpose into a private one, changes its universal activity into the work of this determinate individual, and perverts what is the state's universal property into a possession and finery for the family. By this she turns the earnest wisdom of mature age, which, having died to singularity — to pleasure and to enjoyment, and to actual activity as well — thinks about and attends to the universal alone, into a thing of mockery for the high spirits of unripe youth and of contempt for youth's enthusiasm; and she raises the force of youth generally into what is valid, — the force of the son in whom the mother has given birth to her master, of the brother in whom the sister has the man as her equal, of the youth through whom the daughter, drawn out of her non-self-subsistence, attains the enjoyment and the dignity of womanhood. — The communal being, however, is able to preserve itself only through repressing this spirit of singularity, and since it is an essential moment, the communal being produces it just as much, and produces it as a hostile principle precisely through its repressive stance toward it. Since in separating from the universal purpose it is nothing but evil and null within itself, this principle would be capable of nothing were the communal being not itself to recognize the force of youth, manhood that is not yet ripe and still stands within singularity, as the force belonging to the whole. For the communal being is a people, is itself individuality and is essentially for itself only in this way, that other individualit ies are for it, that it excludes them from itself and knows itself independent of them. The communal being's negative side, which inwardly represses the isolation of individuals but is self-active toward the outside, finds its weapons in individuality. War is that spirit and that form in which there is present, in its actuality and corroboration, that essential moment of ethical substance which is the ethical self-essence and its absolute freedom from all existence. In one respect war lets the singular systems of property and of personal self-subsistence, and singular personality itself as well, feel the force of the negative; in another respect this very negative essence raises itself up within war as what preserves the whole; the valiant youth in whom womankind takes its delight, the repressed principle of corruption, comes out into the daylight and is what is valid. What now decides about the existence of the ethical essence and about spiritual necessity is natural force together with what looks like the accident of good fortune; and since the existence of the ethical essence rests upon strength and good fortune, it is already decided that this essence has gone to ruin. — Just as before it was only Penates that went to ruin within the spirit of a people, so now the living spirits of peoples go to ruin through their own individuality within a universal communal being, one whose simple universality is spiritless and dead and whose vitality is the singular individual, singular as such. The ethical shape that spirit had has disappeared, and another steps into its place.

What determines this ruin of the ethical substance, along with its transition into a different shape, is thus that ethical consciousness is essentially directed upon the law in an immediate way; and it lies in this determination of immediacy that nature as such gets into the action of ethical life. Its actuality brings to light nothing but the contradiction and the seed of corruption which the fine unanimity and the calm equilibrium of ethical spirit carry in that very calm and beauty; for immediacy carries the contradictory sense of being at once the unconscious calm of nature and the self-conscious, restless calm of spirit. — Because of this naturalness, this ethical people is throughout an individuality that nature has determined and that is therefore limited, and so it meets its sublation in another such people. But once this determinateness, which as posited in existence is limitation, yet equally the negative as such and the self of individuality, — disappears, the life of spirit is lost, and with it this substance that in all of them is self-conscious of itself. It comes out upon them as a formal universality, no longer dwelling within them as living spirit; instead the simple solidity of their individuality has shattered into a multitude of points.

c. The Condition of Right

The universal unity into which the immediate living unity of individuality and of substance goes back is the spiritless communal being, which has ceased to be the individuals' substance devoid of self-consciousness and in which they now count, in keeping with their singular being-for-itself, as self-essences and substances. The universal splintered into the atoms of the absolutely many individuals: this spirit that has died is an equality where all count as each, as persons. — What in the world of ethical life bore the name of the hidden divine law has in truth stepped out of its inner being into actuality; there the singular was valid and actual only as the family's universal blood. Taken as this singular he was the selfless departed spirit; but now he has stepped forth out of his unactuality. Since the ethical substance is nothing but true spirit, spirit goes back into the certainty of itself; it is that substance as the positive universal, whereas its actuality consists in being a negative universal self. — The powers and the shapes of the ethical world, we saw, sank into the simple necessity of empty fate. That power of theirs is the substance that reflects itself into its own simplicity; but the absolute essence in its self-reflection, precisely that necessity of empty fate, is nothing other than the I of self-consciousness.

Accordingly the I now counts as the essence that is in and for itself; its substantiality is this being-recognized; but that substantiality is abstract universality, since what fills it is this brittle self and not the self that has been dissolved in the substance.

Personality, then, has here stepped out of the ethical substance's life; it is the actually valid self-subsistence of consciousness. The unactual thought of personality, which comes about through renunciation of actuality, has already appeared as stoic self-consciousness; and as that consciousness proceeded from mastery and servitude, taken as self-consciousness in its immediate existence, so too personality has emerged from immediate spirit — which is the universal ruling will of all and equally their serving obedience. The in-itself that stoicism possessed only in abstraction has now become an actual world. Stoicism amounts to nothing but the consciousness that brings the principle of the condition of right, spiritless self-subsistence, to its abstract form; in fleeing actuality it reached no more than the thought of self-subsistence; it is absolute for itself precisely because it attaches its essence to no existence at all, but instead surrenders every existence and confines its essence to the unity of pure thinking alone. In just the same way, the right of the person is bound neither to a wealthier or mightier existence of the individual as such, nor to a living universal spirit, but instead to its abstract actuality as pure One, or to it as self-consciousness in general.

And as the abstract self-subsistence of stoicism presented its own realization, so this latter will in turn repeat the movement of the first. The former passes over into the skeptical confusion of consciousness, into a prattling of the negative which, shapeless, strays from one contingency of being and of thought to the next, dissolving them, to be sure, in absolute self-subsistence, yet just as much generating them again, and which in fact is nothing but the contradiction of the self-subsistence and non-self-subsistence of consciousness. — Likewise the personal self-subsistence of right is rather this same universal confusion, this same reciprocal dissolution. For self-consciousness, taken as the person's pure empty One, is what counts as the absolute essence. Confronted by this empty universality, the substance takes on the form of fulfillment and of content, and that content is now left completely free and disordered; for the spirit that once subjugated it and bound it together within its unity is no longer present. — In its reality, therefore, this empty one of the person is a contingent existence and an essenceless moving and doing that arrives at no subsistence. Like skepticism, then, the formalism of right is by its concept devoid of any peculiar content; it comes upon a manifold subsistence, namely possession, and stamps upon it, as skepticism did, that same abstract universality through which it bears the name property. But whereas actuality so determined is in skepticism called semblance in general and has only a negative value, in right it has a positive one. The negative value lies in this, that the actual carries the significance of the self as thinking, as what is universal in itself, while the positive one lies in this, that the actual is mine in the significance of the category, as a recognized and actual validity. — Both amount to the same abstract universal; the content that is actual, or the determinateness of what is mine — be it of an outward possession, or of the inner wealth or poverty of spirit and of character, finds no place in this empty form and is no concern of it. It therefore belongs to a power of its own, one that is something other than the formal universal, the power of contingency and arbitrariness. — In its very actual validity, therefore, the consciousness of right undergoes instead the loss of its own reality and its utter inessentiality, and to call an individual a person is to voice contempt.

The content's free power gives itself this determination: that the scattering of the personal atoms into absolute multiplicity is, by the very nature of such determinateness, at once collected into one point foreign to them and equally spiritless, a point which on the one hand, like the brittleness of their personality, is purely singular actuality, but which, set against their empty singularity, at once carries the significance of all content and thereby of the real essence for them, and which, set against their supposedly absolute yet in itself essenceless actuality, constitutes the universal power and the absolute actuality. In this way this master of the world is for himself the absolute person, a person that at the same time encompasses all existence within itself, and for whose consciousness there exists no higher spirit. A person he is; but the lonely person who has stepped over against all; and it is these all that constitute the valid universality of the person, since the singular as such has truth only as the universal multiplicity of singularity, and cut off from that multiplicity the lonely self is in fact the unactual self, the self without force. — Simultaneously it is the content's consciousness, the content that has stepped over against that universal personality. This content, however, once released from its negative power, is the spiritual powers in their chaos: unfettered, they move against one another as elemental essences in wild excess, raving and destructive; their self-consciousness, devoid of force, is the powerless enclosure and the ground of their tumult. Knowing himself in this manner as the sum of all actual powers, this master of the world is that monstrous self-consciousness which knows itself as the actual god; yet because he is nothing more than the formal self, incapable of taming those powers, his movement and self-enjoyment are an excess just as monstrous.

In the destructive violence that he wields against the self of his subjects, which stands over against him, the master of the world has actual consciousness of what he is, namely the universal power of actuality. For his power is not that oneness of spirit in which the persons would cognize their own self-consciousness; on the contrary, as persons they are for themselves and exclude continuity with others out of the absolute brittleness of their punctuality; hence their relationship is a merely negative one, to each other as much as to him, in whom their relation, their continuity, consists. As this continuity he constitutes the essence and the content of their formalism; but a content foreign to them, a hostile essence that in fact sublates the very thing which counts for them as their essence, their contentless being-for-itself; — and inasmuch as he is the continuity of their personality, it is precisely this that he destroys. The personality of right therefore experiences, as the content alien to it asserts its validity within it, and it asserts its validity in them because it is their reality, — rather its own substancelessness. The destructive rummaging in this essenceless ground gives itself, by contrast, the consciousness of its universal dominion, but this self is mere devastation, hence only outside itself, and is rather the casting away of its self-consciousness.

Such is the constitution of the side on which self-consciousness as absolute essence is actual. But out of this actuality the consciousness thrust back into itself thinks this unessentiality of its own; earlier we saw the stoic self-subsistence of pure thinking pass through skepticism and arrive at its truth within the unhappy consciousness, — the truth as to how things stand with its being in and for itself. If this knowledge then appeared only as a one-sided view held by consciousness as such, here its actual truth has entered on the scene. It consists in this: that the reality estranged from self-consciousness is precisely this universal validity of its own. Such validity is the self's universal actuality, though immediately it is just as much the inversion; it is the loss of the self's essence. — The actuality of the self that was absent from the ethical world has now been gained through its return into the person; what was at one in that world now comes forward developed, yet estranged from itself.

B. Self-Estranged Spirit; Culture

Ethical substance kept the opposition shut inside its simple consciousness, and kept that consciousness immediately at one with its essence. Hence, for the consciousness that is aimed immediately at it and whose custom it is, the essence carries the simple determinateness of being; consciousness does not count in its own eyes as this excluding self, nor does substance signify an existence shut out from consciousness, one with which consciousness would have to make itself one only by estranging itself while at the same time bringing that existence forth. But a spirit whose self is what is absolutely discrete finds its content over against it as an actuality just as unyielding, and the world is here determined as something external, as self-consciousness's negative. Yet this world is a spiritual essence; in itself it is being and individuality interpenetrating each other; the world's existence is self-consciousness's work, yet no less an actuality immediately on hand and alien to it, one possessing a being peculiarly its own, in which self-consciousness fails to cognize itself. This world is the external essence, the free content belonging to right; but the external actuality that the master of the world of right comprises within himself is not merely this elemental essence, on hand for the self by chance, but is the self's labor, though not a positive one, — its negative labor rather. It receives its existence through self-consciousness's own externalization and loss of essence, which the external violence of the unbound elements, amid the devastation that reigns in the world of right, seems to inflict upon it. Taken for themselves, these elements are only sheer devastating and the dissolution of themselves; but this dissolution, this negative essence of theirs, is precisely the self; the self is their subject, their doing and their becoming. This doing and becoming, though, by which substance becomes actual, is the estrangement of personality, for the self that is valid in and for itself immediately, that is, without estrangement, has no substance and is the play of those raging elements; its substance is accordingly its own externalization, and the externalization is the substance, or the spiritual powers that order themselves into a world and thereby maintain themselves.

In this manner substance is spirit, that is, the self and the essence in self-conscious unity, though each of the two also signifies estrangement for the other. Spirit is the consciousness of an objective actuality that is free for itself; yet that unity of the self and of the essence stands opposed to this consciousness: to the actual consciousness, the pure consciousness. On the one hand, actual self-consciousness passes over through its externalization into the actual world, and that world passes back into it; on the other hand, this very actuality, the person as much as the objectivity, is sublated; they are purely universal. Their estrangement is precisely the pure consciousness, or the essence. What is present has its opposite immediately in its beyond, the beyond being the present's thinking and the present's being-thought; and the beyond likewise has its opposite in the here below, which is the actuality estranged from it.

Accordingly this spirit builds up for itself not just one world but a twofold one, split apart and set in opposition. — For ethical spirit the world is its own present; and so every power within that world falls inside this unity and, insofar as the two are distinguished, stands in balance with the whole. Nothing there signifies self-consciousness's negative; the departed spirit itself is present in kinship's blood, in the family's self, and government's universal power is the will, which is the people's self. Here, by contrast, what is present signifies merely objective actuality whose consciousness lies in the beyond; every singular moment, taken as essence, receives that consciousness, and with it actuality, from something else, and to the extent that it is actual, its essence is other than its actuality. Nothing possesses a spirit that is grounded in it and dwells within it, but each thing is outside itself in something alien — the whole's balance is not a unity that abides with itself, nor a repose that has come back into itself, but rests instead upon the estrangement of what is opposed. The whole, therefore, like every singular moment, is a self-estranged reality; it breaks apart into a realm where self-consciousness is actual, being both itself and its object, and into another, that of pure consciousness, which, situated beyond the first, has no actual present but is in faith. Just as the ethical world, out of the separation of divine from human law and of their shapes, and just as its consciousness, out of the separation into knowledge and into unconsciousness, go back into their destiny, into the self as this opposition's negative power, so these two realms of self-estranged spirit will likewise turn back into the self; but if the first was the immediately valid self that came first, the singular person, then this second one, returning into itself out of its externalization, will be the universal self, the consciousness that takes hold of the concept; and those spiritual worlds, whose moments one and all lay claim to a fixed actuality and an unspiritual subsistence, will dissolve away in pure insight. As the self that takes hold of itself, pure insight brings culture to completion; what it apprehends is the self alone, and it apprehends everything as the self, that is, it comprehends everything, wipes out all objectivity, and converts all being-in-itself into a being-for-itself. Once directed against faith, which is the realm of essence, alien and lying in the beyond, pure insight is the Enlightenment. In this realm too, into which estranged spirit rescues itself as into the consciousness of a repose equal to itself, the Enlightenment carries estrangement through to completion; it disorders the housekeeping that spirit conducts here, in that it carries in the implements of the world here below, implements that spirit cannot deny to be its own property, since its consciousness belongs to that world as well. — Through this negative business pure insight simultaneously makes itself real, and produces its own object: the uncognizable absolute essence, together with the useful. Because actuality has in this way forfeited all substantiality, so that nothing in itself remains within it, the realm of faith is overthrown and so too is that of the real world, and this revolution produces absolute freedom, whereby spirit, estranged until now, has withdrawn completely into itself, quits this land of culture, and crosses over into a different land, the land of moral consciousness.

I. The World of Self-Estranged Spirit

This spirit's world falls apart into a twofold world; the first is the world of actuality, or of spirit's own estrangement; the second is the one it erects for itself, rising above the first, within pure consciousness's ether. Being opposed to that estrangement, this second world is for precisely that reason not free of it, but is rather just estrangement's other form, the form that consists precisely in having one's consciousness in two kinds of world, and that spans them both. So what is under examination here is not the self-consciousness of absolute essence as it is in and for itself, nor religion, but rather faith, to the extent that faith amounts to flight from the actual world and hence is not in and for itself. Such flight away from the realm of what is present is thus immediately, in its own self, twofold. The element into which spirit lifts itself is pure consciousness; but that element belongs not to faith alone, it belongs equally to the concept; the two accordingly make their entrance together, and faith comes under consideration only in its opposition to the concept.

a. Culture and its Realm of Actuality

The spirit of this world is a spiritual essence that a self-consciousness has pervaded, a self-consciousness knowing itself immediately present as this being that is for itself, and knowing the essence as an actuality set over against it. Yet the existence of this world, and equally the actuality of self-consciousness, has its basis in a movement: that self-consciousness externalizes its personality, brings forth its world thereby, and relates to that world as to something alien, so that it now has to take possession of it. But its renouncing of being-for-itself is itself the generating of actuality, and through that renouncing it therefore takes immediate possession of actuality. — Or: self-consciousness is only something, has reality only, insofar as it estranges itself from itself; in doing so it posits itself as universal, and it is this universality of its own that constitutes its validity and its actuality. Such equality with all others is therefore not the equality of right, not that immediate being-recognized and validity which self-consciousness has simply because it is; its being valid comes about instead through the estranging mediation of having brought itself into conformity with the universal. Right's spiritless universality takes up into itself every natural mode of character and of existence alike, and entitles it. The universality that is valid here, however, is the universality that has come to be, and this is why it is actual.

What gives the individual validity and actuality here is therefore culture. Its true original nature and substance is the spirit of the estrangement of natural being. This externalization is therefore that spirit's purpose no less than its existence; it serves at once as the means, or the transition, by which substance as thought passes over into actuality and, conversely, determinate individuality into essentiality. This individuality cultivates itself up to what it in itself is, and only in that way is it in itself, possessing actual existence; how far its culture reaches is the measure of its actuality and its power. Although the self knows itself here as this self to be actual, its actuality all the same consists solely in the sublating of the natural self; the originally determinate nature is therefore reduced to the unessential difference of magnitude, to more or less energy of will. The will's purpose and content, however, are the property of the universal substance alone and cannot be anything but universal; where a nature's particularity turns into purpose and content, it is something impotent and unactual; it is a kind that labors, in vain and ludicrously, to get itself put into effect; it is the contradiction of conferring actuality on the particular, when actuality is immediately the universal. If, then, individuality is falsely placed in the particularity of nature and of character, then no individualities and characters are to be found in the real world; rather, individuals have an existence that is the same for one another; that supposed individuality is precisely only the meant existence, which has no permanence in this world, where only what externalizes itself, and hence only the universal, attains actuality. — What is meant therefore counts as what it is, as a kind. Kind does not amount to quite the same thing as espèce, "the most frightful of all nicknames, since it marks out mediocrity and voices contempt in its highest degree." Kind, though, and being good of its kind, is a German turn of phrase that lends this meaning an honest look, as though nothing so bad were intended by it, or that in fact still does not contain within itself the consciousness of what kind is, and of what culture and actuality are.

What shows up, in relation to the single individual, as its culture is precisely the essential moment of substance itself: substance's thought universality passing over immediately into actuality, or substance's simple soul, whereby the in-itself is something recognized and existence. The movement of the individuality that cultivates itself is therefore immediately substance's becoming as the universal objective essence, that is, the becoming of the world of actuality. That world, though individuality is what brought it about, is for self-consciousness something immediately estranged, and it bears for self-consciousness the form of an actuality that cannot be budged. Being all the while certain, however, that this world is substance of its own, self-consciousness sets about taking possession of it; the power it gains over the world comes through culture, which viewed from this side looks like a bringing of itself into conformity with actuality, carried as far as the energy of its original character and talent will let it go. What looks here like the individual's violence, to which substance is supposed to succumb and by which it is thereby sublated, is one and the same with substance's own actualization. For wherein the individual's power lies is just this, that it makes itself conform to substance, that is, that it externalizes its own self and so posits itself as the objective substance that has being. Its culture, and its own actuality along with it, thus amount to the actualizing of substance itself.

The self is actual to itself only as sublated. For itself, accordingly, it does not make up any unity of the consciousness of itself with the object; the object is instead, for the self, its own negative. — By way of the self as soul, then, substance is worked out in its moments so that each opposite inspirits the other, each through its estrangement giving the other its subsistence and receiving its own from it in equal measure. Each moment, meanwhile, holds its determinateness as a validity not to be overcome, and as a fixed actuality over against the other. Thinking pins this difference down in the most universal manner by setting good and bad in absolute opposition, two terms that flee each other and can by no means become the same. Yet what this fixed being has for its soul is the immediate transition into what is opposed to it; existence is rather the inversion of every determinateness into the determinateness opposed to it, and this estrangement alone is the essence and the preservation of the whole. This actualizing movement and inspiriting of the moments is what we must now consider; estrangement will estrange itself, and by means of it the whole will retrieve itself into its concept.

First the simple substance itself is to be considered in the immediate organization of its existing, still uninspirited moments. — Just as nature unfolds itself into the universal elements, among which air is the enduring, purely universal, transparent essence, — water, however, the essence that is always sacrificed, — fire their ensouling unity, which just as much always dissolves their opposition as it divides their simplicity into that opposition, — the earth, finally, the firm knot of this articulation and the subject of these essences as well as of their process, of their going forth and their return, — so the inner essence, or simple spirit, belonging to self-conscious actuality lays itself out as a world into masses of just this sort, universal but spiritual, — into the first mass, the in itself universal, self-equal spiritual essence; — into the second, the being-for-itself essence that has become unequal within itself, the essence that sacrifices and gives itself away; and into the third, which is subject in being self-consciousness and holds the force of fire immediately in it; — it is in the first essence that it has awareness of itself as being-in-itself; in the second, though, it undergoes the becoming of being-for-itself by way of the universal's sacrifice. Spirit itself, however, is what the whole is in and for itself, that which splits itself in two, into substance as enduring and into substance as self-sacrificing, and which likewise takes back that substance into its unity, being at once the flame that breaks out and devours it and the enduring shape of it. — We see that these essences answer to the communal being and the family of the ethical world, without possessing, though, the native spirit that those two have; conversely, whereas fate is alien to that spirit, self-consciousness here is the actual power of these essences and knows itself as such.

These members must be considered under two aspects: as they are first represented inside pure consciousness, in the guise of thoughts, that is, of what has being-in-itself, and as they are represented within actual consciousness in the guise of objective essences. — Under that form of simplicity the first is the good, as the self-equal, immediate and unchangeable essence of all consciousness, — the independent spiritual power belonging to the in-itself, beside which the movement of consciousness that is for itself merely plays along. The other, by contrast, is spiritual essence in its passive form, or the universal so far as it surrenders itself and lets individuals take from it the consciousness of their singularity; it is the essence that is null, the bad. — This absolute being-dissolved of essence is itself something that endures; just as the first essence is the ground, the starting point, and the result of individuals, who are purely universal within it, so the second is, on the one hand, the self-sacrificing being for another and, on the other hand and for just that reason, their constant return into themselves as the singular and their enduring becoming-for-itself.

These simple thoughts of good and bad, however, are estranged from themselves with the same immediacy; they are actual, and within actual consciousness they stand as objective moments. The first essence, accordingly, is state power, the other wealth. — State power is, as the simple substance, likewise the universal work; — the absolute matter at hand, in which the individuals' essence is expressed to them and their singularity is simply nothing but the consciousness of their universality; — it is likewise the work and simple result from which the fact that it comes out of their doing disappears; it remains the absolute ground and subsistence of all their doing. — This ethereal substance of their life, simple as it is, becomes being through this determination of its unchangeable self-equality, and with that only being for another. It is therefore in itself immediately the opposite of itself, wealth. Although wealth is what is passive or null, it is likewise universal spiritual essence, just as much the constantly becoming result of the labor and the doing of all as it dissolves again into the enjoyment of all. In enjoyment individuality does become for itself, or become singular, yet enjoyment of this kind issues from the universal doing, just as it in turn produces universal labor and the enjoyment of all. What is actual carries, quite simply, the spiritual significance of being immediately universal. Every singular one, to be sure, means at this moment to be acting self-interestedly; for this is the moment where the consciousness of being for himself is what he gives himself, and so he takes it for nothing spiritual; yet even on a merely external view it turns out that in his enjoyment each one gives all of them something to enjoy, that in his labor he works for all as much as for himself, and that all work for him. Thus his being-for-itself is in itself universal, while self-interest is something merely meant, unable ever to make actual what it means, namely to do something that would not redound to the good of all.

Self-consciousness thus cognizes, in these two spiritual powers, its substance, its content, and its purpose; it intuits its double essence there, in the one its being-in-itself, in the other its being-for-itself. — As spirit, though, it is at once the negative unity both of their subsistence and of the separation between individuality and the universal, or between actuality and the self. For the individual, therefore, mastery and wealth are on hand as objects, that is, as things from which it knows itself to be free and of which it means that it can choose between them or take neither. As this free and pure consciousness it steps over against the essence as one that is only for it. It then has the essence as essence within itself. — Within this pure consciousness the substance's moments are for it not state power and wealth but rather the thoughts of good and bad. — Self-consciousness, further, is the relation in which its pure consciousness stands to its actual one, in which what is thought stands to the objective essence; it is essentially judgment. — It has indeed already emerged, for the two sides of the actual essence and through their immediate determinations, which is the good and which the bad: the former is state power, the latter wealth. Only this first judgment is not to be viewed as a spiritual judgment; for in it the one side has been determined merely as what is being-in-itself, or positive, the other merely as what is being-for-itself, and negative. But as spiritual essences each of them interpenetrates both moments and is therefore not exhausted in those determinations; and the self-consciousness that relates itself to them is in and for itself; so it has to relate to each of them in the doubled manner, whereby their nature as self-estranged determinations will be turned outward.

For self-consciousness, then, an object counts as good and in itself when self-consciousness finds itself in it, and as bad when what it finds there is its own opposite; the good consists in objective reality's equality with it, the bad in that reality's inequality. At the same time, whatever is good and bad for it is good and bad in itself, since self-consciousness is just that in which these two moments, being in itself and being for it, coincide; it is the actual spirit of those objective essences, and judgment is the proof of its power over them, a power that makes them into what they are in themselves. What furnishes their criterion and their truth is not how they immediately are in themselves the equal or the unequal, that is, the abstract in-itself or being-for-itself, but what they are in spirit's relation to them, their equality or inequality with spirit. Spirit's relation to them, posited at first as objects and becoming, through spirit, the in-itself, turns at the same time into their reflection into themselves, by which they take on actual spiritual being and by which what their spirit is emerges. But just as their first immediate determination differs from spirit's relation to them, so too the third, their own spirit, will differ from the second. — To begin with, their second in-itself, which comes forth through spirit's relation to them, must already turn out otherwise than the immediate one; for this mediation by spirit rather sets the immediate determinateness in motion and makes it into something other.

Accordingly, consciousness in its being in and being-for-itself does find within state power its simple essence and subsistence at large, only not its individuality as such, finds its in-itself there but not its being-for-itself; what it finds there instead is doing disowned as singular doing and yoked into obedience. The individual therefore reflects itself into itself in the face of this power; that power is for it the oppressive essence and the bad; for instead of being what is equal, it is what is simply unequal to individuality. — Wealth, by contrast, is the good; it aims at universal enjoyment, gives itself up, and procures for all the consciousness of their self. In itself it is universal beneficence; should it withhold some benefit and fail to accommodate every need, that is a contingency that detracts nothing from its universal and necessary essence, which is to impart itself to all singular individuals and to be a giver with a thousand hands.

