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.

VII. Religion

Among the formations dealt with hitherto, which are broadly told apart into consciousness, self-consciousness, reason and spirit, there did indeed also occur religion, as consciousness of the absolute essence in general; but only as seen from the standpoint of consciousness, which for its part is conscious of the absolute essence; in those forms, though, neither the absolute essence taken in and for itself nor spirit's self-consciousness came to light.

Even consciousness already becomes, insofar as it is understanding, consciousness of what is supersensible in objective existence, or of its inner. But whatever is supersensible and eternal, by whatever other name one gives it, is selfless; so far it is only the universal, which still falls well short of being spirit that has knowledge of itself as spirit. — Next, self-consciousness, whose completion lies in the shape taken by the unhappy consciousness, was nothing but spirit's pain, struggling its way back out toward objectivity without ever arriving there. Hence the unity of the singular self-consciousness with its unchangeable essence, a unity that self-consciousness brings itself to, remains a beyond for it. — Neither reason in its immediate existence, which for us issued from that pain, nor the peculiar shapes belonging to it has any religion, since the self-consciousness proper to them seeks and knows itself in the immediate present.

In the ethical world, by contrast, a religion did come into view, the religion of the underworld; it consists in faith in the terrible, unknown night of fate, and faith in the Eumenides of departed spirit; — the first of these is pure negativity under the form of universality, the second is that same negativity under the form of singularity. In this latter form the absolute essence is indeed the self, and something present, as the self cannot but be; yet the singular self is this singular shade, which has the universality that is fate standing apart from it. It is, to be sure, a shade, a sublated This, and thus a universal self; but that negative significance has not yet turned over into this positive one, and so what the sublated self still signifies at the same time, and immediately, is this particular and essenceless self. — Fate without the self, however, remains the unconscious night, which arrives neither at differentiation within itself nor at the clarity of self-knowing.

Such faith in the nullity of necessity and in the underworld turns into faith in heaven, since the departed self has to make itself one with its universality, to unfold there what that universality holds, and so to become clear to itself. This realm of faith, however, we saw unfold its content without the concept, within the element of thinking alone, and therefore we saw it go under in its fate, namely in the religion of the Enlightenment. Here the supersensible beyond of the understanding re-establishes itself, yet in such a manner that self-consciousness rests satisfied on this side of things and knows the supersensible, that empty beyond which is neither to be cognized nor to be feared, neither as self nor as power.

In the religion of morality what is finally reinstated is that the absolute essence has a positive content; it stands united, though, with the negativity of the Enlightenment. This content is a being that is at the same time withdrawn into the self and stays shut up there, and a differentiated content the parts of which are negated as immediately as they are put forward. But the fate into which this self-contradicting movement sinks away is the self that is conscious of being that fate, the fate of essentiality and actuality.

Spirit knowing itself is, in religion, immediately its own pure self-consciousness. The shapes of spirit that have been examined — spirit as true, spirit as estranged from itself, spirit as certain of itself — make it up, taken together, in its consciousness, which, confronting its world, fails to cognize itself there. But in conscience spirit subjugates its objective world as such, and likewise its representation and its determinate concepts, and is now a self-consciousness that is at home with itself. Within this self-consciousness spirit, represented as an object, carries for itself the meaning of being universal spirit, which holds all essence and all actuality inside itself; but it is not there in the form of free actuality, nor in that of nature appearing as self-subsistent. Spirit does have shape, that is, the form of being, in that its consciousness has it as object; but since in religion this consciousness is posited under the essential determination of being self-consciousness, the shape is wholly transparent to itself; and the actuality that spirit contains lies enclosed within it, or sublated within it, exactly in the way it does when we say all actuality; it is actuality as thought, universal actuality.

Since, then, the determination of spirit's consciousness proper lacks, in religion, the form of free otherness, spirit's existence stands distinguished from its self-consciousness, and its actuality proper falls outside religion; one and the same spirit does belong to both, yet spirit's consciousness does not span the two together, and religion shows up as one part of existence and of what is done and pursued, the other part being life in spirit's actual world. Now just as we know that spirit in its world and the spirit conscious of itself as spirit, that is, spirit in religion, are one and the same, so the completion of religion lies in this, that the two should become equal to each other, not merely that spirit's actuality be encompassed by religion, but conversely that spirit, as spirit conscious of itself, should become actual and should become the object of its consciousness. — To the extent that spirit in religion represents itself to itself, it is of course consciousness, and the actuality shut up inside religion serves as the shape and clothing of spirit's representation. Within this representation, however, actuality is not granted its full right, which would be to be not merely clothing but self-subsistent free existence; and conversely, since it lacks completion in its own self, actuality is a determinate shape, one that falls short of what it is meant to exhibit, namely spirit as conscious of itself. If spirit's shape were to express spirit itself, the shape would have to be nothing other than spirit, and spirit would have to have appeared to itself, or to be actual, just as it is in its essence. In that way alone would there also be attained what may look like a demand for the very opposite, namely that the object of spirit's consciousness at the same time have the form of free actuality; but only that spirit which is an object to itself as absolute spirit is for itself an actuality just as free as it remains, within that actuality, conscious of itself.

When, to begin with, a distinction is drawn between self-consciousness and consciousness proper, between religion and spirit in its world, that is, the existence of spirit, this last consists in spirit as a whole, insofar as spirit's moments exhibit themselves as stepping apart, each on its own account. These moments, though, are the following: consciousness, self-consciousness, reason and spirit — the last of these being spirit in its immediacy, spirit not yet grown into the consciousness of spirit. Their combined totality makes up spirit in its worldly existence as such; spirit as such holds the formations dealt with hitherto within the universal determinations, the moments just named. Religion presupposes the entire course these moments run through, and constitutes their simple totality, that is, their absolute self. — Their course, incidentally, when related to religion, is not to be represented in temporal terms. Only spirit as a whole is in time, and shapes that are shapes of the whole of spirit as such exhibit themselves in a sequence; for the whole alone possesses actuality proper, and therefore possesses the form of pure freedom over against another, a form that gives itself expression as time. But spirit's moments, consciousness, self-consciousness, reason and spirit, have, just because they are moments, no existence that differs from one another. — In the way that spirit was set off from its moments, so too, thirdly, the singularized determination of these moments must be set off from the moments themselves. For we saw each of those moments in turn differentiate itself within itself along a course of its own and take on differing shapes; as, for example, within consciousness, sense-certainty and perception were distinguished. These latter aspects step apart from one another in time, and they belong to a particular whole. — For spirit comes down out of its universality, by way of determination, into singularity. Consciousness, self-consciousness and so on make up the determination, or the middle. Singularity, however, is constituted by the shapes of these moments; these therefore exhibit spirit in its singularity, that is, its actuality, and are distinguished in time, yet in such a way that the later one retains the earlier ones within itself.

If, then, religion is the completion of spirit, in which spirit's singular moments, consciousness, self-consciousness, reason and spirit, are grasped as going back into their ground and as having gone back into it, then taken together these moments make up the existing actuality of spirit as a whole, a spirit that only is as the movement of differentiating these aspects of itself and returning into itself out of them. What contains the becoming of religion as such is the movement of the universal moments. Yet since each of these attributes has been exhibited not simply in the way it determines itself generally, but as it stands in and for itself, that is, in the way it runs through its own course within itself as a whole, what has arisen thereby is not only the becoming of religion as such; rather, those complete courses run by the singular aspects contain at the same time the determinatenesses of religion itself. The whole of spirit, the spirit of religion, is once again the movement of reaching, from out of its immediacy, the knowledge of what it immediately, or in itself, is, and of bringing it about that the shape in which it appears for its consciousness be perfectly equal to its essence, and that it intuit itself as it is — in this becoming, then, spirit is itself present in determinate shapes, which make up the differences of this movement; and with that the determinate religion likewise has a determinate actual spirit. If, therefore, the spirit that knows itself has, generally, consciousness, self-consciousness, reason and spirit belonging to it, then to the determinate shapes of the self-knowing spirit there belong the determinate forms that developed within each of these separately: within consciousness, within self-consciousness, within reason and within spirit. For its actual spirit, the determinate shape of religion singles out, from the shapes of each of spirit's moments, the shape corresponding to it. This one determinateness of religion runs through every aspect of religion's actual existence and imprints on them this shared stamp.

In this way the shapes that have emerged up to this point now order themselves otherwise than they appeared within their series, on which the necessary brief remark must first be made. — Within the series we considered, each moment, by deepening into itself, cultivated itself into a whole governed by its own peculiar principle; and the depth in which these moments, having no subsistence on their own account, had their substance was cognition, or spirit. This substance, however, has now stepped forth; it is the depth of the spirit certain of itself, and this depth does not allow the singular principle to isolate itself and turn itself into a whole on its own; instead, gathering all these moments into itself and holding them together, it advances within the whole wealth belonging to its actual spirit, and every particular moment of that spirit takes in and receives, in common with the rest, the same determinateness of the whole. — This spirit certain of itself, along with its movement, is their true actuality; it is the being-in-and-for-itself that accrues to each singular one. — If, then, the single series so far, in its advance, marked the regressions within it by means of nodes, but continued on out of them once more into one single length, it has now been snapped, as it were, at those nodes, at the universal moments, and has broken up into many lines which, bound together into a single sheaf, at the same time join symmetrically, so that the identical differences into which each particular line shaped itself within its own bounds come together. — It is, besides, so plain of itself from the whole exposition how the coordination of the universal directions presented here is to be understood, that any remark to the effect that these differences must essentially be grasped only as moments of the becoming and not as parts becomes superfluous; in actual spirit these differences are attributes of its substance, whereas in religion they are rather only predicates of the subject. — Likewise, in itself or for us, all the forms as such are indeed contained in spirit and in each of them; but as regards spirit's actuality, everything depends solely on which determinateness is there for spirit within its consciousness, on which determinateness it has used to express its self, or in what shape it has knowledge of its essence.

The difference drawn between actual spirit and spirit as knowing itself to be spirit, or between spirit itself as consciousness and as self-consciousness, is sublated within the spirit that has knowledge of itself in accordance with its truth; in that spirit, consciousness and self-consciousness have been evened out. But since religion here is as yet only immediate, this difference has not yet gone back into spirit; nothing more than the concept of religion is posited, and within that concept the essence is self-consciousness, which is all truth for itself and holds all actuality within that truth. This self-consciousness, taken as consciousness, has itself for its object; spirit, which so far knows itself only immediately, is therefore spirit to itself under the form of immediacy, and the shape in which spirit appears to itself has the determinateness of being. This being, to be sure, is filled neither with sensation nor with manifold material, nor with one-sided moments, purposes and determinations of any other kind, but with spirit, and is known by itself to be all truth and actuality. This fulfillment is accordingly not equal to its shape, nor spirit as essence equal to its consciousness. Spirit becomes actual only as absolute spirit, in that it is to itself in its truth as it also is in the certainty of itself, or in that the extremes into which spirit divides itself as consciousness stand for one another in spirit's own shape. The formation that spirit assumes as the object of its consciousness stays filled with spirit's certainty, filled with it as with substance; through this content there vanishes any prospect of the object sinking down to pure objectivity, to the form of the negativity belonging to self-consciousness. Spirit's immediate unity with itself is the foundation, or pure consciousness, within which consciousness steps apart. Shut up in this way within its pure self-consciousness, spirit has no existence, within religion, as the creator of nature in general; what it brings forth in this movement are rather its own shapes as spirits, and these together make up the completeness of spirit's appearance, while the movement itself is the becoming of spirit's perfect actuality by way of the singular aspects of that actuality, that is, by way of its imperfect actualities.

Spirit's first actuality is the concept of religion itself, that is, religion in its immediate form and hence as natural religion; within it spirit has knowledge of itself as its own object under a natural, immediate shape. The second, however, is necessarily this: that spirit should know itself under the shape of sublated naturalness, that is, of the self. It is therefore the religion of art; for it is through the producing done by consciousness that the shape lifts itself into the form of the self, consciousness thereby intuiting its own doing, that is, the self, in its object. The third, finally, sublates what was one-sided in the first two; the self is quite as much something immediate as the immediacy is self. If spirit as such stands in the first under the form of consciousness, in the second — under that of self-consciousness, then in the third it stands under the form in which the two are united; it has the shape of what is in and for itself; and since it is thus represented in the way it is in and for itself, what we have here is revealed religion. Although in revealed religion spirit does arrive at its true shape, it is precisely the shape itself, together with representation, that remains the aspect not yet overcome, and out of it spirit has to pass over into the concept, so as to dissolve the form of objectivity entirely within the concept, within that which likewise encloses this its own opposite. Then spirit will have taken hold of its own concept, as we so far have only taken hold of it, and since its shape, the element in which it exists, is the concept, that shape is spirit itself.

A. Natural Religion

Spirit that has knowledge of spirit is conscious of its own self, and it is there to itself in the form of the objective, it is; and at the same time it is being-for-itself. It exists for itself, it is the side of self-consciousness, and this as against the side of its consciousness, that is, of relating itself to itself as object. The opposition lies within its consciousness, and with it the determinateness of the shape in which spirit knows itself and appears to itself. This determinateness is our sole concern in the present consideration of religion, since spirit's shapeless essence, its pure concept, has already come out. Yet the difference between consciousness and self-consciousness falls, at one and the same time, inside self-consciousness itself; what the shape of religion contains is not the existence of spirit as nature freed from thought, nor as thought freed from existence; it is rather existence preserved within thinking, and equally something thought which is there to itself. — One religion is marked off from another by the determinateness of the shape within which spirit has knowledge of itself; but it must be noted at the same time that presenting this self-knowledge of spirit in terms of this single determinateness by no means exhausts an actual religion as a whole. The series of the various religions that will emerge exhibits, once more and just as much, only the various sides of a single religion, and indeed of each single one, and those representations which appear to set one actual religion apart from another are found in every one of them. At the same time, though, the diversity must also be considered as a diversity of religion. For since spirit is situated within the difference between its consciousness and its self-consciousness, what the movement aims at is the sublating of this principal difference and the conferring of the form of self-consciousness upon the shape which is the object of consciousness. But this difference is not already sublated merely because the shapes that consciousness contains carry the moment of the self about them too, and because God is represented as self-consciousness. A self that is represented is not the actual self; if it is to belong in truth to the shape, as every other closer determination of the shape must, it has in part to be posited in the shape by what self-consciousness does, while in part the lower determination has to show itself as sublated and comprehended by the higher one. For what is represented ceases to be represented, and ceases to be alien to spirit's knowledge, only through this, that the self has produced it and hence intuits the object's determination as its own, and so intuits itself in the object. — By this activity the lower determination is at once made to disappear; for doing is the negative, which carries itself through at the expense of something else; to the extent that the lower determination still turns up, it has withdrawn into inessentiality; conversely, in cases where the lower is still what dominates while the higher turns up as well, the one stands selflessly beside the other. If, then, the various representations within one single religion do exhibit the whole movement of its forms, what fixes the character of each religion is nonetheless the particular unity in which consciousness and self-consciousness stand, that is, the fact that self-consciousness has taken the determination of the first one's object into itself, has fully appropriated it through its own doing, and knows it as the essential determination over against the others. — That faith in some determination of the religious spirit is true shows itself in the fact that actual spirit is constituted in the same way as the shape in which it intuits itself in religion — as, for example, God's becoming man, which occurs in Eastern religion, holds no truth, since that religion's actual spirit lacks this reconciliation. — This is not the place to go back from the totality of the determinations to the single determination and to show in what shape, inside it and inside its particular religion, the completeness of the remaining ones is contained. A higher form, when placed back under a lower one, is stripped of its significance for self-conscious spirit and belongs to that spirit only superficially, belonging merely to its representation. It is to be considered in its own peculiar significance, and considered there where it functions as this particular religion's principle and stands corroborated by that religion's actual spirit.

a, The Light-Essence

Spirit, as the essence that is self-consciousness, — in other words, as the self-conscious essence that constitutes the whole of truth and knows every actuality to be itself, remains, over against the reality that it bestows on itself through the movement of its consciousness, nothing more as yet than its concept; and against the daylight of this unfolding that concept is the night of spirit's essence, while against the existence of spirit's moments as self-subsistent shapes it is the creative mystery from which spirit is born. This mystery contains its own revelation within itself; for existence draws its necessity from this concept, inasmuch as the concept is spirit knowing itself and therefore holds in its essence the moment whereby it is consciousness and gives itself objective representation. — It is the pure I that, in externalizing itself, has in itself, as a universal object, the certainty of its own self; or rather, for it this object is the permeation of all thinking and all actuality.

In the first, immediate splitting-in-two of absolute spirit as it knows itself, the shape spirit takes carries the determination proper to immediate consciousness, that is, to sense-certainty. Spirit intuits itself under the form of being, though not that spiritless being, replete with contingent determinations of sensation, which pertains to sense-certainty; rather, it is being that spirit has filled. It likewise includes within itself the form that came up already with immediate self-consciousness, namely the master's form as against that self-consciousness of spirit which draws back from its own object. — This being, which the concept of spirit has filled, is accordingly the shape taken by spirit's simple relation to itself, or, equally, the shape of shapelessness. In virtue of this determination that shape is the pure light-essence of the sunrise, which contains and fills all things and which sustains itself in a substantiality devoid of form. What it has as its otherness is the negative, simple in just the same way, namely darkness; the movements by which it externalizes itself, the creations it brings forth in the unresisting element of its otherness, are outpourings of light, and, simple as they are, these outpourings are at the same time both its becoming-for-itself and a returning out of its existence, streams of fire that devour all shaping. The difference which it confers on itself does indeed run riot within the substance of existence, taking shape as the forms of nature; yet the simplicity essential to its thinking roves among them, without subsistence and without understanding, stretching their limits to the measureless and dissolving, in its own sublimity, the beauty they have raised to splendor.

Whatever content this pure being unfolds, that is, its perceiving, is therefore an essenceless playing-alongside upon this substance, which merely rises and never sinks into itself so as to become subject and to secure its differences by way of the self; the determinations of this substance are mere attributes, which never flourish into self-subsistence but stay nothing more than names for the One of many names. The One wears the manifold forces of existence, together with the shapes of actuality, the way one wears a selfless ornament; they are merely messengers of its power, destitute of any will of their own, intuitions of its magnificence and voices that sing its praise.

