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

In inorganic nature the observation of nature comes upon the concept as realized — laws whose moments are things which at the same time relate as abstractions; this concept, however, is not a simplicity reflected within itself. Organic nature's life, by contrast, is nothing but this simplicity reflected within itself; its opposition to itself, as the universal and as the singular, does not break apart within the essence of this life itself; and the essence is not a genus that would divide and move itself within its own element free of difference and that, in its own opposition, would at the same time remain undifferentiated for its own self. Observation finds this free concept — whose universality holds developed singularity just as absolutely within itself — only in the concept that itself exists as concept, that is, in self-consciousness.

Now, in turning back into itself and directing itself upon the concept that is actual as free concept, observation first finds the laws of thought. This singularity, which thinking is in its very self, is the movement of the negative in its abstraction, taken wholly back into simplicity, and the laws lie outside reality. — That they have no reality says nothing else whatever than that they are without truth. They are supposed, admittedly, to be not the whole truth, but still a formal truth. Yet the purely formal without reality is a thought-thing, or the empty abstraction lacking the splitting-in-two within it, which would be nothing other than the content. — On the other side, however, since they are laws of pure thinking, while this thinking is what is universal in itself and hence a knowledge that immediately has being, and therein all reality, within it, these laws are absolute concepts and are, undivided, the essentialities of the form as much as of things. Because the universality that moves within itself is the simple concept split in two, it thereby possesses content in itself, a content that is every content, save only a sensuous being. This is a content which stands neither in contradiction to the form nor separated from it in any way, but is rather essentially the form itself, since the form is nothing but the universal as it divides itself into its own pure moments.

But in the way this form or content is for the observation qua observation, it takes on the determination of a content that is found, given, that is, of one that merely is. It turns into a placid being of relations, a host of necessities set apart from one another, which as a fixed content in and for itself are supposed to possess truth in their determinateness, and which are thereby in fact removed from the form. — Such an absolute truth belonging to fixed determinatenesses, or to a plurality of different laws, contradicts, however, the unity of self-consciousness, that is, of thinking and of form as such. Whatever gets stated as a fixed law that abides in itself can be no more than a moment of the unity reflecting itself within itself, and can come on the scene only as a vanishing magnitude. But when they are torn by consideration out of this context of the movement and set down in isolation, what they lack is not content — for they do have a determinate content — rather, what they are deprived of is the form, which is their essence. In fact these laws fail to be the truth of thinking not on the ground that they are meant to be merely formal and devoid of content, but on the opposite ground: that in their determinateness, or precisely as a content stripped of its form, they are meant to count as something absolute. Taken in their truth, as moments that vanish within the unity of thinking, they would need to be understood as knowledge, or as thinking movement, and not as laws of knowledge. Observing, however, is not knowledge itself and has no acquaintance with it; it rather inverts the nature of knowledge into the shape of being, that is, it apprehends its negativity only as laws of being. — Here it suffices to have shown, out of the general nature of the matter, that the so-called laws of thought have no validity. Their more detailed development belongs to speculative philosophy, where they exhibit themselves as that which in truth they are: singular moments that vanish, whose truth is nothing but the whole of the thinking movement, knowledge itself.

This negative unity of thinking is for its own self, or rather it amounts to being-for-its-own-self, that is, to the principle of individuality, and it is doing consciousness in its reality. It is to this consciousness, as the reality of those laws, that observing consciousness is thereby led on by the nature of the matter. Because this connection does not exist for it, it takes thinking, in its laws, to remain standing on the one side for it, while on the other side it obtains a further being in what is now its object, namely the doing consciousness, a consciousness that is for itself in the sense that it sublates otherness, its actuality lying in this intuiting of itself as the negative.

For observation, then, a new field opens up in the acting actuality of consciousness. In psychology there is that mass of laws by which spirit relates in differing ways to the differing modes of its own actuality, taken as an otherness found already present; in part by receiving these modes into itself and becoming conformable to the habits, the customs, and the way of thinking it has found already there, wherein it is object to itself as actuality — in part by knowing itself as self-active over against them, by seizing out of them, with inclination and passion, only what is particular for itself, and by making what is objective conformable to itself; in the one case relating negatively toward itself as singularity, in the other toward itself as universal being. — Taken on the first side, self-subsistence lends to what it has found already there nothing beyond the form of conscious individuality in general, and as regards content it halts within the universal actuality it has come upon; taken on the other side, however, it lends that actuality at least a modification peculiar to itself, one that does not run counter to the actuality's essential content, or else a modification through which the individual, as a particular actuality and as a content peculiar to itself, sets itself in opposition to that actuality — and becomes a crime, in that it sublates that actuality in a merely singular manner, or, doing so in a universal manner and thereby for all, puts another world, another right, other law and customs in the place of those now present.