These two judgments furnish the thoughts of good and bad with a content that is the reverse of what they had for us. — So far, however, self-consciousness has related to its objects only incompletely, namely only by the standard of being-for-itself. Yet consciousness is equally an essence having being-in-itself, and it must make this side too into a standard, which is what first completes the spiritual judgment. On this side it is state power that pronounces its essence to it; that power is in part law at rest, in part government and command, which arranges the universal doing's singular movements; the former is simple substance itself, the latter substance's own doing, which animates and sustains both itself and everyone. The individual thus finds its ground and essence expressed, organized, and put into activity there. — Through the enjoyment of wealth, by contrast, it does not experience its universal essence but obtains only the transient consciousness and enjoyment of itself as a singularity that is for itself, and of its inequality with its essence. — The concepts of good and bad thus receive here the content opposed to the previous one.

Both of these ways of judging come upon an equality as well as an inequality; for the first judging consciousness, state power is unequal to it and the enjoyment of wealth equal to it, whereas for the second the former is equal and the latter unequal to it. What is on hand is a doubled finding of equality and a doubled finding of inequality, a relation to the two real essentialities that runs in opposite directions. — This differing judging we have ourselves to judge, applying to it the standard already set up. Accordingly, the relation of consciousness that finds equality is the good, the one that finds inequality the bad; and these two ways of relating are now themselves to be held fast as different shapes of consciousness. Because it relates in differing ways, consciousness falls itself under the determination of the difference of being good or bad, and not because its principle would be either being-for-itself or else pure being-in-itself, since both are equally essential moments; the doubled judging just considered set the principles out separately and therefore holds only abstract ways of judging. Consciousness in its actuality carries both principles within it, and the difference lies solely in its essence, that is, in the relation it bears to the real.

The mode of this relation is the opposed one: the one is a relating to state power and wealth as to something equal, the other as to something unequal. — The consciousness of the relation that finds equality is the noble-minded one. In the public power it regards what is equal to itself, in that it has in that power its simple essence and the activation of that essence and stands in the service of actual obedience as well as of inner respect toward it, and likewise in wealth, in that wealth procures for it the consciousness of its other essential side, of being-for-itself; hence it regards wealth too as an essence in relation to itself, recognizes the one from whom it enjoys as a benefactor, and holds itself obliged to gratitude.

The consciousness of the other relation, by contrast, is the base one, which holds fast to its inequality with the two essentialities; which sees in the ruler's power, then, a fetter and a suppression of being-for-itself, so that it hates the ruler, renders obedience only out of spite, and stands forever poised for revolt, — and which in wealth, through which it attains the enjoyment of its being-for-itself, likewise regards only the inequality, namely with the enduring essence; since through wealth it comes only to the consciousness of singularity and of transient enjoyment, it both loves and scorns wealth, and once enjoyment has vanished, enjoyment being of itself something that vanishes, it takes its relationship to the rich man to have vanished as well.

As yet these relations express only the judgment, the determination of what the two essences are for consciousness as objects, and not yet their being in and for themselves. The reflection that is represented in the judgment is, in part, so far only for us a positing of the one determination as well as of the other, and hence an equal sublating of both, not yet the reflection of those determinations for consciousness itself. In part they as yet merely are immediately essences, having neither become such nor having any self-consciousness in them; whatever it is for which they are does not yet amount to their animation; they are predicates that are not yet subject themselves. On account of this separation the whole of spiritual judging still comes apart into two consciousnesses, each lying under a one-sided determination. — Now, just as at the start the indifference between the two sides of estrangement — on the one hand the in-itself of pure consciousness, that is, the determinate thoughts of good and bad — on the other side their existence as state power and wealth, lifted itself to a relation of the two, to judgment; so this external relation has to lift itself to inner unity, or into thinking's relation to actuality, and the spirit of the two shapes of judgment has to step forth. This happens in that judgment becomes syllogism, the mediating movement in which the necessity and the middle of the two sides of the judgment come forth.

In the judgment, then, the noble-minded consciousness finds itself over against state power in such a way that this power is indeed not yet a self but so far only the universal substance, of which, however, it is conscious as of its essence, as of its purpose and absolute content. Relating to that power so positively, it relates negatively to purposes of its own, to its particular content and existence, letting these disappear. This is the heroism of service, — the virtue that offers up singular being to the universal and so brings the universal into existence, — the person who renounces possession and enjoyment unbidden, acting for the power on hand and being actual for it.

Through this movement the universal is joined together with existence in general, just as the existing consciousness through this externalization cultivates itself into essentiality. What this consciousness estranges from itself in service is its consciousness sunk into existence; but the being that has been estranged is the in-itself; through this culture it therefore obtains respect for itself and respect from others. — But state power, which so far was only the thought universal, the in-itself, becomes through this very movement the universal that has being, an actual power. It is this actual power only in the actual obedience it attains through the judgment of self-consciousness that it is the essence, and through the free self-sacrifice of that consciousness. This doing, which locks essence together with the self, brings forth a doubled actuality: itself, as that which possesses true actuality, and state power in turn as the true, which is valid.

Through this estrangement, though, state power has still not become a self-consciousness knowing itself to be state power; what is valid is only its law, or its in-itself; no particular will belongs to it yet; for the serving self-consciousness has not yet externalized its pure self and inspirited state power with it, but only its being; it has sacrificed to that power only its existence, not its being-in-itself. — Such a self-consciousness is valid as one conforming to the essence; its being-in-itself is what wins it recognition. The others find their essence put into activity in it, though not their being-for-itself, — their thinking or pure consciousness fulfilled, though not their individuality. It is therefore valid in their thoughts and enjoys honor. It is the proud vassal who is active for state power insofar as that power is not a will of its own but an essential will, and who is valid to himself only in this honor, only in the essential representation of general opinion, not in the grateful representation of individuality, for he has not helped individuality to its being-for-itself. His language, were he to relate himself to a will of state power's own, a will that has not yet come to be, would be the counsel that he gives for the universal best.

State power is therefore still without will in the face of counsel, and does not decide among the different opinions about the universal best. It is not yet government, and hence not yet in truth actual state power. — Being-for-itself, the will that as will remains unsacrificed, is the inner, sequestered spirit of the estates, a spirit that, over against its own speech about the universal best, keeps back its particular best, and that tends to turn this prattle about the universal best into a surrogate for action. The sacrifice of existence carried out in service is indeed complete once carried through to death; but the very danger of death withstood and outlived leaves a determinate existence behind, and with it a particular for-itself, which renders counsel for the universal best ambiguous and suspect, and which in fact keeps back its own opinion and its particular will against the power of the state. It therefore still relates unequally to that power and falls under the determination of the base consciousness, that of standing forever poised for rebellion.

This contradiction, which consciousness has to sublate, carries within the present form, that of standing in being-for-itself's inequality over against state power's universality, the further form that the externalization of existence just spoken of, in reaching completion, namely in death, is itself something that has being and not something returning into consciousness, — that consciousness does not outlive it and be in and for itself, but merely passes over into the unreconciled opposite. Hence the only true sacrifice of being-for-itself is the one in which it surrenders itself as completely as it does in death and yet preserves itself just as much in this externalization; what it is in itself is thereby made actual, namely the self-identical unity of itself with itself as the opposed. In that the sequestered inner spirit, the self as such, steps forth and estranges itself, state power is at that same stroke raised into a self of its own; whereas without this estrangement the deeds of honor and of the noble consciousness, and the counsels issuing from its insight, would stay the ambiguous thing that still harbored that sequestered ambush of particular intention and self-will.

But this estrangement occurs solely in language, which here steps forth in its own peculiar significance . — In the world of ethical life, as law and command, — in the world of actuality, at first as counsel, language takes the essence as its content and is the form of that essence; here, though, the form which language itself is becomes its own content, and it is valid as language; it is the force of speaking, as such, that carries out what is to be carried out. For language is the pure self's existence, as self; in language the singularity of self-consciousness that is for itself enters into existence as such, in such a way that it is for others. I as this pure I is nowhere else there; in any other expression it lies sunk in an actuality and in a shape out of which it can pull back; out of its action, as out of its physiognomic expression, it is reflected into itself, and it leaves such incomplete existence, where there is always as much too much as too little, lying about without soul. Language, however, holds it in its purity; language alone gives utterance to I, to the I itself. Being existence, this existence of the I is an objectivity that has the I's true nature in it. I is this I — but just as much a universal one; its appearing is just as immediately the externalization and the disappearance of this I, and thereby its remaining in place within its universality. The I giving utterance to itself is heard; it is a contagion, in which it has immediately passed over into unity with all those for whom it is there and is universal self-consciousness. — In its being heard, its existence has of itself immediately died away; this otherness of its own is drawn back into itself; and just this is its existence, as a self-conscious Now: to be, as it stands there, not there, and by this disappearing to be there. So this disappearing is itself immediately its remaining; it is its own knowledge of itself, and its knowledge of itself as something that has gone over into another self, that has been heard, and that is universal.

Spirit comes by this actuality here for the reason that the extremes whose unity it is have, with equal immediacy, the determination of being actualities of their own for themselves. Their unity has been decomposed into brittle sides, each of them being for the other an actual object shut out from it. Unity therefore steps forth as a middle that is shut out from, and distinguished from, the sequestered actuality of the sides; it thus has an actual objectivity of its own, distinct from its sides, and is for them, that is, it is something existing. The spiritual substance enters into existence as such only once it has won for its sides such self-consciousnesses as know this pure self to be an immediately valid actuality and in this just as immediately know that they are this only through the estranging mediation. Through the former the moments are purified into the self-knowing category and thereby purified to the point of being moments of spirit; through the latter spirit steps as spirituality into existence. — Spirit is thus the middle that presupposes those extremes and is generated through their existence, — but just as much the spiritual whole that breaks out between them, that divides itself into them, and that only through this contact generates each of them into a whole in its own principle. — That the two extremes are already in themselves sublated and decomposed brings forth their unity, and this unity is the movement that joins the two together, exchanges their determinations, and joins them together, and indeed does so in each extreme. This mediation thereby places each of the two extremes' concept into that extreme's actuality; or, what each of them is in itself it turns into that one's spirit.

The two extremes, state power and the noble-minded consciousness, are decomposed by this, the former into the abstract universal that is obeyed and into the will that is for itself, which, however, does not yet belong to it; — the latter into the obedience of a sublated existence, that is, into being-in-itself as self-respect and honor, — and into that pure being-for-itself not yet sublated, the will still lying in ambush. Both sides are purified into two moments, moments of language accordingly, and these are the abstract universal, which goes by the name of the universal best, and the pure self that renounced, in service, its consciousness sunk into a manifold existence. Both are in their concept the same, for the pure self is precisely the abstractly universal, and hence their unity is posited as their middle. But the self is so far actual only at the extreme of consciousness, — the in-itself only at the extreme of state power; what consciousness lacks is that state power should have passed over to it not merely as honor but actually, — what state power lacks is that obedience be rendered to it not merely as to the so-called universal best but as to a will, or that it be the deciding self. That unity of the concept, where state power yet stands and to which consciousness has purified itself, becomes actual through this mediating movement, whose simple existence, serving as the middle, is language. — For its sides, however, it does not yet have two selves on hand as self; for state power is only being inspirited into a self; hence this language is not yet spirit as spirit fully knows and utters itself.

Being the extreme of the self, the noble-minded consciousness shows up as the one from which the language issues by which the sides of the relationship shape themselves into ensouled wholes. — The heroism of mute service becomes the heroism of flattery. This speaking reflection of service constitutes the spiritual middle that decomposes itself, and it reflects not only its own extreme into itself but also the extreme of universal power back into that extreme itself, and makes that power, which so far is only in itself, into being-for-itself and into the singularity of self-consciousness. It thereby becomes the spirit of this power, — to be an unlimited monarch; — unlimited, for the language of flattery raises the power into its purified universality; — this moment, as the product of language, of existence purified into spirit, is a cleansed self-equality; — monarch, for that language likewise raises singularity to its peak; what the noble-minded consciousness externalizes on this side of simple spiritual unity is the in-itself of its thinking in its purity, the I that is its own. More determinately, language raises singularity, otherwise only something meant, into its existing purity by conferring on the monarch his own name; for the name is the one place where the difference of the singular one from all the rest is not meant but rather made actual by everyone; in the name, the singular one as purely singular is valid no longer within his own consciousness merely, but within the consciousness of all. Through the name, then, the monarch is simply set apart from all, singled out and alone; in it he is the atom that can impart nothing of its essence and has no equal. — This name is thereby the reflection into itself, or the actuality, that universal power has in it itself; through the name that power is the monarch. He, this singular one, conversely knows himself, this singular one, to be the universal power in that the nobles place themselves around the throne not merely as ready for the service of state power but as ornaments, and in that they are always telling the one who sits on it what he is.

The language of its praise is in this way the spirit that closes the two extremes together within state power itself; abstract power is by this language reflected back into itself and given the moment belonging to the other extreme, the being-for-itself that wills and decides, and with it a self-conscious existence; or by this route this singular actual self-consciousness arrives at knowing itself with certainty to be the power. It is that point of the self in which, through the externalization of inner certainty, the many points have converged. — But since this spirit peculiar to state power has its actuality and its sustenance in the sacrifice of the doing and the thinking of the noble-minded consciousness, state power is self-estranged self-subsistence; the noble-minded consciousness, the extreme of being-for-itself, gets back the extreme of actual universality in exchange for that universality of thinking into which it had externalized itself; the state's power has passed over into it. Only in the noble-minded consciousness does state authority first become truly active; within its being-for-itself that authority stops being the inert essence which it seemed to be while it appeared as the extreme constituted by abstract being-in-itself. — Considered in itself, what is meant by state power reflected into itself, or by its having become spirit, is nothing beyond this: that it has turned into a moment of self-consciousness, that is, that it is only as something sublated. Therewith it is now the essence as one whose spirit consists in being sacrificed and given away, or it exists as wealth. — It does indeed go on subsisting as an actuality alongside the wealth into which, by its concept, it is forever becoming; but as an actuality whose concept is precisely this movement: to pass over, by way of the service and the veneration through which it comes to be, into its opposite, into the externalization of power. For itself, then, the peculiar self that is its will turns, through the noble-minded consciousness's throwing of itself away, into a universality that externalizes itself, into a complete singularity and contingency lying at the mercy of any stronger will; of universally acknowledged and incommunicable self-subsistence there remains to it only the empty name.

If, then, the noble-minded consciousness defined itself as that which would relate to the universal power in an equal manner, the truth about it is rather that, while serving, it keeps back for itself its own being-for-itself, whereas in the genuine renunciation of its personality it is the actual sublating and tearing apart of the universal substance. Its spirit is the relationship of utter inequality: on the one hand, keeping its will in its honor; on the other hand, in surrendering that will, partly estranging itself from its own inwardness and becoming the highest inequality with itself, partly subjugating the universal substance to itself in that very surrender and making that substance completely unequal to itself. — Plainly, then, the determinateness it possessed in the judgment over against what was called the base consciousness has thereby vanished, and with it that consciousness as well. The base consciousness has reached its purpose, which was to bring the universal power under being-for-itself.

Self-consciousness, thus made rich by the universal power, exists as universal beneficence, or that beneficence is wealth, which is in turn itself an object for consciousness. For wealth is for consciousness the universal in subjugated form, a universal that this first sublating has not yet brought back absolutely into the self. — What the self has as its object is not yet itself as self, but the sublated universal essence. Because this object has come into being only now, what is posited is the immediate relation of consciousness to it, a consciousness which accordingly has not yet displayed its inequality with the object; it is the noble-minded consciousness, which obtains its being-for-itself from the universal that has become unessential, and which therefore acknowledges that universal and is grateful toward its benefactor.

In wealth itself the moment of being-for-itself is already present. It is not the selfless universal that state power is, nor the ingenuous inorganic nature of spirit; it is that nature as it clings to itself by will against whoever would seize hold of it for enjoyment. But since wealth has only the form of essence, its being-for-itself is one-sided, not in itself but rather the in-itself in sublated form, and so it is the individual's return into itself within enjoyment, a return devoid of essence. Wealth accordingly stands in need of animation itself; and its reflective movement amounts to this, that what only is for itself should become in and for itself, that what is the sublated essence should become essence; in this way it comes to have its own spirit in it itself. — The form of this movement having been laid out already, it suffices here to determine its content.

Here, then, the noble-minded consciousness does not relate itself to the object as to essence in general; rather, what is alien to it is being-for-itself itself; it finds its self as such estranged and already there for it, as a fixed objective actuality which another fixed being-for-itself must hand over to it. Being-for-itself is its object, hence what is its own; but in being an object it is at once and immediately an alien actuality possessing a being-for-itself and a will of its own, which means that consciousness sees its self placed in an alien will's power, dependent on whether that will chooses to release the self to it.

From any singular side self-consciousness is able to abstract, and for that reason, in an obligation touching such a side, it keeps its being-recognized and its in-itself validity as an essence that is for itself. Here, though, on the side of its pure and most proper actuality, or of its I, it sees itself outside itself and in the possession of another; it sees that its personality as such hangs upon another's contingent personality, upon the chance of a moment, upon an arbitrary whim or upon whatever circumstance is most indifferent. — In the condition of right, whatever stands under the objective essence's power appears as a contingent content that can be abstracted from, and that power does not touch the self as such; on the contrary, the self is there recognized. Here alone it sees that the certainty of itself, taken as such, is the most essenceless of all, that pure personality is absolute impersonality. Its gratitude therefore has for its spirit a feeling of this deepest abjection and equally of the deepest rebellion. Since the pure I intuits itself outside itself and torn apart, in this being torn apart whatever possesses continuity and universality, whatever goes by the name of law, of good, of right, has at the same time fallen apart and come to ruin; all that is alike is dissolved, for the purest inequality is on hand, the absolute unessentiality of what is absolutely essential, being-for-itself's own being-outside-itself; the pure I is absolutely broken up.

If, then, this consciousness does get back from wealth the objectivity of being-for-itself and sublates it, this is not merely, in terms of its concept, as incomplete as the preceding reflection was; it is also unsatisfying for consciousness itself; since here the self takes itself in as something objective, the reflection sets up the immediate contradiction within the pure I itself. Yet as self it stands at the same time immediately over this contradiction: it is that absolute elasticity which sublates once again this having-been-sublated of the self, which casts off the abjection of having its being-for-itself come to it as something alien, and which, in revolt against this receiving of itself, is for itself in the very act of receiving.

Since the relationship of this consciousness is thus tied up with this absolute being torn apart, the difference within its spirit, its being determined as noble-minded over against the base, falls away, and the two are one and the same. — The spirit of wealth as benefactor may further be distinguished from the spirit of the consciousness that receives the benefaction, and calls for separate consideration. — It was the essenceless being-for-itself, the essence given away. By imparting itself, however, it becomes the in-itself; in fulfilling its determination of sacrificing itself, it sublates the singularity of enjoying only for itself, and, as singularity sublated, it amounts to universality or essence. — That which it imparts, that which it hands over to others, is being-for-itself. It does not, however, surrender itself in the manner of a selfless nature, as the condition of life that ingenuously gives itself away, but as an essence that is self-conscious and holds on to itself for itself: the element's inorganic power, which the receiving consciousness knows to be perishable in itself, is not what wealth is; wealth is rather the power over the self, a power aware of itself as independent and arbitrary, and aware at the same time that what it doles out is another's self. — Wealth thus shares abjection with its client, but where the client has rebellion, wealth has arrogance. For on the one side wealth, like the client, knows being-for-itself as a contingent thing; but this contingency, in whose power personality stands, is what wealth itself is. In this arrogance, which fancies that by a meal it has obtained an alien I-self and has thereby purchased the subjugation of that self's innermost essence, wealth overlooks the other's inner rebellion; it overlooks the complete throwing-off of every fetter, this pure being torn apart, for which, since the self-equality of being-for-itself has become utterly unequal to it, everything alike, all subsistence, has been torn apart, and which therefore tears apart the benefactor's opinion and view most of all. Wealth stands immediately before this innermost abyss, before this bottomless depth where every hold and all substance has disappeared; and in that depth what it makes out is merely a vulgar thing, a toy for its mood, an accident of its caprice; its spirit is the wholly essenceless opinion that it is the spirit-forsaken surface.

As self-consciousness had a language of its own over against state power, or as spirit came forth between those extremes as an actual middle, so too does it have a language over against wealth, and its rebellion has a language of its own still more. The first of these languages, which supplies wealth with the consciousness of its essentiality and thereby gets hold of wealth, is a language of flattery too, though an ignoble one; — for the essence it proclaims is one it knows to be given away, an essence that is not in itself. Flattery's language, however, as was noted earlier, is spirit that is still one-sided. Its moments are, to be sure, the self that the culture of service has purified into pure existence, and power's being-in-itself. But that pure concept where the simple self is the same as the in-itself, that pure I the same as this pure essence or thinking, — this unity of the two sides between which reciprocal action occurs, is absent from the consciousness of this language; for that consciousness the object still counts as the in-itself set over against the self; or the object is not at once its own self as such. — The language of being torn apart, though, is the perfect language, and it is the true existing spirit of this entire world of culture. This self-consciousness, to which there belongs the rebellion that casts off its own abjection, is directly the absolute self-equality within absolute being torn apart, pure self-consciousness mediating itself purely with itself. It is the equality belonging to the identical judgment, where subject and predicate are one and the same personality. Yet this same identical judgment is simultaneously the infinite judgment; for the personality in question is absolutely split in two, so that subject and predicate are simply indifferent beings, each of no concern to the other, lacking necessary unity, indeed such that each of them is the power of a personality of its own. For its object being-for-itself has its own being-for-itself, as something simply other and at the same time just as immediately as itself, — as itself in the shape of another, not because that other would carry a different content, but rather the content is one and the same self, and the form is that of absolute opposition and of an entirely separate, indifferent existence. — What is present here, then, is the spirit belonging to this real world of culture, a spirit conscious of its concept and of itself in its truth.

Spirit here is that absolute and universal inversion, the estrangement of actuality and of thought alike; it is pure culture. The experience made in this world is that truth belongs neither to the actual essences of power and of wealth, — nor to their determinate concepts, good and bad, nor to consciousness of the good and the bad, the noble-minded and the base; rather, all these moments invert themselves one within the other, and each is its own opposite. — Universal power, being the substance, in arriving at a spirituality of its own by way of the principle of individuality, takes the self that is its own only as a name attached to it, and, being actual power, is rather the powerless essence that sacrifices itself. — But this selfless essence given away, this self turned into a thing, is on the contrary essence returning into itself; it amounts to being-for-itself that is for itself, the existence of spirit. — The thoughts of these essences, of the good and of the bad, undergo the same inversion in this movement; whatever is determined to be good is bad; whatever is bad is good. The consciousness of each of these moments, judged as the noble and as the base consciousness, is in truth just as much the inversion of what such determinations ought to be: the noble-minded is quite as base and abject as abjection turns round into the nobility of self-consciousness in its most cultivated freedom. — Everything likewise, formally regarded, is outwardly the inverse of what it is for itself; what it is for itself, in its turn, it is not in truth, but is something other than it wants to be, being-for-itself is rather the loss of itself, and estrangement from itself is rather self-preservation. — What is on hand, then, is this: that all the moments exercise a universal justice upon one another, each estranging itself from its own self to just the degree that it fancies itself into its opposite and thereby inverts that opposite. — True spirit, however, is just this unity of what is absolutely separated, and indeed it comes into existence as their middle precisely by means of the free actuality these selfless extremes themselves possess. Its existence is universal speaking and the judging that tears apart, before which every one of those moments that are meant to count as essences and as actual members of the whole dissolves, and which is likewise this self-dissolving play with itself. Such judging and speaking is therefore the true and the invincible, since it overpowers everything; it is that with which, in this real world, one has truly and solely to do. Every part of this world thereby reaches the point where its spirit is pronounced, or where one speaks of it with spirit and says of it what it is. — The honest consciousness takes each moment for an abiding essentiality, and it is the uncultured thoughtlessness of not knowing that it is doing the inverted thing just as much. The consciousness torn apart, by contrast, is the consciousness of inversion, and indeed of absolute inversion; what rules within it is the concept, which draws together thoughts that lie far apart for honesty, and whose language is on that account witty.

What spirit's discourse from and about itself contains is therefore the inversion of all concepts and all realities, the universal deceit practiced on itself and on others, and the shamelessness of uttering that deceit is for precisely that reason the greatest truth. This discourse is the derangement of the musician "who piled up and blended thirty arias, Italian and French, tragic and comic, of every sort of character; at one moment, with a deep bass, he descended as far as hell, then he tightened his throat and with a falsetto tore apart the heights of the air, by turns frenzied, mollified, imperious, and derisive." — To the calm consciousness, which honestly puts the melody of what is good and true into a sameness of tones, that is, into a single note, this discourse looks like "a rambling of wisdom and madness, a mixture of adroitness and baseness in equal measure, of ideas as correct as they are false, of a perversity of feeling as total, a shamefulness as complete, as its candor and truth are entire. It will be unable to refuse to enter into all these tones and to run up and down the entire scale of feelings, from deepest contempt and rejection up to highest admiration and emotion; fused into these there will be a ridiculous trait that robs them of their nature;" those tones will possess, in their very candor, a reconciling trait, and in their shattering depth that all-powerful trait which gives spirit to itself.

Set the discourse of this confusion that is clear to itself alongside the discourse of that simple consciousness of what is true and good, and the latter can only be monosyllabic against the open eloquence, conscious of itself, that belongs to the spirit of culture; for there is nothing it can tell that spirit which the spirit does not already know and say of its own accord. Should it go beyond its monosyllables, it says just what spirit pronounces, and in doing so commits the additional folly of imagining that what it says is something new and different. Its very syllables, shameful, base, are already this folly, since spirit says them of itself. When this spirit in its discourse inverts everything monotonous, on the ground that what is thus self-same is a mere abstraction while in its actuality it is inversion in it itself, and when the straightforward consciousness, on the contrary, defends the good and the noble, that is, what keeps itself the same in its expression, in the one way here available to it, — namely by pleading that the good does not forfeit its worth merely for being tied to the bad or mixed with it, since this is its condition and necessity, since herein consists the wisdom of nature; — then this consciousness, believing itself to be contradicting, has only gathered the content of spirit's discourse into a trivial formula, one which thoughtlessly makes the very opposite of what is noble and good into the condition for it and the necessity of it, and supposes itself to be saying something other than just this, that what goes under the name of noble and good has for its essence the inversion of itself, just as the bad, conversely, is what is excellent.