This reeling life, however, has to determine itself toward being-for-itself, and to lend subsistence to its vanishing shapes. That immediate being, in which this life sets itself over against its own consciousness, is none other than the negative power which dissolves its own differences. In truth, then, it is the self; and this is why spirit proceeds to know itself under the form of the self. Pure light casts its simplicity apart into an infinity of forms and makes of itself an offering to being-for-itself, in order that the singular may take its subsistence from light's substance.

b. The Plant and the Animal

Self-conscious spirit, having gone into itself out of the shapeless essence, or having raised its immediacy into the self in general, gives its simplicity the determination of a manifoldness of being-for-itself; it is the religion of spiritual perception, in which spirit breaks apart into the countless plurality of weaker and stronger, richer and poorer spirits. This pantheism, which is at first the tranquil subsistence of these spirit-atoms, turns within itself into a hostile movement. The innocence belonging to the flower-religion, which is nothing but a selfless representation of the self, crosses over into the earnestness of a life of struggle, into the guilt of the animal-religion, and the repose and powerlessness of the intuiting individuality crosses over into a being-for-itself that destroys. — Nothing is gained by having stripped the things of perception of the death of abstraction and having raised them into essences of spiritual perception; the ensouling of this realm of spirits carries that death within it by way of determinateness and the negativity residing in determinateness, which reaches out across the innocent indifference of those things. Owing to that negativity, the scattering into the manifoldness of quiet plant-shapes is made into a hostile movement, one in which the hatred that belongs to their being-for-itself wears them away. — This scattered spirit's actual self-consciousness is a multitude of singularized, unsociable spirits of peoples that fight one another to the death out of their hatred, growing conscious of determinate animal-shapes as their essence, for they are nothing other than animal spirits, animal lives that cut themselves off and are conscious of themselves without universality.

Within this hatred, though, the determinateness proper to a being-for-itself that is purely negative wears itself away, and it is this movement of the concept that carries spirit over into a different shape. Sublated being-for-itself constitutes the form belonging to the object, a form which the self has brought forth, or rather which is the very self that has been brought forth, the self that wears itself away, that is, that becomes a thing. The one who labors therefore prevails over animal spirits that merely tear things apart, since what he does is not only negative but pacified and positive. From now on, then, the consciousness of spirit is the movement that lies beyond immediate being-in-itself just as much as beyond abstract being-for-itself. Since the in-itself has been demoted through opposition into a determinateness, it is no longer the form proper to absolute spirit, but an actuality which the consciousness of spirit finds set over against itself as ordinary existence and which it sublates, and consciousness is likewise not merely this sublating being-for-itself but also brings forth its representation of it, namely being-for-itself put out into the form of an object. This bringing-forth is not yet the accomplished kind, however, but a conditioned activity and the forming of something already at hand.

c. The Master Builder

Spirit therefore appears here as the master builder, and its doing, by which it brings itself forth as an object while not yet having grasped the thought of what it itself is, is an instinct-like laboring, in the way bees build their cells.

The first form, since it is the immediate form, is the abstract one belonging to the understanding, and the work, in its own self, has not yet been filled by spirit. The crystals of the pyramids and obelisks, simple combinations of straight lines, with flat surfaces and equal proportions of the parts, forms in which the incommensurability of the round has been wiped out, are the works of this master builder of strict form. Owing to the mere intelligibility that the form has, the form is not, in its own self, its own meaning, and it is not the spiritual self. The works therefore either merely receive spirit into themselves, as a spirit that is alien and has departed, one that has abandoned its living interpenetration with actuality and, itself dead, takes up lodging in these crystals which are destitute of life; — or else they relate themselves outwardly to spirit as to something which is itself outward and is not there as spirit — as to the rising light which throws its meaning upon them.

The separation from which the laboring spirit sets out, the separation of being-in-itself, which becomes the material that it works up, — from being-for-itself, which is the side of the laboring self-consciousness, has become objective for it in its work. Its further exertion must aim at sublating this separation of soul and body, at clothing and shaping the former in its own self, while ensouling the latter. As the two sides are brought closer to each other, they nonetheless keep, over against each other, the determinateness of the represented spirit and of the shell that surrounds it; its unity with itself contains this opposition of singularity and universality. When the work approaches itself in its sides, this at the same time brings about the other result as well, namely that it comes nearer to the laboring self-consciousness, and that this self-consciousness attains, within the work, a knowing of what it in and for itself is. In this manner, however, it constitutes as yet only the abstract side of the activity of spirit, an activity that knows its content not yet in its own self but on its work, a work that is a thing. The master builder himself, spirit in its wholeness, has not yet appeared; he remains the essence that is still inward and concealed, an essence whose wholeness is on hand only in decomposed form, split into the active self-consciousness and into the object it has brought forth.

The surrounding dwelling, then, the external actuality which so far has only been raised into the abstract form of the understanding, the master builder works out into a more ensouled form. For this he makes use of plant life, which no longer counts as sacred, the way it did for the earlier powerless pantheism, but which he, grasping himself as the essence that is for itself, takes as something serviceable and demotes to outer surface and ornamentation. Yet it is not employed without alteration; rather, the one who labors at the self-conscious form simultaneously wipes out the transitoriness that the immediate existence of this life has about it, and draws its organic forms nearer to the stricter and more universal forms belonging to thought. The organic form, which when left free proliferates in particularity, is for its part yoked under the form of thought, while on the other side it raises these straight-lined and level shapes into a more ensouled roundedness — a blending that becomes the root of free architecture.

This dwelling, the side of the universal element or of the inorganic nature of spirit, now encloses within itself a shape of singularity as well, one that brings nearer to actuality the spirit previously severed from existence, inward or outward to it, and that thereby renders the work more equal to the active self-consciousness. The laborer reaches first for the form of being-for-itself as such, for the animal shape. That animal life is no longer where his immediate consciousness of himself lies, he demonstrates by constituting himself, over against that life, as the force that brings it forth and by knowing himself within it as within his work; through which the animal shape becomes at once something sublated and the hieroglyph of another meaning, of a thought. For this reason the laborer no longer employs it alone and in its entirety; he mixes it, rather, with the shape of thought, the human one. The work, however, still has no shape and no existence wherein the self is there as self; — it still lacks this, that it should pronounce in its own self that it encloses an inner meaning within itself; what it lacks is language, the element wherein the fulfilling sense is itself on hand. The work, then, even where it has cleansed itself completely of the animal and carries on it nothing but the shape of self-consciousness, is a shape that is as yet toneless and needs the ray of the sun as it rises before it can have a tone, a tone that, being engendered by light, is again mere sound and not language, and exhibits only an outer self, not the inner one.

Over against this outer self of the shape stands the other shape, which indicates that it has an inner within it. Nature, in going back into its essence, reduces its living manifoldness, which singularizes itself and grows confused in its own movement, to an inessential shell that is the covering of the inner; and this inner, to begin with, is still the simple darkness, what is unmoved, the formless black stone.

Each of the two presentations holds inwardness and existence within it — the two moments belonging to spirit; and each holds both of them at the same time in an opposed relationship, the self as inner just as much as outer. Both must be brought into unity. — In the statue formed in human likeness the soul has not yet emerged from the inner, it is not yet language, that existence which in its own self is inward, — and the many-formed existence has an inner that is still toneless, one that draws no distinctions within itself and remains cut off from its outer side, to which all the distinctions belong. — The master builder consequently brings the two together by mixing the natural shape with the self-conscious one, and these ambiguous essences, enigmas to themselves, pairing what is conscious in its struggle with what is unconscious, the simple inner with the outer of many shapes, the obscurity of thought with the clarity of expression, break out into the language of a deep wisdom that is hard to understand.

In this work the instinct-like labor comes to an end, the labor that produced, over against self-consciousness, the unconscious work; for in it the activity of the master builder, which constitutes self-consciousness, is met by an inner that is just as self-conscious and pronounces itself. In doing this he has worked his way up to the splitting-in-two of his consciousness, the point at which spirit meets spirit. Where self-conscious spirit is thus at one with itself, insofar as it is to itself both shape and object of its consciousness, the mixtures it had entered into with the unconscious manner of the immediate shape of nature are accordingly purged away. These monsters in shape, speech, and deed dissolve into spiritual formation, — into an outer that has gone into itself, — into an inner that, out of itself and upon its own self, expresses itself; into thought, an existence that gives birth to itself, that keeps its shape in conformity with itself, and that is clear. Spirit is artist.

B. The Religion of Art

Spirit has lifted the shape in which it is for its own consciousness into the very form of consciousness, and it produces such a shape for itself. The master builder has given up synthetic labor, the mingling of the disparate forms of thought and of what is natural; once the shape has acquired the form belonging to self-conscious activity, he has thereby become a worker in spirit.

Suppose we ask which actual spirit it is that has, in the religion of art, the consciousness of its absolute essence: what then emerges is that this spirit is the ethical one, or the true spirit. It is not simply the universal substance of all singulars; rather, because for actual consciousness that substance bears the shape of consciousness, the sense of this is that the substance, which possesses individualization, is known by them as their own essence and work. So for them it is not the light-essence, in the unity of which the being-for-itself belonging to self-consciousness is preserved only negatively, only as something that vanishes, and which intuits the master of its actuality, — nor is the substance the ceaseless self-devouring of peoples who hate one another, — nor their subjugation into castes which, taken together, constitute the semblance of an organization of a whole brought to completion, though one lacking the universal freedom of the individuals. Rather, it is the free people in which custom constitutes the substance of all, and whose actuality and existence everyone, and each singular individual, knows as his own will and his own deed.

The religion of ethical spirit, however, is that spirit's raising of itself above its own actuality, a going back out of its truth into pure knowledge of itself. Since it is in immediate unity with its own substance that the ethical people lives, and since the principle of the pure singularity of self-consciousness is not present in it, its religion appears in its consummation only in the parting from its subsistence. For the actuality of ethical substance rests partly on its calm immutability over against the absolute movement of self-consciousness, and thus on this: that self-consciousness has not yet, out of its calm custom and its firm trust, gone into itself; — partly on the organization of that substance into a multiplicity of rights and of duties, as well as on the apportionment into the masses of the estates and of their particular doing, which works together into the whole; — and thus on this: that the singular individual is satisfied with the restriction of his existence and has yet to seize the unrestricted thought of his free self. But that calm immediate trust in the substance goes back into trust in itself and into the certainty of itself, while the multiplicity of rights and of duties, along with restricted doing, constitutes for the ethical the very same dialectical movement that the multiplicity of things and of their determinations constitutes, — a movement that finds its rest and its fixity nowhere but in the simplicity of self-certain spirit. — The consummation of ethical life into free self-consciousness and the destiny of the ethical world is therefore individuality that has gone into itself, the absolute frivolity of ethical spirit, which has dissolved in itself every fixed distinction of its subsistence and the masses of its organic articulation, and which, wholly sure of itself, has attained an unrestricted joyfulness and the freest enjoyment of its own self. This simple certainty that spirit has within itself is what is ambiguous, in that it is to be calm subsistence and firm truth, — as well as absolute unrest and the perishing of ethical life. It veers over, however, to the second of these, since the truth belonging to ethical spirit is still only this substantial essence and this trust, within which the self has no knowledge of itself as free singularity, and which therefore founders in that inwardness, or in the self's becoming free. Since trust has thus been broken and the substance of the people buckled inwardly, spirit, which had been the middle between extremes that have no subsistence, has now come forth into the extreme of a self-consciousness that seizes itself as essence. This latter is spirit certain within itself, which grieves over the loss of its world and which now brings forth its essence, raised above actuality, out of the purity of the self.

It is in such an epoch that absolute art steps forth; earlier, art is that instinct-like laboring which, submerged in existence, labors outward from existence and back into it, which does not find its substance in free ethical life, and which therefore does not have free spiritual activity for its laboring self either. Later, spirit has moved past art in order to gain a higher presentation of itself; — that is, to be not merely the substance born from the self, but, in its presentation as object, to be this self; not merely to bring itself to birth out of its concept, but to have as its shape that concept itself, so that the concept and the artwork produced know one another mutually to be one and the same.

Now that ethical substance has taken itself back, out of its existence, into its pure self-consciousness, this latter is the side of the concept, or of activity, by means of which spirit produces itself as object. That side is pure form, because in ethical obedience and service the singular individual has worked away from himself all unconscious existence and all fixed determination, in the same way that the substance has itself turned into this fluid essence. Such a form is the night in which betrayal came upon the substance and it made itself into subject; and it is from that night of the pure certainty of itself that ethical spirit is resurrected, as the shape set free from nature and from its own immediate existence.

The existence of the pure concept, the concept into which spirit has escaped from its body, is an individual whom spirit chooses for itself as the vessel of its pain. Spirit is present in this individual as the individual's universal and as its power, at whose hands it suffers violence, — as its pathos, and in giving itself over to that pathos the individual's self-consciousness forfeits its freedom. But the pure self of the individual, as the negative power, overcomes that positive power of universality. This pure activity, aware of the force it cannot lose, struggles with the unshaped essence; and in becoming master over it, the activity has turned pathos into its material and has furnished itself with its own content, and this unity emerges as a work, universal spirit individualized and represented.

a. The Abstract Work of Art

The first work of art, taken as the immediate one, is the abstract and singular work. On its side it has to move out of the immediate, objective manner and toward self-consciousness, while for its part self-consciousness, in the cult, is bent on sublating the distinction it initially sets up between itself and its own spirit, and on thereby bringing forth the work of art that is alive within itself.

Of the ways in which artistic spirit sets its shape at the furthest remove from its own active consciousness, the first is the immediate one: that shape simply is there as a thing. — Within it the shape splits into a difference: on one side singularity, which bears the shape of the self upon it, — on the other universality, which sets forth the inorganic essence in relation to the shape, as its surroundings and its dwelling. This universality acquires its pure form, the form that belongs to spirit, when the whole is raised into the pure concept. It is not the understanding's crystal, which gives housing to what is dead or takes its light from a soul lying outside it, — nor is it that mixture of nature's forms with those of thought which first comes forth out of the plant, thought's activity here being still an imitating. Rather, the concept sloughs off whatever still clings to these forms from root, bough and leafage, and refines them into figures whose crystalline straightness and flatness have been lifted into incommensurable proportions, with the result that the abstract form of the understanding absorbs the ensoulment of the organic while its essence, incommensurability for the understanding, is preserved along with it.

But the god that dwells within is a black stone drawn out of the animal's housing, a stone shot through with the light of consciousness. Human shape sheds the animal element it had been mixed with; the animal now serves the god as nothing more than a contingent costume; it takes its place beside his true shape, is no longer valid on its own account, and has sunk to signifying something else, to being a mere sign. In the very same move the god's shape sheds from itself the neediness that the natural conditions of animal existence impose, and it merely alludes to the inner arrangements of organic life as melted into its surface and belonging to that surface alone. — The god's essence, however, unites nature's universal existence with self-conscious spirit, which in its own actuality makes its appearance as standing opposite that existence. Being at first also a singular shape, the god has for his existence one among nature's elements, while his self-conscious actuality is one singular spirit of a people. But within this unity nature counts as the element that has been reflected into spirit: nature transfigured by thought, made one with self-conscious life. That is why the divine shape carries its natural element within it only as sublated, as a dim recollection. The waste being and the muddled struggle belonging to the free existence of the elements, that unethical realm of Titans, has been defeated and banished to the hem of an actuality now clear to itself, to the dim frontiers of a world that has found itself in spirit and settled. Those ancient gods into which the light-essence, begetting with darkness, first particularizes itself, namely the sky and the earth, the ocean and the sun, the blind Typhonic fire within the earth, and so forth, have given way to shapes that retain of them no more than a darkly recollecting echo of those Titans, shapes that are natural essences no longer but rather the lucid ethical spirits of self-conscious peoples.

So this simple shape has in itself wiped out the restlessness of infinite singularization — the restlessness it has as the natural element, which is necessary only as universal essence but relates contingently in its existence and its movement, — as well as the restlessness it has as the people, which, scattered among particular masses of doing and among the individual points of self-consciousness, possesses an existence of manifold sense and doing — and has gathered that restlessness into a tranquil individuality. Therefore over against it, over against the essence, stands the moment of restlessness — self-consciousness, which, as the birthplace of that shape, retained for itself nothing beyond being pure activity. Everything that belongs to substance the artist handed over wholly to his work, while granting himself, as a determinate individuality, no actuality in the work; he could bring the work to completion only by externalizing his own particularity, disembodying himself and heightening himself into the abstraction of pure doing. — In this first, immediate act of generation the split between the work and its self-conscious activity has not yet been closed again; the work, accordingly, is not on its own account what is genuinely ensouled, but constitutes a whole only in company with its own coming-to-be. The ordinary feature of the work of art, that it was generated in consciousness and fashioned by human hands, is the moment in which the concept exists as concept, the concept that steps up against the work. And if that concept, whether in the artist or in the beholder, should be disinterested enough to pronounce the work of art absolutely ensouled in itself and to forget itself as the one who does or the one who looks, then over against this we must hold fast to the concept of spirit, a concept that cannot do without the moment in which spirit is conscious of its own self. This moment, though, stands opposed to the work, since spirit, in this its first splitting-in-two, assigns to each of the two sides, against the other, its abstract determination, that of doing and that of being-a-thing, and since the two have not yet managed to return into the unity out of which they set out.

So in his work the artist comes to experience that what he produced was no essence like himself. From it a consciousness does indeed come back to him, in that an admiring multitude reveres the work as the spirit that constitutes their own essence. But this ensoulment, in giving him back his self-consciousness only as admiration, amounts rather to a confession made by the ensoulment to the artist that it is not his equal. Since what returns to him is joyfulness and nothing more, he fails to find in it the pain of his forming and begetting, or the strain of his labor. They may go on passing judgment on the work, or bringing offerings to it, or investing their consciousness in it however they will, — should they place themselves, with their acquaintance, above the work, he knows by how much his deed exceeds their talk and their understanding; — should they place themselves beneath it and cognize in it the essence that rules over them, he knows himself to be that essence's master.

The work of art therefore calls for a different element of its existence, and the god for a different way of coming forth than this one, in which he sinks from the depth of his creative night down into what is opposite to him: into externality, into the determination proper to a thing that lacks self-consciousness. Language is this higher element, — an existence that is immediately self-conscious existence. Singular self-consciousness, in being there within language, is there with the very same immediacy as a universal contagion; the thorough particularizing of being-for-itself is at once the fluid state and the universally imparted unity of the many selves; language is soul that exists as soul. The god, then, whose shape has language for its element, is that work of art which is ensouled within itself, since it has immediately within its existence the pure activity that formerly stood over against the god so long as he existed as a thing. Or: while its essence is becoming objective, self-consciousness remains immediately with itself. Because it is thus at home in its own essence, it amounts to pure thinking, or devotion, and the inwardness of that devotion also possesses existence in the hymn. The hymn retains within itself the singularity of self-consciousness, and when heard this singularity is at the same time present as universal; devotion, once kindled in everyone, is the spiritual stream that within the manifoldness of self-consciousness is conscious of itself both as one identical doing of all and as simple being; and as this universal self-consciousness belonging to all, spirit holds within a single unity its pure inwardness and equally the being-for-itself of the singulars and their being for others.

