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.