Suppose the simple consciousness puts in place of this spiritless thought the actuality of what is excellent, adducing that excellence in the example of an invented case or else of a genuine anecdote, and so showing that it is not an empty name but is present: then over against it stands the universal actuality of inverted doing, the whole real world, within which such an example makes up only something quite isolated, an espèce; and to exhibit the existence of what is good and noble as a single anecdote, invented or genuine, is the harshest thing that could be said of it. — If the simple consciousness demands, in the end, that this whole world of inversion be dissolved, it cannot require of the individual a withdrawal from that world, for it is this very world that conditions Diogenes in his tub, and the demand addressed to the singular one is exactly what counts as the bad, namely to look after oneself for oneself as a singular one. Directed at universal individuality, however, the demand for such a withdrawal cannot mean that reason is to surrender once more the spiritual, cultivated consciousness it has reached, is to sink the spread-out wealth of its moments back into the simple natural heart, and is to relapse into the wildness and the nearness of animal consciousness, which goes by the name of nature and also of innocence; the demand for dissolution can be raised only against the spirit of culture itself, namely that out of its confusion it should return to itself as spirit and gain a still higher consciousness.

In fact, though, spirit has already carried this out in itself. Consciousness's being torn apart, self-conscious of itself and pronouncing itself, is the scornful laughter directed at existence as well as at the confusion of the whole and at itself; and it is likewise the dying-away of this whole confusion, a dying-away that still hears itself. — This vanity of all actuality, as of every determinate concept, a vanity that hears itself, is the way the real world is doubly reflected into itself; once in this self of consciousness, taken as this one, and a second time in the pure universality of that self, or in thinking. On the first side, spirit that has come to itself keeps its gaze turned into the world of actuality, which is still its purpose and its immediate content; on the other side, its gaze is turned partly inward alone and negatively against that world, partly away from it toward heaven, so that the beyond of that world is its object.

On that side where the return into the self takes place, the vanity of all things counts as consciousness's own vanity, or consciousness itself is vain. It is the self that is for itself, a self that knows how not merely to pass judgment on everything and chatter about it, but wittily to state the fixed essences of actuality together with the fixed determinations that judgment sets up, and to state them in their contradiction, and this contradiction is their truth. — Looked at from the side of form, it knows all things as estranged from themselves: being-for-itself cut off from being-in-itself; likewise what is meant, and the purpose, cut off from truth; and cut off from both of these again, being for another, the pretense cut off from the real opinion and from the true matter and intention. — It thus knows how to pronounce each moment correctly over against the other, and in general the inversion of them all; it knows what each is better than each is, no matter how each may be determined. Since its acquaintance with the substantial reaches only to the side of disunity and conflict that the substantial unites within itself, and not to the side of that uniting, it understands very well how to judge the substantial, but has lost the capacity to grasp it. — This vanity, meanwhile, needs the vanity of all things, so as to draw from them the consciousness of the self; it therefore produces that vanity itself and is the soul that sustains it. Power and wealth are the supreme purposes of its exertion; it is aware that renunciation and sacrifice are what cultivate it into the universal, bring it into possession of the universal, and give it, in that possession, universal validity; they are the actual recognized powers. But this validity of its own is itself vain, and in the very act of mastering power and wealth it knows them not to be self-essences; it knows itself, rather, as their power and knows them as vain. That it thus stands outside power and wealth even while possessing them, it exhibits in witty language, which is for that reason what interests it most and is the truth of the whole; in such language this self, as the pure self belonging neither to actual determinations nor to determinations of thought, becomes for itself something spiritual, something of truly universal validity. It is the nature of all relationships that tears itself apart, and it is the conscious tearing-apart of them; yet only as rebellious self-consciousness does it know its own being torn apart, and in knowing it, it has immediately raised itself above it. Within that vanity all content turns into something negative, which can no longer be grasped positively; nothing remains as positive object except the pure I itself, while the consciousness torn apart, in itself, is this pure self-equality belonging to self-consciousness that has returned into itself.

b. Faith and Pure Insight

The spirit of estrangement from its own self has its existence within the world of culture; but since this whole has undergone estrangement from itself, what stands beyond that world is a world without actuality, the world of pure consciousness, or the world of thinking. Whatever is purely thought constitutes its content; thinking is its absolute element. Yet since thinking is at the outset the element of this world, consciousness merely has these thoughts; it does not yet think them, nor does it know them to be thoughts; for it they exist instead in the form of representation. For consciousness does step out of actuality into pure consciousness, and yet it remains, taken as a whole, within actuality's own sphere and determinateness. Consciousness in its torn-apart state is as yet the self-equality of pure consciousness only in itself, for us, not for its own self. It is therefore only the immediate elevation, one not yet brought to completion within itself, and it still carries within itself its own opposed principle, that which conditions it, without having gained mastery over it through the mediated movement. Hence what is valid for it as the essence of its own thought does not take the form of the abstract in-itself alone; it takes the form of something commonly actual, an actuality raised merely into another element and yet not stripped there of the determinateness of an actuality that is not thought. — This must be essentially differentiated from the in-itself that forms the essence of the stoic consciousness; for that consciousness only the form of thought as such had validity, a form which along with it has some content or other, foreign to it, taken over from actuality, whereas for the consciousness now in question the form of thought is not what has validity; — and equally it must be differentiated from the in-itself belonging to the virtuous consciousness, a consciousness for which the essence does indeed stand in relation to actuality, for which the essence is actuality's own essence, — though as yet only an unactual essence; — whereas for the consciousness now in question the essence counts as an actual essence, even though it lies beyond actuality. In the same way, neither what is right and good in itself for law-giving reason nor the universal of the law-testing consciousness carries the determination of actuality. — So although within the world of culture pure thinking itself fell on one side of the estrangement, namely as the measure of the abstractly good and bad in judging, it has now passed through the movement of the whole and been enriched by the moment of actuality and thereby by that of content. This actuality of the essence, though, is likewise nothing more than an actuality of pure consciousness and not of actual consciousness; lifted into the element of thinking it may be, yet for that actual consciousness it does not yet count as a thought, and lies instead beyond its own actuality, since the former is the flight away from the latter.

Religion — for it is evident that religion is what we are speaking of — makes its appearance here as the faith of the world of culture, and in appearing thus it does not yet appear in the way it is in and for itself. — Under other determinatenesses it has already made its appearance for us, namely as unhappy consciousness, as a shape taken by the substanceless movement of consciousness itself. — In the ethical substance too religion appeared, as faith in the underworld; but the consciousness of the departed spirit is not properly faith, is not the essence as posited in pure consciousness's element on the far side of what is actual, for that spirit has an immediate presence of its own; its element is the family. — Here, however, religion has in part come forth out of the substance, of which it is the pure consciousness; and in part this pure consciousness has become estranged from the actual consciousness that belongs to it, the essence estranged from its existence. Religion is thus no longer the substanceless movement of consciousness, and yet it retains the determinateness of an opposition to actuality taken as this actuality in general, and to that of self-consciousness in particular, so that in essence it is nothing more than a faith.

This pure consciousness of the absolute essence is an estranged consciousness. How that of which it is the other determines itself is what must now be examined more closely, and pure consciousness can be considered only in conjunction with that other. At first glance this pure consciousness seems to have nothing but the world of actuality confronting it; but since it is the flight out of that world, and thereby the determinateness of opposition, it carries this opposition on itself; pure consciousness is thus essentially estranged from itself within its own self, and faith constitutes only one side of it. Meanwhile the other side has already arisen for us. Pure consciousness, that is to say, is a reflection away from culture's world, and is so in this manner: this world's substance, along with the masses into which it divides itself, showed themselves to be what they are in themselves, namely spiritual essentialities, absolutely restless movements or determinations that sublate themselves immediately in their own opposite. Their essence, the simple consciousness, is accordingly the simplicity of the absolute difference, a difference that immediately is no difference at all. It is therewith pure being-for-itself, not as the being-for-itself of this singular, but as the self that within itself is universal, a restless movement that assails and penetrates the quiescent essence of the matter. Within it, accordingly, there is present the certainty which immediately knows its own self as truth, present as pure thinking, as the absolute concept wielding the power of its negativity, a negativity that annihilates every objective essence supposed to stand over against consciousness and turns such essence into a being belonging to consciousness. — At the same time this pure consciousness is equally simple, for the very reason that its difference is not a difference at all. But as this form of simple reflection into itself, pure consciousness constitutes the element of faith, the element within which spirit holds, over against that being-for-itself of self-consciousness, the determinateness of positive universality, the determinateness of being-in-itself. — Driven back into itself from the essenceless world that does nothing but dissolve itself, spirit is, in accordance with truth, in undivided unity both the absolute movement and negativity belonging to its appearing and the essence of that appearing as satisfied within itself, its positive quiescence. Lying, however, quite generally under the determinateness of estrangement, these two moments come apart as a doubled consciousness. The former is pure insight, the spiritual process that draws itself together in self-consciousness, a process confronted by the consciousness of the positive, by objectivity's form or that of representing, and directed against it; its own object, however, is nothing other than the I in its purity. — By contrast, the simple consciousness of what is positive, of quiescent self-equality, has the inner essence as essence for its object. Pure insight therefore has at the start no content of its own, since it is the negative being-for-itself; to faith, on the contrary, the content belongs, but without insight. While the former never steps out of self-consciousness, faith likewise holds its content in pure self-consciousness's element, though in thinking and not in concepts, in pure consciousness and not in pure self-consciousness. So faith is indeed pure consciousness of the essence, that is, of the simple inner, and therefore is thinking; — this is the chief moment in the nature of faith, and it is the one commonly overlooked. The immediacy with which the essence is present in faith rests on the fact that faith's object is essence, that is, pure thought. This immediacy, however, once thinking steps into consciousness, or pure consciousness into self-consciousness, takes on the significance of an objective being lying on the far side of the self's consciousness. It is owing to that significance, one that pure thinking's immediacy and simplicity acquire within consciousness, that the essence of faith drops down out of thinking into representation and becomes a supersensible world, essentially an other of self-consciousness . — In pure insight, by contrast, the transition of pure thinking into consciousness carries the opposite determination; here objectivity signifies a content that is merely negative, a content sublating itself and going back into the self; which is to say that, properly, the self alone is its own object, or the object has truth only in so far as it bears the self's form.

Faith and pure insight share the element of pure consciousness, and just as much they share the character of being a return out of the actual world of culture. They accordingly offer themselves for consideration from three sides. In the first case each stands in and for itself, outside every relationship; in the second, each takes up a relation to the actual world, which stands opposed to pure consciousness; and in the third, each takes up a relation, within pure consciousness, to the other.

Within the believing consciousness, the side of being in and for itself is that consciousness's absolute object, and the content and determination of this object have already emerged. For according to the concept of faith it is nothing other than the real world as lifted into pure consciousness's universality. The way the real world is articulated therefore also makes up the organization of that object, save that within the latter the parts, in their inspiriting, do not become estranged from themselves but are essences that are in and for themselves, spirits that have returned into themselves and remain by themselves. — The movement of their transition is accordingly an estrangement of the determinateness in which they stand within their difference, and it is so for us alone; for us alone, too, it is a necessary series; faith, by contrast, takes their difference to be a quiescent diversity and their movement to be a happening.

To name them briefly according to how their form is externally determined: within the world of culture it was state power, or the good, that came first, and here likewise the first is the absolute essence, spirit that is in and for itself, in so far as spirit is the eternal substance in its simplicity. But in realizing its concept, which is to be spirit, the substance makes the transition into being for another; what was its self-equality becomes the actual absolute essence that sacrifices itself, and it becomes a self, but a perishable one. The third is accordingly the return of this estranged self and of the abased substance into its first simplicity, and only in this way is the substance represented as spirit. —

These distinct essences, drawn back into themselves by thinking, away from the changeableness of the actual world, are unchanging eternal spirits whose being consists in thinking the unity that they constitute. Removed as they are from self-consciousness, these essences nevertheless reach into it; if the essence stayed unmoved within the form belonging to the first simple substance, it would stay foreign to self-consciousness. The externalization of this substance, however, and then its spirit, does carry the moment of actuality upon itself, and thereby takes a share in the believing self-consciousness; or, put differently, the believing consciousness belongs to the real world.

Taken in this second relationship, the believing consciousness in part possesses an actuality of its own within culture's real world, and makes up that world's spirit and existence, which we have already examined; in part, however, it sets itself over against this actuality of its own as against something vain, and is the movement of sublating it. This movement does not consist in its having a witty consciousness of that world's inversion; for it is the simple consciousness, which counts wit among the things that are vain, on the ground that wit still takes the real world as its purpose. Rather, actuality stands over against the quiescent realm of its thinking as a spiritless existence, one that has therefore to be overcome externally. Such obedience of service and of praise, by sublating sensuous knowledge and sensuous doing, brings forth the consciousness of unity with the essence that is in and for itself, though not as a unity actually intuited; this service is instead only a perpetual bringing-forth that never fully reaches its goal in the present. The community does reach that goal, for the community is universal self-consciousness; but the realm of pure thinking must necessarily stay, for the singular self-consciousness, a beyond of its actuality, or rather, once that realm has entered actuality through the externalization of the eternal essence, this actuality is a sensuous actuality that has not been comprehended ; and one sensuous actuality remains indifferent toward another, so that the beyond has gained nothing further than the determination of distance in space and in time. — The concept, however, the actuality of spirit present to its own self, remains in the believing consciousness the inner that is everything and effects everything but never itself comes forward.

In pure insight, on the other hand, the concept is the sole actuality; and this third side of faith, that of being an object of pure insight, is the proper relationship in which faith makes its appearance here. — Pure insight itself has likewise to be considered in part in and for itself, in part in its relationship to the actual world in so far as that world is still on hand positively, namely as vain consciousness, and in part, finally, in the relationship to faith just named.

We have already seen pure insight in and for itself; faith is spirit's quiescent pure consciousness, spirit taken as essence, whereas pure insight is spirit's self-consciousness; and so for it the essence is known not as essence at all but as absolute self. Its aim, then, is to sublate every self-subsistence that is other to self-consciousness, whether the self-subsistence of what is actual or of what has being-in-itself, and to make that self-subsistence into the concept. It is not merely reason's self-conscious certainty of being all truth; it also knows that this is what it is.

In the manner, however, in which the concept of pure insight makes its entrance, it is not yet realized. Its consciousness accordingly still appears as something contingent and singular, and what counts for it as the essence appears as a purpose it has to bring about. As yet it has only the intention of making pure insight universal, that is, of turning everything that is actual into the concept, and into one and the same concept in every self-consciousness. This intention is pure, since pure insight forms its content; and this insight is equally pure, since its content is nothing but the absolute concept, a concept that meets with no opposite in any object and is not restricted within its own self; in the unrestricted concept the two sides lie immediately together: that everything objective bears only the significance of being-for-itself, of self-consciousness, and that this being-for-itself bears the significance of something universal, so that pure insight comes to be owned by every self-consciousness. This second side of the intention results from culture in so far as within culture the differences of objective spirit, the parts and judgment-determinations of its world, have foundered, and with them the differences that appear as originally determinate natures. Genius, talent, particular capacities in general, belong to actuality's world in so far as that world still has upon it the side of being a spiritual animal kingdom, one that in mutual violence and confusion fights and cheats over the essences of the real world. — Within that world the differences have no place, to be sure, as genuine coin; individuality neither rests content with the unactual matter at hand, nor does it possess a particular content and purposes belonging to itself. Rather, it counts only as something of universal validity, namely as something cultured; and the difference reduces itself to a lesser or greater energy; — a difference of magnitude, that is, an inessential one. This last diversity, though, has foundered in this, that within the complete being torn apart of consciousness the difference flipped over into an absolutely qualitative one. What there is other to the I is nothing but the I itself. This infinite judgment wipes out all one-sidedness and ownness of the original being-for-itself; the self knows itself, as pure self, to be its own object; and the absolute equality of the two sides is what constitutes pure insight's element. — Pure insight is accordingly the simple essence, undifferentiated within itself, and just as much the universal work and a universal possession. Self-consciousness, within this simple spiritual substance, both grants and secures to itself, in every object alike, the consciousness of this its singularity, or of its doing, just as, conversely, its individuality is therein equal to itself and universal. — This pure insight, then, is the spirit that cries out to all consciousness: be for your own selves what all of you already are in your own selves — rational.

II. The Enlightenment

Faith is the distinctive object against which pure insight turns the force of the concept, faith being the form of pure consciousness that confronts it within one and the same element. But it stands, too, in a relation to the actual world, since, like faith, it is a return out of that world into pure consciousness. What has to be seen first is how its activity is constituted when it turns against that world's impure intentions and inverted insights.

Mention was already made above of the quiescent consciousness that stands over against this whirl, a whirl which dissolves itself within itself and generates itself once more; it is that consciousness which makes up the side belonging to pure insight and intention. Into this quiescent consciousness, however, as we saw, there falls no particular insight concerning the world of culture; that world rather has the most painful feeling about itself and the truest insight into itself — the feeling of being the dissolution of everything that steadies itself, of having been racked upon the wheel through all the moments of its existence and smashed in every bone; — and it is likewise the language of this feeling and the judging witty discourse upon every side of its own condition. Pure insight can therefore have here no activity and no content of its own, and can accordingly relate only as the formal, faithful apprehending of this witty insight that the world has of itself, and of the world's language. Since this language is scattered, since the judging is a raving of the moment that forgets itself again at once, and since it amounts to a whole only for a third consciousness, that third consciousness can mark itself off as pure insight solely by gathering those self-dispersing traits into a universal picture and then making them into an insight belonging to everyone.

By this simple means it will bring the confusion of this world to dissolution. For it has emerged that the essence of this actuality lies not in the masses, nor in the determinate concepts and individualities, but that this actuality has its substance and its hold solely in the spirit that exists as judging and as discussing, and that the interest in having some content for this ratiocinating and chattering is alone what sustains the whole together with the masses of its articulation. Within this language of insight, self-consciousness is still for itself something that is for itself, this singular; yet the content's vanity is at once the vanity of that very self which knows the content to be vain. Now once the quietly apprehending consciousness gathers into a collection the aptest formulations, those cutting clean through the matter, out of all this witty gossip of vanity, then, alongside the remaining vanity of existence, the very soul that still sustains the whole, namely the vanity of witty judging, founders as well. To most people the collection displays a wit better than their own, or at any rate displays to everyone a more many-sided one, and it displays knowing-better and judging in general as something universal and by now universally familiar; with that, the sole interest still remaining is wiped out, and singular insight dissolves into universal insight.

Above this vain knowledge, however, the knowledge of essence still stands firm, and pure insight first appears in its proper activity only insofar as it steps forward against faith.

a. The Struggle of the Enlightenment with Superstition

The various modes in which consciousness relates negatively, skepticism in part, in part theoretical and practical idealism, are subordinate shapes when set against this shape of pure insight and of its dissemination, the Enlightenment; for insight has substance for its birthplace, it takes the pure self of consciousness for something absolute, and it takes up the contest with the pure consciousness whose object is the absolute essence of all actuality. — Faith and insight are one and the same pure consciousness, yet opposed as regards form, since for faith the essence counts as thought and not as concept, hence as something flatly opposed to self-consciousness — whereas for pure insight it is the self that is the essence — and thus, for one another, the one is the utter negative of the other. — In the manner in which the two step forth against each other, the whole of the content accrues to faith, since within faith's tranquil element of thinking each moment acquires subsistence; — pure insight, by contrast, has at the outset no content at all, being rather the sheer disappearance of content; but by moving negatively against that which is negative to it, pure insight will bring itself to realization and furnish itself with a content.

It knows faith to be the very opposite of itself, of reason and of truth. Since faith counts for it, quite generally, as a tissue of superstition, prejudices, and errors, the consciousness of this content organizes itself for it, further, into a realm of error, one in which false insight exists at first as the universal mass of consciousness, immediate, ingenuous, and without any reflection into itself, but in which it also carries, cut off from that ingenuousness, the moment of reflection into self, or of self-consciousness, in the shape of an insight and an evil intention that keep to themselves in the background and by which the mass is befooled. That mass falls prey to the fraud of a priesthood that pursues its envious vanity of keeping insight in its own sole possession, together with whatever else serves its advantage, and that conspires at the same time with despotism, which, being the synthetic, conceptless unity of the real realm and this ideal one, — a strangely inconsistent essence, — towers over the multitude's poor insight and the priests' poor intention, unites the two in itself as well, and, holding both in contempt, extracts from the people's stupidity and confusion, using the deceiving priesthood as its instrument, the advantage of undisturbed dominion and of the gratification of its lusts and arbitrary will, while being all the while that identical dullness of insight, that identical superstition and error.

With these three sides of its enemy the Enlightenment does not engage indiscriminately; for its essence being pure insight, which is the universal in and for itself, the relation it truly bears to the other extreme is the one in which it makes for what is common and equal in both. The side on which singularity isolates itself out of the universal ingenuous consciousness is what stands opposed to it, and that it cannot touch immediately. Hence what its activity has for its immediate object is not the will of the priesthood that deceives nor of the despot that oppresses; the object is rather that will-less insight which does not singularize itself into being-for-itself, the concept of rational self-consciousness, a concept whose existence lies in the mass while not yet being present there as concept. But in tearing this honest insight and its ingenuous essence away from prejudices and errors, pure insight twists the reality and the power of the bad intention's deception out of that intention's hands, since the realm of that deception has its soil and material in the universal mass's conceptless consciousness — as being-for-itself has its substance in simple consciousness generally.

Pure insight's relation to the ingenuous consciousness of the absolute essence now presents two sides: for one part, pure insight is in itself identical with that consciousness; for the other part, that consciousness, inside the simple element belonging to its thought, allows the absolute essence along with the parts of that essence to stand and to acquire subsistence for themselves, granting them validity solely as its own in-itself and therefore in an objective fashion, while denying its being-for-itself inside this in-itself. — To the extent that, on the first side, this faith is, for pure insight, in itself pure self-consciousness and has merely to become so for itself, that concept of faith affords pure insight the element wherein it realizes itself in the stead of false insight.

Seen from this side, namely that the two are essentially the same and that pure insight's relation runs through and within one and the same element, its communicating is immediate, and its giving and receiving an undisturbed flowing together. Whatever other stakes may have been hammered into consciousness, consciousness is in itself that simplicity wherein all things are dissolved, forgotten, and ingenuous, and which is on that account utterly susceptible to the concept. For this reason one may liken the communicating of pure insight to a quiet expansion, or to the spreading of a scent through an atmosphere that offers no resistance. It is an infection that permeates everything, one that gives no prior sign of being opposed to the indifferent element it slips into, and that therefore admits of no defense against it. Only after the infection has spread abroad is it there for the consciousness that had unconcernedly given itself over to it. For what consciousness received into itself was indeed the simple essence, equal to itself and equal to consciousness, yet it was simultaneously the simplicity of a negativity reflected into itself, a negativity that afterwards unfolds, as its nature requires, as something opposed, thereby recalling to consciousness the mode it formerly had; this negativity is the concept, that simple knowledge which knows itself and at once its own contrary, but knows the contrary within itself as sublated. Thus the moment pure insight is there for consciousness, it has already spread; the struggle waged against it gives away that the infection has taken place; the struggle comes too late, and every remedy only aggravates the disease, for what it has gripped is the pith of spiritual life, consciousness in its own concept, that is, its pure essence itself; and so within consciousness there is no force that would stand higher than the infection. Because it resides in the essence itself, its still scattered expressions can be forced back and its surface symptoms muffled. And this is of the greatest benefit to it, for it now wastes no strength to no purpose, neither does it prove itself unworthy of its essence, as it does whenever it erupts in symptoms and singular outbreaks against the content of faith and against the connectedness of faith's outer actuality. Rather, an invisible and unnoticed spirit now, it steals through the noble parts through and through, and has soon made itself thorough master of every entrail and limb of the unconscious idol, and "on one fine morning, with its elbow, it deals its comrade a push, and Bautz! Baradautz! the idol lies on the ground." — On one fine morning whose noon runs no blood, once the infection has worked its way through every organ of spiritual life; nothing but memory then still holds fast the dead mode of spirit's earlier shape, as a history gone by one knows not how; and the serpent of wisdom, newly exalted to be adored, has thereby done no more than shed a shriveled skin without pain.

But this silent onward weaving of spirit within the simple interior of its substance, spirit keeping its own activity hidden from itself, is but a single side of how pure insight becomes real. Its dissemination does not consist solely in like joining with like; nor is its actualization merely an expansion free of opposition. The doing of the negative essence is, rather, just as essentially a movement that has developed and that differentiates itself within itself, a movement which, being conscious doing, has to set its moments out in a determinate, manifest existence, and has to be on hand as a loud uproar and a violent struggle with what is opposed as such.

So we have to see in what way pure insight and intention relate negatively to the other that stands opposed to them and that they find already there. — Pure insight and intention, in relating negatively, can be nothing but their own negative, seeing that their concept is the whole of essentiality with nothing lying outside it. Qua insight, then, it turns into pure insight's negative, into untruth and unreason; and qua intention, into the negative of pure intention, into the lie and the impurity of purpose.

It gets tangled in this contradiction by letting itself into a quarrel and supposing that what it combats is something other. — It only supposes this, for its essence, being absolute negativity, lies in having otherness present in it. The absolute concept is the category; the category consists in this, that knowledge, and likewise the object of knowledge, are one and the same. Consequently what pure insight pronounces to be its other, what it declares to be error or lie, can be nothing except itself; it is able to damn only what it itself is. What lacks rationality is without truth; or, what is not comprehended is not; so when reason talks about an other than itself, its talk is in fact about itself alone; in this it never steps out beyond itself. — This struggle with what is opposed therefore carries within it the sense of being reason's actualization. For that actualization lies precisely in the movement whereby the moments are developed and then taken back into insight; and one part of that movement is the differentiating in which comprehending insight places itself over against itself as object; for as long as it tarries in this moment it stands estranged from itself. Taken as pure insight it has no content whatever; the movement by which it is realized lies in its becoming, as it itself, its own content, since no other content could accrue to it, it being the self-consciousness of the category. Since, however, in setting the content over against itself, it at first knows the content merely as content and not yet as itself, it mistakes itself in it. Its completion accordingly means this: to cognize as its own the content that was objective for it to begin with. Its result, however, will thereby be neither a restoration of the errors it fought nor merely its own first concept, but an insight that cognizes its own absolute negation as its own actuality, as itself; in other words, its concept cognizing itself. — That the Enlightenment's struggle with errors has this nature, of fighting itself in them and damning in them what it itself maintains, is something for us, or is what the Enlightenment and its struggle are in themselves. The first side of that struggle, however, its befoulment through the admission of negative relating into its self-equal purity, is how it stands as an object for faith, which accordingly undergoes it as lie, unreason, and bad intention, just as faith is for it error and prejudice. — As regards its content, it is at the outset the empty insight, one for which its content shows up as another; it therefore finds this content standing before it in the shape in which the content does not yet belong to it, as an existence wholly independent of it, in faith.