This language differs from a further language of the god, one that is not the language of universal self-consciousness. In the religion of art as in the religions that came before it, the god's oracle is his necessary first language, for his concept implies just as much that he is the essence of nature as that he is the essence of spirit, and that he therefore has an existence that is spiritual and not merely natural. So long as this moment lies merely in his concept and has yet to be realized within the religion, religious self-consciousness finds that language to be the language of an alien self-consciousness. A self-consciousness still alien to its own community is not yet there in such a way as its concept requires. The self is that being-for-itself which is simple and thereby wholly universal; but the self severed from the community's self-consciousness is as yet merely a singular one. — What this own and singular language contains follows from the universal determinateness under which absolute spirit is posited in its religion at all. — The universal spirit of the rising, which has as yet given its existence no particularization, accordingly utters propositions about the essence that are equally simple and universal, and the substantial content of these propositions is exalted in its simple truth. Yet precisely because of that universality, this content strikes a self-consciousness that goes on educating itself further as trivial at the same time.

The self that has been cultivated further and lifts itself to being-for-itself has become master of substance's pure pathos and of the objectivity belonging to the rising light-essence, and that simplicity of truth it knows as what is in itself, as something whose form is not that of a contingent existence conveyed by an alien language, but rather as the sure and unwritten laws of the gods, which live forever, and of which no one knows whence they appeared. — The universal truth that the light-essence revealed has here drawn back into what is inward or nether and has thereby been raised out of the form of contingent appearance; in the religion of art, by contrast, since the god's shape has assumed consciousness and with it singularity as such, the god's own language, the god being the spirit of the ethical people, is the oracle, which knows that people's particular affairs and announces what is useful with regard to them. The universal truths, though, are claimed by knowing thought as belonging to itself, precisely because they are known as what is in itself, and their language is for that thought no longer alien but its own. Just as that ancient sage looked for what is good and beautiful in his own thinking, while handing over to his daemon the poor and contingent content of knowledge, whether he would do well to associate with this person or that, or whether an acquaintance would do well to make a certain journey, and other such meaningless matters, so too does universal consciousness gather what it knows of the contingent from birds, or from trees, or from the fermenting earth whose vapor takes from self-consciousness its level-headedness; for the contingent is what is not level-headed and is alien, and ethical consciousness therefore also allows itself to be determined about it in a manner that is not level-headed and is alien, as though by a throw of dice. When the singular individual determines himself through his understanding and deliberately picks out what would be useful to him, the ground of this self-determination is the determinateness of his particular character; that determinateness is itself something contingent; and so the understanding's knowledge of what is useful to the singular individual turns out to be a knowledge of just the same kind as the knowledge of oracles or of the lot; the one difference being that whoever puts a question to the oracle or the lot thereby gives voice to the ethical disposition of indifference toward the contingent, whereas the other person handles what is contingent in itself as though it were the essential interest of his thought and his knowledge. Higher than either of these, however, is to make deliberation into the oracle of contingent doing while all the same knowing this deliberated action itself, in respect of its relation to the particular and of its usefulness, as something contingent.

The true self-conscious existence which spirit obtains in a language that is not the language of an alien and therefore contingent, non-universal self-consciousness, that existence is the work of art we saw a moment ago. It stands opposed to the thing-like existence of the statue. The statue is the existence that rests, whereas the work of art in language is the existence that disappears; and where in the statue objectivity, set free, goes without any immediate self of its own, in the latter it stays by contrast too closely locked inside the self, arrives too little at any shaping, and, like time, has immediately ceased to be there in the very act of being there.

What constitutes the cult is the movement of both sides, a movement in which the divine shape, set moving within self-consciousness's pure element of feeling and at rest within the element of thinghood, reciprocally surrenders its differing determination, and in which there comes into existence the unity that is the concept of their essence. Within the cult the self procures for itself the consciousness that the divine essence descends out of its beyondness to the self, and that essence, which previously is the unactual and merely objective one, thereby obtains the actuality proper to self-consciousness.

In itself this concept of the cult is already contained and at hand within the stream of hymnic song. Such devotion is the self's immediate, pure satisfaction by way of itself and in itself. It is the soul made pure, a soul that in this purity is immediately essence and nothing else, one with the essence. Because of its abstraction the soul is not a consciousness that would distinguish its object from itself, and so it amounts only to the night of that object's existence and the place made ready for its shape. The abstract cult, then, raises the self up so that it is this pure divine element. Consciously the soul carries out this purification; yet it is not yet the self that has climbed down into its own depths and knows itself as the evil one, but is instead something that is, a soul that washes its externality clean, dresses it in white garments, and conducts its inwardness along the represented path of labors, roads and rewards, the path of a culture that externalizes particularity in general, a path by which the soul reaches the dwellings and the fellowship of blessedness.

As yet this cult is only something secret, that is, an accomplishing that is merely represented and unactual; it has to be an actual action, for an unactual action stands in contradiction with itself. By this means consciousness proper lifts itself up into its pure self-consciousness. Within consciousness the essence carries the significance of a free object; the actual cult brings that object back into the self — and insofar as, within pure consciousness, it signifies the pure essence that dwells beyond actuality, this essence climbs down by way of this mediation from its universality to singularity and so closes together with actuality.

The way in which the two sides enter into the action settles itself thus: for the self-conscious side, insofar as it is actual consciousness, the essence puts itself forward as actual nature; for one thing, nature belongs to that side as possession and property and is valid as the existence that is not in itself; — for another, nature is that side's own immediate actuality and singularity, which it likewise regards as non-essence and sublates. For its pure consciousness, however, this same external nature carries the opposite significance at the same time, namely that of being the essence which is in itself, against which the self sacrifices its own unessentiality, just as, in the reverse direction, it sacrifices to itself the unessential side of nature. The action is on this account a movement of spirit, since it is this two-sided affair: to sublate the abstraction of the essence, as devotion determines the object, and to make the essence into something actual, and to sublate the actual, as the agent determines both the object and himself, and to raise it into universality.

The cult's own action therefore begins with the pure giving over of a possession, which its owner, to all appearance quite uselessly so far as he is concerned, pours out or sends up in smoke. In doing this he gives up, in the presence of the essence of his pure consciousness, possession together with the right of property and of enjoying it, gives up personality and the return of his doing into the self, and he reflects the action into the universal or the essence instead of reflecting it into himself. — Conversely, though, the essence that is founders in this act just as much. The animal offered up in sacrifice is a god's sign; the fruits that get eaten are living Ceres and Bacchus themselves; — within the animal the powers of the upper right die, the right that has blood and actual life; within the fruits, however, the powers of the nether right die, the bloodless right that possesses the secret and cunning power. — Insofar as it is a doing, the sacrificing of the divine substance belongs to the self-conscious side; and for such an actual doing to be possible at all, the essence must itself have already made a sacrifice of itself in itself. It has done this in giving itself existence and making itself into the singular animal and into the fruit. This renunciation, which the essence has thus already carried out in itself, is displayed by the acting self within existence and for its own consciousness, and it puts in place of that immediate actuality of the essence a higher one, namely the actuality of the self itself. For the unity that has emerged, being the result of the sublated singularity and separation of both sides, is not fate in its merely negative form but carries a positive significance. Only to the abstract subterranean essence is what has been sacrificed to it surrendered whole, and thereby the reflection of possession and of being-for-itself into the universal is marked off as something distinguished from the self as such. Yet this is only a slight portion, while the other sacrificing merely destroys what is unusable and is rather the dressing of the sacrificial offering for a meal, whose feasting defrauds the action of its negative significance. Of that first offering the sacrificer holds back the greater part, and of the second what is usable, reserving it for his own enjoyment. This enjoyment is the negative power sublating both the essence and singularity, and it is simultaneously the positive actuality within which the essence's objective existence is transformed into a self-conscious one, and the self becomes conscious of its being one with the essence.

This cult, to be sure, is an actual action, and yet its significance lies more nearly in devotion alone; what belongs to devotion has not been produced objectively, just as the result, in enjoyment, robs itself of its own existence. So the cult moves on and makes up for this lack, in the first place, by conferring an objective subsistence on its devotion, in that it is the labor, common or singular, that lies within everyone's power and that brings forth the god's dwelling and finery in his honor. — In part this sublates the objectivity of the statue, for by consecrating his gifts and his labors in this way the worker inclines the god toward himself and intuits his own self as something that belongs to the god; and in part this doing is not the singular laboring of the artist, but this particularity has been dissolved in universality. What comes about, however, is not merely the god's honor, nor does the blessing of his inclination flow to the worker in representation alone; the labor also bears the significance that is the reverse of the first, the reverse of externalization and of honor rendered elsewhere. The god's dwellings and halls serve the use of human beings, and the treasures kept in them belong, in an emergency, to the human being; the honor the god enjoys in his ornament is the honor of the people that is rich in art and magnanimous. At the festival that same people adorns its own dwellings and clothing no less, and its business too, with elegant utensils. In this way it receives for its gifts the grateful god's return and the proofs of that inclination in which it joined itself to him through labor, not in hope and in some later actuality; rather, in the very act of paying honor and presenting the gifts it immediately enjoys its own riches and finery.

b. The Living Work of Art

The people that approaches its god in the cult belonging to the religion of art is the ethical people, which knows its state and that state's actions as its own will and its own accomplishment. This spirit, which steps up against the self-conscious people, is therefore not the light-essence that, selfless as it is, holds no certainty of the singulars within itself and is instead merely their universal essence and the imperious power in which they vanish… So the cult that belongs to the religion of this simple, shapeless essence returns to its adherents nothing in general beyond this, that they make up the people belonging to their god; it wins for them only their subsistence and simple substance at large, and not their actual self, which is on the contrary cast out. For the god they revere is empty depth rather than spirit. In the religion of art, by contrast, the cult does without that abstract simplicity which belongs to the essence, and hence without the essence's depth. But the essence which is united with the self immediately is in itself spirit and knowing truth, though not yet truth that has been known, or truth that knows itself in its own depth. Since the essence here has the self on it, its appearance is friendly toward consciousness, and within the cult consciousness obtains not merely the universal warrant of its subsistence but its existence as self-conscious within that essence as well; conversely, the essence has no selfless actuality in a repudiated people whose substance alone is granted recognition, but has its actuality in the people whose self is recognized in its substance.

So there emerges out of the cult a self-consciousness satisfied within its essence, and a god who has entered into it as into his abode. For itself this abode is substance's night, that is, substance's pure individuality, yet no longer the artist's tense individuality, which has not yet come to terms with an essence that is turning objective, but rather the satisfied night, which possesses its pathos on itself without needing anything, since it is returning from intuition, from objectivity that has been sublated. — Taken for itself, this pathos is the essence of the rising, an essence that has by now, however, gone down within itself and possesses on itself its going-down, namely self-consciousness and with it existence and actuality. — At this point it has traversed the movement of its actualization. Setting itself down from its pure essentiality into an objective natural force together with that force's expressions, it is an existence meant for the other, for the self that consumes it. In its fruit the quiet essence of selfless nature attains the stage at which nature, dressing itself and digested, offers itself to selfish life; in the usefulness of being edible and drinkable it arrives at its supreme perfection, since in that it is the possibility of an existence that is higher, and it touches upon spiritual existence; — grown in part into quietly potent substance, in part into spiritual fermentation, the earth-spirit in its metamorphosis has ripened over there into the feminine principle of nourishment, over here into the masculine principle of the self-propelling force of self-conscious existence.

So in this enjoyment that rising light-essence is betrayed for what it is; the enjoyment is the mystery of that essence. For the mystical does not consist in a secret's being hidden, nor in ignorance, but consists in this, that the self knows itself as one with the essence, so that the essence is thereby revealed. The self alone is revealed to itself; or rather, whatever is revealed is revealed only within an immediate certainty of itself. Within that certainty, however, the simple essence has been posited by the cult; as a usable thing it not only has the existence that is seen, felt, smelled and tasted, but is an object of desire as well, and actual enjoyment makes it one with the self, so that it is thereby wholly betrayed to the self and revealed to it. — Whatever is said to be revealed to reason and to the heart in truth remains secret, for there is still lacking the actual certainty that belongs to immediate existence, both the objective certainty and the enjoying one, which within religion is not merely the thoughtless immediate certainty but at the same time the purely knowing certainty of the self.

What has thereby been revealed through the cult to self-conscious spirit within spirit itself is the simple essence, revealed as the movement whereby it partly steps up out of its nocturnal concealment into consciousness, so as to be the quietly nourishing substance of consciousness, and partly loses itself once more in the subterranean night, in the self, lingering above only with a quiet maternal longing. — The pure drive, though, is the many-named light-essence of the rising and its reeling life, a life which, having likewise let go of its abstract being, first gathered itself into the fruit's objective existence, then gave itself over to self-consciousness and reached its proper actuality within it, — and which now wanders about as a crowd of ecstatic women, nature's untamed reeling in self-conscious shape.

As yet, however, the only absolute spirit betrayed to consciousness is the one that is this simple essence, not the one that is spirit on itself, that is, only the immediate spirit, nature's spirit. Its self-conscious life is therefore nothing but the mystery of bread and of wine, of Ceres and of Bacchus, and not that of the other gods, the properly higher ones, whose individuality encloses self-consciousness as such within itself as an essential moment. So spirit has not yet sacrificed itself to consciousness as self-conscious spirit, and the mystery of bread and of wine has not yet become the mystery of flesh and of blood.

This unsteadied reeling of the god has to calm itself into an object, and the enthusiasm that never arrived at consciousness has to bring forth a work that steps up against it, just as the statue did against the enthusiasm of the earlier artist, as a work equally complete, yet not as one lifeless on itself but as a living self. — A cult of this kind is the festival that the human being gives in his own honor, though into such a festival he does not yet put the significance of absolute essence; for what has so far been revealed to him is the essence, not yet spirit; not, that is, something which essentially assumes human shape. But this cult lays the ground for that revelation and spreads out its moments singly. Thus here we have the essence's abstract moment of living corporeality, as earlier we had the unity of the two in unconscious rapture. So the human being puts himself in the statue's place, as a shape trained and worked up into wholly free movement, while the statue is wholly free repose. While each singular individual knows how to present himself at the very least as a torchbearer, one among them rises out of the rest, one who is movement given shape, the polished working-out and fluid force of every limb; — an ensouled and living work of art, who joins strength to his beauty and to whom there falls, as the prize of his force, that ornament with which the statue used to be honored, and, in the stone god's stead, the honor among his people of being the supreme bodily presentation of their essence.

In both of the presentations that have just come up, the unity of self-consciousness and the spiritual essence is at hand, yet the balance between them is still missing. Within Bacchic enthusiasm the self is outside itself, whereas within beautiful corporeality the spiritual essence is. The dullness of that consciousness and its wild stammering must be received into the clear existence belonging to the latter, and the latter's spiritless clarity into the former's inwardness. Language is once again the complete element, the element in which inwardness is outward to the same degree that outwardness is inward, though it is neither the oracle's language, wholly contingent and singular in what it contains, nor the hymn of feeling that praises the singular god alone, nor the contentless stammering of Bacchic frenzy. Rather, language has gained its clear and universal content; its clear content, since out of that first wholly substantial enthusiasm the artist has worked himself through to a shape that is an existence of his own, permeated in all its stirrings by the self-conscious soul and living along with it; — its universal content, since in this festival, which is the honor of the human being, the one-sidedness of the statues disappears, statues that hold within them merely a national spirit, one determinate character of divinity. The beautiful fighter does count as the honor of his own particular people, and yet he is a corporeal singularity in which the fullness and gravity of meaning have gone under, along with the inner character of that spirit which bears the particular life, the concerns, the needs and the customs of his people. In this externalization into full corporeality spirit has set aside those particular impressions and resonances of nature which it used to enclose within itself while it was the people's actual spirit. Its people is therefore no longer conscious of its own particularity in him, but conscious rather of the setting aside of that particularity and of the universality that its human existence has.

c. The Spiritual Work of Art

The peoples' spirits, which reach awareness of their essence's shape in some particular animal, coalesce into One; and thus the several beautiful spirits of peoples are joined together into One pantheon, whose element and whose habitation is language. Within the actuality that a people's spirit possesses, pure self-intuition as universal humanity takes this form: that such a spirit allies itself with the others with which nature makes it into One nation, for a shared undertaking, and that for this work it builds up a total people and with it a total heaven. Yet the universality that spirit reaches in its existence is only this first sort, the sort that has just set out from the individuality of the ethical, has not yet got beyond its own immediacy, and has not shaped One state out of these tribes. What grounds the ethical life of a people's actual spirit is partly the immediate trust that singular individuals place in the whole of their people, and partly the immediate share which everyone, regardless of the distinction of estates, takes in the resolves and deeds of the government. In this uniting, which at first is not into an abiding order but only for one commonly undertaken action, that freedom of all and each to have a share is provisionally set to one side. Hence this first form of community amounts less to abstract thought's dominion, which would strip singular individuals of the self-conscious part they play in the whole's will and deed, than to a gathering of individualities.

This gathering of the peoples' spirits constitutes a circle of shapes that now embraces nature in its entirety along with the entire ethical world. They as well stand under the One's supreme command more than under his overlordship. On their own account they constitute the universal substances of what, in itself, the self-conscious essence both is and does. But this essence makes up the force, and at least to begin with the midpoint, about which those universal essences exert themselves, a midpoint that as yet appears to bind their several affairs together only by accident. Yet what already holds the ground for self-consciousness being the midpoint of those divine forces is the divine essence's own return into self-consciousness, a return that at first hides the essential unity beneath the form of an amicable outward relation between the two worlds.

The very universality that belongs to this content belongs necessarily to the form of consciousness too, the form in which the content makes its appearance. The cult's actual doing is no longer what is at work here; instead there is a doing raised not yet into the concept but only into representation, into that synthetic joining of self-conscious with external existence. Language, the existence of this representation, is the first language of all, the epic taken as such, and it holds the universal content, if only as the world's completeness, and not as the universality of thought. The singer is the singular and actual one who, as this world's subject, generates it and carries it. What moves him as pathos is not nature's stupefying power but Mnemosyne: collectedness, an inwardness that has come to be, the recollection of the essence that was until now immediate. He is the organ that disappears into its own content; his own self is not what has validity, but his Muse, his universal song. In fact, though, what is present is the syllogism where the world of the gods, the extreme of universality, is knit through the middle of particularity with singularity, with the singer. That middle is the people as embodied in its heroes, who are singular human beings just as the singer is, but only represented ones, and for that reason universal ones as well, as the gods are, who form the free extreme of universality.