The Enlightenment, then, apprehends its object in the first place and quite generally by taking it for pure insight and, in doing so, failing to cognize itself, pronouncing it error. Within insight as such, the way consciousness apprehends an object is such that the object turns for it into the essence of consciousness, into an object which consciousness saturates, in which consciousness sustains itself, remaining at home with itself and present to itself, and which consciousness, being thereby the object's own movement, brings forth. It is exactly as this that the Enlightenment states faith correctly when it says of faith that what faith holds to be the absolute essence is a being of faith's own consciousness, faith's own thought, a product brought forth by consciousness. With this it pronounces faith error and invention about the very same as what it itself is. — Wanting as it does to school faith in the new wisdom, it tells faith nothing new by this; for faith's object is for faith just exactly that, the pure essence of faith's own consciousness, such that this consciousness does not posit itself in that object as lost and negated but places its trust in it, which means precisely that within it consciousness finds itself as this consciousness, or as self-consciousness. Whomever I trust, his certainty of his own self counts for me as the certainty of my own self; I cognize my being-for-myself in him, in that he acknowledges it and it counts for him as purpose and essence. Trust, however, is faith, because the consciousness of faith stands in an immediate relation to its object and hence also intuits this, its being one with the object and in the object. — Furthermore, when what is an object for me is that in which I cognize my own self, I am in it, at the same time and quite generally, an other self-consciousness for myself, that is, one that has in it become estranged from its particular singularity, from its naturalness and contingency, yet that in part stays self-consciousness in it and is in part, precisely in it, essential consciousness, as pure insight is. — The concept of insight holds not merely this, that consciousness cognizes its own self in the object it sees into and, without abandoning what is thought and only thereafter returning out of it into itself, possesses itself immediately in that object; consciousness is aware of itself as the mediating movement as well, aware of itself as the doing or the bringing-forth; and through this there is present in thought, for consciousness, this unity of itself as the self with the object. — This very consciousness is faith too; obedience and doing make up a necessary moment by way of which the certainty of one's being within the absolute essence is brought about. To be sure, this doing of faith does not have the look of the absolute essence itself being brought forth by it. But faith's absolute essence is essentially not that abstract essence lying beyond the believing consciousness; it is the spirit of the community, the unity of abstract essence and self-consciousness. That the essence should be this spirit of the community: in this the community's own doing is an essential moment; the essence is that spirit only through the bringing-forth carried out by consciousness; — or rather it is so not without having been brought forth by consciousness; for however essential the bringing-forth may be, it is just as essentially not the sole ground of the essence, but only one moment. The essence is, simultaneously, in and for its own self.

Looked at from the other side, pure insight's concept is to be for itself an other as its object, since it is just this negative determination that makes up the object. Accordingly it also states, from this other side, the essence of faith to be something alien to self-consciousness, not its essence but slipped under it like a changeling. Only here the Enlightenment is being wholly foolish; faith undergoes it as a talk which has no idea what it is uttering and grasps nothing of the matter when it holds forth about priestly fraud and the duping of the people. Its talk runs as if some hocus-pocus worked by juggling priests had slipped under consciousness, in place of the essence, something absolutely alien and other; and it says in the same breath that this is an essence belonging to consciousness, one that consciousness believes in, entrusts itself to, and seeks to render favorable to itself; — which is to say that in it consciousness intuits its own pure essence quite as much as its singular and universal individuality, and that by its own doing consciousness brings forth this unity between itself and its essence. What it declares to be alien to consciousness it states immediately as consciousness's very own. — How, then, can it possibly talk of fraud and duping? By stating immediately, and about faith itself, the reverse of what it maintains of faith, it rather exhibits itself to faith as being the conscious lie that it is. In what way are duping and fraud to occur where consciousness has, in its truth, the immediate certainty of its own self; where in its object it is in possession of its own self, in that it finds itself there quite as much as it brings itself forth there. The difference is not so much as present in the words any longer. — Where the question has been posed in general terms, whether one may be permitted to deceive a people, one would in fact have to reply that the question is worth nothing, since on this head a people cannot be deceived at all. — Brass in the place of gold, counterfeit bills of exchange in the place of real ones, may well be sold in single cases; a battle that was lost may be fastened upon a good many as a battle won; and further lies about sensuous things and singular occurrences may be given credence for a while; but within the knowledge of the essence, where consciousness possesses the immediate certainty of its own self, any thought of duping drops away completely.

Let us go on to observe the way faith undergoes the Enlightenment within the distinct moments of its consciousness, at which the account set out so far was directed only in general terms. These moments are pure thinking, or, as object, the absolute essence in and for itself; then faith's relating to it as a knowledge, the ground of its faith; and finally its relating to it in its doing, or its service. Just as pure insight has in general failed to recognize itself in faith and has disowned itself there, so in these moments too it will relate in an equally inverted manner.

Pure insight relates negatively to the absolute essence of the believing consciousness. That essence is pure thinking, thinking that has been posited inside itself as object, that is, as the essence; within the believing consciousness this in-itself of thinking takes on, for the consciousness that is for itself, the form of objectivity, though only its empty form; it stands in the determination of something represented. To pure insight, on the other hand, being pure consciousness taken on the side of the self existing for itself, the other shows up as a negative of self-consciousness. One might still take this either for thinking's pure in-itself or else for the being belonging to sense-certainty. Yet since it is at once for the self, and since this self, as one that has an object, is actual consciousness, the object proper to pure insight is, as such, an existing common thing of sense-certainty. This object of its own shows up for it in faith's representation. It damns that representation, and in it its own object. But already in this it wrongs faith, apprehending faith's object in such a way that the object is its own. It says of faith accordingly that faith's absolute essence is a lump of stone, a wooden block possessed of eyes that do not see, or else some bread dough that grew in the field, was transformed by human beings, and was sent back there; — or in whatever further ways faith may anthropomorphize the essence and render it objective and representable for itself.

The Enlightenment, which gives itself out as the pure, here makes an actual perishable thing out of what for spirit is eternal life and holy spirit, and it fouls that with the intrinsically null view held by sense-certainty, — a view not present to worshipping faith in the least, so that the Enlightenment simply tells faith this lie about it. What faith reveres is for faith in no sense stone, or wood, or bread dough, nor any other temporal sensuous thing. Should the Enlightenment take it into its head to say that faith's object is after all this too, or even that it is this in itself and in truth, then faith for its part is quite as well acquainted with that too, only that for faith it falls outside its worship; and for its part nothing of the sort, no stone and so forth, is in itself for faith at all, but in itself for faith is the essence of pure thinking alone.

The second moment is faith's relation, as a knowing consciousness, to this essence. For faith as thinking pure consciousness this essence is immediate; but pure consciousness is no less a mediated relating of certainty to truth, a relating that makes up the ground of faith. This ground becomes for the Enlightenment, in the same way, a contingent knowledge of contingent occurrences. The ground of knowledge, however, is that universal which knows, and this in its truth is absolute spirit, which, within abstract pure consciousness, or within thinking as such, is merely absolute essence, whereas as self-consciousness it is knowledge of itself. Pure insight sets down this knowing universal, the simple spirit that knows itself, as being likewise a negative of self-consciousness. Itself, to be sure, it is the purely mediated thinking, that is, thinking that mediates itself with itself, and it is pure knowledge; yet inasmuch as it is pure insight, pure knowledge that does not yet know itself, that is, for which it is not yet the case that it is this pure mediating movement, that movement appears to it, like everything it is itself, as another. Engaged, then, in its own actualization, it develops this essential moment of its own, yet the moment shows up for it as something faith owns, and, in the determinateness of being external to it, as a contingent knowledge of just such commonly actual histories. So it fathers upon religious faith the fabrication that faith's certainty rests upon a few singular historical testimonies which, regarded as historical testimonies, would certainly not yield that degree of certainty about their content which newspaper reports give us about some occurrence or other; — that faith's certainty rests, further, on the accident of the preservation of these testimonies, — preservation by paper on the one hand, and on the other by the dexterity and honesty with which they were carried over from one paper to another, and finally on the correct apprehension of what dead words and letters mean. In point of fact, though, it never enters faith's head to hang its certainty on testimonies and contingencies of that kind; in its certainty faith is an ingenuous relationship to its absolute object, a pure knowledge of that object, one that mixes no letters, no paper, and no copyists into its consciousness of the absolute essence and does not mediate itself with that essence by means of such things; this consciousness is instead the ground of its own knowledge, mediating itself with itself; it is spirit as such, which is its own testimony, as much in the interior of the singular consciousness as through the universal presence of the faith that all have in it. Should faith want to procure for itself, out of the historical, that manner of grounding or at any rate of confirming its content which the Enlightenment talks about, and should it be in earnest in supposing and acting as if that were what mattered, then it has already allowed the Enlightenment to lead it astray; and its exertions to ground or fortify itself in such a fashion are merely testimonies it gives of its own infection.

There remains the third side still, the relating of consciousness to the absolute essence as a doing. This doing consists in sublating the individual's particularity, or the natural way in which the individual is for itself, and out of it there arises for the individual the certainty that it is pure self-consciousness, one with the essence in accordance with its doing, that is, as a singular consciousness that is for itself. — Since purposiveness and purpose come apart within this doing, and since pure insight relates negatively to this doing as well and disowns itself here as in the other moments, it must, where purposiveness is concerned, present itself as want of understanding, insight being bound up with intention, so that the accord of purpose with means appears to it as something other, indeed as the contrary; — while where purpose is concerned it must make what is bad, enjoyment and possession, into the purpose, thereby proving itself the most impure intention, since pure intention, as another, is likewise impure intention.

In view of purposiveness, accordingly, we see the Enlightenment find it foolish when the believing individual procures for itself the higher consciousness of not being in bondage to natural enjoyment and pleasure, and procures it by actually refusing itself both, showing by the deed that it does not lie when it despises them, but that its contempt is true. — In the same way it finds it foolish that the individual should absolve itself of its determinateness of being an absolute singular that shuts out all others and holds property, by letting go of its property itself; whereby the individual displays in truth that it was not in earnest with its isolating, but that it stands above the natural necessity of singularizing itself and of denying, within this absolute singularization of being-for-itself, that the others are one and the same with it. — Pure insight finds the two of them unpurposive as well as wrong, — unpurposive, that in order to show oneself free of pleasure and possession one should refuse oneself pleasure and part with a possession; conversely, then, it will pronounce him a fool who, so as to eat, lays hold of the means of actually eating. — It finds it wrong as well that one should refuse oneself a meal, and should part with butter and eggs neither in exchange for money nor money in exchange for butter and eggs, but outright, receiving nothing of the sort back for them; such a meal, or possession of items like these, it pronounces an end in itself, and pronounces itself thereby, in fact, a very impure intention, one for which such enjoyment and possession are quite essentially the point. Being pure intention, it once more maintains that a rising above natural existence and above the greed for its means is necessary; it merely finds it foolish and wrong that such a rising should be proved by the deed; or rather, in truth this pure intention is a fraud, one that professes and requires an inward rising while giving out that taking it in earnest, actually setting it to work, and proving its truth are superfluous, foolish, and even wrong. — It therefore denies itself both as pure insight, since it denies the immediately purposive doing, and as pure intention, since it denies the intention of showing oneself liberated from the purposes of singularity.

This, then, is how the Enlightenment gives itself to faith to be undergone. It steps forward with this poor look about it because it is precisely by way of its relationship to another that it gives itself a negative reality, or exhibits itself as its own contrary; yet pure insight and intention have to give themselves this relationship, for the relationship is their actualization. — This showed itself at first as a negative reality. Maybe its positive reality has a better make to it; let us see how the latter behaves. — Once every prejudice and all superstition have been driven out, the question comes up: what comes next? What truth has the Enlightenment spread abroad in place of them? — It has already stated this positive content in the course of rooting out error, since that estrangement of itself is quite as much its positive reality. — In that which is absolute spirit for faith, it apprehends whatever it discovers there by way of determination as wood, stone, and so on, as singular actual things; since it thus grasps all determinateness in general, that is, all content and fulfillment of that spirit, in this manner as a finitude, as a human essence and representation, the absolute essence becomes for it a vacuum upon which no determinations, no predicates can be laid. Such a laying-together would in itself be culpable, and it is precisely the one in which the monsters of superstition have been begotten. Reason, pure insight, is admittedly not itself empty, seeing that its own negative is present for it and forms its content; it is rich, rather, though rich only in singularity and limit; to let nothing of that kind attach to the absolute essence or be laid upon it is its insightful way of living, a way that understands how to assign itself and its riches of finitude their place, and how to treat the absolute worthily.

Facing this empty essence, the second moment of the Enlightenment's positive truth is singularity as such, the singularity of consciousness and of all being, shut out from an absolute essence, taken as absolute being in and for itself. In its very first actuality consciousness is sense-certainty and opinion, and here, out of the whole path of its experience, it comes back to that point, being once more a knowledge of that which is purely negative of its own self, or of sensuous things, that is, of existing things which stand indifferently over against its being-for-itself. Here, though, it is not immediate natural consciousness; rather, it has become such for itself. Having first been given over to all the entanglement into which its own unfolding hurls it, and now returned by pure insight to the shape it first had, that shape it has experienced as the result. Grounded upon insight into the nothingness of every other shape of consciousness, and thus of everything that lies past sense-certainty, sense-certainty of this kind is opinion no longer; it is rather the absolute truth. This nothingness of all that reaches out past sense-certainty is admittedly no more than a negative proof of that truth; but of any other it is incapable, for the positive truth belonging to sense-certainty as such is just this, the concept's own unmediated being-for-itself as object, and indeed in the form of otherness, — namely that every consciousness is utterly certain that it is, and that there are other actual things outside it, and that in its natural being it is, like those things, in and for itself or absolute.

The third moment of the Enlightenment's truth, finally, is the relationship of the singular essences to the absolute essence, the relating of the first two moments. Insight, as pure insight of what is equal or unlimited, also goes beyond what is unequal, namely beyond finite actuality, or beyond itself as mere otherness. It has as the beyond of that actuality the empty, to which it therefore relates sensuous actuality. Into the determination of this relationship the two sides do not enter as content, for the one of them is the empty, so that content is on hand solely by way of the other, sensuous actuality. The form of the relating, however, in whose determination the side of the in-itself lends a hand, admits of being made at will; for the form is what is in itself negative, and therefore what opposes itself: being no less than nothing, the in-itself no less than its opposite; or, amounting to the same, the relating of actuality to the in-itself as the beyond is quite as much a negating of that actuality as a positing of it. Finite actuality can therefore, strictly speaking, be taken just as one happens to need it. So the sensuous is now referred to the absolute positively, as to what is in itself, and sensuous actuality is itself in itself; the absolute makes it, fosters it, and tends it. Then again it is also referred to the absolute as to its contrary, as to its non-being; on that relationship it is not in itself, but merely for an other. Whereas in the shape of consciousness that went before, the concepts of the opposition determined themselves as good and bad, for pure insight they turn instead into abstractions of a purer kind, that of being in itself and that of being for an other.

Both ways of regarding the matter, the finite's positive relating to the in-itself as well as its negative relating, are in fact necessary alike, so that everything is in itself in exactly the measure in which it is for an other; or: all things are useful. — Each thing surrenders itself to others, at one moment letting others put it to use and being for them; at the next it props itself up again, so to speak, on its hind legs, plays hard to get with what is other, is for itself, and puts the other to use on its own account. — For the human being, the thing that is conscious of this relation, his essence and his position follow from that. Immediately as he is, as natural consciousness, he is in himself, good, as a singular he is absolute, and other things are for him; and since for him, being the animal that is conscious of itself, the moments carry the significance of universality, everything exists for his pleasure and diversion, and, just as he issued from God's hand, he strolls about the world as though it were a garden laid out on his behalf. — He must have picked from the tree of the cognition of good and evil as well; therein he owns a usefulness that sets him apart from everything else, for as chance would have it his nature, good in itself, is also so made that an overdose of diversion injures it, or rather his singularity has its beyond in it too, can pass out beyond itself and destroy itself. As a safeguard here, reason serves him as a useful means for keeping this passing-beyond within due bounds, or rather for preserving himself in passing beyond what is determinate; for that is the force of consciousness. What the conscious essence, universal in itself, enjoys must itself, in variety and in duration, be nothing determinate but universal; measure accordingly has the determination of preventing pleasure from being broken off in its variety and duration; which is to say that measure is determined as immoderation. — As everything is useful to the human being, so is he useful in his turn, and his determination is just as much to make of himself a publicly useful and universally serviceable member of the troop. However much he looks after himself, exactly that much must he also make himself available to the others, and however much he makes himself available, that much does he look after himself: one hand washes the other. Yet wherever he may find himself, he is well placed: he is of use to others and is put to use.

One thing is useful to another in one manner, another in another; but what gives all things this useful mutuality is their essence, namely their being related to the absolute in the doubled manner: the positive one, — whereby each is in and for itself, and the negative one, whereby each is for others. The relating to the absolute essence, that is, religion, is therefore of all usefulness the most useful; for it is pure usefulness itself: it is that subsistence which all things have, the being in and for themselves that is theirs, and it is the falling of all things, the being for an other that is theirs.

For faith, to be sure, this positive result of the Enlightenment is no less a horror than is the Enlightenment's negative bearing toward it. This insight into the absolute essence, which sees nothing in it save just the absolute essence, the être supreme, or the void, — this outlook on which everything, just as it immediately exists, is in itself or good, and on which, finally, the concept of utility exhaustively expresses the relation of singular conscious being to the absolute essence, namely religion, is for faith flatly detestable. This peculiar wisdom of the Enlightenment necessarily appears to faith at once as flatness itself and as the confession of flatness; for it consists in knowing nothing of the absolute essence, or, what comes to the same, in knowing about it this wholly level truth, that it is just the absolute essence, whereas it knows only of finitude, and indeed knows finitude as the true, and this knowledge of finitude as the true, to be the highest thing of all.

Against the Enlightenment faith possesses divine right, the right belonging to absolute self-equality, that is, to pure thinking, and at the Enlightenment's hands it meets with nothing but wrong; for the Enlightenment contorts faith in every one of its moments and makes of them something other than they are within it. The Enlightenment, for its part, has merely human right against faith and in support of its truth; for the wrong it does is itself the right of inequality, and consists in inverting and altering, a right proper to the very nature of self-consciousness over against the simple essence, that is, over against thinking; but because the right it has is that of self-consciousness, the Enlightenment will not stop at keeping its right too, as though spirit were left with two equal rights confronting each other, neither of which could satisfy the other; it will instead lay claim to absolute right, since self-consciousness is that negativity of the concept which not only is for itself but also reaches out over its opposite; and faith, itself being consciousness, will find itself unable to refuse the Enlightenment that right.

For the Enlightenment takes up against the believing consciousness no principles peculiar to itself, but only such as that consciousness already carries within it. It merely gathers together for faith faith's own thoughts, which within it drift apart unnoticed; while faith dwells on one of its modes, the Enlightenment merely recalls to it the others that it also has, but of which it always forgets the one whenever it is occupied with the other. It proves itself to be pure insight in the face of faith precisely by seeing the whole while a determinate moment is before it, and so by fetching up the opposite bearing on that moment, and, by inverting the one into the other, driving forth the negative essence of both thoughts, the concept. It appears to faith as twisting and lie because it exhibits the otherness of faith's moments; it thereby seems to faith to be making of them straightaway something different from what they are in their singularity; but this other is just as essential, and in truth it is on hand in the believing consciousness itself, only that this consciousness does not think of it there but keeps it somewhere else; hence it is neither foreign to faith nor can faith disown it.

Yet the Enlightenment, for all that it reminds faith of the opposite of its separated-off moments, remains every bit as unenlightened about itself. Its relating to faith is purely negative, in that it excludes faith's content from its own purity and takes that content to be the negative of itself. In this negative, then, in faith's content, it fails to cognize itself, and on that same account it also fails to put together the two thoughts, the one it fetches up and the one against which it fetches that one up. Since it fails to cognize that what it condemns in faith is straightaway its own thought, it is itself caught in the opposition of the two moments, of which it acknowledges only one, namely in each case the one opposed to faith, while severing the other from it exactly as faith does. It therefore does not bring forth the unity of the two as their unity, that is, the concept; the concept nevertheless arises for it of its own accord, or it simply finds it there as something on hand. For pure insight realizes itself, in itself, in precisely this way: insight, having the concept for its essence, at first turns into an absolute other to itself and denies itself, for the concept's opposition is an absolute one, and then out of that otherness arrives at itself, or at its own concept. — But the Enlightenment is nothing more than this movement, the pure concept's activity still unconscious of itself, which does indeed reach itself as an object but takes that object for an other, and which likewise does not know the nature of the concept, namely that it is the undifferentiated that separates itself absolutely. — Against faith, therefore, insight is the power of the concept just to the extent that it constitutes the movement, the relating, of those moments that lie apart within faith's consciousness, a relating through which their contradiction is brought to light. Herein lies the absolute right of the violence that insight exercises over faith; the actuality, however, to which it brings this violence lies in just this, that the believing consciousness is itself the concept and therefore itself acknowledges the opposite that insight fetches up before it. The Enlightenment is therefore in the right as against faith, since what it makes valid in faith is just what faith itself cannot do without and what faith already has in its own self.

The Enlightenment asserts, first of all, the moment of the concept, namely that of being a doing of consciousness; it asserts this against faith — that faith's absolute essence is the essence of its own consciousness as a self, or that it is brought forth through consciousness. For the believing consciousness its absolute essence, exactly as it is for it the in-itself, is at the same time not like some foreign thing that would stand there, one knows not how or from where; rather, its trust consists precisely in finding itself therein as this personal consciousness, and its obedience and service consist in bringing that essence forth as its own absolute essence through its doing. It is really only of this that the Enlightenment reminds faith, whenever faith baldly pronounces the in-itself of the absolute essence to lie beyond the doing of consciousness. — But while it does bring up against faith's one-sidedness the opposed moment, that of consciousness's doing as against the being on which faith alone dwells here, and while it likewise fails to bring together the thoughts that are its own, it takes the pure moment of doing in isolation and pronounces about faith's in-itself that it is only something consciousness has brought forth. Doing that is isolated and set over against the in-itself is, however, a contingent doing, and, as a representing, a manufacture of fictions — of representations that are not in themselves; and this is how the Enlightenment views the content of faith. — Conversely, though, pure insight says the very opposite as well. In asserting the moment of otherness that the concept has in it, it pronounces the essence of faith to be one that in no way concerns consciousness, lying beyond it, foreign to it and uncognized. For faith, its essence is, on the one side, that which faith trusts and in which it has the certainty of itself, and on the other side something inscrutable in its ways and unreachable in its being.

Further, when the Enlightenment views the object of faith's veneration as stone and wood, or otherwise as a finite anthropomorphic determinateness, it asserts against the believing consciousness a right that this consciousness itself concedes. For since faith is this consciousness split in two, having a beyond of actuality and a pure here below over against that beyond, there is in fact present in it also this view of the sensuous thing, according to which the thing is valid in and for itself; yet the two thoughts of what is in and for itself, which for faith is at one time the pure essence and at another a common sensuous thing, never come together in it. — Even faith's pure consciousness is infected by the latter view, for, lacking the concept, the distinctions of its supersensible realm are a row of self-subsistent shapes and their movement a happening; that is to say, they are only in representation and carry about them the mode of sensuous being. — The Enlightenment on its side likewise isolates actuality, treating it as an essence forsaken by spirit, and isolates determinateness as an unbudging finitude which would be no moment within the spiritual movement of the essence itself, neither nothing, nor yet a something that is in and for itself, but a vanishing something.

It is plain that matters stand the same way with the ground of knowledge. The believing consciousness itself acknowledges a contingent knowledge, since contingencies are what it stands in a relationship to, and since the absolute essence itself has for it the form of a represented common actuality; with this the believing consciousness is also a certainty that lacks truth in its own self, and it owns up to being just such an unessential consciousness, on this side of the spirit that makes itself certain and corroborates itself. — This moment, however, it forgets in its spiritual, immediate knowledge of the absolute essence. — The Enlightenment, though, which recalls this to faith, has in mind once again only the contingent knowledge and lets the other slip, — has in mind only that mediation which takes place by way of an alien third, and not the mediation in which what is immediate serves as its own third, through which it brings about its own mediation with the other, that is, with itself.

Finally, in its view of the doing of faith, the Enlightenment finds the casting away of enjoyment and of possessions to be wrong and lacking in purposiveness. — As regards the wrong, it secures the agreement of the believing consciousness in this, that the latter itself acknowledges the actuality of owning property, holding fast to it, and enjoying it; and it conducts itself all the more stubbornly and in isolation in asserting its property, just as it surrenders itself all the more crudely in its enjoyment, since beyond this actuality falls its religious doing — the doing that gives up possession and enjoyment — which purchases for it its freedom on that side. Through this opposition, such service of sacrificing natural impulse and enjoyment has in fact no truth; retention takes place alongside sacrifice; the sacrifice is merely a sign that accomplishes the actual sacrifice in only a small part and hence in fact merely represents it.

As for purposiveness, the Enlightenment judges it clumsy that a single possession should be thrown away so as to know and show oneself free of possession as such, that a single enjoyment should be denied oneself so as to know and show oneself free of enjoyment as such. The believing consciousness itself takes absolute doing to be a universal doing; for it, universality belongs not merely to the acting of that absolute essence which is its object, but the singular consciousness as well is to show itself wholly and universally freed from its sensuous essence. But to throw away a singular possession, or to renounce a singular enjoyment, is not the universal action in question; and since, within action, the purpose, which is a universal, and the execution, which is a singular, would essentially have to stand before consciousness in their mismatch, such acting proves to be an acting in which consciousness has no share, and thus proves, strictly speaking, too naive to count as an action; fasting is too naive a way to show oneself free of the pleasure of the meal, — too naive, as with Origen, to rid oneself of another pleasure from the body in order to show it done away with. The action itself proves to be an external and singular doing; desire, however, has its roots within, and it is a universal; the pleasure it takes vanishes neither along with the instrument nor through any singular privation.

Here, however, it is the Enlightenment that takes the inward, the unactual in isolation over against actuality, just as earlier it clung to the externality of thinghood over against the inwardness of faith in its intuition and devotion. It locates what is essential in the intent, in the thought, and so spares itself the actual accomplishment of any liberation from natural purposes; in truth this inwardness is itself what is merely formal, finding its fulfillment in the natural drives, which are justified precisely by being inward, by having their place in universal being, in nature.

The Enlightenment therefore has an irresistible power over faith for the reason that the very moments it makes valid are to be found in faith's own consciousness. Considered more closely as to its effect, this force in its relating to faith seems to rend the beautiful unity that trust forms with immediate certainty, to sully faith's spiritual consciousness with base thoughts taken from sensuous actuality, and, through the vanity of the understanding and of one's own willing and accomplishing, to wreck a disposition that submission had left quieted and assured. In fact, though, what it rather sets in motion is the sublation of the thoughtless, or rather conceptless separation that is on hand in faith. The believing consciousness employs a double measure and weight; it has two kinds of eyes, two kinds of ears, two kinds of tongue and speech; it has doubled all its representations without ever comparing this doubleness of sense. Or faith lives in two kinds of perception: the one, the perception of the sleeping consciousness that lives purely in conceptless thoughts, the other that of the waking consciousness that lives purely in sensuous actuality; and in each it keeps a household of its own. — The Enlightenment throws the light of the representations of the sensuous world upon that heavenly one, and pointed out in the latter this finitude, which faith cannot disavow, since faith is self-consciousness and hence the unity to which both modes of representation belong and in which they do not drift apart, for they belong to one and the same inseparable simple self, and it is into this self that faith has passed over.