In this epic, then, what the cult brings about in itself, the divine's relation to the human, is quite generally set forth before consciousness. Its content is an action performed by the essence that is conscious of its own self. Acting upsets the substance's repose and stirs the essence, so that the essence's simplicity is divided and opened out into a manifold world of forces both natural and ethical. That action wounds the quiet earth; it is the trench which, quickened by blood, summons up the spirits of the departed, and they, athirst for life, obtain it in the doing of self-consciousness. The business at which the general effort is directed acquires two sides: a selflike side, being accomplished by a totality of actual peoples together with the individualities at their head, and a universal side, being accomplished by their substantial powers. The relation between the two, however, was determined a moment ago as the synthetic linking together of universal and singular, in other words as representing. How this world is to be judged depends upon that determinateness. — Their relationship is thereby a blending that parcels out the unity of the doing inconsistently and needlessly tosses the action back and forth between the two sides. The universal powers carry the shape of individuality and with it the principle of acting; hence their working appears as a doing just as free, and proceeding just as entirely from them, as the doing of human beings does. One and the same deed, therefore, has been done by gods and by human beings alike. The earnestness of those powers is a laughable superabundance, since human beings are in fact the very force of acting individuality; — and the strain and labor of human beings is an equally pointless effort, since it is rather those powers that direct everything. — Mortals who live but a day, mortals who are nothing, are simultaneously the mighty self that subjugates the universal essences, that injures the gods and that supplies them generally with actuality and with an interest in doing; conversely, these impotent universalities, which feed on human gifts and only through human beings get anything to do at all, are the natural essence and the stuff of all that happens, and are likewise the ethical matter and the pathos belonging to the doing. Although only individuality's free self brings their elemental natures into actuality and into a relationship set into activity, they are just as much the universal that withdraws from this linkage, that stays unlimited in its determination, that through the unconquerable elasticity of its unity wipes out the punctual character of the agent along with the agent's figurations, that keeps itself pure, and that dissolves everything individual in its own fluidity.

Just as they come to stand in this contradictory relation to the selflike nature that opposes them, so likewise does their universality fall into strife with its own determination and with that determination's relationship to others. Eternal and beautiful individuals, they rest in their own existence and are lifted clear of transience and of alien violence. — And yet they are also determinate elements, particular gods, and so they relate themselves to others. But this relationship to others, which by virtue of its opposition amounts to a quarrel with them, is a comic forgetting of their own eternal nature. — Determinateness has its roots in divine subsistence and possesses, within the bounds of that subsistence, the self-subsistence proper to a whole individuality; owing to this, their characters simultaneously forfeit the sharp edge of their own peculiarity and mingle in their ambiguity. — A purpose of activity, and the activity as well, inasmuch as both aim at another and so at a divine force that cannot be defeated, is a contingent and empty preening which likewise melts away and converts the seeming earnestness of the deed into a risk-free play, sure of itself, yielding neither result nor success. But if, within the nature that their divinity has, the negative, that is, the determinateness of that divinity, shows up merely as an inconsistency in their activity and as a contradiction of purpose with outcome, while that self-subsistent security in the face of the determinate keeps the upper hand, then for just that reason there steps opposite them the pure force of the negative, and it steps opposite as their ultimate power, against which they are helpless. Over against mortals' singular self, which cannot withstand their power, they count as the universal and as the positive; and yet for that very reason the universal self floats above them and above this entire world of representation, the world that owns the whole content, floating there as the conceptless void of necessity — an occurrence toward which they conduct themselves selflessly and in mourning, since natures thus determinate cannot find themselves within such purity.

Such necessity, though, is the unity of the concept, to which the contradictory substantiality of singular moments stands subjected, a unity wherein the inconsistency and the contingency belonging to their doing are set in order and wherein the play of their actions gains earnestness and worth from those actions themselves. Loosed and on its own, the content of representation's world plays out its movement in the middle, gathered about the individuality of a hero who nonetheless feels his life broken in the midst of his force and beauty and who grieves as he looks ahead to an early death. For singularity that is firm within itself and actual has been shut out to the extremity and split in two into its moments, moments that have not yet found one another and become united. The one singular, the abstract and unactual one, is necessity, which takes no part in the life of the middle, and no more does the other, the actual singular, the singer, who holds himself outside that life and goes under in his own representation. Both extremes have to come closer to the content: the one, necessity, must be filled out with the content; the other, the singer's language, must take part in it; and the content, which up to now was abandoned to itself, must gain within itself the certainty of the negative and its firm determination.

This higher language, tragedy, accordingly gathers the scattered moments of the essential and acting world into a tighter unity; the substance of the divine steps apart into its shapes in keeping with the nature of the concept, and its movement likewise accords with the concept. So far as form goes, language, by entering into the content, stops being narrative, and the content stops being a merely represented one. It is the hero himself who speaks, and what is performed sets before the listener, who is at once a spectator, human beings who are self-conscious, who know their right and their purpose, along with the power and the will that their determinateness carries, and who know how to say these. They are artists who do not, in the manner of the language that goes along with ordinary doing in actual life, pronounce unconsciously, naturally, and naively the outward face of their resolve and their undertaking; instead they express the inner essence, prove the right of their acting, and the pathos they belong to they maintain with deliberation and pronounce with precision, in its universal individuality, free of contingent circumstances and of the particularity of personalities. The existence of these characters consists, in the end, of actual human beings, who put on the persons of the heroes and present them in speech that is actual and their own rather than narrated. Just as it is essential to the statue that human hands should have made it, so essential to his mask is the actor, — not as some outward condition that the contemplation of art would have to abstract from, — or, insofar as such abstraction really is to be made within that contemplation, what is being said thereby is precisely this, that art still does not have the true and proper self within it.

The universal ground upon which these shapes, engendered out of the concept, carry on their movement is the consciousness of that first representing language and of its selfless, loosely dispersed content. It is the common people at large, whose wisdom finds words in the chorus of old age; the people finds its representative in that chorus's want of strength, since the people itself amounts to nothing more than the positive, passive material set over against the individuality of the government. Going without the power of the negative, it cannot hold together or tame the riches and the motley plenitude of divine life; it lets that life scatter instead, and in its hymns of veneration it extols now this and now again another of the singular moments, each as a self-subsistent god. But where it feels the earnestness of the concept as that concept marches across these shapes and shatters them, and where it is given to witness how ill things turn out for the gods it has extolled once they hazard themselves on this ground where the concept holds sway, it does not itself become the negative power that intervenes by acting; it keeps rather to the selfless thought of that power, to a consciousness of alien fate, and it brings forward the empty wish for reassurance and the feeble speech of soothing. Given its fear before the higher powers, substance's immediate arms, before the struggle they wage with one another, and before necessity's simple self, which grinds them down as it grinds down the living beings tied to them; — given its compassion for those living beings, which it simultaneously knows to be one and the same with itself: what it has is only the idle horror at this movement, a regret just as helpless, and, at the end, the empty repose of submitting to a necessity whose work it grasps neither as the necessary action of character nor as the doing of the absolute essence within its own self.

Upon this spectating consciousness, as upon the indifferent ground of representing, spirit makes its entrance not in a scattered manifoldness but in the simple splitting-in-two of the concept, and its substance accordingly shows itself torn apart into two extreme powers. Simultaneously, these elemental universal essences are self-conscious individualities — heroes who invest their consciousness in one of these powers, who possess in it the determinateness of their character, and who constitute its activation and its actuality. — This universal individualizing descends, as was recalled, still further to the immediate actuality of existence proper, and it sets itself before a throng of spectators, for whom the chorus is their counter-image, or rather their own representation putting itself into words.

Both the content and the movement of the spirit that is here an object to itself have come under consideration already, as the ethical substance's nature and realization. Within its religion spirit gains consciousness about itself, or exhibits itself to its own consciousness in a purer form and a simpler configuration. If, then, the ethical substance split itself in two through its concept, so far as its content goes, into the two powers determined as divine and human, or as subterranean and upper right — the first being the family, the second the power of the state — and if of these the first had the feminine and the other the masculine character, then the circle of gods, formerly multiform and unsteady in its determinations, narrows itself down to these powers, which by this determination are brought nearer to individuality proper. For the whole's earlier scattering into the many abstract forces that appear substantialized amounts to the dissolution of the subject, a subject that comprehends them merely as moments within its own self; individuality is on that account no more than the surface form of those essences. Conversely, any difference among the characters going beyond the one named must be reckoned to a personality that is contingent and in itself external.

The essence divides itself simultaneously with respect to its form, that is, with respect to knowledge. The acting spirit confronts, as consciousness, the object upon which it is active, an object determined by that very fact as the negative of the knower; through this the agent finds itself in the opposition between knowledge and non-knowledge. It draws its purpose from its character and knows that purpose as the ethical essentiality; but owing to the determinateness of its character it knows only the One power of the substance, while the other stays hidden from it. Present actuality is on that account one thing in itself and something else for consciousness; in this relation the upper right and the lower right acquire the meaning of a power that knows and makes itself manifest to consciousness, and of a power that conceals itself and lurks in ambush. The One is the side of light, the oracle's god, who according to his natural moment sprang from the sun that lights up all things, who knows all and makes all manifest — Phoebus, and Zeus, his father. Yet the orders issued by this truth-speaking god, and his declarations of what is, prove rather to be deceptive. For in its concept such knowledge is immediately non-knowledge, since in acting consciousness is, within its own self, precisely this opposition. The man who could unlock the riddling Sphinx herself, and the man who trusts with a child's trust, are for this reason dispatched to ruin by what the god manifests to them. This priestess, from whom the beautiful god speaks, is nothing other than those double-meaning sisters of fate who use their promises to drive men into crime and who, by the double tongue of what they had given out as a guarantee, cheat whoever trusted the manifest sense. This is why a consciousness purer than the second sort, which puts its faith in witches, and more deliberate and more thorough than the first sort, the sort that relies on the priestess and on the beautiful god, hesitates over revenge when the father's own spirit has made a revelation about the crime that murdered him, and stages still further proofs — on the ground that this revealing spirit might just as well be the devil.

Such mistrust has its grounds, for the knowing consciousness puts itself into the opposition of its own certainty to the objective essence. The ethical's right, that actuality is nothing in itself over against the absolute law, comes to experience that its knowledge is one-sided, that its law is merely the law belonging to its own character, and that it laid hold of only the one power of the substance. The action is itself this inversion whereby what is known turns into its opposite, into being; it is the sudden turning of the right of character and of knowledge into the right of the opposed one, to which the former is tied within the substance's essence — into the Erinys of the other, roused in hostility. Of the other's power and character, that is. This lower right shares the throne with Zeus and enjoys a standing equal to that of the manifest right and the knowing god.

It is to these three essences that acting individuality restricts the chorus's world of gods. The first is the substance, the power of the hearth, the spirit of family piety, and equally the universal power belonging to the state and to the government. Since it is to the substance as such that this difference belongs, the difference does not individualize itself for representation into two distinct shapes; in actuality it has instead the two persons of its characters. By contrast, the difference between knowledge and non-knowledge falls within each of the actual self-consciousnesses — distributing itself between two individual shapes only in abstraction, within the element of universality. For the hero's self has existence solely as a consciousness that is whole, and so it is essentially the whole difference belonging to the form; its substance, though, is a determinate one, so that only one side of the content's difference belongs to it. Hence in representation the two sides of consciousness, which possess in actuality no individuality of their own separately belonging to each, each acquire a particular shape of its own: one the shape of the god who makes manifest, the other the shape of the Erinys who keeps herself concealed. In part the two enjoy equal honor, and in part Zeus, the shape of the substance, is the necessity that governs how the two stand in relation to each other. Substance is that relation whereby knowledge exists for itself yet possesses its truth in the simple, whereby the difference through which actual consciousness comes to be possesses its ground in the inner essence that extinguishes that difference, and whereby the self-clear assurance of certainty possesses its confirmation in oblivion.

Consciousness unlocked this opposition by acting; acting according to the manifest knowledge, it undergoes that knowledge's deceit, and, devoted in respect of content to the one attribute of the substance, it violated the other and thereby granted the other a right against itself. In following the knowing god it laid hold rather of what was not manifest, and it pays the price for having trusted a knowledge whose ambiguity, since ambiguity is that knowledge's very nature, had to be at hand for it too, together with a warning about it. The priestess's raving, the witches' unhuman shape, the voice of the tree and of the bird, dreams, and so on are not modes in which truth makes its appearance; they are signs that warn of deception, of unreflectedness, of the singularity and contingency of this knowledge. Or, and this is the same thing, the opposed power that consciousness violates is at hand as a pronounced law and a valid right, whether the family's law or the state's; consciousness, however, followed its own knowledge and hid what was manifest from itself, whereas the truth of the powers of content and of consciousness that step forth against one another is the result that both have equal right and therefore, within the opposition which acting brings forth, equal wrong. The movement of the doing proves their unity in the reciprocal ruin that overtakes both powers and the self-conscious characters alike. The opposition's reconciliation with itself is Lethe in the underworld, by way of death — or Lethe in the upper world, by way of acquittal, not from guilt, which consciousness cannot disown, since it acted, but from the crime, together with the expiatory calm that acquittal brings. Both are oblivion, the having-vanished of the actuality and the doing that belonged to the substance's powers, to their individualities, and to those powers that belong to the abstract thought of good and of evil; for not one of them taken singly is the essence; the essence is rather the whole at rest within its own self, the unmoving unity of fate, the quiet existence and with it the inactivity and lifelessness of family and government, the equal honor and with it the indifferent unactuality of Apollo and of the Erinys, and the return of their inspiriting and their activity into the simple Zeus.

Heaven's depopulation is completed by this fate — the depopulation of that thoughtless blending of individuality with essence, — a blending through which the essence's doing appears as inconsistent, contingent, unworthy of the essence; for individuality, adhering to the essence only on the surface, is what is unessential. The expulsion of such essenceless representations, which philosophers of antiquity called for, thus begins already in tragedy at large, in that the concept governs the dividing of the substance, so that individuality here is what is essential, while the determinations count as the absolute characters. For that reason the self-consciousness that tragedy represents recognizes and acknowledges only One supreme power, and it knows this Zeus solely as the state's power or the hearth's, and, within the opposition belonging to knowledge, solely as the father of that knowledge of the particular which is becoming a shape — and, further, as the Zeus of oath and Erinys, the Zeus of the universal, of an inwardness dwelling in concealment. Those moments, by contrast, which scatter further out of the concept into representation and which the chorus lets count one after another, are not the hero's pathos; for him they sink down to mere passion — to contingent, essenceless moments that the selfless chorus may well extol, but that are incapable of making up the heroes' character or of being pronounced and honored by them as their essence.

But the divine essence's own persons, and with them the characters of its substance, also converge into the simplicity of the unconscious. Over against self-consciousness, this necessity has as its determination that it is the negative power over every shape that steps forward, a power in which self-consciousness does not cognize itself but rather goes under. The self steps forward only as apportioned to the characters, not as the middle of the movement. Self-consciousness, however, which is the simple certainty it has of itself, is in truth the negative power: it is the unity of Zeus, that is, the unity of the substantial essence with abstract necessity, the spiritual unity into which all things go back. Because actual self-consciousness is still held distinct from substance and from fate, it amounts in part to that chorus, or better, to that spectating throng, whom this movement of divine life fills with fear as something alien, or in whom, when it comes close, that movement produces nothing beyond the emotion of a compassion that does not act. In part, insofar as consciousness joins in the acting and belongs among the characters, this uniting is an external one, a hypocrisy, since the true uniting, that of the self, of fate, and of the substance, is not yet at hand; the hero who steps forward before the spectator breaks apart into his mask and his actor, into the person and the actual self.

The heroes' self-consciousness has to come out from behind its mask and exhibit how it knows that it is itself the fate of the chorus's gods, and the fate of the absolute powers themselves, and how it is no longer severed from the chorus, from universal consciousness.

Comedy, then, has to begin with this side: that the gods' fate is what actual self-consciousness exhibits itself to be. These elemental essences, being universal moments, are no self and are not actual. Granted, they are furnished with the form of individuality, yet that form is merely imagined into them and does not belong to them in and for themselves; a moment so abstract does not serve the actual self as substance and content. The self, the subject, is therefore raised above such a moment as above a singular property; wearing this mask, it pronounces the irony of a mask that would like to be something in its own right. The preening of universal essentiality has been given away to the self; it shows itself captive within an actuality and drops the mask at the very point where it means to be something proper. Stepping forward here in its meaning as something actual, the self plays with the mask that it puts on for the once in order to be its person — but out of this semblance it emerges again just as quickly in a nakedness and an ordinariness of its own, and these show it to be no different from the self proper, the actor, and no different from the spectator either.

This universal dissolving of shaped essentiality as such within its individuality grows more serious in content, and with that more wanton and more bitter, in proportion as the content carries its more serious and more necessary meaning. Within the divine substance the meaning of natural essentiality and that of ethical essentiality are united. So far as the natural goes, actual self-consciousness already shows itself, in putting nature to use for its finery, its dwelling, and so on, and in feasting on its sacrifice, to be that fate which has had the secret betrayed to it of how things stand with nature's self-essentiality; through the mystery of bread and of wine it appropriates that self-essentiality along with what the inner essence means, and in comedy it is aware of the irony this meaning has generally. — Insofar, now, as this meaning holds ethical essentiality within it, it is in part the people, taken on its two sides, that of the state or the demos proper and that of family singularity; — and in part it is self-conscious pure knowledge, the universal's rational thinking. — This demos, the universal mass, knowing itself as lord and ruler and as the understanding and insight that command respect, coerces and befools itself by way of the particularity of its own actuality, and it puts on display the ludicrous contrast that holds between its opinion of itself and the existence it immediately has, between its necessity and its contingency, between its universality and its commonness. When the principle of its singularity, cut off from the universal, comes out in the proper shape of actuality and openly lays claim to the communal being, whose secret damage it is, and arranges that communal being to suit itself, then all the more immediately does the contrast betray itself between the universal taken as a theory and what practice is actually about, namely the complete liberation of immediate singularity's purposes from the universal order and the mockery those purposes heap on that order.