Faith has thereby lost the content that filled its element, and sinks together into a dull stirring of spirit within itself. It is driven out of its kingdom, or this kingdom has been plundered, since the waking consciousness seized to itself every distinction and every extension of that kingdom, and claimed and gave back all its parts to the earth as the earth's property. Faith is not for that reason satisfied, for this illumination has everywhere brought forth nothing but singular essence, so that what speaks to spirit is an actuality void of essence and a finitude that spirit has abandoned. — Having no content, and unable to remain in this emptiness, or rather, going out past the finite, which is its one content, and coming upon the void alone, faith is pure longing; its truth is a beyond that stands empty, for which no adequate content can any longer be found, since everything has been put to other uses. — With this, faith has in truth turned into the very thing that the Enlightenment is: consciousness of the relation borne by the finite that is in itself to the predicateless, uncognized and uncognizable absolute; the sole difference being that the Enlightenment is the satisfied one, and faith the unsatisfied Enlightenment. Whether the Enlightenment can remain within its satisfaction is something that will show itself in the Enlightenment; that longing of the clouded spirit, mourning as it does the loss of the spiritual world that was its own, lies waiting in ambush. The Enlightenment itself bears this blemish of unsatisfied longing about it, — in the guise of pure object, upon its empty absolute essence, — in the guise of doing and movement, upon the going out beyond its own singular essence toward the unfulfilled beyond, — in the guise of fulfilled object, upon the selflessness of the useful. It will sublate this blemish; from a closer consideration of the positive result that is truth for it, it will emerge that the blemish is in itself already sublated therein.

b. The Truth of the Enlightenment

The muffled weaving of spirit, which no longer distinguishes anything within itself, has thus, within itself, stepped beyond consciousness, whereas consciousness has by contrast gained clarity about itself. — In respect of its necessity and its condition, what determines the first moment of such clarity is this: that pure insight, which in itself is the concept, makes itself actual; and it does this by positing otherness, or determinateness, upon insight itself. So taken, insight is negative pure insight, that is, the negation of the concept; this negation is just as pure; and with it there has arisen the pure thing, the absolute essence, which apart from this carries no further determination. Spelled out more closely: as absolute concept, insight is a distinguishing of distinctions which are distinctions no longer, a distinguishing of abstractions, of pure concepts, that no longer carry themselves and owe their hold and their distinctness entirely to the whole of the movement. What such distinguishing of the undistinguished amounts to is just this: that the absolute concept turns itself into its own object and, in the face of that movement, sets itself up as the essence. In doing so the essence goes without the aspect in which the abstractions or distinctions get held apart, and so what it turns into is pure thinking as pure thing. — This, accordingly, is just that muffled, unconscious weaving of spirit inside itself into which faith sank down when it forfeited its differentiated content; — and it is likewise that movement belonging to pure self-consciousness, for which it is meant to be the utterly alien beyond. For, since this pure self-consciousness is movement in pure concepts, in distinguishings that are not distinctions at all, it does in fact collapse together with the unconscious weaving, that is, with pure feeling or with pure thinghood. — The self-estranged concept, however — for it still stands here at the level of this estrangement — does not cognize this same essence in both sides, in the movement of self-consciousness and in its absolute essence, — does not cognize the same essence of the two, which is in fact their substance and their subsistence. Failing to cognize this unity, it takes the essence to be valid only under the form of an objective beyond, whereas the distinguishing consciousness, which on these terms keeps the in-itself outside itself, counts as a finite consciousness.

Over that absolute essence the Enlightenment enters into the very conflict with itself that it previously had with faith, and it splits into two parties. A party first corroborates itself as the victorious one by breaking apart into two parties; for in doing so it shows that it possesses in itself the very principle it was fighting, and has thereby sublated the one-sidedness with which it earlier came forward. The interest formerly shared between it and the other party now falls wholly within it and forgets the other, since inside itself it finds the opposition that keeps it occupied. At the same time, though, the opposition has been lifted into that higher, victorious element in which it presents itself purified. So that the discord arising within one party, which looks like a misfortune, proves instead to be its good fortune.

Pure essence itself has no distinction in it; distinction therefore accrues to it in such a way that two such pure essences come forth for consciousness, or rather a twofold consciousness of pure essence comes forth. — Pure absolute essence has its place only within pure thinking; indeed it simply is pure thinking, and hence it is nothing but the negative essence, lying flatly beyond the finite, beyond self-consciousness. Yet on these terms it is precisely being, the negative belonging to self-consciousness. And as that negative, it is also related to self-consciousness; it is external being, and, in being related to that in which distinctions and determinations fall, it receives distinctions upon itself, namely that of being tasted, of being seen, and so forth; and the relationship is sense-certainty and perception.

Suppose we take our start from this sensuous being, which is where that negative beyond necessarily ends up, and abstract from the determinate modes of consciousness's relation to it; pure matter is then what remains over, the muffled weaving and stirring within itself. The essential point to observe here is that pure matter is merely the residue that remains once we abstract from sight, touch, taste, and the rest, which is to say, it is not the seen, the tasted, the felt, and the rest; what gets seen, felt, and tasted is never matter but rather the color, a stone, a salt, and so forth; matter is instead the pure abstraction; and by this route the pure essence of thinking comes to be at hand, or pure thinking itself, as the absolute that is undifferentiated within, undetermined, and devoid of predicates.

The one Enlightenment calls the absolute essence that predicateless absolute which lies beyond actual consciousness, in thinking, and from which we set out; — the other calls it matter. If the two were distinguished as nature on the one hand and spirit or God on the other, then the unconscious weaving within itself would lack, in order to be nature, the wealth of unfolded life; — and spirit or God would lack the consciousness that distinguishes itself within itself. As we have seen, the two are flatly one and the same concept; what separates them lies not in the matter itself but purely in the divergent points of departure taken by the two formations, and in the fact that each halts at a point of its own within the movement of thinking. Were they to step past that point, they would meet and would cognize as one and the same what counts for the one, on its own profession, as an abomination and for the other as folly. For to the one, the absolute essence lies within its pure thinking, or immediately for pure consciousness, outside the finite consciousness, as the negative beyond of the latter. Suppose it reflected that this simple immediacy of thinking is nothing other than pure being, and, further, that whatever stands as negative for consciousness bears at once a relation to consciousness, seeing that in the negative judgment it is precisely the is (copula) that holds the two separated terms together as well, — then there would follow a relation of this beyond, taken under the determination of an external existent, to consciousness, and so an identity with what goes by the name of pure matter; the lacking moment of presence would thereby have been won. — The other Enlightenment sets out from sensuous being, proceeds to abstract away the sensuous relation of tasting and seeing and the rest, and makes of it the pure in-itself, absolute matter, that which is neither felt nor tasted; this being has in this way become the predicateless simple, essence of pure consciousness; and it is the pure concept as existing in itself, or pure thinking within itself. Within its own consciousness this insight does not take the countervailing step from what exists, which is purely existent, across to the thought, which is the same as the purely existent, nor therefore the step from what is purely positive to what is purely negative; and yet the positive is pure at all only through negation, while the purely negative, precisely as pure, is self-equal within itself and positive on just that account. — Or rather, neither of them has reached the concept of Cartesian metaphysics, that being in itself and thinking are the same, nor the further thought that being, pure being, is nothing concrete and actual but the pure abstraction; and conversely that pure thinking, self-equality, or essence, is on one side the negative of self-consciousness and hence being, and on the other, as immediate simplicity, likewise nothing other than being; thinking is thinghood, or, equally, thinghood is thinking.

At this point essence carries the splitting-in-two within it only to the extent that it belongs to two sorts of consideration; on one side essence must carry the distinction in its very self, on the other side it is just here that the two sorts of consideration run together into one; for those abstract moments, pure being and the negative, through which the two sorts differ, are then united in the object that these ways of considering have. — The universal they share is the abstraction of a pure quivering within itself, or of pure thinking of itself. This simple movement rotating on its own axis must throw itself apart, because it is movement at all only in distinguishing its own moments. What such distinguishing of the moments leaves behind is the unmoved, the hollow shell of pure being, which is actual thinking no longer, no longer any life within itself; for as the distinction, it is the whole of the content. But this distinguishing, which posits itself outside that unity, is thereby the alternation among the moments in-itself, being for another, and being-for-itself, an alternation that does not return into itself; — it is actuality in the shape it wears as object for pure insight's actual consciousness, — it is utility.

However poorly utility may show up in the eyes of faith, or of sentimentality, or even of that abstraction which styles itself speculation and fixes the in-itself for itself, utility is nonetheless where pure insight brings its realization to completion and where insight is its own object, an object it no longer disavows and one that does not carry for it the worth of something empty or of a pure beyond. For, as we saw, pure insight is the existent concept itself, the self-equal pure personality, and it draws distinctions inside itself in such fashion that each distinguished term is itself pure concept, which is to say, is immediately not distinguished at all; pure insight is a simple, pure self-consciousness standing for itself every bit as much as in itself, within one immediate unity. Hence what insight has as being-in-itself is no abiding being; it immediately stops being anything in its distinctness, and a being of that sort, one that immediately has no hold, is not in itself but essentially for another, namely the power by which it gets absorbed. Yet this second moment, set over against the first, against being-in-itself, disappears every bit as immediately as the first did; or rather, as being only for another it is disappearing itself, and thereby it is what has returned into itself, it is being-for-itself posited. But this simple being-for-itself, as self-equality, is rather a being, and hence for another. — The useful gives expression to this nature that pure insight has in the unfolding of its moments, that is, to pure insight as object. The useful is something that subsists in itself, a thing, and yet such being-in-itself amounts to no more than a pure moment; the useful is therefore absolutely for another, though it is for another only in the measure in which it is in itself; and these opposed moments have gone back into the inseparable unity of being-for-itself. Now although the useful does give expression to the concept of pure insight, it does so not as that insight as such but as insight in the form of representation or as its object; it is nothing more than the tireless alternation of those moments, of which one is admittedly the very having-returned-into-itself, yet only as being-for-itself, that is, as an abstract moment stepping aside over against the rest. The useful is not itself that negative essence which holds these moments, opposed as they are, at once undivided under one and the same regard, or holds them in itself as a thinking, in the way they are when they are pure insight; the useful does carry within it the moment of being-for-itself, yet not in such fashion that it reaches out over the other moments, the in-itself and being for another, and would thereby be the self. So in the useful pure insight has for its object its own concept in that concept's pure moments; it is the consciousness of this metaphysics, though not yet the comprehension of it; the unity of being and of the concept itself has still not been arrived at. Since for pure insight the useful still wears the form of an object, insight goes on having a world, one that no longer exists in and for itself and yet is still a world, which it marks off from itself. Yet since the oppositions have stepped out to the sharp point of the concept, the next stage will be that they collapse together and that the Enlightenment comes to experience the fruit of its own deeds.

If we consider the object now reached in relation to this whole sphere, the actual world of culture had gathered itself up into the vanity of self-consciousness, — into the being-for-itself that still has that world's confusion for its content and that is still the singular concept, not yet the concept that is universal for itself. Returned into itself, however, that concept is pure insight, — pure consciousness in the guise of the pure self, that is, negativity, while faith is that very same pure consciousness in the guise of pure thinking, that is, positivity. In that self faith possesses the moment which completes it; — but since faith goes under through this very supplement, pure insight is now where the two moments come into view for us: as the absolute essence, purely thought or negative — and as matter, the positive existent. — What this completeness still lacks is that actuality of self-consciousness proper to the vain consciousness, — the world from which thinking lifted itself up to itself. In utility this lack is made good to the extent that pure insight has won positive objectivity there; insight is on that account an actual consciousness, satisfied inside itself. Such objectivity now constitutes insight's world; it has turned into the truth of the whole preceding world, the ideal one as much as the real. The first world of spirit is the outspread realm of its self-dispersing existence and of the isolated certainty of itself; just as nature scatters its life into shapes of endless variety, with no genus of those shapes at hand. The second world holds the genus, and constitutes the realm of being-in-itself, of truth as against that certainty. The third, though, the useful, is that truth which is at the same time the certainty of itself. What the realm of faith's truth lacks is the principle of actuality, of certainty of its own self as this singular. Actuality, on the other hand, certainty of its own self as this singular, is what lacks the in-itself. Both worlds are unified in what pure insight has for its object. The useful is that object, insofar as self-consciousness sees clean through it and finds in it its own singular certainty, its enjoyment (its being-for-itself); in this fashion self-consciousness sees its way into the object, and such insight holds within it the true essence of the object (namely, being something seen through, or being for another); insight is therefore itself true knowledge, and self-consciousness possesses with equal immediacy its own universal certainty, its pure consciousness, within this relationship, a relationship in which, accordingly, truth is bound up with presence and actuality alike. Both worlds are reconciled, and heaven has been transplanted down onto the earth.

III. Absolute Freedom and Terror

It is in utility that consciousness has found its own concept. But this concept is in part still an object, and for that very reason still a purpose as well, one in possession of which consciousness does not yet immediately stand. As yet, utility remains something predicated of the object, not the subject itself, or its immediate and sole actuality. It is the same thing that appeared earlier in this guise: that being-for-itself has not yet shown itself to be what is substance for the other moments, which would make the useful immediately nothing but the self of consciousness, and would thereby put it in consciousness's possession. — This retraction of the form of objectivity in the useful has, however, in itself already taken place, and out of this inner overturning there emerges the actual overturning of actuality, the new shape of consciousness, absolute freedom.

For in fact what is present is no more than objectivity's empty semblance, and it is this that holds self-consciousness apart from possession. For, on the one side, whatever subsistence and validity the determinate members of the organization of the actual and the believed world had has withdrawn altogether into this simple determination, which is their ground and their spirit; on the other side, that determination retains nothing of its own any longer, being instead pure metaphysics, pure concept, or the knowledge self-consciousness has. What consciousness cognizes, in the useful as object with respect to its being in and for itself, is that its being-in-itself is, in essence, being for another; being-in-itself, as what is selfless, is in truth the passive, or what is there for another self. For consciousness, though, the object has this abstract form, that of pure being-in-itself. Consciousness, after all, is pure insight, and the differences within it have the pure form of concepts. — But the being-for-itself into which being for another withdraws, the self, is not some self of its own, distinct from the I, belonging to what goes by the name of object; for consciousness as pure insight is not a singular self confronted by the object as an equally own self, but is the pure concept, self looking into self, the absolute doubled seeing of one's own self; its certainty of itself constitutes the universal subject, and the concept it knows constitutes the essence of all actuality. So if the useful amounted to nothing but an interchange of moments that never came back into its own unity, and was on that account still an object for knowledge, it now stops being one, since knowledge is itself that movement of the abstract moments; knowledge is the universal self, self of itself no less than of the object, and, being universal, the unity into which this movement returns.

Spirit is hereby present as absolute freedom; it is that self-consciousness which grasps itself thus: that its own certainty of itself is what is essence in every spiritual mass, in the real world no less than in the supersensible one, or, turned about, that essence and actuality are nothing but consciousness's knowledge of itself. — Aware of its pure personality, it is therein aware of spiritual reality in its entirety, and reality is nothing but the spiritual; the world, for it, is quite simply its own will, and that will is a universal will. And this will, be it noted, is not the empty thought of a will posited in tacit or represented consent, but is really and truly a universal will, a will belonging to each and every singular one as such. For in itself the will is the consciousness that personality, or anyone whatever, has, and it ought to exist as this genuine, actual will, as that self-conscious essence which belongs to all personality and to each, so that everyone always does the whole undividedly, and whatever comes on the scene as the whole's doing is the immediate, conscious doing of each one.

This undivided substance of absolute freedom mounts the world's throne, and no power whatever is able to withstand it. For consciousness is in truth the sole element wherein spiritual essences, or powers, possess their substance, and so their whole system, which organized and maintained itself by dividing into masses, has fallen apart, once singular consciousness grasped the object as having no essence other than self-consciousness itself, that is, as being absolutely the concept. What made the concept into an existent object was its differentiation into separated, subsisting masses; but as the object becomes the concept, nothing subsisting remains in it; negativity has penetrated all its moments. It steps into existence in this way: each singular consciousness raises itself out of the sphere allotted to it, ceases to locate its essence and its work in that particularized mass, and instead apprehends its own self to be the concept of the will and all the masses to be this will's essence, so that it can actualize itself only in a labor that is labor entire. In this absolute freedom, then, every estate is wiped out, all those spiritual essences the whole articulates itself into; the singular consciousness that had belonged to such a member, willing and accomplishing within it, has sublated its barrier; the universal purpose is its purpose, the universal law its language, the universal work its work.

Object and difference have here lost the meaning of utility, which had served as predicate for all real being; consciousness no longer starts its movement from the object as from something alien out of which it would first have to return into itself, for the object is to it consciousness itself; opposition accordingly reduces to the one difference between singular and universal consciousness; but the singular is immediately, for itself, that which merely bore the semblance of opposition, and it is universal consciousness and will. Over the corpse of that vanished self-subsistence belonging to real or believed being, the beyond of this its actuality floats as nothing more than the reek of a stale gas, the empty Etre suprême.

Once the differentiated spiritual masses have been sublated, along with the restricted life of individuals and spirit's two worlds, what remains present is nothing but universal self-consciousness moving within itself, moving as an interaction of itself under the form of universality with itself as personal consciousness; the universal will withdraws into itself and is a singular will, faced by the universal law and work. Yet this singular consciousness knows itself, with the same immediacy, to be universal will; it knows that its object is law which it has itself given and work which it has itself accomplished; and so, passing over into activity and bringing objectivity into being, it produces nothing singular, but only laws and acts of state.

By this the movement becomes consciousness's interaction with its own self, one in which it discharges nothing that would take on the shape of an object standing free over against it . The consequence is that it can attain no positive work at all: neither universal works of language nor of actuality, neither laws and universal institutions of conscious freedom — nor deeds and works of freedom as willing. — The work that freedom, in giving itself consciousness, might make of itself would amount to this: that as universal substance it should turn itself into an object and into enduring being. This otherness would be the difference within it, according to which it would divide itself into subsisting spiritual masses and into the members of various powers; partly in that these masses would be the thought-things of a separate legislative, judicial, and executive power, partly in that they would be the real essences that emerged in the real world of culture and, once the content of universal doing were considered more closely, the particular masses of laboring, which are further differentiated as more specific estates. — Universal freedom, having in this way separated itself into its members and by that very act made itself into existent substance, would thereby be free of singular individuality and would apportion the multitude of individuals among its various members. Personality's doing and being would thereby be confined, though, to a single branch of the whole, to a single sort of doing and being; placed into being as its element, personality would take on the significance of something determinate; it would stop being universal self-consciousness in truth. Universal self-consciousness will not be swindled out of actuality in the process, neither by the representation of obedience to self-given laws that would allot it a part, nor by its representation in legislating and in universal doing, — not swindled out of the actuality of giving the law itself, and of accomplishing not one singular work but the universal itself; for where the self is merely represented and merely a representation, there it is not something actual; where it is stood in for, it simply is not.

Singular self-consciousness fails to find itself in absolute freedom's universal work as an existent substance, and it fails just as surely in the proper deeds and individual actions of freedom's will. If the universal is to arrive at a deed, it has to draw itself together into individuality's One and put a singular self-consciousness at the head; for only within a self that is one is the universal will an actual will. By that very move, however, all the other singulars are shut out from the whole of this deed, sharing in it only within limits, with the result that the deed would not be a deed of actual universal self-consciousness. — Universal freedom can therefore bring forth no positive work or deed; nothing is left to it but negative doing; it is merely the fury of vanishing.

But there remains one actuality that stands highest and most opposed to universal freedom, or rather one object that still comes to be for it: the freedom and singularity belonging to actual self-consciousness itself. For universality of that sort, which never lets things come to the reality of an organic articulation and whose purpose lies in preserving itself within undivided continuity, differentiates itself internally all the same, being as it is movement, or consciousness as such. And precisely for the sake of its own abstraction it splits into extremes equally abstract: on the one side universality, simple, unbending, cold; on the other the discrete, absolute, hard brittleness and stubborn pointlikeness of actual self-consciousness. Having finished off the real organization and now subsisting for itself, universality has this and nothing else for its object; — an object stripped of all further content, of possession, existence, and outward extension, an object that is nothing but this knowledge of itself as a singular self, absolutely pure and free. There is nothing about it to lay hold of except its abstract existence as such. — The relationship of these two, then, since they are indivisibly and absolutely for themselves and can therefore send no part into the middle by which they might link up with each other, is wholly unmediated pure negation; and indeed the negation of the singular as an existent within the universal. Universal freedom's sole work and deed is accordingly death, a death, moreover, with no inner extent or fulfillment, since what gets negated is the unfulfilled point of the self that is absolutely free; and so it is the coldest, shallowest death of all, meaning no more than the hacking apart of a cabbage head or a swallow of water.

In the shallowness of this syllable lies the wisdom of the government, the understanding possessed by the universal will in accomplishing itself. The government is itself nothing other than the point that fixes itself in place, or the individuality of the universal will. Being a willing and accomplishing that issues from one point, it wills and accomplishes, at one and the same time, an ordinance and an action that are determinate. In doing so it shuts all remaining individuals out of its deed, while at the same time constituting itself as something that is a determinate will and hence set against the universal will; it therefore has flatly no way of presenting itself other than as a faction. Only the victorious faction is called the government, and precisely in its being a faction there lies, immediately, the necessity of its downfall; and conversely, that it is the government is what makes it a faction and guilty. Should the universal will hold the government's actual acting against it as the crime committed upon it, the government in return possesses nothing determinate, nothing external, in which the guilt of the will set against it might display itself; for over against the government, which is the actual universal will, there stands only the unactual pure will, the intention. Falling under suspicion accordingly steps into the place of being guilty, or carries the same meaning and effect , and the reaction from outside directed at this actuality, which resides in the bare inwardness of intention, consists in the dry extermination of this existent self, a self from which there is nothing to remove save its very being.

In this work peculiar to it, absolute freedom turns itself into an object, and self-consciousness learns what freedom is. In itself it is precisely this abstract self-consciousness, which eradicates within itself all difference and all subsistence of difference. As this it is its own object; death's terror is the intuition of this negative essence of its own. This reality of freedom's, however, absolutely free self-consciousness finds to be wholly other than freedom's own concept of itself had been, the concept, namely, that the universal will is nothing but personality's positive essence, and that personality knows itself in that will only positively, only as preserved. Here, instead, for this consciousness, which as pure insight draws a flat separation between its positive and its negative essence, — the absolute without predicates as pure thinking and equally as pure matter, — the absolute transition from the one to the other is present in its actuality. — The universal will, as absolutely positive actual self-consciousness, turns over into the negative essence, because it is this self-conscious actuality heightened into pure thinking or into abstract matter, and shows itself to be just as much the sublating of thinking of itself, or of self-consciousness.

Being, then, the universal will's pure self-equality, absolute freedom carries negation within it, and with negation difference as such, and it develops that difference once again into actual difference. For in the self-equal universal will pure negativity finds its element of subsistence, its substance, wherein its moments become real; it finds the matter it can put to use for its own determinateness; and since that substance has proved to be the negative for singular consciousness, the organization of the spiritual masses builds itself up once more, and among these masses the multitude of individual consciousnesses is distributed. These consciousnesses, having felt the fear of their absolute master, death, once more put up with negation and with the differences, subordinate themselves to the masses, and return to a divided and restricted work, but thereby to their substantial actuality.

This tumult would have flung spirit back to where it started, the real and ethical world of culture, a world that the fear of the master, come once again into people's hearts, had done no more than freshen and make young again. Spirit would have to traverse this circuit of necessity afresh and repeat it endlessly, were the result nothing more than self-consciousness and substance thoroughly penetrating each other, — a penetration in which self-consciousness, having undergone the force its universal essence turns negatively against it, would want to know and find itself to be, not this particular, but only something universal, and could on that account also bear the objective actuality of universal spirit, which shuts it out as a particular. — But in absolute freedom there was nothing, neither consciousness, which is sunk into a manifold existence or which fixes determinate purposes and thoughts for itself, — nor an external valid world, be it one of actuality or of thought, standing in reciprocal interaction with one another; rather, there was the world simply in the form of consciousness, as universal will, and equally self-consciousness drawn together out of all extended existence, out of manifold purpose and judgment, into the simple self. The culture it gains through interaction with that essence is therefore the loftiest and the final one: watching its pure, simple actuality vanish immediately and pass over into the emptiness of nothing. Within the world of culture itself, consciousness never reaches the point of intuiting its negation or estrangement in this form of pure abstraction; there its negation is a filled one: either the honor or the wealth won in place of the self from which it estranged itself; — or the language of spirit and of insight that torn consciousness attains, or else it is faith's heaven, or the useful of the Enlightenment. Every one of these determinations goes under in the loss the self suffers in absolute freedom; its negation is death without meaning, the negative's sheer terror, holding within it nothing positive, nothing that fills. — Yet this negation, in its actuality, is not anything alien at the same time: it is neither that universal necessity lying beyond, in which the ethical world perishes, nor the singular contingency of private possession or of the owner's whim, on which torn consciousness sees its own dependence, — it is rather the universal will, and this will, in the last abstraction it has reached, holds nothing positive and can therefore return nothing for the sacrifice, — and just for that reason it stands unmediatedly at one with self-consciousness; being the purely negative, it is for that very reason the purely positive; and death without meaning, the self's unfulfilled negativity, reverses within the inner concept into positivity that is absolute. The immediate unity that consciousness has with the universal will, the demand it makes that it know itself to be this determinate point within that will, is transformed for consciousness into the flatly opposite experience. What vanishes for it here is abstract being, the immediacy of a point without substance, and the universal will is itself just this vanished immediacy, as which consciousness now knows itself, insofar as it is sublated immediacy, insofar as it amounts to pure knowledge or pure will. Consciousness thereby knows that will as itself and knows itself as essence, though not as the essence that is immediately existent, knowing neither that will as the revolutionary government or as the anarchy striving to constitute anarchy, nor knowing itself as the midpoint of this faction or of its opposite; rather, the universal will is its pure knowledge and willing, and it is universal will as this pure knowledge and willing. In this it does not lose itself, for pure knowledge and willing is what it is, rather than the atomic point of consciousness. It is thus pure knowledge interacting with its own self; pure knowledge taken as essence is the universal will; yet this essence is simply and solely pure knowledge. Self-consciousness is therefore the pure knowledge of essence as pure knowledge. Further, as singular self it is nothing but the form of the subject, the form of actual doing, and this form it knows precisely as form; and likewise objective actuality, being, is for it a form that is simply selfless; for such actuality would be what goes unknown; but this knowledge knows knowledge as the essence.