Rational thinking lifts the divine essence clear of its contingent shape; and, set against the conceptless wisdom of the chorus, which trots out assorted moral maxims and lets a whole crowd of laws and of determinate concepts of duty and of right pass as valid, it elevates them into simple ideas: the beautiful and the good. — What this abstraction moves toward is a consciousness of the dialectic that these maxims and laws carry in them, and thereby a consciousness that the absolute validity in which they earlier appeared is vanishing. As that contingent determination, and that superficial individuality, which representation had lent to the divine essentialities vanish, nothing is left to them on their natural side but their immediate existence in its nakedness; they are clouds, a vapor in the act of vanishing, just as those representations are. Having become, in respect of their thought essentiality, simple thoughts, the beautiful and the good, they put up with being filled by any content one pleases. The force of dialectical knowledge abandons determinate laws and maxims of acting to the pleasure and the levity of the youth thus — by this very means — seduced, and it hands weapons for deception to the anxiety and care of an old age confined to the singularity of life. So the pure thoughts of what is beautiful and what is good put on the comic spectacle of turning empty by way of their liberation from opinion (which contains both their determinateness as content and their absolute determinateness, the holding fast of consciousness), and, by that very liberation, of turning into the plaything of the opinion and the caprice of contingent individuality.

Here, then, that formerly unconscious fate, which consists in empty repose and in oblivion and which stands severed from self-consciousness, is united with the latter. The singular self is that negative force in and through which the gods vanish, and their moments with them, existent nature together with the thoughts of their determinations; and yet it is not the emptiness of this vanishing, but maintains itself within that very nullity, is at home with itself, and is the one actuality there is. In this self the religion of art has reached its completion and has gone back into itself entirely. Because what exhibits itself as this absolute power is the singular consciousness in the certainty it has of itself, that power has lost the form of something represented, something severed from consciousness at large and alien to it, the form that the statue had, and the living beautiful corporeality, and the epic's content, and tragedy's powers and persons; — nor is the unity here the unconscious one belonging to cult and mysteries; — rather the actor's proper self coincides with his person, as does the spectator, who is wholly at home in what is represented to him and watches himself at play. What this self-consciousness intuits is this: that whatever takes on the form of essentiality against it dissolves within it instead, dissolves in its thinking, in its existence, and in its doing, and is given up; it is everything universal going back into the certainty it has of itself, a certainty that accordingly is that perfect fearlessness and essencelessness of everything alien, a well-being and a letting-oneself-be-well on the part of consciousness such as is found nowhere else outside this comedy.

C. Revealed Religion

By way of the religion of art, spirit has passed out of the form of substance into that of the subject, since it is art that brings spirit's shape forth and so plants in that shape the doing, that is, the self-consciousness which inside the terrifying substance does nothing but disappear and which, in trust, never lays hold of itself. The statue is where this becoming-human of the divine essence begins, a statue carrying on it only the outer shape of the self, while the inner side, its activity, lies outside it; in the cult, though, the two sides have fused, and where the religion of art issues, this fully achieved unity has crossed over to the extreme of the self as well; every essentiality has drowned in the spirit that, within the singularity of consciousness, is wholly certain of itself. Here is how the proposition that utters this levity goes: the self is the absolute essence; and what had been essence, namely substance, on which the self figured as accidentality, has dropped to the rank of predicate, while spirit, in this self-consciousness, confronted by nothing in the form of essence, has forfeited its consciousness.

As is plain enough on its own, this proposition, that the self is the absolute essence, has its home in the non-religious spirit, the actual one, and we need to call to mind which of that spirit's shapes gives it voice. That shape will contain, at one and the same time, the proposition's movement and its reversal, the reversal that tunes the self down into predicate and elevates substance into subject. In this way, namely: the reversed proposition does not turn substance into subject in itself or for us, which would come to the same as setting substance up again so that spirit's consciousness gets driven back to where it started, to natural religion; the reversal is instead accomplished for and by self-consciousness itself. Since self-consciousness surrenders itself knowingly, it is kept intact in its externalization and stays the subject of substance, though, having externalized itself just as much, it also possesses the consciousness of substance; or: since its self-sacrifice is what produces substance as subject, what it produces goes on being its own self. The upshot attained is this: given the two propositions, — in the one, that of the first substantiality, the subject does no more than disappear, — and in the second, substance counts as nothing but predicate, so that in each of them the two sides stand with their worth unequal in opposite directions, — what emerges is the union and mutual penetration of both natures, wherein each, at equal worth, is essential every bit as much as it is a mere moment; by this route, then, spirit is consciousness of itself and of its objective substance quite as much as it is simple self-consciousness abiding within itself.

Ethical spirit is what the religion of art belongs to, the spirit whose downfall we watched earlier in the condition of legal right, that is, in the proposition: the abstract person, the self as such, is absolute essence. Within ethical life the self lies sunk in its people's spirit; it is universality filled out. But simple singularity lifts free of this content, and levity purifies it into the person, into the abstract universality of right. There the reality of ethical spirit is lost, and the content-empty spirits of the peoples as individuals stand assembled in one single pantheon, not in a pantheon of representation, whose powerless form leaves each to itself, but in the pantheon of an abstract universality, of the pure thought that strips them of their bodies and grants being-in-and-for-itself to the spiritless self, the singular person.

Yet by its emptiness this self has set the content free; consciousness is the essence only within itself; its own existence, the legal recognition accorded the person, is abstraction left unfulfilled; what it possesses, then, is rather no more than the thought of itself, or, taken as it is there, knowing itself as an object, it amounts to the unactual. Hence it is nothing but the stoic self-subsistence of thinking, and this self-subsistence, on its way through the movement of skeptical consciousness, finds its truth in the shape that came to be called the unhappy self-consciousness.

The unhappy self-consciousness knows what to make of the abstract person's actual validity, and equally of that person's validity within pure thought. Such validity it knows rather as total loss; it is itself that loss made conscious of itself, and the externalization of what it knows of itself. — We can see that this unhappy consciousness forms the reverse side, and the completion, of the consciousness that is entirely happy within itself, the comic one. All divine essence recedes into that comic consciousness; or, put otherwise, it is the total externalization of substance. The unhappy consciousness, by contrast, is the opposite case: the tragic fate of a certainty of itself that was to be in and for itself. This is the consciousness that all essentiality is lost within this certainty of itself and that just this knowing of itself is lost as well — substance no less than self; it is the pain uttering itself in the harsh saying, that God has died.

Within the condition of legal right, then, the ethical world together with its religion has gone under in comic consciousness, while the unhappy consciousness is what knows this whole loss. Gone for it is the self-worth attaching to its immediate personality, and gone as well the worth of its mediated, thought personality. Silenced too is the trust placed in the gods' eternal laws, and silenced are the oracles that professed knowledge of the particular. The statues are corpses now, the animating soul having fled them, as the hymn is words whose faith has fled; the gods' tables stand bare of spiritual food and drink, and consciousness no longer recovers from its games and festivals that joyous unity of itself with the essence. What the Muse's works lack is the force of that spirit for which certainty of itself came forth out of the pulverizing of gods and human beings. What they now are is what they are for us, — lovely fruit broken off the tree, held out to us by a kindly fate, the way a girl hands such fruit across; that fate does not supply the actual life of their existence, nor the tree they grew on, nor the earth and elements that constituted their substance, nor the climate that constituted their determinateness, nor the turning seasons that ruled the process by which they came to be. — Fate, in giving us the works of that art, thus withholds their world, withholds the springtime and summer of ethical life where they came into bloom and ripened, and yields only a recollection of that actuality, wrapped up and enveloped. — Our doing, as we enjoy them, is therefore not the doing of worship, by which our consciousness would come into its complete and filling truth; it is rather the external doing that brushes off these fruits a raindrop, perhaps, or a speck of dust, and that puts up, in the place once held by the inner elements of the surrounding, generating, inspiriting actuality of the ethical, the rambling scaffolding built from the dead elements of their external existence, of language, of the historical, and so on, not so as to live our way into them, but only so as to represent them within ourselves. But the girl who holds out the plucked fruit surpasses the fruit's own nature as that nature lay spread out into its conditions and elements, into air, light, the tree, and so on, where it offered the fruit immediately, since she draws all of this together, at a higher level, into the beam of a self-conscious eye and into the gesture of holding out; in the same way, the spirit of fate that holds those artworks out to us surpasses the ethical life, the actuality, of that people, since it is the re-collection of a spirit that in them still stands externalized, — it is the spirit of that tragic fate which assembles every one of those individual gods and attributes of substance into the single pantheon, into a spirit self-conscious of being spirit.

Every condition of spirit's coming forth lies ready to hand, and that totality of conditions is what constitutes spirit's becoming, its concept, or its coming forth as something in-itself. — Art's productions form a circle that takes in the shapes taken by absolute substance's externalizations: substance appears under individuality's form, as a thing, as an object that is, an object for sensuous consciousness, — as pure language, or as the becoming of a shape whose existence never steps out beyond the self and which is an object purely in the act of vanishing; — as unity with universal self-consciousness, immediate in the inspiration of that consciousness and mediated in the doing of the cult; — as beautiful selflike corporeality, and lastly as an existence lifted into representation, spread out into a world that finally draws itself together into universality, which is likewise pure certainty of itself. — Those forms, and, over against them, the world of the person and of right, with the devastating wildness of the content's elements once they are set loose, and equally the thought person of stoicism along with the groundless unrest of skeptical consciousness, make up the periphery of shapes that stand round the birthplace of the spirit now becoming self-consciousness, expectant and pressing in; the pain and longing of unhappy self-consciousness, penetrating everything, is their center point and the birth pang they share in that coming forth, — namely the simplicity of the pure concept, which holds those shapes within it as its moments.

The pure concept carries on it the two sides that were set out above as the two reversed propositions; the first of them is that substance externalizes itself and becomes self-consciousness, the second, in reverse, that self-consciousness externalizes itself and turns itself into thinghood, that is, into the universal self. The two sides have met each other halfway in this manner, and out of that their true union has arisen. What substance's externalization, its becoming self-consciousness, gives expression to is the passage over into the opposite, the unconscious passage of necessity, that is, the fact that substance in itself is self-consciousness. In reverse, self-consciousness's externalization gives expression to this: that self-consciousness in itself is universal essence, or, since the self is that pure being-for-itself which stays with itself in its own opposite, that for it substance is self-consciousness and, just by that, spirit. Of this spirit, which abandons the form of substance and comes into existence with the shape of self-consciousness, one may therefore say, — supposing one wants to employ the relations borrowed from natural procreation, — that its mother is actual while its father has being that is in-itself; for actuality, or self-consciousness, together with the in-itself as substance, are the two moments of spirit, and it is by their mutual externalization, each turning into the other, that spirit comes into existence as the unity the two of them constitute.

To the extent that self-consciousness takes hold, one-sidedly, of its own externalization alone, granted that its object is by now self no less than being and that it knows every existence as spiritual essence, the true spirit has all the same not yet come to be for it, to the extent, that is, that being at large, or substance, did not on its own side and in itself likewise externalize itself and turn into self-consciousness. For then every existence counts as spiritual essence merely as seen from the standpoint of consciousness, and not on its own account. On this footing spirit is merely imagined into existence; such imagining is the fanatical enthusiasm that slips under nature and history alike, under the world as much as under the mythical representations of the earlier religions, an inner sense different from the one they immediately present to consciousness in their appearance, and, where the religions are concerned, different from the one that the self-consciousness whose religions they were knew in them. This significance, however, is one borrowed, a robe that leaves the bareness of the appearance uncovered and earns itself neither faith nor reverence, remaining instead the clouded night and the private rapture belonging to consciousness.

If this significance of the objective is not to be mere imagining, it must be in itself, which means, first, that for consciousness it springs from the concept and comes forth in its own necessity. That is how the self-knowing spirit sprang up for us: out of the cognition of immediate consciousness, the consciousness whose object is, by way of that consciousness's necessary movement. This concept, which, being immediate, likewise had for its consciousness the shape of immediacy, has secondly given itself, in itself, the shape of self-consciousness, that is, in keeping with the very necessity of the concept, at the point where being, or immediacy, which is the object of sensuous consciousness, an object void of content, externalizes itself and comes to be I for consciousness. — Distinct from the thinking in-itself, that is, from the cognition of necessity, stands the immediate in-itself, or necessity as existent, itself; — a distinction which nevertheless falls within the concept and not beyond it, since the concept's simple unity is immediate being itself; the concept is what externalizes itself, the becoming of intuited necessity, quite as much as it is at home in that necessity, knowing and comprehending it. — When we speak of the immediate in-itself of the spirit that confers on itself the shape of self-consciousness, this says no more than that the world-spirit in its actuality has arrived at this knowledge of itself; only then does that knowledge enter spirit's consciousness as well, and enter as truth. How the first of these came about has already shown itself above.

The fact that absolute spirit has in itself conferred on itself the shape of self-consciousness, and with that for its consciousness too, shows up now as the faith of the world: that spirit is there as a self-consciousness, that is, as an actual human being, that it exists for immediate certainty, that believing consciousness sees and feels and hears this divinity. So understood, it is no imagining; the thing really is so. Consciousness in that case does not set out from what is inward in it, from its thought, joining within itself the thought of God to existence; it sets out instead from the immediately present existence, and there it cognizes God. — Within the content of the concept the moment of immediate being is on hand in this way: religious spirit, as all essentiality returns into consciousness, has turned into a simple positive self, exactly as actual spirit as such, within unhappy consciousness, has turned into precisely this simple self-conscious negativity. By this route the self of the spirit that is there acquires the form of immediacy in its completeness; it is not posited as thought, nor as represented, nor as brought forth, which is what happens to the immediate self in natural religion on the one hand and in the religion of art on the other. Rather, this God is sensuously intuited, immediately, as self, as a singular human being who is actual; on no other terms is he self-consciousness.

The absolute religion has for its simple content this becoming-human of the divine essence, the fact that the essence bears the shape of self-consciousness essentially and immediately. In that religion the essence is known as spirit; the religion is essence's own consciousness about itself, that it is spirit. Spirit, after all, is knowledge of itself in its own externalization: the essence whose being consists in the movement of holding on to equality with itself throughout its otherness. But that is substance, in so far as substance stands reflected into itself within its accidentality as well, not indifferent toward that accidentality as toward something unessential, something found in an alien element, but rather within itself there, that is, in so far as substance is subject or self. — For that reason the divine essence stands revealed in this religion. Its being revealed manifestly amounts to this, that what it is gets known. And it does get known precisely in being known as spirit, as an essence whose essential character is to be self-consciousness. — For consciousness, something in its object stays secret whenever that object is an other for it, something alien, and whenever consciousness does not know the object as itself. Such secrecy comes to an end once the absolute essence is consciousness's object as spirit; for then, in its relation to consciousness, it stands there as self, that is, consciousness immediately knows itself in it, or is revealed to itself in it. Consciousness itself is revealed to itself nowhere but in the certainty it has of its own self; the object in question is the self, and the self is nothing alien: it is unity with itself that cannot be severed, the immediately universal. It is the pure concept, it is pure thinking, that is, being-for-itself, which is immediately being and hence being for another, and which as this being for another has immediately gone back into itself and is at home with itself; hence what is revealed truly and alone is just this. Goodness, justice, holiness, being creator of heaven and of earth, and so on are a subject's predicates, — universal moments that find their hold at this point and that exist only when consciousness first goes back into thinking. — So long as they are what is known, the ground and essence of them, the subject itself, remains unrevealed, and they are likewise determinations of the universal rather than this universal itself. Yet as self the subject itself, and with it this pure universal, is revealed, for the self is just this inwardness reflected into itself, immediately there, and it is the certainty belonging to whichever self it is there for. This — being, in accordance with its concept, what is revealed — is therefore spirit's true shape, and this shape of its, the concept, is likewise its essence and substance and nothing besides. Spirit is known as self-consciousness and lies open to self-consciousness immediately, since spirit is that very self-consciousness; divine nature and human nature are one and the same, and it is this unity that gets intuited.

Here, then, consciousness, that is, the manner in which the essence is for consciousness itself, its shape, really does match its self-consciousness; that shape is a self-consciousness in its own right; with that it is at once an object that is, and this being carries just as immediately the significance of pure thinking, of the absolute essence. — Being there as an actual self-consciousness, the absolute essence looks as though it had stepped down from its eternal simplicity, whereas in truth only in doing so has it reached its highest essence. For not until the concept of the essence has won its simple purity is it the absolute abstraction which is pure thinking, and therewith the pure singularity of the self, just as, for the sake of that simplicity, it is the immediate, that is, being. — What goes by the name of sensuous consciousness is exactly this pure abstraction; it is that thinking to which being counts as the immediate. What is lowest is therefore also what is highest: the revealed, having come out wholly onto the surface, is in just that respect the deepest. That the highest essence is seen, heard, and so forth as a self-consciousness which has being, this is in fact the completing of its concept; and through that completion the essence is there as immediately as it is essence.

Immediate existence of this kind is at the same time not merely immediate consciousness and nothing more; it is religious consciousness; undividedly, the immediacy signifies not only a self-consciousness that is, but the purely thought or absolute essence. Religious consciousness is conscious of the same thing that we in our concept are conscious of, namely that being is essence. This unity of being and essence, of a thinking that immediately is existence, is, just as much as it is the thought of this religious consciousness, its mediated knowledge, also its immediate knowledge; for being and thinking in this unity make up self-consciousness, and this unity is itself there, or the thought unity has at the same time the shape of what it is. Here, then, God stands revealed as he is; he is so there as he is in himself; he is there, as spirit. Pure speculative knowledge is the sole place where God can be reached; he is only within it and is only it itself, since he is spirit; and that speculative knowledge is what revealed religion knows. Speculative knowledge knows him as thinking, as pure essence, knows this thinking as being and as existence, and knows existence as its own negativity and thereby as self, as this self and as universal self; and just this is what revealed religion knows. — Everything the earlier world hoped for and expected pressed toward this revelation alone, toward intuiting what the absolute essence is and finding itself within it; the joy of seeing itself in the absolute essence comes to self-consciousness and takes hold of the entire world, for the essence is spirit, it is that simple movement of the pure moments which expresses precisely this, that the essence gets known as spirit only in being intuited as immediate self-consciousness.