Absolute freedom has thus settled with itself the opposition between universal and singular will; self-estranged spirit, driven to the peak of its own opposition, where pure willing and what purely wills still stand differentiated, brings the opposition down to a form that is transparent, and finds itself there. — As the actual world's realm makes its transition into the realm of faith and of insight, so absolute freedom departs its self-destroying actuality for a different country of spirit conscious of itself, one in which, amid such unactuality, freedom counts as the true, on whose thought spirit regales itself so long as it is thought and stays thought, and knows this being locked up inside self-consciousness as the perfect and complete essence. The new shape of moral spirit has arisen.

C. Spirit Certain of Itself. Morality

The ethical world exhibited the spirit that within it was merely a departed one, the singular self, as that world's fate and its truth. This person of right, however, has its substance and its fulfillment outside itself. This abstraction of the person is sublated by the movement belonging to the world of culture and to the world of faith, and, through an estrangement carried to completion, through the highest abstraction, substance turns for spirit's self into the universal will at first, and at last into spirit's own property. So knowledge appears here to have attained at last a complete equality with its truth; for its truth is just this knowledge, and the entire opposition of the two sides has fallen away; not merely for us or in itself has it fallen away, but for self-consciousness itself. For it has made itself master of the opposition that belongs to consciousness as such, an opposition grounded in the antithesis between the object and consciousness's certainty of its own self; now, however, the object is for it that very certainty, is knowledge — while its certainty of itself, taken as such, has purposes of its own no longer, and so stands no longer within determinateness but is pure knowledge.

The knowledge of self-consciousness is therefore for it the substance itself. For it, substance is in one undivided unity just as much immediate as it is absolutely mediated. Immediate — as the ethical consciousness does, it too knows duty and does duty itself, and belongs to duty as to its own nature; yet it is not character, which the ethical consciousness is, since immediacy makes the latter a determinate spirit, one belonging to but a single ethical essentiality and carrying with it the side of not knowing. — Absolute mediation it is as well, in the manner of the consciousness that undergoes culture and the consciousness of faith; for what it essentially is, is the self's movement of sublating the abstraction of immediate existence, so as to make itself something universal; — but this comes about neither through a sheer estrangement and tearing apart of its self and of actuality, — nor through flight. On the contrary, in its substance it is present to itself immediately, for that substance is its knowledge, is the pure certainty of itself as intuited; and just this immediacy, which constitutes its own actuality, is all actuality, since what is immediate is being itself, and as an immediacy purified through absolute negativity it is something pure, it is being in general, or all being.

The absolute essence is therefore not used up in the determination of being the simple essence of thinking ; on the contrary, it is actuality in its entirety, and such actuality exists only as knowledge; whatever consciousness were not to know would carry no sense and can count as no power for it; into consciousness's knowing will every objectivity, the whole world, has retreated. Its absolute freedom lies in this, that it knows its own freedom, and this very knowledge of its freedom is what constitutes its substance, its purpose, and its one and only content.

a. The Moral Worldview

Duty is what self-consciousness knows as the absolute essence; duty alone binds it, and this substance is nothing other than its own pure consciousness; for it, duty can never acquire the form of something alien. Sealed up within itself in this fashion, though, moral self-consciousness is not yet set down and examined as consciousness. Its object amounts to immediate knowledge, and having been saturated by the self in so pure a way, that object is no object. But being essentially mediation as well as negativity, it carries in its concept a relation to otherness; and so it is consciousness. This otherness, on the one hand, is for it a wholly meaningless actuality, since duty makes up its one essential purpose and object. But because this consciousness is so perfectly sealed within itself, its stance toward that otherness is one of perfect freedom and indifference, and existence is therefore, on the other side, an existence that self-consciousness has entirely released, an existence relating to nothing but itself; the more freedom self-consciousness gains, the more the negative object of its consciousness gains as well. Through this it becomes a world complete in itself, rounded out into an individuality all its own, a self-subsistent totality of laws peculiar to it, together with a self-subsistent course and free realization of these, — a nature in general, whose laws as much as its doings belong to it, as to an essence that troubles itself about moral self-consciousness as little as the latter troubles itself about nature.

From this determination onward a moral worldview shapes itself, and it consists in the relation in which moral being-in-and-for-itself stands to natural being-in-and-for-itself. Underlying this relation there is, on one side, the utter indifference and the peculiar self-subsistence that nature and moral purposes and activity have toward one another, and, on the other side, the consciousness that duty is the one and only essentiality while nature is entirely non-self-subsistent and without essentiality. What the moral worldview contains is the development of those moments that lie within this relation of presuppositions so utterly at odds.

To begin with, then, moral consciousness in general is presupposed; duty counts for it as the essence, for a consciousness that is actual and active and that fulfills duty in its actuality and its deed. For this moral consciousness, however, the freedom of nature is presupposed just as much, or it experiences that nature takes no interest in giving it any consciousness that its own actuality is at one with nature's, and so leaves it to become perhaps happy, perhaps also not. The immoral consciousness, on the contrary, may find its own realization by sheer chance, precisely where the moral consciousness finds nothing but an occasion for acting and does not see the good fortune of execution and the enjoyment of accomplishment come to it through what it does. It therefore finds ground enough for lamenting a condition in which it and existence fail to match, and lamenting the injustice that restricts it to possessing its object merely as pure duty while refusing it the sight of that object, and of itself, made actual.

Happiness is something moral consciousness cannot give up; it cannot drop this moment from its absolute purpose. A purpose pronounced as pure duty has it essentially in it to contain this singular self-consciousness; an absolute moment of morality was made up by individual conviction and the knowledge of that conviction. This moment, taken at the purpose that has become objective, at fulfilled duty, is the singular consciousness that intuits itself as realized, that is, enjoyment, which accordingly does not lie immediately within the concept of morality regarded as disposition, but only within the concept of its realization. By this very fact, however, enjoyment lies in morality as disposition as well; for what disposition drives at is not to stay disposition set over against acting, but to act, that is, to make itself actual. Stated as the whole, with awareness of its moments, the purpose is accordingly this: that duty fulfilled should be a purely moral action and realized individuality alike, and that nature, as the side of singularity standing over against the abstract purpose, should be one with that purpose. — Necessary as it is to experience the disharmony of both sides, since nature is free, duty is just as much the one essential thing, and nature over against duty is what has no self. That entire purpose, which the harmony makes up, has actuality itself inside it. It is likewise the thought of actuality. The harmony between morality and nature — or, given that nature comes under consideration only to the degree that consciousness undergoes nature's unity with it — the harmony between morality and happiness gets thought as necessarily being, or it stands postulated. For to demand says that something not yet actual is thought as being; a necessity that belongs not to the concept qua concept but to being. But this necessity is essentially, at the same time, a relation established through the concept. The being that is demanded thus does not fall to the representing of a contingent consciousness; it lies rather in morality's own concept, whose true content is nothing but the unity of pure with singular consciousness; and to the singular consciousness there belongs this, that such unity be for it as an actuality, which, in the purpose's content, is happiness, while in its form it is existence as such. — The existence thus demanded, or the unity of the two, is accordingly no wish, and, taken as a purpose, not one whose attainment might still be in doubt; it is, rather, reason's own demand, or reason's immediate certainty and presupposition.

That first experience, together with this postulate, does not stand alone; on the contrary, a whole circle of postulates opens out. For nature is not just this altogether free external manner in which consciousness, as in a pure object, would have to bring its purpose to realization. Consciousness itself is, in its own self, essentially something for which this other free actual being is; that is, it is itself contingent and natural. The nature that belongs to consciousness is sensibility, and sensibility, in the shape of willing, as drives and inclinations, possesses on its own account a determinate essentiality of its own, or singular purposes, and therefore stands over against the pure will and the pure purpose of that will. Over against such opposition, though, the essence for pure consciousness lies rather in the relation of sensibility to it, in sensibility's absolute unity with it. Pure thinking on the one hand and the sensibility of consciousness on the other are in themselves one consciousness, and it is precisely pure thinking that this pure unity exists for and within; but for pure thinking taken as consciousness there stands the opposition between itself and the drives. Within this strife of reason and sensibility, what ranks as the essence for reason is that the strife dissolve itself and that the unity of the two come forth as result, a unity which is not that original one, in which both are in a single individual, but one issuing from the known opposition of the two. Morality becomes actual only in such a unity, for that unity harbors the opposition by which the self is consciousness, or is for the first time actual and in fact a self, universal at the same time; or what finds expression in it is that mediation which, as we see, morality essentially requires. — Sensibility, one of the two moments of the opposition, is simply the otherness or the negative, while duty's pure thinking is the essence from which nothing may be given up; so the unity produced seems able to arise only through the sublation of sensibility. Yet since it is itself a moment of this becoming, the moment of actuality, one will have to be satisfied, so far as the unity goes, with saying that sensibility should be conformable to morality. — This unity as well is a postulated being; it is not there, since what is there is consciousness, that is, the opposition between sensibility and pure consciousness. At the same time, though, it is not an in-itself in the manner of the first postulate, where free nature makes up one side, so that its harmony with moral consciousness falls outside that consciousness; nature here is instead the nature belonging to consciousness in its own self, and what is at issue here is morality as such, a harmony that belongs to the acting self; consciousness accordingly has to produce that harmony itself and to go on making progress within morality. Its completion, however, must be pushed off into infinity; for were completion actually to arrive, moral consciousness would sublate itself. For morality counts as moral consciousness only as the negative essence, for whose pure duty sensibility has only a negative meaning, is only not conformable. Within the harmony, on the other hand, what vanishes is morality as consciousness, that is, its actuality, just as within moral consciousness, or within actuality, what vanishes is morality's harmony. Completion, therefore, is not something actually attainable; it can only be thought as an absolute task, that is, as a task that simply stays a task. At the same time, however, one has to think its content as content that simply must be and does not stay a task; whether one represents consciousness in that goal as wholly sublated or not; how the matter really stands admits of no clear discrimination any longer in the dark distance of infinity, into which, for just that reason, the reaching of the goal has to be shoved. Strictly it will have to be said that the determinate representation ought neither to interest us nor to be sought after, because it leads into contradictions, — of a task that is to stay a task and yet be fulfilled, — of a morality that is to be consciousness no longer, actual no longer. Yet through the consideration that a completed morality would harbor a contradiction, the holiness of the moral essentiality would suffer, and absolute duty would show itself as something unactual.

The first postulate laid down a harmony between morality and objective nature, which is the world's final purpose; the second laid down a harmony between morality and the sensuous will, which is the final purpose belonging to self-consciousness as such; thus the former yields harmony under the form of the in-itself, the latter under the form of being-for-itself. But what joins these two extreme final purposes, both of them thought, as their middle, is the very movement of actual acting. Harmonies they are, whose moments in their abstract differentiation have not yet become an object; that happens in actuality, where the sides come forward inside consciousness proper, each of them as the other of the other. Whereas earlier the harmonies were only the separated ones that are in themselves and for themselves, the postulates that arise in this way contain harmonies that are now in and for themselves.

Moral consciousness, as the simple knowledge and the willing of pure duty, is in its acting related to an object that is opposed to its own simplicity — to the actuality of the manifold case, and thereby has a manifold moral relationship. What arises here is, as regards content, the many laws in general, and as regards form, the mutually contradicting powers of the consciousness that knows and of the unconscious. — Where the many duties are concerned, first of all, moral consciousness holds nothing valid in them but pure duty; the many duties, taken as many, are determinate ones, and as such they are nothing holy for moral consciousness. Yet since they are necessary through the concept of acting, which encompasses a manifold actuality and hence a manifold moral relation, they have to be regarded as being in and for themselves. Since they can further exist only inside a moral consciousness, they are simultaneously present in a consciousness other than the one for which pure duty alone is the pure in-and-for-itself and holy.

It is postulated, therefore, that an other consciousness exists, one that sanctifies these duties, or that knows them as duties and so wills them. The first consciousness keeps pure duty indifferent toward every determinate content, and duty is nothing but this indifference toward content. The second, by contrast, harbors the relation to acting, no less essential, along with the necessity of determinate content; because duties count for it as determinate duties, content as such is for that consciousness every bit as essential as the form by which content is duty. This consciousness is thereby one within which universal and particular are absolutely at one, so that its concept coincides with the concept of the harmony between morality and happiness. For this opposition expresses just as much how the self-equal moral consciousness stands separated from actuality, which as multiple being runs counter to the simple essence of duty. But whereas the first postulate expressed only the harmony between morality and nature as being, since nature there is this negative side of self-consciousness, namely the moment of being, now by contrast this in-itself is posited essentially as consciousness. For what has being now stands in the form of the content that duty has, or it is the determinateness found in a determinate duty. The in-itself is accordingly the unity of things that, as simple essentialities, essentialities of thinking, exist only within a consciousness. This consciousness is from now on a master and ruler over the world, one who produces the harmony between morality and happiness and who likewise sanctifies the duties as many. The latter amounts to saying that determinate duty cannot be immediately holy for the consciousness of pure duty; but since determinate duty is likewise necessary on account of actual acting, which is something determinate, its necessity falls outside that consciousness into another one, which is thereby what mediates between determinate and pure duty and the ground on which determinate duty too is valid.

In actual action, however, consciousness relates as this self, as something entirely singular; it is aimed at actuality as such and takes actuality for its purpose, since what it wants is to accomplish something. Duty as such therefore falls outside consciousness into another essence, which is the consciousness and the holy legislator of pure duty. For the acting consciousness, just because it is something acting, what has immediate validity is the other of pure duty; pure duty accordingly forms the content of a different consciousness and is holy for the first only mediately, namely in that other.

Since it is hereby posited that duty's validity as what is in and for itself holy falls outside actual consciousness, this consciousness stands in general, on the one side, as the moral consciousness that is imperfect. In respect of its knowledge, accordingly, it knows itself as one whose knowledge, like its conviction, is incomplete and contingent; in respect of its willing, as one whose purposes are infected with sensibility. Because it is unworthy, it therefore cannot look upon happiness as necessary, but only as something contingent, and can look for it only out of grace.

Even though its actuality is imperfect, duty nevertheless counts as the essence in the eyes of its pure will and knowledge; in the concept, taken as set over against reality, or in thinking, it is therefore perfect. The absolute essence, however, is just this thought-of being, postulated on the far side of actuality; hence it is that thought within which knowledge and willing that are morally imperfect pass for perfect, and which, taking them as of full weight, thereby dispenses happiness in proportion to worthiness, that is, in proportion to the merit ascribed to it.

Herewith the worldview is completed; for within the concept that moral self-consciousness has, both sides, pure duty and actuality, are posited in one unity, and neither of them is thereby posited as being in and for itself, but rather as a moment, or as sublated. This comes to be for consciousness in the moral worldview's last part; consciousness, namely, places pure duty in an essence other than what it is itself, that is, it posits it partly as something represented, partly as something that is not what has validity in and for itself, since what is non-moral rather counts as perfect. In the same way it posits itself as one whose actuality, being unsuited to duty, is sublated and, as sublated, or in the representation that belongs to the absolute essence, no longer stands in contradiction to morality.

For moral consciousness itself, however, its moral worldview carries no such meaning, that consciousness develops its own concept in it and makes that concept its object; it is aware neither of this opposition of form nor of the opposition on the side of content, whose parts it neither sets in relation nor compares with one another, but instead rolls onward in the course of its development, never being the concept that holds the moments together. For its knowledge extends only to the pure essence, or to the object to the extent that this object is duty, insofar as it constitutes the abstract object belonging to its pure consciousness, as pure knowledge or as its own self. It relates, then, only in a thinking way, not in a comprehending one. The object belonging to its actual consciousness is therefore not yet transparent to it; nor is it that absolute concept which alone seizes otherness as such, or seizes its own absolute opposite as itself. Its own actuality, along with every objective actuality, does indeed count for it as the inessential; its freedom, however, is that of pure thinking, and precisely for this reason nature has arisen over against pure thinking as something just as free. Because both are in it in the same way, the freedom of being and the fact that being is enclosed within consciousness, its object turns into something having being and yet at the same time nothing but thought; in this view's last part the content gets posited essentially so that its being counts as something represented, and this joining of being and thinking is pronounced to be what it actually is, namely representing.

If we look at the moral worldview in this manner, taking this objective mode to be nothing else than the very concept of moral self-consciousness, which it renders objective for itself, then through this awareness about the form of the worldview's origin a different shape of its presentation results. — The starting point, namely, is actual moral self-consciousness, or the circumstance that such a one exists. For the concept posits it in the determination that all actuality whatever possesses essence for it only insofar as that actuality conforms to duty, and the concept posits this essence as knowledge, that is, in immediate unity with the self that is actual; consequently this unity is actual on its own account, it is an actual moral consciousness. — Now this consciousness, being consciousness, represents to itself its content as an object, namely as the world's final purpose, as the harmony between morality and all actuality. But since it represents this unity as an object and is not yet the concept that holds power over the object as such, then this unity is for it a negative of self-consciousness, or it falls outside consciousness as a beyond of its actuality, yet at the same time as something that is also thought as being, though merely thought.

What then remains over for it, which as self-consciousness is an other than the object, is the disharmony obtaining between the consciousness of duty on one side and actuality on the other, its own actuality at that. The proposition now reads: there is no morally completed actual self-consciousness; — and since anything moral exists only where it is completed, duty being the pure unmixed in-itself and morality consisting solely in conformity to this purity, — the second proposition says quite generally that nothing morally actual exists.

But since, thirdly, it is a single self, the unity of duty and actuality belongs to it in itself; that unity accordingly comes to be its object as completed morality, — though as a beyond of its actuality, — a beyond that is nevertheless supposed to be actual.

Within this goal, which is the synthetic unity of the two propositions preceding, self-conscious actuality no less than duty is posited merely as a sublated moment; for neither stands singly, but since it belongs to their essential determination to be free of the other, in the unity neither is any longer free of the other, so each is sublated, and thus, as regards content, they become an object of which each is valid for the other, while as regards form, this mutual exchange of theirs is at the same time only represented. — Or: what is actually not moral, since it is likewise pure thinking and raised above its own actuality, is nonetheless moral in representation and is taken for fully valid. Thereby the first proposition, that a moral self-consciousness does exist, is reinstated, but tied to the second, that there is none: namely, one does exist, though only in representation; or there is indeed none, yet another consciousness lets it pass for such.

b. Dissemblance

What the moral worldview shows us is, for one part, consciousness itself consciously generating its object; we do not see it stumble upon this object as something foreign, nor does the object come to be for it unconsciously; instead it proceeds throughout on a ground from which it posits the objective essence, and thus it knows that essence as its own self, since it knows itself as the active one that generates it. It thus looks as though consciousness here arrives at its rest and satisfaction, for these it can find only where it no longer needs to reach out beyond its object, because the object no longer passes out beyond consciousness. From the other side, however, consciousness itself rather posits the object outside itself, as its own beyond. Yet this being that is in and for itself is equally posited as something which is not free of self-consciousness but is there for the behoof of self-consciousness and through it.

In truth, then, the moral worldview amounts to no more than the working out of this underlying contradiction along its various sides; it is, to use a Kantian expression here, where it fits best, an entire nest of thoughtless contradictions. Consciousness behaves in this development so as to fix one moment and from there to pass immediately over to the other, sublating the first; but now that it has set up this second one, it dissembles it too in turn, and makes the opposite into the essence instead. At the same time it is conscious of its own contradiction and of its dissembling too, since it moves over from one moment to the opposed one immediately and precisely in relation to that moment itself; because one moment possesses no reality in its eyes, it posits just that moment as real, or, what comes to the same, in order to maintain that one moment has being in itself, it maintains that the opposed one is what has being in itself. By this it admits that in fact it is serious about neither of them. This is to be examined more closely in the moments of this dizzying movement.

Let us for the moment leave standing the presupposition of an actual moral consciousness, since it is not made in immediate relation to anything that went before, and let us take up instead the first postulate, the harmony between morality and nature. That harmony is to have being in itself, not for the actual consciousness, and not as something present; the present is rather nothing but the contradiction between the two. Within the present, morality is taken to be on hand, while actuality is given a position in which it fails to harmonize with morality. But the actual moral consciousness is one that acts; the actuality of its morality consists precisely in this. In acting itself, however, that position is immediately dissembled; for to act is nothing else than realizing the inner moral purpose, nothing else than bringing forth a purpose-determined actuality, which is to say the harmony of actuality itself with the moral purpose. The carrying out of the action is at the same time there for consciousness, being the presence of that unity in which actuality and purpose are one; and since consciousness, in the action once carried out, gives itself actuality as this singular one, or intuits existence as having come back into it, and since enjoyment lies just here, the actuality of the moral purpose also contains within it that form of itself which bears the name of enjoyment and happiness. — Acting therefore fulfills immediately and in fact what had been set up as not taking place and was supposed to be only a postulate, only a beyond. Through the deed, then, consciousness declares that it is not serious about postulating, since the sense of acting is rather to make present what was supposed not to be present. And since it is for the sake of acting that the harmony gets postulated — what is to become actual through acting must, after all, already be so in itself, or else no actuality would be possible, the linkage between acting and the postulate has this shape: for the sake of acting, that is, for the sake of an actual harmony of purpose with actuality, that very harmony is posited as not actual, as beyond.

In acting, then, there is no seriousness whatever about the inadequacy of purpose and actuality; the acting itself, by contrast, does seem to be meant seriously. But in fact the actual action is only the action of the singular consciousness, hence itself only something singular, and the work is contingent. But the purpose of reason, as the universal purpose embracing all things, is no less than the world entire; a final purpose reaching far past the content of this singular action, and therefore to be set beyond every piece of actual acting whatever. Because the universal best is what is to be carried out, nothing good gets done. In fact, however, what has now been set up, namely the nullity of actual acting and the reality that belongs to the whole purpose alone, is on every side dissembled once again. Moral action is neither contingent nor restricted, since its essence is pure duty; pure duty makes up the one and only whole purpose; and so the action, as that purpose actualized, is the accomplishment of the whole absolute purpose, however restricted its content may otherwise be. Or if once again actuality is taken as nature, which has laws of its own and stands over against pure duty, so that duty is unable to realize its law in nature, then, since duty as such is the essence, what is really at stake is not the accomplishment of pure duty, though pure duty is the whole purpose; for what such accomplishment would aim at is not pure duty but its opposite, actuality. But that actuality is not at stake is dissembled once again; for by the concept of moral acting, pure duty is essentially a consciousness that is active; acting is therefore indeed called for, absolute duty is to find expression throughout the whole of nature, and the moral law is to become a law of nature.

If, then, we let this highest good count as the essence, then consciousness has no seriousness whatever about morality. For within this highest good, the law that nature has is no other than the law of morality. Moral acting itself thereby drops away, for acting takes place only on the presupposition of something negative that is to be sublated through the action. But if nature does conform to the ethical law, then that law would surely be violated by acting, by the sublating of what is. — On that assumption, then, what is conceded to be the essential state is one in which moral acting has no place at all and is entirely superfluous. The postulate of the harmony of morality and actuality, of a harmony posited through the concept of moral acting, whose business is to bring the two into agreement — therefore expresses itself from this side too as follows: because moral acting is the absolute purpose, the absolute purpose turns out to be that moral acting should not be on hand at all.

If we set these moments side by side, the moments through which consciousness has rolled onward in its moral representing, it becomes clear that consciousness sublates each of them again in its opposite. It starts out from the claim that for it morality and actuality are not in harmony, yet it is not serious about this, for in the action the presence of this harmony is there for it. Nor, however, is it serious about this acting, since acting is something singular; for it has so lofty a purpose, the highest good. But this in turn is only a dissembling of the matter, for in it all acting and all morality would drop away. Or rather, it is not really serious about moral acting; what is most desirable, what is absolute, is that the highest good be carried out and moral acting be superfluous.

From this result consciousness, in its contradictory movement, must roll further onward and must necessarily dissemble the sublating of moral acting once again. Morality is the in-itself; if it is to take place, the world's final purpose cannot already be carried out, and the moral consciousness has instead to be for itself and to come upon a nature opposed to it. But in its own self it must be complete. This leads to the second postulate, that of the harmony between it and the nature immediately attached to it, namely sensibility. Its purpose the moral self-consciousness sets up as pure, as independent of inclinations and drives, such that this purpose has annihilated within itself the purposes of sensibility. — Yet consciousness dissembles once more this sublation of the sensible essence that it has just set up. Consciousness acts, it brings its purpose into actuality, and the self-conscious sensibility that is supposed to be sublated turns out to be precisely this middle term standing between pure consciousness and actuality — sensibility is the instrument by which the former actualizes itself, the organ, and it is what goes under the names of drive and inclination. There is therefore no seriousness about sublating inclinations and drives, since it is just these that are self-consciousness actualizing itself. But they are not to be suppressed either; they are merely to stand in conformity with reason. And stand in conformity with it they do, for moral acting is nothing other than consciousness actualizing itself and thereby giving itself the shape of a drive; that is, it is immediately the present harmony between drive and morality. In fact, however, the drive is not merely this empty shape, which might have within it some spring other than itself and be driven by that. For sensibility is a nature that has its own laws and its own springs in its own self; morality can therefore not be serious about being the mainspring of the drives, the inclining angle of the inclinations. For since the drives have their own fixed determinateness and their peculiar content, it would rather be the consciousness with which they conformed that conformed to them; a conformity that the moral self-consciousness declines. The harmony of the two is thus only in itself and postulated. — Moral acting had a moment ago set up the present harmony between morality and sensibility, but that is now dissembled; the harmony lies beyond consciousness in a foggy remoteness where nothing can any longer be told apart with precision or comprehended, since our attempt a moment ago to comprehend this unity did not succeed. — In this in-itself, however, consciousness surrenders itself entirely. Such an in-itself is its moral completion, where morality's struggle with sensibility has come to an end and sensibility conforms to morality in a way that cannot be grasped. — For that reason this completion is once more nothing but a dissembling of the matter; for in it, in fact, morality itself would rather be the thing that surrendered, morality being nothing but the consciousness of the absolute purpose in its purity, and therefore in opposition to every other purpose; and morality is the activity of this pure purpose to just the degree that it knows itself to be raised above sensibility, knows sensibility's meddling, and knows its own opposition to sensibility and its struggle with it. — That it is not serious about moral completion, consciousness itself declares outright in the very fact that it dissembles completion out into infinity, that is, asserts it to be never completed.

Rather, then, only this intermediate state of non-completion is what is valid for it; a state that is nevertheless supposed to be at least a progressing toward completion. Yet it cannot be this either, for progressing in morality would rather be an approach to morality's own downfall. The goal, namely, would be that nothing spoken of above, the sublating of morality and of consciousness itself; and to draw ever closer to nothing is to diminish. Moreover, progressing as such would, exactly like diminishing, presuppose differences of magnitude within morality; but of such differences there can be no talk in morality. In morality, as the consciousness for which the ethical purpose is pure duty, no diversity whatever is to be thought of, least of all the superficial diversity of magnitude; there is only a single virtue, only a single pure duty, only a single morality.