The concept of a spirit that knows itself as spirit is, taken by itself, still the immediate concept, undeveloped as yet. Essence is spirit, which is to say it has appeared, it stands revealed; being revealed in this first way is itself immediate; yet immediacy is equally pure mediation, that is, thinking, and must therefore exhibit as much on itself as immediacy. — Looked at with more determinateness: within the immediacy of self-consciousness, spirit is this singular self-consciousness, standing over against the universal one; it is an excluding One which, in the eyes of the consciousness for which it is there, still wears the undissolved form of a sensuous other; that consciousness has not yet come to know spirit as its own, or spirit, while being a singular self, is not yet there as a universal self as well, as the self of all. Put otherwise, the shape lacks as yet the form of the concept, that is, the form of the universal self, of that self which in its immediate actuality is at the same time something sublated, is thinking, universality, without forfeiting the actuality in the universality. — The form of this universality that comes next, itself immediate, is not yet the form of thinking as such, of the concept qua concept; it is the universality of actuality, the totality of selves, and the lifting of existence into representation; much as everywhere, and to give one determinate example, the sublated sensuous This is at first the thing of perception and not yet the universal that belongs to the understanding.

So this singular human being, in whom the absolute essence stands revealed, carries out on himself as a singular the movement belonging to sensuous being. He is God present here immediately; by that very fact his being passes over into having-been. For the consciousness to which he has this sensuous presence, seeing him and hearing him come to an end; it has seen and heard him; and only because it merely has seen and heard him does it itself become spiritual consciousness, or, just as he formerly rose up for it as sensuous existence, he has now risen up in spirit. — For so long as it sees and hears him sensuously it is nothing but immediate consciousness, which has left the inequality of objectivity unsublated and has not withdrawn it into pure thinking, and which knows this objective singular while failing to know itself as spirit. As the immediate existence of the one known as absolute essence vanishes, what is immediate takes on its negative moment; spirit stays the immediate self of actuality, though now as the universal self-consciousness of the community, a self-consciousness that reposes in a substance of its own while that substance is universal subject within it; the complete whole of that spirit is not the singular taken on his own, but the singular together with the community's consciousness, and what he is for the community.

Pastness and remoteness, however, make up only that incomplete form in which the immediate manner gets mediated, or posited as universal; that manner has been dipped into the element of thinking only on the surface, is kept there as a sensuous manner, and is not posited as one with what thinking itself is by nature. It has been lifted no further than into representing, since representing is precisely the synthetic linking of sensuous immediacy with the universality of that immediacy, that is, with thinking.

The determinateness in which spirit becomes conscious of itself in this community of its own is constituted by this form of representing. It is not yet spirit's self-consciousness ripened into its concept taken as concept; mediation remains unfinished. So in this linking of being and thinking the defect is present that the spiritual essence is still afflicted with an unreconciled splitting-in-two into a here below and into a beyond. The content is the true content, but every one of its moments, posited as they are in the element of representing, has the character of going uncomprehended and of appearing instead as sides that are entirely self-subsistent and relate to one another externally. If the true content is to acquire its true form for consciousness as well, consciousness needs a higher culture: it must lift its intuition of the absolute substance up into the concept and must, for itself, bring its consciousness level with its self-consciousness, as has already occurred for us, or in itself.

This content is now to be considered as it stands within spirit's consciousness. — Absolute spirit is content, and as such it has the shape of its truth. Its truth, though, does not consist merely in being the community's substance, the community's in-itself, nor merely in rising up out of that inwardness into the objectivity that belongs to representing; it consists in coming to be an actual self, in reflecting itself into itself, and in being subject. That, then, is the movement spirit carries out within its community; that is spirit's life. What spirit, in revealing itself, is in and for itself therefore does not come to light by having its rich life in the community unwound, so to speak, and traced back to its first thread, say to the representations of the first, incomplete community, or indeed to whatever the actual human being said. Underlying such tracing back is the instinct to reach the concept; but it mistakes the origin, taken as the immediate existence of the first appearance, for the simplicity of the concept. What such impoverishing of spirit's life brings about, when the community's representation and the community's doing toward that representation are cleared away, is therefore not the concept but sheer externality and singularity instead, the historical manner of the immediate appearance together with a spiritless recollection of one singular shape that is merely meant, and of its past.

Spirit is the content of its consciousness at first under the form of pure substance, or, what is the same, it is what its pure consciousness contains. The movement of this element of thinking is a climbing down to existence, that is, to singularity. Between the two, the middle is their synthetic linking, the consciousness of becoming-other, or representing as such. Third comes the return out of representation and out of otherness, in other words the element of self-consciousness itself. — Spirit is made up of these three moments; its stepping apart within representation consists in being in a determinate manner, and this determinateness is nothing but one of spirit's moments. Spirit's movement carried out in full therefore consists in spreading its nature through each of its moments as through an element; and because each of these circles completes itself within itself, spirit's reflection into itself is at once its passing over into the next circle. Representation forms the middle standing between self-consciousness as such and pure thinking, and it is no more than one determinateness among them; at the same time, as has come to light, the character it has of being the synthetic linking lies spread across every one of these elements and is the determinateness they share.

The content that is to be considered has already turned up in part as the representation belonging to the unhappy and to the believing consciousness; — in the former, though, with the determination of a content brought forth out of consciousness and yearned after, a content in which spirit can find neither satiety nor rest, because the content is not yet spirit's own in itself or as its substance; — in the latter, by contrast, the content has been considered as the world's selfless essence, as the essentially objective content of a representing, — a representing that takes flight from actuality altogether and is therefore without the certainty of self-consciousness, which parts from it partly as the vanity of knowledge, partly as pure insight. — The community's consciousness, on the other hand, has this content for its substance, just as that content is the community's certainty of its own spirit.

Represented at first as substance within the element of pure thinking, spirit is thereby, immediately, the simple, self-equal, eternal essence, an essence that carries not the abstract significance of essence but the significance of absolute spirit. Only, spirit consists in being the actual, and not in being a significance, an inward something. The simple eternal essence would accordingly be spirit in an empty word only, were it to remain with the representation and with the expression of the simple eternal essence. Being the abstraction, however, the simple essence is in fact negative in its own self, and specifically the negativity of thinking, negativity such as it is in itself within essence; that is to say, it is the absolute difference from itself, its pure becoming-other. Taken as essence it is in itself only, or for us; but since this purity is precisely abstraction, precisely negativity, it is for its own self, it is the self, the concept. — It is therefore objective; and where representation apprehends and utters the necessity of the concept just stated as a happening, what gets said is that the eternal essence begets another for itself. Yet within this otherness it has returned into itself just as immediately; for the difference in question is difference in itself, that is, immediately it differs from nothing but itself, and so it is the unity that has come back into itself.

Three moments accordingly come apart from one another: essence; being-for-itself, which is essence's otherness and for which essence is; and being-for-itself, or knowing oneself, in the other. In its being-for-itself the essence intuits nothing but itself; throughout this externalization it stays with itself alone, and the being-for-itself that shuts itself off from the essence is the knowledge the essence has of its own self; it is the word which, once spoken, externalizes the speaker and leaves him emptied out, and which is heard just as immediately, the existence of the word being nothing other than this hearing of itself. So the differences that get made are dissolved as immediately as they are made, and made as immediately as they are dissolved, and what is true, what is actual, is just this movement circling within itself.

It is this movement within its own self that utters the absolute essence as spirit; taken without being grasped as spirit, the absolute essence is merely the abstract void, and spirit, taken without being grasped as this movement, is merely an empty word. When spirit's moments are taken hold of in their purity, they are those restless concepts whose whole being lies in being their own opposite in their own selves and in finding their rest within the whole. The community's representing, however, is not this comprehending thinking; it holds the content while lacking the content's necessity, and in place of the concept's form it carries the natural relations of father and son over into the kingdom of pure consciousness. Since it relates itself representationally in this way within thinking itself, the essence is revealed to it well enough, yet on account of that synthetic representation the essence's moments partly fall apart from one another for it, so that they are not related through a concept of their own, and partly it draws back from this pure object of its and relates to the object only externally; the object has been revealed to it by an alien source, and within this thought of spirit it fails to cognize itself, fails to cognize the nature of pure self-consciousness. In so far as one has to go beyond the form of representing and beyond those relations borrowed from what is natural, and thereby beyond taking the moments of the movement which spirit is as isolated, unshakeable substances or subjects rather than as moments that pass over, — this going beyond is to be viewed, as was recalled earlier with respect to another side of the matter, as a pressing of the concept; but being mere instinct, it misconstrues itself, casts away the form and the content along with it, and, what amounts to the same, degrades the content into a historical representation, an heirloom of tradition; here what is purely external in faith is all that is kept, kept as something dead and without cognition, while the inner side of faith has disappeared, since that inner side would be the concept knowing itself as concept.

Absolute spirit, as represented in pure essence, is admittedly not the abstract pure essence; on the contrary, that essence, precisely by being no more than a moment within spirit, has sunk to the rank of an element. Yet the presentation of spirit within this element carries on it, as regards form, the very defect that essence as essence carries. Essence is the abstract, and hence the negative of its own simplicity, another; in the same way spirit within essence as element is the form of simple unity, and just for that reason is quite as essentially a becoming-other. — Or, what comes to the same, how the eternal essence stands toward its being-for-itself is the simple, immediate relating of pure thinking; within this simple intuiting of its own self in the other, then, otherness is not posited as otherness; the difference here is difference such as immediately amounts, in pure thinking, to no difference; it is a recognition of love, in which the two were not set in opposition to each other according to their essence. — Spirit as uttered within the element of pure thinking is itself essentially this: to be not in that element alone but to be something actual, for otherness lies within its very concept, that is, the sublating of the pure concept that is merely thought.

Since it is the abstract, the element of pure thinking is itself rather the other of its own simplicity, and for that reason it passes over into the element proper to representing, — an element where the moments of the pure concept acquire a substantial existence over against one another quite as much as they are subjects that do not, for some third party, hold the indifference of being toward each other, but, reflected into themselves, set themselves apart from one another and into opposition.

Spirit, then, being merely eternal or abstract, makes itself into another, or enters existence, and immediately enters immediate existence. A world is accordingly what it creates. This creating is representation's word for the concept itself in its absolute movement, or for the fact that the simple, that is, pure thinking, which has been declared absolute, is instead the negative, precisely because it is the abstract, and so is what is opposed to itself, the other; — or, to put the matter in still another way, because that which has been posited as essence amounts to simple immediacy or being, and yet, as immediacy or being, goes without the self and so, since inwardness is wanting, is passive, or being for another. — Being for another of this sort is at once a world; spirit, taken in respect of the determination being for another, is the quiescent subsistence of those moments that were previously shut up inside pure thinking, and hence is the dissolving of their simple universality and their falling apart into a particularity of their own.

The world, however, is not merely this spirit thrown apart into completeness and into the external ordering of that completeness; because spirit is in essence the simple self, that self is present in the world just as much: the existent spirit, which is the singular self that has consciousness and that distinguishes itself from itself as other, or as world. — Posited at first in such immediacy, this singular self has not yet become spirit for itself; hence it is not as spirit, and while it may be called innocent, it can hardly be called good. If it is really to be self and spirit, it must, precisely as the eternal essence displays itself as that movement in which it is self-equal within its otherness, first become, to its own self, another. Given that this spirit is determined as existing at first only immediately, or as dispersed into the manifoldness that its consciousness has, its becoming-other is the going-within-itself of knowledge as such. Immediate existence turns over into thought, or merely sensuous consciousness turns over into the consciousness of thought; and since this is thought that issues from immediacy, thought that is conditioned, it is no pure knowledge but rather a thought that carries otherness in it, and so the thought of good and evil that stands opposed to itself. Man is represented in such a way that this happened, as something not necessary, — that by plucking from the tree of the cognition of good and evil he lost the form of self-equality, and that he was expelled from the state of innocent consciousness, from a nature that offered itself without labor, and from paradise, the garden of the animals.

Since this going-within-itself of existent consciousness determines itself immediately as a becoming unequal to itself, evil shows up as the first existence of consciousness once it has gone within itself; and since the thoughts of good and of evil are opposed outright, with that opposition not yet dissolved, this consciousness is in essence nothing but the evil one. At the same time, though, and just because of this opposition, the good consciousness is also at hand over against it, along with the relationship the two have to each other. — Insofar as immediate existence turns over into thought, and that being-within-itself is thereby determined more closely as partly thinking itself and partly the moment of the essence's becoming-other, the becoming-evil can be shifted still further back, beyond the existent world, into the first realm of thinking already. One may accordingly say that the firstborn son of light already, in going within himself, is this evil, and that he fell away, whereupon another was at once begotten in his place. A form of that kind, such as falling away, and likewise son, belongs merely to representation, not to the concept, and it moreover degrades the moments of the concept downward into representing, or inversely carries representing over into the realm of thought. — It is just as indifferent whether one coordinates a manifold of further shapes with the eternal essence's simple thought of otherness and transposes the going-within-itself into them. Such coordination has at the same time to be approved, since through it this moment of otherness expresses difference as well, as it ought to; and indeed not as plurality at large but at the same time as determinate difference, so that the one part, the son, is the simple that knows itself as essence, whereas the other part is the externalization of being-for-itself, an externalization that lives only in praising the essence; into this part, in turn, one may place the taking back of externalized being-for-itself and the going-within-itself of evil. To the extent that otherness falls apart into two, spirit would be more determinate in its moments and, if these are counted, would be expressed as a fourfold unity, or even as a fivefold unity, since the multitude in turn falls apart into two parts, those that stayed good and those that turned evil. — To count the moments can be regarded as useless altogether, since on one side what is differentiated is itself no less merely one, namely just the thought of difference, a thought that is only one thought insofar as it is this differentiated item, the second over against the first, — while on the other side the thought that gathers the many into one must be dissolved out of the universality it has and split into more than three or four differentiated items; — and this universality, set against the abstract one's absolute determinateness, the principle of number, appears, in relation to number itself, as indeterminateness, so that there could be talk only of numbers at large, that is, not of any count of the differences, which makes any thought here of number and counting wholly superfluous, just as elsewhere a mere difference of magnitude and multitude is without concept and says nothing.

Good and evil were the determinate differences of thought that had come out. Since their opposition remains undissolved, and since they are represented as essences of thought, each self-subsistent on its own, man is the essenceless self, the synthetic ground on which they exist and fight. But these universal powers belong no less to the self; or rather, the self is what makes them actual. In keeping with this moment, then, it comes about that, just as evil amounts to nothing but the going-within-itself of spirit's natural existence, so conversely the good enters actuality and shows up as a self-consciousness that exists. — What in spirit as purely thought is merely intimated as the becoming-other of the divine essence in general draws nearer here to its realization for representing; for representing, that realization consists in a self-abasement of the divine essence, which renounces its abstraction and its unactuality. — The other side, evil, representing takes to be a happening foreign to the divine essence; and to grasp evil within that essence itself, as its wrath, is the highest and hardest exertion of a representing that wrestles with itself, an exertion which, going without the concept, stays fruitless.

The estrangement of the divine essence is thus posited in its doubled manner; spirit's self and spirit's simple thought are the two moments, and their absolute unity is spirit itself; its estrangement consists in the two stepping apart, the one holding a value unequal to that of the other. The inequality is on that account a doubled one, and two combinations arise, the moments common to which are the ones just given. Within the first, the divine essence is what counts as essential, whereas natural existence together with the self counts as unessential and as what is to be sublated; within the second, by contrast, being-for-itself is what counts as essential, and the simple divine as unessential. Their middle, still empty, is existence at large, the bare commonality of its two moments.

This opposition is not dissolved so much by the struggle of the two, which are represented as separate and self-subsistent essences. Their self-subsistence implies that each of them must, in itself, by its concept, dissolve within its own self; the struggle first falls at the point where the two cease being these blends of thought with self-subsistent existence and stand facing each other merely as thoughts. For then, as determinate concepts, they are essentially only within the opposed relation; as self-subsistent, by contrast, their essentiality lies outside the opposition, so that their movement is free and belongs to them. And so, just as the movement of the two is the movement in itself, since it has to be considered in the two themselves, it is likewise begun by whichever of them is determined over against the other as what is in itself. This is represented as a voluntary deed; but the necessity of its externalization lies in the concept that what is in itself, determined so only within the opposition, precisely therefore has no true subsistence; — hence it is the one for which the simple, and not being-for-itself, counts as the essence that externalizes its own self, goes into death, and thereby reconciles the absolute essence with its own self. For it is in this movement that it displays itself as spirit; the essence in its abstractness stands estranged from itself, possessing natural existence and selflike actuality; that otherness of its own, its sensuous presence, is withdrawn again through the second becoming-other and posited as sublated, as universal; by this the essence has become within actuality its own self; actuality's immediate existence has stopped being something alien or external to the essence, since it is sublated and universal; this death is therefore the essence's arising as spirit.

The self-conscious essence's immediate presence, once sublated, is that essence in the guise of universal self-consciousness; the concept of the sublated singular self, which is absolute essence, therefore expresses immediately the constituting of a community that has lingered until now in representing and now returns into itself as into the self; and with that, spirit passes over out of the second element of its determination, representing, into the third, self-consciousness as such. — Let us look further at the way that representing conducts itself as it proceeds; we then see this expressed first of all: that the divine essence takes on human nature. In that it is already pronounced that the two, in themselves, are not separate; — just as, where it is said that the divine essence externalizes itself from the beginning, that its existence goes within itself and turns evil, it is not pronounced but is nevertheless contained that this evil existence is, in itself, nothing foreign to that essence; the absolute essence would carry only this empty name were there in truth an other to it, were there a falling away from it; — the moment of being-within-itself makes up, rather, the self of spirit in its essential moment. — That being-within-itself, and thereby actuality for the first time, belongs to the essence itself: this, which for us is concept, and so far as it is concept, appears to representing consciousness as a happening beyond comprehension; the in-itself assumes for that consciousness the form of indifferent being. But the thought that those moments which seem to flee one another, the absolute essence and the self that is for itself, are not separate does occur to this representing too, — for representing possesses the true content, — yet only afterwards, — within the externalization of the divine essence that becomes flesh. This representation, still immediate in this manner and hence not spiritual, or which knows the essence's human shape as yet only as a particular one and not as universal, turns spiritual for this consciousness through the movement in which the shaped essence sacrifices its immediate existence once again and goes back to the essence; the essence as reflected within itself is spirit only then. — What is represented here, then, is the reconciliation between the divine essence and the other at large, and determinately with the thought of that essence, with evil. — If this reconciliation is expressed in accordance with its concept by saying that it consists in this, that in itself evil is the same as good, or again that the divine essence is the same as the whole compass of nature, while nature severed from the divine essence is only nothingness, — then this must be regarded as a spiritless way of expressing oneself, one bound to give rise to misunderstandings. — Given that evil is the same as good, evil is precisely then not evil, nor is good good; rather both are sublated, evil at large being the being-for-itself that is within itself, and good being the selfless simple. Once both are pronounced in this way according to their concept, their unity becomes evident at the same time; for the being-for-itself that is within itself is simple knowledge, and the selfless simple is likewise the pure being-for-itself that is within itself. — Just as much, therefore, as one has to say that on this concept of theirs good and evil, that is, to the extent that they are not good and not evil, are the same, just as much must one say that they are not the same, that they are simply different, since simple being-for-itself, or equally pure knowledge, are alike pure negativity, or absolute difference within their own selves. — Only these two propositions together complete the whole; against the asserting and assuring of the first, holding fast to the second must be set with unconquerable stubbornness; since the two have equal right, they have equal wrong as well, and their wrong lies in treating abstract forms of this kind, namely the forms the same and not the same, the forms identity and non-identity, as things that are true, fixed, actual, and in resting upon them. Truth lies neither with the one nor with the other, but precisely in their movement: that the simple same is abstraction and thereby absolute difference, while this difference, as difference in itself, differentiated from its own self, is self-equality. The very same holds of the selfsameness between the divine essence and nature at large, and of human nature especially; the divine essence is nature to the extent that it is not essence; nature, according to its essence, is divine; — but spirit is that in which both abstract sides are posited as in truth they are, namely as sublated, — a positing that no judgment, and no spiritless is, the judgment's copula, can express. — Nature likewise is nothing outside its essence; but this nothing itself just as much is; it is absolute abstraction, hence pure thinking, or being-within-itself, and taken with the moment of its opposition to spiritual unity it is evil. What makes these concepts difficult is solely the clinging to the is and the forgetting of thinking, within which the moments no less are than they are not, — within which they are only the movement that spirit is. — What has come to be for representing consciousness in that reconciliation is precisely this spiritual unity, the unity in which differences are present only as moments, only as sublated; and since it is the universality that self-consciousness has, the latter has stopped being a representing one; the movement has gone back into it.