Since, then, moral completion is not what is meant seriously, but rather the middle state, that is, as was just discussed, non-morality, we are brought back from another side to what the first postulate contains. For there is no seeing how happiness could be demanded on account of this moral consciousness's worthiness. Conscious as it is of its own non-completion, it cannot in fact demand happiness as a thing merited, as something it would be worthy of; it can only beg for happiness out of a free grace, that is, crave happiness as such, in and for itself, and expect it not on that absolute ground but by chance and arbitrary favor. — In just this, non-morality declares what it is — that what is at stake is not morality but happiness in and for itself, without any relation to morality.

This second side of the moral worldview sublates the further assertion made by the first side as well, the assertion that presupposed a disharmony between morality and happiness. — For the experience is claimed to be made that in this present things often go badly for the moral person, while for the immoral one they often go happily. Yet the intermediate state of uncompleted morality, which has emerged as the essential thing, plainly shows that this perception and would-be experience is only a dissembling of the matter. For if morality is uncompleted, that is, if in fact morality is not, what can the experience that things go badly for it amount to? — Since it has at the same time come out that what is at stake is happiness in and for itself, it shows itself that in the judgment that things go well for the immoral person no wrong was meant to be taking place here. Since morality as a whole is uncompleted, the labeling of an individual as immoral falls away in itself, and so has none but an arbitrary ground. By this alone the judgment of experience acquires its sense and content, namely that to some people happiness in and for itself ought not to fall; that is, the judgment is envy, which takes morality for its cloak. The ground, however, why others should receive their share of so-called good fortune is that good friendliness which grants and wishes them, and itself, this grace, that is, this piece of chance.

Morality in the moral consciousness, then, is uncompleted; this is what is now being set up; but its essence is to be only what is completed and pure; uncompleted morality is therefore impure, or it is immorality. Morality itself is thus in an essence other than the actual consciousness; that other essence is a holy moral lawgiver. — Morality as uncompleted within consciousness, which is the ground of this postulating, signifies in the first instance that morality, being posited within consciousness as actual, thereby enters into relation with an other, with an existence, so that otherness or difference attaches to morality itself, and from this a manifold multitude of moral commandments arises. At the same time, however, these many duties count as inessential for the moral self-consciousness; for what is at stake is the one pure duty alone, and for it these duties, so far as they are determinate, hold no truth. Their truth, accordingly, can lie nowhere but in another, and through a holy lawgiver they are what they are not for consciousness, namely holy. — Yet this is itself once again only a dissembling of the matter. For to itself the moral self-consciousness is the absolute, and nothing counts as duty except what it knows to be duty. But it knows pure duty alone as duty; whatever is not holy for it is not holy in itself either, and what lacks holiness in itself can receive no consecration from the holy essence. Nor is the moral consciousness serious at all about letting something be made holy through a consciousness other than itself; for to it only that is holy which is holy to it through itself and within itself. — Just as little, then, is it serious about this other essence being a holy one, for in that essence something was supposed to attain essentiality which for the moral consciousness, that is, in itself, has no essentiality.

If the holy essence was postulated on the ground that within it duty would hold good not as pure duty but rather as a plurality of determinate duties, then this too must be dissembled again, and the other essence must count as holy only insofar as pure duty alone is valid within it. And in fact pure duty is valid only in another essence, not in the moral consciousness. Even though pure morality seems to be the one thing valid within that consciousness, the matter must be placed otherwise, since the moral consciousness is at the same time natural consciousness. Within it, morality stands affected and conditioned by sensibility, and so is not in and for itself but a contingency of the free will; while in the moral consciousness as pure will it is a contingency of knowledge; in and for itself, therefore, morality resides in another essence.

This essence, then, counts here as purely completed morality for the reason that in it morality bears no relation to nature and sensibility. The reality of pure duty, however, consists in its actualization within nature and sensibility. What the moral consciousness takes its own imperfection to consist in is that morality, within it, holds a positive relation toward nature and sensibility, for it regards this as an essential moment of morality, that morality hold nothing but a negative relation toward them. The pure moral essence, by contrast, elevated as it is above all struggle with nature and sensibility, holds no negative relation toward them. In fact, then, all that is left to it is the positive relation toward them, that is, precisely what a moment ago counted as the uncompleted, as the immoral. But pure morality cut off entirely from actuality, so that it would be just as much without any positive relation toward actuality, would amount to an unconscious and unactual abstraction, and in such an abstraction the concept of morality, namely to be the thinking of pure duty together with a willing and a doing, would be sublated outright. This so purely moral essence is therefore once more a dissembling of the matter, and must be surrendered.

Within this purely moral essence, though, the moments of that contradiction in which this synthetic representing keeps driving itself about, along with the opposed alsos that it lets follow one after another without ever bringing these thoughts of its own together, each opposite forever relieving the other, draw so close to one another that consciousness must here abandon its moral worldview and take flight back into itself.

Consciousness cognizes its morality as not completed on the ground that a sensibility and a nature standing opposed to morality affect it, and these in part cloud morality itself as such, in part let a whole crowd of duties spring up, which land consciousness in embarrassment whenever it comes to the concrete case of actual acting; for each case is the concretion of many moral relations, in the way that any object of perception is a thing possessing many properties; and since determinate duty is a purpose, it carries a content, and its content is a portion of the purpose, so that morality is not pure. — Morality thus has its reality in another essence. But this reality means nothing other than that morality here is in and for itself — for itself, that is, that it is the morality of a consciousness; in itself, that is, that it has existence and actuality. — Within that first, uncompleted consciousness morality is not carried through; there morality amounts to the in-itself in the sense of a thought-thing, since it keeps company with nature and sensibility, with the actuality belonging to being and to consciousness, which constitutes its content, while nature and sensibility are what is morally null. — In the second, morality is on hand as completed, and not as an uncarried-out thought-thing. But this completion consists precisely in morality's having, in a consciousness, actuality, and likewise free actuality, existence as such, in its being not the empty but the filled and content-laden; — that is, morality's completion gets posited in this, that what a moment ago was determined as the morally null is on hand in it and on it. At the one time morality is supposed to have validity simply only as the unactual thought-thing of pure abstraction, yet just as much to have no validity in this manner; its truth is supposed to consist in standing opposed to actuality, entirely free and empty of actuality, and then once more in being actuality itself.

The syncretism of these contradictions, laid out in the moral worldview, collapses into itself, since the difference on which it rests, the difference between what must necessarily be thought and posited and what is nevertheless at the same time inessential, becomes a difference that no longer even lies in the words. What gets posited at the end as something diverse, whether as the null or as the real, is one and the same thing throughout, namely existence and actuality; and what is supposed to be absolutely nothing but the beyond of actual being and consciousness, while equally being the null only within that being and as a beyond, is pure duty and the knowledge of pure duty as the essence. The consciousness that draws this difference which is none, that declares actuality to be at once the null and the real — and declares pure morality to be just as much the true essence as the essenceless, utters together the thoughts it had previously kept apart, and thereby states of itself that it is not serious about this determination and about setting the moments of the self and of the in-itself apart from one another; rather, what it declares to be what absolutely has being outside consciousness it in fact holds enclosed inside the self belonging to self-consciousness, and what it declares to be the absolutely thought or the absolute in-itself it takes, for just that reason, to be something devoid of truth. — It comes to be for consciousness that this setting of the moments apart is a dissembling, and it would be hypocrisy were it to hold onto that setting apart all the same. But as pure moral self-consciousness it flees back into itself with revulsion from this inequality between its representing and what its essence is, from this untruth which declares to be true what for it is valid as untrue. It is pure conscience, which spurns such a moral representation of the world; it is within itself the simple spirit certain of itself, which acts conscientiously and immediately, without the mediation of those representations, and which has its truth in this immediacy. — But if this world of dissemblance is simply moral self-consciousness developing through its own moments, and so is its reality, then in going back into itself it will, as regards its essence, become nothing else; that going-back-into-itself is rather only the attained consciousness that its truth is a merely pretended one. It would still have to pass off that truth as its own truth, for it would have to utter and exhibit itself as an objective representation, yet it would know that this is only a dissembling; it would thereby in fact be hypocrisy, and that spurning of that dissembling would already be the first expression of hypocrisy.

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

The antinomy of the moral worldview, namely, that moral consciousness both exists and does not exist, — or that duty's validity is a beyond of consciousness while conversely occurring nowhere but within it, had been condensed into the representation in which non-moral consciousness is supposed to be valid as moral, its contingent knowledge and willing to be accepted as fully weighty, and happiness to be allotted to it out of grace. Moral self-consciousness did not take this self-contradicting representation upon itself, but displaced it into an essence other than itself. But when it posits beyond itself what it is compelled to think as necessary, this too is contradiction, a contradiction of form, just as the earlier one was a contradiction of content. Yet since in itself the very thing that appears to be contradictory, the thing in whose separation and re-dissolution the moral worldview keeps knocking about, is one and the same, namely pure duty, which as pure knowledge amounts to nothing but the self of consciousness, while that self amounts to being and actuality; — and since, in the same way, whatever is supposed to have its place beyond actual consciousness amounts to nothing but pure thinking and thus really to the self: therefore self-consciousness, for us or in itself, withdraws into itself and recognizes as its own self that essence in which pure knowledge and pure duty are at the same time what is actual. For itself it is that which, in its contingency, possesses full validity, that which knows its immediate singularity to be pure knowledge and acting, to be the true actuality and harmony.

This self of conscience, spirit that is immediately certain of itself as the absolute truth and as being, is the third self, the one that the third world of spirit has yielded for us, and a brief comparison with the preceding selves is in order. The totality, or actuality, that exhibits itself as the ethical world's truth is the self of the person; that self's existence is being-recognized. Since the person is a self drained of substance, this its existence is equally an abstract actuality; the person is valid, and immediately so; the self is a point at rest immediately within the element of its being; nothing severs it from its universality, so that the two neither move nor stand in relation to each other, the universal within it lacks all differentiation, forming no content for the self, while the self likewise receives no fulfillment from itself. — The second self is the culture-world that has arrived at its truth, or the spirit of splitting-in-two restored to itself — absolute freedom. It is in this self that the first immediate unity of singularity and universality breaks apart; the universal, which equally persists as purely spiritual essence, as being-recognized, or as universal willing and knowledge, is the object, is the content belonging to the self, and is the self's universal actuality. Yet this universal lacks the form of an existence set free from the self; hence within this self it arrives at no fulfillment, at no positive content, at no world. Moral self-consciousness does, to be sure, let its universality go free, so that the universality turns into a nature in its own right, while equally holding it fast within itself as something sublated. But this is merely the dissembling play of alternation between these two determinations. Only as conscience does it possess, in its self-certainty, the content for what was hitherto empty duty, and likewise for empty right and the empty universal will; and since this self-certainty is equally what is immediate, it is existence itself.

Once it has reached this its truth, moral self-consciousness accordingly leaves behind, or rather sublates within itself, the division from which dissemblance sprang: the division between the in-itself and the self, between pure duty as the pure purpose and actuality as a nature and sensuousness set over against that pure purpose. Having in this way gone back into itself, it is concrete moral spirit, which does not, in the consciousness of pure duty, furnish itself with an empty standard that would stand over against actual consciousness; instead, both pure duty and the nature set against it are sublated moments; in immediate unity it is a self-actualizing moral essence, and the action is immediately a moral shape that is concrete.

A case calling for action lies before us; for the knowing consciousness this case is an actuality of an objective kind. This consciousness, as conscience, knows the case in an immediate concrete manner, and the case at the same time is only as consciousness knows it. Knowledge counts as contingent to the extent that it differs from the object; but spirit certain of itself no longer performs such contingent knowing, no longer fabricates thoughts inside itself from which actuality would diverge; rather, once the division between the in-itself and the self has been sublated, the case stands immediately within the sensuous certainty of knowledge just as it stands in itself, and it stands in itself in no other way than as it stands within this knowledge. — On this basis, action understood as actualization is the will's pure form: the bare reversal whereby actuality as a case that merely is turns into an actuality that has been done, and the bare mode of objective knowledge turns into the mode of knowing actuality as something consciousness has produced. Sense-certainty gets taken up into spirit's in-itself immediately, or rather gets reversed into it, and this reversal too is simple and unmediated, a passage through the pure concept that alters nothing in the content, which is determined by the interest of the consciousness knowing it. — Conscience, moreover, does not parcel out the circumstances of the case among distinct duties. It does not conduct itself as a positive universal medium within which the many duties would each on its own retain an immovable substantiality, with the result either that acting would be impossible altogether, since every concrete case harbors opposition as such, and as a moral case harbors the opposition of duties, so that in settling how to act one side, one duty, would invariably be violated; — or that, once action does occur, one of the opposed duties really does suffer violation. Conscience is instead that negative One, the absolute self which wipes out these various moral substances; its acting in accordance with duty is simple, fulfilling no particular duty but rather knowing and doing what is concretely right. With conscience, then, moral acting as acting emerges for the first time, and it is into this that the deedless consciousness of morality preceding it has passed over. — A differentiating consciousness may take the deed's concrete shape apart into various properties, that is, here into various moral relations, and may then declare each of them absolutely valid, as it must if each is to be a duty, or else may set them side by side and test them. Within conscience's simple moral action the duties lie so thoroughly buried that every one of these singular essences immediately suffers damage, and the testing that shakes at duty finds no place at all in conscience's unwavering certainty.

Equally absent from conscience is that oscillating uncertainty of a consciousness which at one moment locates so-called pure morality outside itself, in another holy essence, and takes itself to be the unholy one, while at the next moment it locates moral purity within itself and assigns the linking of the sensuous to the moral to that other essence.

It renounces all these posturings and dissemblings of the moral worldview by renouncing the consciousness that grasps duty and actuality as contradictory. According to the latter, I act morally insofar as I am conscious of accomplishing only pure duty and not anything else, which in fact means: insofar as I do not act. When I really do act, however, awareness of an other accompanies me, of an actuality already at hand and of one I intend to bring forth, and I hold a determinate purpose and discharge a determinate duty; something other than the pure duty that alone was to be intended is present in it. — Conscience, by contrast, is precisely the consciousness that, when moral consciousness pronounces that the essence of its acting is pure duty, this pure purpose dissembles the matter; for the matter itself is this: that pure duty has its standing in pure thinking's empty abstraction and acquires reality and content only on some determinate actuality, an actuality which is the actuality of consciousness itself, consciousness taken not as a thing of thought but as a singular. For its own part, conscience possesses its truth in the immediate certainty it has of itself. The essence is this concrete certainty of itself, certainty that is immediate; viewed according to the opposition of consciousness, one's own immediate singularity makes up the content of moral doing, while the form of that doing is just this self as pure movement, namely as knowledge or as one's own conviction.

Looked at more closely in its unity and in what the moments signify: moral consciousness grasped itself merely as the in-itself or essence, whereas as conscience it grasps its own self, its being-for-itself. — The moral worldview's contradiction dissolves; that is to say, the difference underlying it turns out to be no difference, and it collapses into pure negativity; and pure negativity is nothing but the self, a simple self that is pure knowledge just as much as it is knowledge of itself as this singular consciousness. Hence what fills the previously empty essence is this self, since the self is what is actual, and being actual no longer signifies being a nature foreign to the essence, self-subsistent in laws of its own. Being the negative, it is the pure essence's difference, a content, and indeed one valid in and for itself.

Further, since this self is pure knowledge equal to itself, it is the simply universal, so that duty is precisely this knowledge taken as its own knowledge, as conviction. Duty has ceased to be the universal that confronts the self; it is known to possess no validity in such separatedness; the law now subsists for the self's sake, and not the reverse, the self existing for the law's sake. But for that very reason law and duty have not only the significance of being-for-itself but also of being-in-itself, for this knowledge, by virtue of its self-equality, is precisely the in-itself. This in-itself also separates itself, within consciousness, from that immediate unity with being-for-itself; stepping over against it in this way, it is being, being for another. — Duty, precisely as duty deserted by the self, now comes to be known as a mere moment; from signifying absolute essence it has sunk to a being that is not self, not for itself, and so to being for another. Yet just for that reason this being for another stays an essential moment, since it is the self as consciousness that makes up the opposition between being-for-itself and being for another, and since duty now has in it something immediately actual and is no longer merely abstract pure consciousness.

This being for another, accordingly, is substance which has being in itself and is differentiated from the self. Pure duty, or the abstract in-itself, has not been surrendered by conscience; on the contrary, it is the essential moment of relating oneself to others as universality. It constitutes what self-consciousnesses share in common, and this shared element is the substance wherein the deed obtains subsistence and actuality; the moment of being recognized by the others. This moment of being-recognized, of a pure consciousness that is there, is lacking to moral self-consciousness, which for that reason neither acts at all nor actualizes anything. Its in-itself is for it either the abstract non-actual essence or being as an actuality that is not spiritual. The existing actuality belonging to conscience, however, is one that is self, that is, existence aware of itself, the spiritual element in which recognition takes place. Doing therefore amounts merely to carrying its singular content over into the objective element, where that content is universal and recognized, and it is just this being recognized that turns the action into actuality. What makes the action recognized and thereby actual is that existing actuality ties immediately into conviction or knowledge, or that the knowledge one has of one's purpose is itself, immediately, the element of existence, universal recognizing. For duty, the action's essence, has its standing in the conviction conscience holds regarding it; that conviction is precisely the in-itself itself; it is self-consciousness that is universal in itself, or being-recognized, and with that, actuality. Whatever gets done out of the conviction of duty is thus, immediately, something possessing subsistence and existence. There is thus no longer any question here of the good intention failing to come about, or of things going badly for the good person; rather, what is known as duty carries itself out and comes to actuality, because what is dutiful is precisely the universal of all self-consciousnesses, what is recognized and hence what has being. Taken separately and on its own, though, with the self's content left out, this duty is being for another, the transparent, which has only the significance of an essentiality wholly devoid of content.

If we look back to the sphere with which spiritual reality first entered at all, the concept there was that the expressing of individuality is what is in and for itself. But the shape giving that concept immediate expression was the honest consciousness, which knocked about with the abstract matter at hand. There this matter at hand was a predicate; only in conscience does it become subject, a subject that has posited within itself every moment of consciousness, and one for which all those moments (substantiality as such, outward existence, and the essence of thinking) lie enclosed in this certainty it has of itself. Substantiality as such belongs to the matter at hand in ethical life, outward existence in culture, and thinking's self-knowing essentiality in morality; in conscience the matter at hand is the subject knowing these moments within its own self. Whereas the honest consciousness only ever seizes the empty matter at hand, conscience by contrast wins it in its fulfillment, which conscience gives to it through itself. Conscience is this power in virtue of knowing consciousness's moments to be moments and, as their negative essence, dominating them.

If we consider conscience with respect to the several determinations of the opposition that shows up in acting, and consider its awareness of what those determinations are, then it stands first of all as a knower toward the actuality of the case in which action is to be taken. To the extent that the moment of universality attaches to this knowledge, the knowledge required for conscientious acting includes embracing without any restriction the actuality that lies before it, and hence knowing the circumstances of the case precisely and weighing them. But since this knowledge is acquainted with universality as a mere moment, it is a knowledge of these circumstances that is conscious of not encompassing them, or of not being conscientious in this regard. Knowledge's genuinely universal and pure relation would be a relation to something not opposed to it, to itself; but acting, by way of the opposition essential to it, is related to something negative over against consciousness, to an actuality that has being in itself. Over against the simplicity of pure consciousness, the absolutely other, or manifoldness in itself, this actuality is an absolute multiplicity of circumstances that divides and spreads itself out infinitely: backward into its conditions, sideways into its juxtapositions, forward into its consequences. — Conscientious consciousness is aware of this nature of the matter and of its own relation to it, and it knows that its acquaintance with the case in which it acts falls short of the universality demanded, and that its pretension to such a conscientious weighing of all circumstances is null. Yet this acquaintance with and consideration of all circumstances is not entirely absent; it is there only as a moment, as something that is only for others; and its incomplete knowledge, because it is its own knowledge, counts for it as sufficient and complete knowledge.

Matters stand no differently for the universality of the essence, that is, for pure consciousness's determining of the content. — As it moves toward action, conscience is related to the many sides of the case. The case breaks up into those sides, and pure consciousness's relation to the case breaks up along with it, so that the case's manifoldness amounts to a manifoldness of duties. — That it must choose among these and decide is something conscience knows, since not one of them is absolute in its determinateness or in its content, only pure duty is. But within its reality this abstraction has come to signify the I conscious of itself. As conscience, the spirit certain of itself rests within itself, and its real universality, or its duty, has its seat in the pure conviction it has of duty. Taken as such, this pure conviction is quite as empty as pure duty itself, being pure in the sense that nothing inside it, no determinate content, counts as duty. Action, however, is called for; the individual has to determine it; and the spirit certain of itself, within which the in-itself has come to signify the self-conscious I, knows that determination and content are to be had in the immediate certainty it has of itself. This certainty, in the role of determination and content, is natural consciousness, which is to say, the drives and inclinations. — No content whatever does conscience acknowledge as absolute for it, since conscience is the absolute negativity of all that is determinate. Determining comes out of itself; yet determinateness as such falls within the self's own circle, and that circle is what one calls sensuousness; for having a content drawn from the immediate certainty it has of itself, nothing lies ready to hand except sensuousness. — Whatever, in earlier shapes, presented itself as good or as bad, as law and as right, is an other over against immediate self-certainty; it is a universal which is now a being for another; or, seen from another side, an object that mediates consciousness with itself, steps in between consciousness and its own truth, and, far from being consciousness's immediacy, rather cuts it off from itself. — For conscience, though, certainty of itself is the pure immediate truth; and this truth is accordingly its immediate self-certainty represented as content, which is to say, quite generally, the arbitrary will of the singular and the contingency of its unconscious natural being.

This content is at the same time valid as moral essentiality, as duty. For pure duty, as the testing of laws already made plain, remains utterly indifferent to any content whatever and puts up with any content whatever. Here it also carries the essential form of being-for-itself, and individual conviction in this form amounts to nothing but the awareness that pure duty is empty, that duty is only a moment, its substantiality a predicate whose subject lies in the individual, whose arbitrary will supplies duty with content, can attach any content to this form, and can pin its conscientiousness to that content. — Someone increases his property in a certain manner; it is a duty for each to see to his own preservation and that of his family, and no less to the possibility of proving useful to his fellows and of doing good to those who need help. The individual is aware that this is a duty, since such content lies immediately within the certainty he has of himself; he sees further that in the present case he is discharging this duty. Others may take that certain manner for fraud; they fasten on other sides of the concrete case, while he holds onto this side by being aware of the increase of property as pure duty. — So it is that what others name violence and wrong discharges the duty of asserting one's self-subsistence against them; what they name cowardice, — the duty of holding onto one's life and onto the possibility of usefulness to one's fellows; whereas what they name bravery in fact violates both duties. Cowardice, though, dare not be so inept as to overlook that keeping one's life and the possibility of usefulness to others are duties, so inept as to lack conviction about the dutifulness of its dealings, or so inept as to overlook that what accords with duty resides in knowing; otherwise it would commit the ineptitude of being immoral. Since morality resides in the awareness of having discharged duty, the acting called cowardice will be no more devoid of this awareness than the acting called bravery; the abstraction that goes by the name of duty admits of this content as it admits of any, so cowardice knows what it does as duty, and inasmuch as it knows this and inasmuch as conviction of duty is itself what accords with duty, it is recognized by the others; the action is thereby valid and has actual existence.

Against this freedom, which deposits whatever content it pleases in the passive universal medium of pure duty and pure knowledge, one content as readily as another, nothing is gained by insisting that a different content ought to have been deposited there; for whichever it might be, each carries upon it the blemish of determinateness, a determinateness that pure knowledge has left behind and can spurn as readily as it can take any up. In being determinate, every content ranks alongside every other, even where it appears to bear the very character of having the particular sublated within it. One might suppose that, because in the actual case duty splits in two into opposition generally and thereby into the opposition of singularity and universality, that duty whose content is the universal itself immediately bears upon it the nature of pure duty, so that form and content come to correspond entirely; so that, for example, action for the universal good would deserve preference over action for the individual good. But this universal duty is precisely that which is at hand as substance existing in and for itself, as right and law, and which is valid independently of the knowledge and conviction as well as of the immediate interest of the singular; it is therefore exactly that against whose form morality as such is directed. As for its content, that too is determinate, to the extent that the universal good stands opposed to the singular good; its law is accordingly a law that conscience knows itself to be flatly free of, granting itself absolute warrant to add to it and take from it, to leave it undone as much as to carry it out. — Furthermore, that distinction between duty toward the singular and duty toward the universal is, by the very nature of opposition as such, nothing fixed. On the contrary, what the singular does for himself also benefits the universal; the more he has provided for himself, the greater is not only his possibility of being useful to others; rather, his actuality itself consists in nothing but being and living in connection with others; his singular enjoyment essentially has the significance of thereby giving up what is his to others and helping them to acquire their own enjoyment. In fulfilling the duty toward the singular, and hence toward himself, the duty toward the universal is fulfilled as well. — The weighing and comparing of duties that would enter here would come down to calculating the advantage the universal might derive from an action; but by this route morality falls partly to the necessary contingency of insight, and partly conscience has its very essence in cutting off such calculating and weighing and in deciding out of itself without grounds of that kind.

Acting and sustaining itself in this manner, conscience holds together the in-itself and being-for-itself, holds together pure thinking and individuality, and is the spirit certain of itself, a spirit whose truth resides in it, in its self, in its knowledge, and there as knowledge of duty. It sustains itself precisely in this: that everything positive in the action, duty's content no less than duty's form and the knowing of duty, falls to the self, to the self's certainty of itself, whereas whatever would set itself against the self as an in-itself of its own is valid only as untrue, only as sublated, only as a moment. Hence it is not universal knowledge as such that counts, but its own acquaintance with the circumstances. Into duty, as the universal being-in-itself, it inserts the content that it takes from its natural individuality, for that content is the one present in it; through the universal medium in which this content stands, it becomes the duty that conscience exercises, and thereby empty pure duty is posited as something sublated, as a moment; this content is duty's sublated emptiness, or its fulfillment. — Yet conscience is just as much free of every content whatever; it absolves itself of any determinate duty that claims to be valid as law; drawing on the force of its self-certainty, it wields the majesty of an absolute autarky that binds and looses. — Such self-determination is therefore immediately what simply accords with duty; duty is knowledge itself; and this simple selfhood is the in-itself, since the in-itself means pure self-equality, which is present in this consciousness. —

Immediately, this pure knowledge is being for another; for being pure self-equality, it is immediacy, or being. Yet at the same time this being is the pure universal, the selfhood belonging to all; in other words, acting is recognized and for that reason actual. This being is the element by which conscience stands immediately in a relation of equality with all self-consciousnesses; and what that relation signifies is not the selfless law but the self of conscience.

But an inequality seems to attach to conscience in that what it does as right is at the same time being for another. The duty it carries out is a determinate content; granted, this content is consciousness's self, and therein consciousness's knowledge of itself, its equality with itself. But once carried out, once its place is in the universal medium of being, this equality has ceased to be knowledge, has ceased to be that differentiating which sublates its differences just as immediately; in being, rather, the difference is posited as something that subsists, and the action is a determinate one, unequal to the element of everyone's self-consciousness and therefore not necessarily recognized. Each of the two sides, conscience in its acting and the universal consciousness that recognizes this action as duty, is equally free of the determinateness of the doing. Because of this freedom, the relation within the common medium of connection is rather a relationship of complete inequality, and consequently the consciousness for which the action exists finds itself in complete uncertainty about the acting spirit that is certain of itself. It acts, it posits a determinateness as something that is; the others hold to this being as to its truth and are in this respect certain of it; in that being it has expressed what counts for it as duty. Yet it is free of any determinate duty; it is already out of the place where they suppose it to be actual, and this medium of being itself, along with duty as existing in itself, counts for it only as a moment. What it thus sets up before them, it also dissembles again, or rather has immediately dissembled. For its actuality is for it not this duty and determination put on display, but the actuality it possesses in absolute self-certainty.

Whether this conscience is morally good or whether it is evil is thus beyond them, or rather, not only are they unable to know it, they are bound to regard it as evil. For its freedom from the determinateness of duty and from duty as existing in itself is theirs no less. What it sets up before them they know how to dissemble in their turn; it is something through which only the self of another is expressed, not their own; they not only know themselves to be free of it, but must dissolve it in their own consciousness, must annihilate it by judging and explaining, in order to preserve their own self.

The action of conscience, however, is more than this determination of being that the pure self has deserted. Anything that is to be valid and recognized as duty is so only through knowledge of it as duty and conviction of it as duty, through knowing one's own self within the deed. Should the deed no longer carry this self in it, it stops being the one thing that constitutes its essence. Its existence, once deserted by this consciousness, would be an actuality of the ordinary sort, and the action would strike us as the satisfying of one's pleasure and desire. What is to be there counts here as essentiality solely because it is known as individuality that expresses itself; and this being-known is what gets recognized and what is to have existence as such.

The self enters existence as self; spirit that is certain of itself exists for others precisely as such; its immediate action is not what is valid and actual; what gets recognized is neither the determinate nor what has being-in-itself, but only the self that knows itself, taken as such. Universal self-consciousness is the element of subsistence; whatever steps into that element cannot be the action's effect, since the effect does not last there and acquires no permanence; self-consciousness alone is what gets recognized and wins actuality.

We thus see language once again as the existence of spirit. It is self-consciousness existing for others, which is immediately at hand as such and, as this one, is universal. Language is the self that detaches itself from itself, a self that turns objective for itself as pure I — I, that in this objectivity keeps itself as this self just as it flows together immediately with the others and is their self-consciousness; it hears itself just as it is heard by the others, and this hearing is precisely existence that has become self.

What language has gained here as content is no longer the inverted, inverting, torn-apart self of the world of culture; it is spirit that has gone back into itself, certain of itself and, within its self, certain of its truth or of its recognizing, and recognized as this knowledge. Ethical spirit speaks in law and in the simple command, and in lament, which is more a tear over necessity; moral consciousness, by contrast, remains mute, locked up inside itself, for in it the self does not yet have existence, and existence and the self still stand in a merely external relation to one another. Language emerges only as the middle between self-subsistent and mutually recognized self-consciousnesses; the existing self is immediately a being-recognized that is universal, manifold, and simple within this multiplicity. Conscience's language has for its content the self that knows itself to be essence. This alone is what language expresses, and this expressing is the true actuality of the doing and the validity of the action. Consciousness expresses its conviction; it is this conviction alone in which the action is duty; and the action counts as duty solely because the conviction is expressed. For universal self-consciousness is free of the merely existing determinate action; that action as existence counts for nothing with it, but rather the conviction that the action is duty; and this conviction is actual in language. — To actualize the action means here not carrying its content over from the form of purpose or of being-for-itself into that of abstract actuality, but carrying it over from the form of immediate certainty of oneself, which knows its knowledge or being-for-itself to be the essence, into that of an assurance that consciousness has been convinced of duty and, as conscience, knows duty out of itself; so the assurance amounts to assuring that what consciousness is convinced of is that its own conviction is the essence.

Whether the assurance of acting from conviction of duty is true, whether what gets done really is duty — such questions or doubts carry no weight against conscience. — The question whether the assurance is true would presuppose that the inner intention diverges from the one professed, that is, that the singular self's willing can come apart from duty, from what universal and pure consciousness wills; the latter would have been placed into the words spoken, while the former would in truth drive the action. But this very difference between universal consciousness and the singular self is the one that has sublated itself, and conscience is that sublating. Law and duty are the immediate knowledge of the self certain of itself; its intention is right by the mere fact of being its intention; all that is demanded is that it know this, and that it state its conviction that its knowing and willing is what is right. Uttering this assurance sublates in itself the form of the self's particularity; in that utterance the self recognizes the necessary universality of the self; by naming itself conscience, it names itself pure self-knowing and pure abstract willing, that is, it names itself a knowing and willing that is universal, that recognizes the others and is equal to them, since they too are just this pure self-knowing and willing, and that is for this reason recognized by them in turn. What is right has its essence in the willing that belongs to the self certain of itself, in the knowledge that essence is the self. — Anyone who says that he acts thus out of conscience speaks truly, for his conscience is the self that knows and wills. But he must essentially say so, for this self has at the same time to be a universal self. It is not universal in the action's content, since that content, on account of its determinateness, is in itself a matter of indifference: universality lies rather in the action's form; it is this form that is to be posited as actual; the form is the self, which as such is actual in language, declares itself to be the true, and precisely therein recognizes all selves and is recognized by them.

Conscience, therefore, raised in majesty above any determinate law and above every content that duty might have, puts into its knowledge and its willing whatever content it likes; it is moral genius, for which the inward voice of its own immediate knowledge counts as the voice of God, and since existence too is known just as immediately in that same knowledge, it is the divine power of creation, whose very concept holds livingness in it. It is likewise worship carried on within its own self; for its acting is the intuiting of this divinity of its own.

Worship of this solitary kind is essentially, and at the same time, worship belonging to a community, and the pure inward knowing and hearing of oneself passes over into the moment of consciousness. Its objective existence lies in the intuiting of itself, and this objective element consists in the speaking-out of its knowledge and willing as something universal. By speaking out in this way the self acquires validity and the action becomes the deed that executes it. Universal self-consciousness is the actuality and the subsistence of what it does; the speaking-out of conscience, however, posits its own certainty as a pure self and thereby as a universal one; the others allow the action to be valid for the sake of this speech, wherein the self stands expressed and recognized as the essence. So the mutual assurance of one another's conscientiousness and good intentions is what constitutes the spirit of their bond and its substance, along with the delight taken in this reciprocal purity and the refreshment found in the splendor of such knowing and speaking, of nursing and tending such excellence. — To the extent that this conscience still keeps its abstract consciousness apart from its self-consciousness, its life remains hidden in God; God is indeed present immediately to its spirit, its heart, its self; but the revealed side, that is, its actual consciousness together with the mediating movement belonging to it, is for conscience something other than that concealed interior, other than the immediacy with which the essence is present. Yet with the completion of conscience the distinction between the abstract consciousness and the self-consciousness sublates itself. It knows that the abstract consciousness is nothing but this self, this being-for-itself certain of its own self, and that within the immediacy with which the self is related to the in-itself, which, once placed beyond the self, amounts to the abstract essence and to what stays concealed from it, precisely the difference is sublated. For a relation counts as a mediating one where the terms it relates are not identical but rather an other for one another, becoming one only within a third; the immediate relation, by contrast, in fact signifies nothing but unity. Consciousness, having risen above the thoughtlessness of still counting these differences, which are no differences at all, as differences, knows the immediacy with which the essence is present in it as the unity of the essence with its own self, knows its self accordingly as the living in-itself, and knows this knowledge of its own as religion, which, being knowledge intuited or knowledge that exists, is what the community speaks about its own spirit.

What we see here, accordingly, is self-consciousness withdrawn into its innermost depth, a depth for which every externality as such disappears — withdrawn into the intuition of the I = I, where this I amounts to all essentiality and all existence. Within this concept of its own self it goes under, since it has been driven up to the point where its extremes meet, and driven there in such a way that the differentiated moments that make it real, or still make it consciousness, are not for us merely these pure extremes; rather, what it is for its own part, and what counts to it as the in-itself and what counts to it as existence, have evaporated into abstractions that retain no hold, no substance, for this consciousness itself; and whatever counted hitherto as essence for consciousness has withdrawn into those abstractions. — Refined to a purity like this, consciousness is the poorest shape it has, and the poverty that constitutes all it owns is itself a disappearing; this absolute certainty, the certainty into which substance has dissolved, is the absolute untruth, which collapses in upon itself; it is absolute self-consciousness, and in it consciousness goes under.

If we consider this going-under within its own self, then for consciousness the substance that has being-in-itself is knowledge as its knowledge. Being consciousness, it stands divided in an opposition of itself against the object that counts for it as the essence; but this very object is the wholly transparent one, it is its own self, and consciousness on its part is nothing more than knowledge of itself. Every form of life, and every spiritual essentiality, has receded into this self and forfeited its difference from the I itself. Hence the moments of consciousness are those extreme abstractions, and none of them stands fast; each rather loses itself in the other and brings the other forth. It is the unhappy consciousness's alternation with itself, though here the alternation takes place for that consciousness itself and inside it, and it is aware of being that concept of reason which the earlier consciousness was only in itself. So the absolute certainty of its own self, precisely as consciousness, immediately turns round into a sounding-forth, into objectivity of its being-for-itself; yet this world it has created is its own speech, a speech it has heard just as immediately, and only the echo of it returns to it. This returning, accordingly, does not carry the sense that it is there in and for itself; for the essence is for it no in-itself but rather itself; and just as little does it possess existence, since the objective never gets so far as to be a negative of the actual self, any more than that self gets so far as to be actual. What it lacks is the force of externalization, the force to turn itself into a thing and to bear up under being. It lives in fear of soiling the splendor of its inner life by acting and by existing, and so, to keep its heart pure, it shuns any contact with actuality and persists in the stubborn powerlessness that will not renounce the self it has honed to the last abstraction, will not confer substantiality on itself, will not convert its thinking into being nor commit itself to the absolute difference. The hollow object that it produces for itself therefore fills it now with the consciousness of emptiness; its doing is a yearning that merely loses itself in the course of becoming an essenceless object, and that, falling back beyond this loss and into itself, finds itself only as something that has been lost; — an unhappy, so-called beautiful soul amid this transparent purity of its moments, it flickers out inwardly and fades like a shapeless vapor dissolving into air.

This silent confluence of the marrowless essentialities of a life turned to vapor has yet to be grasped under the other meaning that belongs to conscience's actuality and under the appearance that its movement takes, with conscience regarded now as something that acts — Above, the objective moment within this consciousness determined itself to be universal consciousness; the knowledge that knows its own self is, as this self, marked off from other selves; language, in which all reciprocally recognize one another as acting conscientiously, this universal equality, breaks up into the inequality of the singular being-for-itself, since each consciousness is just as absolutely reflected out of its universality and back into itself; the opposition of singularity to the other singulars and to the universal thereby sets in of necessity, and it is this relationship together with its movement that we have to consider. — Or, put the other way, this universality and duty carry the flatly opposite meaning of a determinate singularity that exempts itself from the universal, one for which pure duty is nothing but universality that has risen to the surface and been turned outward; duty resides in words alone and is valid as a being for another. Conscience, aimed at first only negatively against duty in the shape of this determinate duty on hand, knows itself free of it; but once it fills the empty duty with a determinate content drawn out of its own self, it gains the positive consciousness that it is qua this self that it makes the content; its pure self, being empty knowledge, is what has neither content nor determination; the content it hands over to that self is taken from its own self as this determinate one, from itself as natural individuality, and while it talks about how conscientious its acting is, it is indeed aware of its pure self, yet in the purpose of its acting, taken as actual content, it is aware of itself as this particular singular and aware of the opposition of what it is for its own part to what it is for others, the opposition between universality, or duty, and its own being-reflected out of that universality.

If the opposition that conscience enters upon as acting thus finds expression in conscience's interior, that same opposition is at once an outward inequality in the element of existence, the inequality of its particular singularity over against another singular. — Its particularity lies in this: the pair of moments that make up its consciousness, namely the self and the in-itself, are valid within it at unequal worth, and valid with the determination that certainty of its own self is the essence, as against the in-itself or the universal, which is valid merely as a moment. Set over against this inward determination, then, is the element of existence, that is, universal consciousness, to which on the contrary universality, duty, is the essence, while singularity, which is for itself over against the universal, is valid only as a sublated moment. The first consciousness, in the eyes of this fastening upon duty, counts as evil, since it is the inequality of its being-within-itself with the universal, and since it at the same time proclaims what it does to be equality with itself, to be duty and conscientiousness, it counts as hypocrisy.

The movement of this opposition is at first the formal establishing of an equality between what evil is in itself and what it declares itself to be; it has to come to light that evil is evil, so that its existence matches its essence, and hypocrisy has to be unmasked. — The bringing back of the inequality present in hypocrisy into equality is not already achieved by the familiar claim that hypocrisy proves its respect for duty and virtue in the very act of assuming their semblance and wearing it as a mask before its own consciousness no less than before that of others; a recognition of the opposite, so it is said, in which equality and agreement are implicitly contained. — Yet hypocrisy has equally reflected itself out of this recognition made in speech and back into itself, and in using what has being-in-itself merely as a being for another it rather contains its own contempt for that in-itself and exhibits its essencelessness before everyone. For whatever permits itself to be put to use as an external tool proves to be a thing possessing no weight of its own within it.

Nor is this equality brought about by the one-sided persistence of the evil consciousness in itself, any more than by the universal consciousness's judgment. — Should the former deny itself before the consciousness of duty, and maintain that what the latter pronounces wickedness, absolute inequality with the universal, is in truth an acting that follows inner law and conscience, then its inequality with the other still remains within such a one-sided assurance of equality, since the other neither believes nor recognizes it. — Or again, since one-sided persistence in one extreme dissolves itself, evil would by that route admit to being evil, but in the very admission it would immediately sublate itself and would be neither hypocrisy nor an unmasking of itself as such. It does in fact admit to being evil by maintaining that, set against the recognized universal, it acts in accordance with its own inner law and conscience. For were such a law and conscience not the law belonging to its singularity and arbitrary choice, it would not be anything inner and its own, but would be what is universally recognized. Anyone who says, therefore, that he goes by his own law and conscience in acting against others is in fact saying that he mistreats them. But actual conscience is not this persistence in a knowledge and a will opposed to the universal; on the contrary, the universal is the element in which it has its existence, and its language pronounces what it does to be the recognized duty.

Just as little does the universal consciousness, by persisting in its judgment, unmask and dissolve hypocrisy. — When it cries out against hypocrisy that it is bad, base, and so on, what such a judgment invokes is its law, exactly as the evil consciousness invokes its own. For the former steps forth over against the latter, and steps forth thereby as a particular law. So it holds no advantage over the other; it rather legitimates the other, and this zeal accomplishes exactly the reverse of what it supposes itself to be doing — namely, it displays what it calls true duty, what is supposed to be universally recognized, as something not recognized, and so grants the other an equal right of being-for-itself.

This judgment, though, carries another side along with it, and from that side it becomes the opening toward a dissolution of the opposition on hand. — The consciousness of the universal does not relate to the first as something actual and acting, since the first is rather the actual one — it relates to it instead as the party that is not caught up in the opposition of singularity and universality which acting brings on. It stays within the universality of thought, relates as something apprehending, and its first action amounts to nothing more than judgment. — By this judgment it now sets itself, as was just noted, beside the first, and the first, by way of this equality, arrives at the intuition of its own self within this other consciousness. Duty's consciousness, after all, relates in an apprehending, passive way; yet this very fact puts it at odds with itself qua absolute will of duty, at odds with itself qua that which determines flatly out of its own self. It can well afford to keep itself in purity, since it does not act; it is that hypocrisy which wants judging taken for an actual deed, and which proves its uprightness not by acting but by pronouncing excellent sentiments. It is therefore constituted just like the one reproached for putting duty into its talk and nowhere else. In both, the side of actuality stands equally distinct from the talk: in the one case through the action's self-serving purpose, in the other through the absence of any acting at all, an acting whose necessity lies in the very speaking about duty, for duty without a deed carries no meaning whatever.

But judging must also be regarded as a positive action on the part of thought, and it carries a positive content; from this side the contradiction lodged in the apprehending consciousness, along with that consciousness's equality with the first, grows still more complete. — The acting consciousness pronounces this determinate doing of its own to be duty, and the judging consciousness has no way to deny it that; for duty is itself the contentless form open to any content whatever, — or else the concrete action, differentiated in itself by its many-sidedness, bears upon it the universal side, the side taken for duty, quite as much as it bears the particular side that constitutes the individual's share and interest. Now the judging consciousness does not remain standing at that side of duty, nor at the agent's knowledge that this is his duty, the relationship and the station of his actuality. It fastens instead on the other side, plays the action over into the interior, and explains it out of an intention distinct from the action itself and out of a self-serving motive. Just as every action admits of being considered for its conformity to duty, so it admits of this other consideration, that of particularity; for qua action it is the individual's actuality. — This judging accordingly lifts the action clear of its existence and reflects it back into the interior, that is, into the form of the agent's own particularity. — Should the action be attended by fame, judging knows this interior to be a craving for fame; — should the action be on the whole suited to the individual's station without exceeding it, and be so constituted that individuality does not carry that station hung upon it as an external determination but fills this universality out through itself and precisely thereby shows itself fit for something higher, then judgment knows the action's interior to be an appetite for honor, and so on. Since in action generally the agent attains the intuition of its own self in objectivity, or the feeling of itself in its existence and hence enjoyment, judgment knows the interior to be a drive toward the agent's own happiness, even were that happiness to consist in nothing more than inner moral vanity, in the enjoyment felt at the consciousness of one's own excellence, and in the foretaste that the hope of a happiness to come affords. — No action can withdraw itself from such judging, since the pure purpose of duty done for duty's own sake is what is unactual; its actuality lies in the doing of individuality, and by that fact the action bears upon it the side of particularity. — For the valet there exists no hero; not, however, because the one is no hero, but because the other is — the valet, and the hero has dealings with him not as a hero but as one who eats, drinks, puts on his clothes, in short in the singularity of need and representation. So too, for judging there exists no action where it could not set the side of the individuality's singularity against the universal side of the action and play morality's valet toward the agent.

With this the judging consciousness is itself base, for it divides the action and both produces and holds fast to the action's inequality with itself. It is furthermore hypocrisy, because it gives out such judging not for another manner of being evil but for the right consciousness of the action, because in this unactuality of its own and in this vanity of knowing well and knowing better it raises itself above the deeds it has torn down, and because it would have its deedless talk taken for an excellent actuality. — Making itself equal in this way to the acting consciousness it judges, it is cognized by that consciousness as one and the same with itself. The acting consciousness finds that the other not only apprehends it as something alien and unequal to itself, but that the other is rather, by its own constitution, equal to it. Intuiting this equality and uttering it, it confesses itself to the other, and it expects likewise that the other, having in fact placed itself on a par with it, will answer its speech in turn, will utter its own equality in that speech, and that the existence of recognition will thereby come on the scene. Its confession is not a debasement, a humiliation, a casting-away of itself in relation to the other; for this uttering is not the one-sided act whereby it would posit its inequality with the other; rather, it speaks out solely on account of having intuited the equality of the other with itself, it utters their equality from its own side in its confession, and it utters it because language is spirit's existence as an immediate self; so it expects that the other will contribute its share to this existence.

Yet upon evil's admission, It is I, this answering confession of like kind does not follow. That is not how the judging meant it; on the contrary! It pushes this community away from itself, and it is the hard heart, existing for itself and refusing continuity with the other. — With that the scene turns around. The one that had confessed sees itself thrust back and sees the other in the wrong, the other which refuses to let its interior step out into the existence of speech, and which sets against evil the beauty of its soul, and against the confession the stiff neck of a character that stays equal to itself, together with the muteness of holding itself within itself and not throwing itself away upon another. Here the supreme revolt of the spirit certain of itself is posited; for it beholds itself in the other as this simple knowledge of the self, and beholds it so that even the outward shape of this other is not, as wealth was, the essenceless, not a thing; rather, what is held up against it is thought, knowledge itself; it is that pure knowledge in its absolutely fluid continuity which refuses to set up communication with the confessing one — with the very one that in its confession had already renounced separated being-for-itself and had posited itself as sublated particularity and thereby as continuity with the other, as something universal. The other, however, holds in reserve for its own part its uncommunicating being-for-itself; and in the confessing consciousness it holds fast to that very same thing, which the confessing consciousness has nonetheless already cast off. It thereby exhibits itself as the consciousness abandoned by spirit and denying spirit, for it fails to cognize that spirit, in absolute certainty of its own self, is master over every deed and every actuality and can throw them off and undo them. At the same time it fails to cognize the contradiction it commits when it will not let the throwing-off that has taken place in speech count as the true throwing-off, while it has the certainty of its own spirit not in any actual action but in its interior, and the existence of that interior in the speech of its judgment. So it is itself what checks the other's return out of the deed into speech's spiritual existence and into the equality of spirit, and by this hardness it produces the inequality that is still on hand.

Insofar, then, as the spirit certain of itself, as beautiful soul, lacks the force to externalize the knowledge of itself that it keeps within, it can reach no equality with the consciousness it thrust back, and hence no intuited unity of its own self in the other, no existence at all; equality accordingly comes about only negatively, as a spiritless being. The beautiful soul, void of actuality, standing in the contradiction of its pure self against that self's necessity to externalize itself into being and to swing over into actuality, standing in the immediacy of this opposition held fast — an immediacy that alone is the middle and the reconciliation of an opposition heightened to its pure abstraction, and that is pure being or empty nothing — is therefore, as consciousness of this contradiction while its immediacy stays unreconciled, unhinged into madness and melts away in a consumption of longing. With this it does in fact surrender the hard clinging to its being-for-itself, but what it brings forth is merely the spiritless unity of being.

The true equalization, namely the self-conscious and existent one, is already contained in what precedes, as regards its necessity. Breaking the hard heart and raising it to universality is the very movement expressed in the consciousness that confessed itself. The wounds of spirit heal, and no scars are left behind; the deed is not the imperishable thing but is withdrawn by spirit back into itself, and the side of singularity present in the deed, whether as intention or as the deed's existent negativity and limit, is what immediately disappears. The self that actualizes, the form of its action, is nothing but a moment of the whole, and the same holds of the knowledge that determines by judgment and fixes the difference between the singular side and the universal side of acting. That evil consciousness posits this externalization of itself, that is, posits itself as a moment, having been drawn forth into the existence of confession by the intuition of its own self in the other. This other, however, must have its one-sided, unrecognized judgment broken, just as the first had to have broken its unrecognized, one-sided existence of particular being-for-itself; and just as the first exhibits spirit's power over its actuality, so this one exhibits that power over its determinate concept.

This other, however, renounces the dividing thought and the hardness of the being-for-itself that clings to it, and does so because in fact it intuits its own self in the first. The first, which throws its actuality away and makes itself into a sublated This, thereby in fact presents itself as something universal; out of its external actuality it returns into itself as essence; and so the universal consciousness cognizes its own self in it. — The forgiveness that it grants the first is its renouncing of itself, of its unactual essence, which it sets equal to that other, to what was actual acting, and it recognizes as good the consciousness that was named evil on account of the determination acting received in thought, or rather it lets go of this difference of determinate thought together with its own determining judgment that is for itself, exactly as the other relinquishes the determining of the action that is for itself. — The word of reconciliation is existent spirit, spirit which intuits the pure knowledge of itself as universal essence within its opposite, within the pure knowledge of itself as the singularity that is absolutely within itself — a reciprocal recognizing that is absolute spirit.

It steps into existence only at that apex where its pure knowledge of its own self is opposition and alternation with itself. Since it knows that its pure knowledge is the abstract essence, it is this knowing duty standing in absolute opposition to the knowledge that knows itself, as the absolute singularity of the self, to be the essence. That first side is the universal in its pure continuity, and it knows the singularity that knows itself to be essence as what is in itself null, as evil. This second side, however, is absolute discreteness, which knows itself in its pure One to be absolute and knows that universal to be the unactual, which is only for others. Both sides are refined to this purity, in which no selfless existence, nothing negative of consciousness, still attaches to them; instead that duty is the character, remaining equal to itself, of its knowledge of its own self, and this evil, for its part, has in its being-within-itself its purpose, and in what it says its actuality; the content of what it says is the substance of its subsistence; it is the assurance of spirit's certainty within itself. — Neither of these two spirits certain of themselves has any purpose beyond its pure self, nor any reality and existence beyond just this pure self. But they are still distinct, and the distinctness is the absolute one, since it is posited in this element of the pure concept. And it is so not only for us, but for the very concepts that stand in this opposition. These concepts are, to be sure, determinate over against one another, yet at the same time universal in themselves, so that they fill out the whole compass of the self, and this self possesses no content other than this determinateness of its own, a determinateness that neither reaches past the self nor is narrower than it; for the one of them, the absolutely universal, is just as much the pure knowing of its own self as is the other, the absolute discreteness of singularity, and both are nothing other than this pure knowing of themselves. Both determinacies are therefore the knowing pure concepts, whose determinateness is itself immediately knowledge, or whose relationship and opposition is the I itself. In this way they are, for one another, these flatly opposed terms; it is the completely inner that has in this way come to face itself and stepped into existence; they constitute the pure knowledge that is posited as consciousness through this opposition. But it is not yet self-consciousness. It has this actualization in the movement of this opposition. For this opposition is rather itself that indiscrete continuity, that equality, of the I = I; and each of them, for itself, sublates itself in its own case precisely through the contradiction of its pure universality, which at once still resists its equality with the other and cuts itself off from it. Through this externalization the knowledge split in two in its existence goes back to the unity of the self; this is the actual I, the universal knowing of itself within its absolute opposite, within the knowledge that has being-within-itself, a knowledge which, because its separated being-within-itself is pure, is itself the completely universal one. The reconciling Yes, in which both I's let their opposed existence go, is the existence of the I expanded into a twofoldness, an I that stays equal to itself therein and, in its complete externalization and its opposite, has the certainty of its own self; — it is God appearing in the midst of those who know themselves as pure knowledge.