Spirit is accordingly posited within the third element, within universal self-consciousness; it is its own community. The community's movement, as the movement of a self-consciousness that distinguishes itself from its representation, is to bring forth what in itself has come to be. The divine man who has died, the human God as such, is in itself universal self-consciousness; it has to become this for this self-consciousness. Or, since it makes up the One side of representation's opposition, namely the evil side, for which what counts as the essence is natural existence and being-for-itself in its singularity, that side, which is represented as self-subsistent rather than as a moment, has for the sake of its self-subsistence to raise itself, in and for its own self, to spirit, or to exhibit spirit's movement in itself.

That side is natural spirit; out of this naturalness the self has to draw back and go within itself, which would mean turning evil. But that side is already evil in itself; the going-within-itself therefore consists in becoming convinced that evil is what natural existence is. The world's existent becoming-evil and being-evil fall within representing consciousness, and so does the existent reconciliation of the absolute essence; within self-consciousness as such, by contrast, what is represented falls, as regards form, only as a sublated moment, since the self is the negative, and so falls as knowledge, — a knowledge that is a pure deed of consciousness within its own self. — In the content too this moment of the negative must find expression. For since the essence has in itself already been reconciled with its own self and is a spiritual unity within which the parts of the representation stand as sublated, as moments, this presents itself in the fact that every part of the representation acquires here the opposite significance from the one it previously had; each significance thereby fills itself out in the other, and only thus does the content become a spiritual one; since determinateness is just as much its own opposite, the unity in otherness, the spiritual unity, is completed, in the way that for us, or in itself, the opposed significances united earlier and even sublated those abstract forms, the same and what is not the same, identity as well as non-identity.

If, then, within representing consciousness the becoming-inward of natural self-consciousness was the existent evil, the becoming-inward within the element of self-consciousness is knowledge of evil as something that in itself is there in existence; such knowledge is indeed a becoming-evil, yet only the becoming of the thought of evil, and for that reason it is acknowledged as the first moment of reconciliation. Since it is a going back into itself away from the immediacy of nature, nature being determined as evil, it is a leaving of nature behind, the dying away of sin. What consciousness leaves behind is not natural existence as such, but that existence at the same time as something known to be evil. The immediate movement of going-within-itself is just as much a mediated one; — it has itself for its presupposition, or is its own ground; the ground of the going-within-itself is, namely, that nature has already gone within itself in itself; for the sake of evil man must go within himself, but evil is itself that going-within-itself. — This first movement is for just that reason itself only the immediate one, or its simple concept, since it is the very thing that is its ground. The movement, or the becoming-other, has therefore still to make its entrance in its more proper form.

Alongside this immediacy, then, the mediation of representation is necessary. In itself, knowledge of nature as spirit's untrue existence, and this universality of the self that has become inward, are spirit's reconciliation with its own self. For a self-consciousness that does not comprehend, this in-itself acquires the form of something existent and represented to it. Comprehension is therefore not for it a seizing of this concept, which knows sublated naturalness as universal and hence as reconciled with itself, but a seizing of that representation according to which, through the happening of the divine essence's own externalization, through its accomplished becoming-human and its death, the divine essence has been reconciled with its existence. — Seizing this representation now expresses more determinately what was earlier called, within it, the spiritual resurrection, or the becoming of its singular self-consciousness into the universal one, into the community. — Taken as death, the death of the divine man is abstract negativity, the movement's immediate result, a movement that ends only in natural universality. This natural significance death loses within spiritual self-consciousness, or death becomes the concept just given; out of what it immediately signifies, out of the non-being of this singular one, death is transfigured into the universality of a spirit that lives in its community, dying and rising again there daily.

What belongs to the element of representation, namely that absolute spirit, as a singular one, or rather as a particular one, represents spirit's nature in its existence, is accordingly transposed here into self-consciousness itself, into the knowledge that maintains itself within its otherness; this knowledge therefore does not die in actuality, in the way that the particular one is represented as having actually died, but rather its particularity dies away within its universality, that is, within its knowledge, which is the essence that reconciles itself with itself. The element of representing that immediately precedes is thus posited here as sublated, or has gone back into the self, into the concept of the self; what in that element was merely existent has become subject. — Precisely thereby the first element, pure thinking, and the spirit eternal within it are no longer a beyond over against representing consciousness or over against the self; instead, the whole's return into itself is precisely this holding of all moments within itself. — The mediator's death, once the self has seized it, is the sublating of his objectivity, that is, of the particular being-for-itself he had; that particular being-for-itself has turned into universal self-consciousness. — The universal, on the other side, has by that very means become self-consciousness, and the pure or unactual spirit belonging to mere thinking has become actual. — That death of the mediator is a death not only of his natural side, that is, of his particular being-for-itself; it is not only the already dead husk, drawn off from the essence, that dies, but the abstraction of the divine essence as well. For inasmuch as his death has not yet brought the reconciliation to completion, he is the one-sided element that knows the simplicity of thinking to be the essence over against actuality; this extreme, the self, does not yet have a value equal to the essence's; the self has that only in spirit. This representation's death therefore carries within it the dying of that abstraction of the divine essence that is not posited as self. It is the unhappy consciousness's painful feeling that God himself has died. This harsh expression expresses the innermost knowledge that simply knows itself, consciousness returning into the night's depth, the night of I = I, a night that distinguishes and knows nothing further outside itself. This feeling is thus in truth the loss of substance and the loss of substance's standing over against consciousness; yet it is at the same time substance's pure subjectivity, the pure certainty it has of its own self, which substance lacked as object, as the immediate, as pure essence. This knowledge, then, is the inspiriting whereby substance becomes subject, whereby its abstraction and its lifelessness have died, and whereby it has thus become actual, a simple and universal self-consciousness.

Spirit is thus a spirit that knows itself; it knows itself, and that which is object to it, is; in other words its representation is the content that is true and absolute, and this content, as we saw, gives expression to spirit itself. At the same time spirit is not merely self-consciousness's content, and not merely an object for it; it is actual spirit besides. It is this in running through the three elements that its nature has; this movement through its own self constitutes its actuality; — what moves is spirit, spirit is the movement's subject, and spirit is equally the moving itself, the substance that the subject passes through. Just as the concept of spirit had come to be for us when we entered religion, that is, as the movement of a spirit certain of itself, a spirit that forgives evil and in doing so gives up its own simplicity and hard immutability, or the movement whereby what is absolutely opposed recognizes itself as the same and this recognizing breaks forth as the yes standing between these extremes, — upon this concept religious consciousness, for which the absolute essence is manifest, directs its intuition; and it sublates the distinction between its self and what it has intuited, is the substance just as it is the subject, and so is itself spirit, precisely because and insofar as it is this movement.

This community, however, is not yet completed in this self-consciousness of its own; its content stands before it in the form of representing generally, and this splitting-in-two still clings to the community's actual spirituality as well, to its return out of its representing, in the way that pure thinking as an element was itself afflicted with it; it does not have consciousness about what it is besides; it is the spiritual self-consciousness that is not an object to its own self as this self-consciousness, that does not open itself up into a consciousness of its own self; instead, to the degree that it is consciousness, it has the representations that were considered. — At its final turning point we watch self-consciousness become inward to itself and arrive at knowledge of being-within-itself; we watch it externalize its natural existence and win pure negativity. But the positive significance, namely that this negativity, this pure inwardness of knowledge, is no less the self-equal essence, — or, again, that substance herein arrives at being absolute self-consciousness, this is something other for devotional consciousness. It seizes this side, that knowledge's pure becoming-inward is, in itself, absolute simplicity, is substance, taking it as the representation of something that is not so in accordance with the concept, and rather as the act of an alien satisfaction. Or, put otherwise, it is not present for it that the pure self's depth is the violence by which the abstract essence gets drawn down out of its abstraction and raised to selfhood by the power that this pure devotion has. — The self's doing thereby keeps this negative significance over against consciousness, because the externalization of substance is, from substance's side, an in-itself for consciousness, one that consciousness does not equally grasp and comprehend, or does not find in its own doing as such. — Since, in itself, this unity between essence and self has come about, consciousness also still has this representation of its reconciliation, but has it as representation. It reaches satisfaction by externally attaching to its own pure negativity the positive significance that it is united with the essence; its satisfaction therefore stays burdened, itself, with the opposition of a beyond. Reconciliation of its own therefore enters its consciousness as a distant thing, a distance belonging to the future, just as the reconciliation accomplished by the other self appears as a distance belonging to the past. Just as the singular divine man has a father who is in itself and has only an actual mother, so the universal divine man, that is, the community, has its own doing and knowing for its father, while eternal love is its mother, a love that it merely feels and does not intuit as an actual immediate object within its consciousness. Its reconciliation is therefore in its heart, yet still split in two from its consciousness, and its actuality still broken. That which steps into its consciousness as being the in-itself, that is, as the side of pure mediation, is the reconciliation lying beyond; while that which is present, the side of immediacy and of existence, is that world which has yet to await its transfiguration. The community is indeed reconciled in itself with the essence; and of the essence it is indeed known that it no longer cognizes its object as estranged from itself, but as equal to itself within its love. But this immediate presence does not yet have the shape of spirit for self-consciousness. The community's spirit is thus, within its immediate consciousness, severed from its religious consciousness, which does pronounce that the two are not separate in themselves, but pronounces an in-itself that is not realized, or that has not yet likewise become absolute being-for-itself.

VIII. Absolute Knowing

Revealed religion's spirit has not yet gotten beyond its consciousness as such, or equivalently, what stands as object for its consciousness is not its actual self-consciousness; spirit at large, together with the moments differentiating themselves within it, falls into representing and into the form of objectivity. Absolute spirit is the content of representing; what alone still needs doing is to sublate this mere form, or rather, seeing that consciousness as such is where this form is at home, the truth of the form must already have come out in consciousness's own shapings. — We must not take this getting-beyond of consciousness's object in the one-sided way that would make the object merely show up as returning into the self; more precisely, the object as such did exhibit itself to consciousness as something vanishing, and beyond that, thinghood gets put in place precisely by the externalization of self-consciousness, an externalization whose significance is positive and not merely negative, and positive not just for us or in itself but for consciousness itself. For consciousness, then, what is negative in the object, the object's sublating of its own self, acquires positive significance in the following way, or rather consciousness comes to know the object's nullity partly by externalizing itself — for in that externalization it makes itself into an object, or, since being-for-itself is an indivisible unity, makes the object into its own self. Yet the other moment lies here too: consciousness has no less sublated that externalization and that objectivity and drawn them back into itself, and so, within its own otherness as such, it stays at home with itself. — Such is consciousness's movement, wherein consciousness amounts to the totality of the moments belonging to it. — Equally, consciousness has to relate itself to the object according to the totality of the object's determinations, having grasped it under each determination in that way. It is that totality of determinations which makes the object, in itself, a spiritual essence, and the object truly becomes such for consciousness by way of apprehending every single determination as the self, that is, by way of the spiritual relating to them just named.

So the object is partly immediate being, a thing in general — the correlate of immediate consciousness; partly a becoming-other of itself, its relationship, that is, being-for-another plus being-for-itself, determinateness — the correlate of perception — and partly essence, or the object as universal — the correlate of the understanding. As a whole it is the syllogism: the universal moving by way of determination into singularity, and conversely singularity moving, by way of singularity as sublated, that is, determination, into the universal. — Under these three determinations, then, consciousness has to know the object as its own self. The knowledge under discussion, however, is not knowledge in the sense of pure comprehension of the object; rather what is to be exhibited is only this knowledge in its coming-to-be, or in its moments, and exhibited on that side which is proper to consciousness as such, while the moments of the concept proper, of pure knowledge, get exhibited under the guise of shapings of consciousness. That is why, within consciousness as such, the object does not yet show up as the spiritual essentiality we have just now put into words, and why consciousness's relating to it is not a consideration of the object in that totality as such, nor in the pure conceptual form of that totality, but is partly a shape of consciousness in general and partly a set of such shapes, taken together by us, wherein the totality both of the object's moments and of consciousness's relating can be exhibited only in dissolution into its moments.

For this side of the grasping of the object, grasping as it stands in the shape of consciousness , nothing more is needed than a reminder of the earlier shapes of consciousness that have already come up. — With regard to the object, then, insofar as it is immediate, an indifferent being, observing reason was seen by us to seek and to find its own self in this indifferent thing, that is, to be conscious of its own doing as something quite as external as the object it is conscious of merely as an immediate. — At its peak, too, we watched it put its determination into the infinite judgment which runs: the I's being is a thing. — A sensuous, immediate thing at that: calling the I a soul does indeed represent it as a thing as well, but as one that is invisible, intangible, and so on, hence in fact not as immediate being, nor as what people mean by a thing. — Taken as it immediately stands, that judgment lacks spirit, or rather is spiritlessness in person. By its concept, though, it is in truth the most spirited of judgments, and it is this inner dimension of it, not yet present in it, that the other two moments still to be considered put into words.

The thing is I; that infinite judgment does in fact sublate the thing; the thing is nothing in itself; significance accrues to it only within the relationship, only through the I and the I's relation to it. — For consciousness this moment came out in pure insight and in the Enlightenment. Things are simply useful, and are to be considered under no other aspect than their usefulness . — Self-consciousness that has been cultured, having traversed the world of spirit estranged from itself, has through its externalization brought the thing forth as its own self; it accordingly keeps itself within the thing and knows the thing's non-self-subsistence, knows that essentially the thing is nothing but being-for-another; or, to express the relationship in full, the relationship being the sole thing that makes up the object's nature at this stage, the thing counts with such self-consciousness as something being-for-itself: sense-certainty gets pronounced absolute truth, yet this being-for-itself gets pronounced a moment that does nothing but vanish and cross over into its opposite, into surrendered being-for-another.

Even here, though, knowledge of the thing has not reached completion; the thing has to be known not merely under the immediacy of being and under its determinateness, but as essence or inner too, as the self. Moral self-consciousness is where this is on hand; it knows its own knowledge to be the absolute essentiality, that is, knows being outright as pure will or knowledge; it is nothing beyond that will and that knowledge; whatever else there may be gets only unessential being, that is, being that is not being-in-itself, only the empty shell of such being. To the extent that moral consciousness, in its representation of the world, discharges existence out of the self, it just as much draws existence back into itself again. As conscience it is at last no longer this alternating placing and dissembling of existence and of the self; instead it knows its existence as such to be this pure certainty of its own self, and the objective element wherein it sets itself forth in acting is nothing else than the self's pure knowledge of itself.

Such are the moments composing spirit's reconciliation with its consciousness proper; taken on their own they are single, and what constitutes the force of the reconciliation is their spiritual unity alone. But the last of the moments is necessarily that unity itself and, as is plain, does in fact bind all of them together within itself. Spirit certain of its own self in its existence has, for the element of existence, nothing besides this knowledge of itself; its pronouncement that it acts, in all it does, from conviction about duty, this language of its own, is the validity of its acting. — Acting is the first separating of the concept's simplicity, a separating that is in itself, together with the return out of that separation. This first movement flips over into the second once the element of recognition, being simple knowledge of duty, posits itself over against the difference and the splitting-in-two residing in acting as such, thereby shaping an iron actuality opposed to acting. In forgiveness, however, we watched this hardness let go of its own self and externalize itself. Thus for self-consciousness actuality, taken as immediate existence, carries no significance here beyond that of being pure knowledge; — and taken equally as determinate existence, or as relationship, what confronts it is a knowledge, partly of this purely singular self, partly of knowledge as universal. Herein it is at the same time posited that for each of the two confronting sides the third moment, universality or essence, is valid only as knowledge; and the empty opposition still left over they finally sublate as well, being then the knowledge of I — I, this singular self that is immediately pure, that is, universal knowledge.

So the reconciliation between consciousness and self-consciousness shows itself as accomplished from a doubled side: once in religious spirit, once in consciousness itself as such. The two differ in this way: the first is that reconciliation under the form of being-in-itself, the second under the form of being-for-itself. In the way they have been considered they at first fall apart; following the order in which its shapes came before us, consciousness had long since reached both the single moments of that reconciliation and their unification, before religion for its part gave the shape of actual self-consciousness to its own object. What has not yet been exhibited is the unification of the two sides; that unification is what brings this series of spirit's shapings to a close, for in it spirit reaches the point of knowing itself neither merely as it is in itself, in respect of its absolute content, nor merely as it is for itself, in respect of its contentless form, that is, on the side belonging to self-consciousness, but rather as it is in and for itself.

Such unification has, however, already taken place in itself, in religion as well, admittedly, in representation's return into self-consciousness, though not according to the proper form, since the religious side is the side of the in-itself, a side that confronts the movement of self-consciousness. Hence the unification belongs to that other side, which within the opposition is the side of reflection into itself, and so the side containing both itself and its own opposite, containing them not merely in itself, in a universal fashion, but for itself, in developed and differentiated fashion. The content, and with it the other side of self-conscious spirit taken precisely as the other side, lies before us complete and has been exhibited; what is still missing by way of unification is the concept's simple unity. On the side of self-consciousness itself this unity is likewise already on hand; but in the way it turned up in what went before, it carries, as do all the other moments, the form belonging to a particular shape of consciousness. — Accordingly it is the part of the shape of spirit certain of itself which halts within its concept and which went by the name of the beautiful soul. For the beautiful soul is spirit's own knowledge of itself within its pure translucent unity — self-consciousness knowing this pure knowledge of pure being-within-itself as spirit — not simply intuition of what is divine, but the divine's intuition of its own self. — Since this concept clings to itself in opposition to its own realization, it is that one-sided shape whose dissolution into empty haze we witnessed, and whose positive externalization and onward movement we witnessed as well. By way of that realization, the persisting-upon-itself of this objectless self-consciousness, the determinateness of the concept over against its fulfillment, gets sublated; universality becomes the form its self-consciousness wins, and what is left over for it is its genuine concept, the concept that has won its realization; the concept stands in its truth, namely in unity with its own externalization; — knowledge of pure knowledge, taken not as an abstract essence, which is what duty amounts to, — but taken as an essence which is this knowledge, is this pure self-consciousness, and so is at the same time a genuine object too, for it is the self existing for itself.

This concept gave itself its fulfillment on one side in acting spirit certain of itself, on the other side in religion: religion won for it the absolute content as content, that is, under the form of representation, of otherness for consciousness; whereas in the former shape the form is the self itself, since that shape holds within it acting spirit certain of itself, and the self carries the life of absolute spirit through to its end. That shape, as we see, is the simple concept just named, which nonetheless gives up its eternal essence, is there, or acts. Its splitting-in-two, its stepping forth, it has in the purity of the concept, purity being absolute abstraction, or negativity. In the same way it has within itself the element of its actuality or of being, and has it in pure knowledge itself, since pure knowledge is the simple immediacy that counts as being and existence just as much as it counts as essence — the first being negative thinking, the second positive thinking itself. Lastly, this existence is just as much what issues out of pure knowledge, and, whether as existence or as duty, it is reflected into itself, that is, is evil. This going into itself constitutes the opposition belonging to the concept, and is thereby the entrance of that non-acting, non-actual pure knowledge of essence. Yet this entrance of it within that opposition amounts to its taking part in the opposition; pure knowledge of essence has in itself externalized its own simplicity, for it is the splitting-in-two, the negativity, which the concept is; so far as this splitting-in-two amounts to the becoming-for-itself, it is evil; taken as the in-itself, it is what stays good. — Now what first takes place in itself takes place simultaneously for consciousness, and it too is doubled, being for consciousness and equally being consciousness's own being-for-itself, its own doing. Whatever has already been posited in itself thus repeats itself now as consciousness's knowledge of it and as conscious doing. For the other's sake each gives up the self-subsistence of the determinateness in which it steps forward against the other. That giving-up is the very renunciation of the concept's one-sidedness which in itself made up the beginning, only now it is its own renunciation, as the concept renounced is its own concept. — Being negativity, the in-itself with which things began is in truth quite as much what is mediated; and so it now posits itself just as it truly is, while the negative , taken as the determinateness of each for the other and in itself, is what sublates its own self. Of the two parts of the opposition, one is the inequality between being-within-itself — within its singularity — and universality, the other the inequality of its abstract universality over against the self; the first dies away from its being-for-itself, externalizes itself, and confesses; the second forswears the hardness belonging to its abstract universality, dying thereby to its unliving self and its unmoved universality; so that the first has completed itself by means of the moment of universality that is essence, and the second by means of the universality that is self; and by this movement of acting, spirit — which is spirit only by being there, which raises its existence up into thought and so into absolute opposition, and which returns out of that opposition precisely through it and within it — has stepped forth as knowledge's pure universality, which is self-consciousness, as a self-consciousness that constitutes the simple unity of knowledge.

Whatever in religion was content, or the form under which an other gets represented, is here the self's own doing; the concept ties things together so that the content is the self's own doing; — for this concept, as we see, is the knowledge of the self's doing inside itself as the whole of essentiality and the whole of existence, the knowledge of this subject as the substance and of substance as this knowledge of its doing. — All that we have contributed here is, on the one hand, the assembling of the single moments, each of which within its own principle presents the life of spirit entire, and, on the other hand, the holding fast of the concept under the concept's own form, a concept whose content would already have yielded itself within those moments, and which would itself already have yielded itself under the form of a shape of consciousness.

This last shape of spirit, spirit which at once confers the form of the self upon its complete and true content, and which thereby realizes its concept while remaining, in that realization, within its concept, is absolute knowing; it is spirit knowing its own self in the shape of spirit, or comprehending knowledge. Truth is not merely, in itself, perfectly equal to certainty; it carries besides the shape of certainty of itself, or, in its existence, meaning for knowing spirit, it stands in the form of spirit's knowledge of its own self. Truth is that content which, in religion, remains unequal to its own certainty. The equality in question lies in the content's having taken on the shape of the self. Thereby what has turned into the element of existence, into the form of objectivity for consciousness, is that which essence itself is, the concept namely. Spirit appearing within this element to consciousness, or, what comes to the same here, brought forth within it by consciousness, is science.

Accordingly, the nature, the moments, and the movement of this knowledge have come out as follows: this knowledge is self-consciousness's pure being-for-itself ; it is the I, this I and no other, and equally an immediately mediated I, a sublated, universal one. — There is a content it differentiates from itself, since it is pure negativity, the splitting of itself in two; it is consciousness. Within its difference this content is itself the I, being the movement of self-sublating, the very negativity in its purity that the I is. In this content, differentiated as it is, the I stands reflected into itself; the content gets comprehended solely through the I's being at home with itself in its own otherness. Given more determinately, this content is nothing other than the very movement just now put into words; for it is spirit running through its own self, and running through it for itself as spirit, in virtue of possessing the concept's shape within its objectivity.

As regards this concept's existence, science does not make its appearance in time and actuality until spirit has attained this consciousness regarding itself. Taken as spirit knowing what it is, it existed neither earlier nor anywhere else than after completing the labor of mastering its own imperfect shaping, of procuring for its own consciousness the shape belonging to its essence, and in this fashion of equalizing its self-consciousness with its consciousness. — Spirit existing in and for itself, differentiated within its moments, is knowledge that is for itself, comprehension in general, which as such has still not arrived at substance, and is not absolute knowing in its own self.

In actuality, now, knowing substance is there before its form, before its conceptual shape. For substance is the in-itself still undeveloped, the ground and the concept in a simplicity still unmoved, and therefore spirit's inwardness or self, which is not yet there. Whatever is there is there in the guise of the simple and immediate not yet developed, in other words as the object of representing consciousness in general. Cognition, spiritual consciousness for which whatever is in itself exists only so far as it is being for the self, and is being of the self, that is, concept — has on that account at the outset only a poor object, over against which substance, and consciousness of substance, is the richer. The openness substance has in such consciousness is in fact hiddenness, for substance is still selfless being, and only certainty of one's own self is open to itself. So to begin with, what belongs to self-consciousness out of substance is only the abstract moments; but as these, being pure movements, drive themselves onward, self-consciousness grows richer, until it has wrested the whole of substance away from consciousness, has sucked into itself the whole edifice of substance's essentialities, and, this negative relating to objectivity being no less positive, a positing, — has generated substance out of itself and thereby restored it for consciousness at the same time. Within the concept that knows itself as concept , the moments accordingly step forward earlier than the fulfilled whole, whose coming-to-be consists in the movement of those moments. Within consciousness, by contrast, the whole, though the uncomprehended whole, comes before the moments. — Time is the concept itself in its being-there, presenting itself to consciousness as empty intuition; that is why spirit necessarily appears in time, and why it goes on appearing in time for just so long as it fails to grasp its pure concept, that is, fails to expunge time. Time is the external pure self, intuited and not grasped by the self, the concept merely intuited; once the concept grasps its own self, it sublates its time-form, comprehends intuiting, and is intuiting comprehended and comprehending. — Time appears, therefore, as the destiny and the necessity of spirit not yet completed within its own self — the necessity of enriching the share self-consciousness holds in consciousness, of setting in motion the immediacy that the in-itself has — that immediacy being the form under which substance stands within consciousness — or, conversely, taking the in-itself as the inward, the necessity of realizing and revealing what is at first only inward, — that is, of vindicating it for certainty of its own self.

On this ground one has to say that nothing gets known which is not there in experience — or, as the same point also gets expressed, which is not on hand as felt truth, as the inwardly revealed eternal, as the believed holy, or under whatever other expressions may be employed. For experience consists in just this, that the content — spirit being that content — is in itself substance and so object of consciousness. This substance, however, which is spirit, is the becoming of spirit toward that which in itself it is; and only as a becoming reflecting itself into itself is spirit in itself truly spirit. In itself spirit is the movement which cognition is — the transformation of that in-itself into the for-itself, of substance into the subject, of what is object for consciousness into object for self-consciousness, that is, into an object just as much sublated, into the concept. That movement is the circle returning into itself, a circle presupposing its own beginning and reaching it only in the end. — So far as spirit is thus of necessity this differentiating within itself, its whole, in intuited form, comes to stand opposite its simple self-consciousness; and since this whole is precisely what has been differentiated, it is differentiated into its pure concept as intuited, into time, and into the content, the in-itself; substance, as subject, bears within it the at first inner necessity of exhibiting what it is in itself on its own self, of exhibiting itself as spirit. It is the completed objective exhibition that is at the same time the reflection of that exhibition, its becoming-self. — Hence spirit cannot reach completion as self-conscious spirit before it has completed itself in itself, as world-spirit. That is why religion's content voices what spirit is at an earlier point in time than science does, while science alone is spirit's true knowledge of its own self.

The movement of driving forth the form of its knowledge of itself is the labor spirit carries out as actual history. The religious community, which at the outset is absolute spirit's substance, is raw consciousness, and the deeper its inner spirit runs, the more barbaric and harsh the existence such consciousness has, while its dull self has correspondingly harsher labor with its essence, with the content of its consciousness that stands alien to it. Only once it has surrendered the hope of sublating this alienness in an external, that is to say alien, manner does it turn, since the alien manner once sublated is the return into self-consciousness, to its own self, to its own world and present, discovering that world as its property; and with this it has taken the first step in climbing down from the intellectual world, or rather in inspiriting that world's abstract element with the actual self. Through observation, on one side, it finds existence as thought and comprehends existence, and conversely finds existence within its thinking. Having in this way first voiced, itself abstractly, the immediate unity of thinking and being, of abstract essence and of the self, and having voiced the first light-essence more purely, that is, as the unity of extension with being — extension being a simplicity nearer to pure thinking than light is — and having thereby roused again in thought the substance of the sunrise, spirit at the same time recoils in a shudder from this abstract unity, from this selfless substantiality, and asserts individuality against it. Yet only after spirit has externalized individuality in culture, thereby turning it into existence and driving it through all existence — after reaching the thought of usefulness and, within absolute freedom, seizing existence as its own will, does it thus turn outward the thought of its innermost depth and voice essence as I = I itself. This I = I, however, is the movement that reflects itself into itself; for inasmuch as this equality, being absolute negativity, is absolute difference, the I's self-equality confronts this pure difference, which, pure and at once objective for the self that knows itself, is to be voiced as time, so that, just as essence was voiced above as the unity of thinking with extension, it would here have to be grasped as thinking's unity with time; but difference left to its own devices, time without rest or stay, collapses instead into itself; time is the objective repose of extension, and extension is the I, pure equality with itself. — Or: the I is not the self alone, it is the self's equality with itself; and this equality is perfect and immediate unity with itself, which is to say that this subject is quite as much the substance. Substance taken by itself alone would be intuiting void of content, or the intuiting of a content which, as determinate, would possess mere accidentality and would lack necessity; substance would count as the absolute only so far as it were thought or intuited as the absolute unity, and every content, in its diversity, would have to fall outside substance into a reflection not belonging to it, substance not being subject, not being what reflects upon itself and into itself, not being comprehended as spirit. Were content nevertheless to be spoken of, that would be partly just so as to hurl it down into the absolute's empty abyss, while partly the content would have been scooped up externally out of sensuous perception; knowledge would seem to have come upon things, upon its difference from itself, and upon the difference among manifold things, with no one comprehending how or whence.

Spirit, though, has shown itself to be for us neither a mere drawing-back of self-consciousness into pure inwardness of its own, nor a mere submerging of self-consciousness in substance together with the non-being of its difference, but rather this movement of the self, which externalizes itself from its own self and sinks into its substance, and which, as subject, has equally gone out of substance into itself and makes substance into object and content, even while it sublates this difference of objectivity and of content. That first reflection out of immediacy consists in the subject's differentiating itself from its substance, the concept splitting itself in two, the going-into-itself and coming-to-be of the I in its purity. Since this difference amounts to the pure doing of I = I, the concept is the necessity and the springing-up of existence, existence that has substance for its essence and that subsists for itself. But existence subsisting for itself is the concept posited within determinateness, and hence just as much its own movement in its own self: the descent into that simple substance which becomes subject only as this negativity, this movement. — The I has no business clinging to itself under the form of self-consciousness over against the form that substantiality and objectivity have, as though it feared its own externalization; spirit's force lies rather in staying equal to its own self within its externalization, and, as what is in and for itself, in positing being-for-itself no less than being-in-itself as a mere moment; — nor is the I some third thing that flings the differences back into the absolute's abyss and pronounces their equality there; knowledge consists rather in this apparent inactivity, which does nothing but look on at how what is differentiated moves on its own self and comes back into its unity.

Within knowledge, then, spirit has concluded the movement of its own shaping, so far as that shaping is encumbered with the unovercome difference of consciousness. It has attained the concept, the pure element in which it exists. The content, taken according to the freedom that its being has, is the self externalizing itself, that is, the immediate unity of knowing oneself. The pure movement of this externalization, viewed on the content, makes up the content's necessity. Content that is diverse stands, as determinate, within the relationship, not in itself, and its unrest is to sublate its own self , or is negativity; hence necessity, or diversity, is quite as much the self, as free being is, and in this selflike form, wherein existence is thought immediately, the content is concept. Now that spirit has won the concept, it spreads out existence and movement within this ether of its own life, and is science. In science the moments of spirit's movement no longer present themselves as determinate shapes of consciousness but, consciousness's difference having withdrawn into the self, as determinate concepts, and as their organic movement grounded in its own self. If, in the phenomenology of spirit, every moment is the difference between knowledge and truth, along with the movement wherein that difference sublates itself, science by contrast holds neither this difference nor its sublating; rather, the moment, having the concept's form, brings the objective form of truth together with that of the knowing self in immediate unity. The moment does not step forward as this movement of crossing over and back, out of consciousness or representation into self-consciousness and the reverse; instead its pure shape, released from its appearance within consciousness, the pure concept, together with the onward movement of that concept, hangs solely upon its pure determinateness. Conversely, every abstract moment of science has answering to it a shape of appearing spirit in general. Just as spirit in its existence is no richer than science, so in its content it is no poorer either. Cognizing science's pure concepts in this form of shapes of consciousness makes up that side of their reality according to which their essence, the concept, posited within science in its simple mediation as thinking, knocks apart the moments of this mediation and presents itself according to the inner opposition.

Science holds within its own self this necessity of externalizing the pure concept's form, and holds the concept's transition into consciousness. For spirit knowing its own self, just because it grasps its concept, is immediate equality with itself, an equality that in its difference is certainty of the immediate, or sensuous consciousness — the beginning from which we set out; and this releasing of itself from the form its self has is the highest freedom and the security of its knowledge of itself.

Still, this externalization remains incomplete; what it expresses is the relation of certainty of itself to the object, and the object, precisely by standing within the relation, has not won its full freedom. Knowledge is acquainted with itself, but with the negative of itself as well, that is, with its limit. To know its limit is to know how to sacrifice itself. That sacrifice is the externalization wherein spirit presents its own becoming-spirit under the form of a free contingent happening, while intuiting its pure self as time lying outside it and, likewise, its being as space. This latter becoming, nature, is spirit's living immediate becoming; nature, spirit externalized, amounts in its existence to nothing beyond this eternal externalization of its subsistence and the movement that produces the subject.

The other side of spirit's becoming, however, history, is the knowing, self-mediating becoming — spirit externalized into time; yet this externalization is equally an externalization of its own self; the negative is what is negative of its own self. What this becoming presents is a sluggish movement, a succession of spirits, a picture gallery whose every image, furnished with spirit's complete wealth, moves just so sluggishly for that very reason: the self must work its way through this whole substantial wealth of its own and digest it. Since spirit's completion lies in knowing perfectly what it is, namely its substance, such knowledge is its going-into-itself, wherein it forsakes its existence and consigns its shape to recollection. In this going-into-itself spirit has sunk down into its self-consciousness's night, while its vanished existence is kept safe there, and that sublated existence — the former one, yet newborn out of knowledge — is a new existence, a new world and shape of spirit. Within that new world spirit has to begin all over again just as ingenuously at its immediacy, rearing itself up once more from there, as though everything foregoing were lost to it and as though nothing had been gained by it from what the earlier spirits went through. But inwardizing recollection has kept that experience safe and is the inner, and in point of fact the higher, form that substance takes. So when this spirit starts its culture afresh from the beginning, seemingly setting out from itself alone, it begins at the same time on a higher rung. The realm of spirits which has formed itself in existence in this manner makes up a sequence in which one spirit succeeded another, each of them taking over the world's realm from the one before. Their goal is that the depth be revealed, this depth being the absolute concept; such revelation is accordingly the sublating of spirit's depth, its extension, that is, the negativity of this I that is within itself, a negativity that is spirit's externalization, or substance — and it is spirit's time, in that this externalization externalizes itself on its own self and so, within its extension quite as much as within its depth, is for the self. The goal, absolute knowing, spirit knowing itself as spirit, has for its pathway a recollection of the spirits, as they stand in their own selves and as they bring the organization of their realm to completion; keeping them safe, on the side of their existence, free and appearing under the form of contingency, is history, whereas on the side of their organization as comprehended it is the science of appearing knowledge; the two taken together, comprehended history, form absolute spirit's recollection and place of the skull, its throne's actuality, truth, and certainty, apart from which it would be the lifeless solitary; only — out of the cup of this realm of spirits its own infinity foams up for it.