Observational psychology, whose first move is to state its perceptions of the universal modes that turn up for it in active consciousness, comes upon a diversity of faculties, inclinations, and passions, and since the recollection of the unity of self-consciousness will not let itself be suppressed while this collection is being reeled off, such psychology has to proceed at least as far as astonishment that so many things, so heterogeneous and so contingent to one another, can be together in spirit as though in a sack, all the more so as they display themselves not as dead things at rest but as restless movements.

While reciting these various faculties, observation stands on the universal side; the side opposed to this universality, the actual individuality, is the unity of these multiple capacities. — Yet apprehending the distinct actual individualities in turn and recounting them so as to say that this person has more inclination toward one thing, that person more toward another, that one has more understanding than the next, holds something far duller in it than even a listing of the kinds of insects, mosses, and the like; for the latter give observation the right to take them in so singular and conceptless a fashion, since they belong essentially to the element of contingent isolation. To take conscious individuality, by contrast, spiritlessly as a singular appearance that merely is, has this contradictory feature, that its essence is the universal of spirit. But because this apprehending at the same time lets individuality step into the form of universality, it discovers its law, and now seems to be pursuing a rational purpose and carrying on a necessary business.

What makes up the content of the law are, as moments, individuality itself on the one hand and, on the other, that individuality's universal inorganic nature, namely, the circumstances found already present, the situation, habits, customs, religion, and so on; out of these the determinate individuality is to be comprehended. They contain what is determinate no less than what is universal, and they are at once something present, which offers itself to observation and which, on the other side, gives expression to itself in the form of individuality.

Now the law of this relationship between the two sides would have to state which effect and which influence these determinate circumstances exercise upon individuality. But this individuality is precisely this: just as much to be the universal, and therefore to flow together in a placid, immediate way with the present universal, with customs, habits, and so on, and to become conformable to them, as to relate to them in opposition and rather to invert them — and likewise to relate to them in its singularity with complete indifference, neither letting them work upon it nor being active against them. What is to have an influence upon individuality and which influence it is to have — which actually amounts to the same thing — therefore depends solely upon individuality itself; to say that through this the individuality has become this determinate one means nothing else than that it has already been this. Circumstances, situation, customs, and so on, which on the one side are exhibited as present and on the other within this determinate individuality, express only the indeterminate essence of that individuality, which is not what is at issue. If these circumstances, this way of thinking, these customs, this condition of the world had not existed at all, then the individual would indeed not have become what it is; for all who find themselves in this condition of the world are this universal substance. — But in the way this condition has particularized itself in this individual — and such an individual is what is to be comprehended — it would have to have particularized itself in and for its own self and, in this determinateness it had given itself, to have worked upon an individual; only so would it have made that individual into the determinate one it is. If the external had constituted itself in and for itself just as it appears in the individuality, then the individuality would be comprehended out of the external. We would then have a twofold gallery of images, the first of them a reflected shine of the second: the first being the gallery of the complete determinateness and delimitation of external circumstances, the second that same gallery rendered into the mode in which those circumstances are within the conscious essence; the former the spherical surface, the latter the center point that represents that surface within itself.

But the surface of the sphere, the world of the individual, immediately carries the ambiguous sense of being a world and situation existing in and for itself, and of being the world of the individual, either insofar as the individual had merely flowed together with it, had let it pass into itself just as it is and had related to it only as formal consciousness; — or else of being the world of the individual in the way that what is present has been inverted by the individual. — Because actuality, for the sake of this freedom, admits of this doubled sense, only out of the individual itself can the individual's world be comprehended, and the influence upon the individual exercised by an actuality that is represented as being in and for itself takes on, through the individual, the absolutely opposite sense, that the individual either lets the stream of inflowing actuality run its course within itself, or breaks it off and inverts it. By this, however, psychological necessity becomes so empty a word that, with regard to whatever is supposed to have had this influence, there is the absolute possibility that it might just as well not have had it.

With this there drops away the being that would be in and for itself, the being that was to constitute the one and indeed the universal side of a law. Individuality is whatever its world amounts to as its own; individuality is itself the circle of its doing, wherein it has exhibited itself as actuality, and it is nothing whatever but the unity of the being that is present and the being that is made; a unity in which the sides do not come apart, as they do in the representation of the psychological law, as a world present in itself and as an individuality that is for itself; or, if each side is taken by itself in that way, then there is no necessity present, and no law of how the two relate to each other.

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

Observation in psychology discovers no law for the relationship in which self-consciousness stands to actuality, that is, to the world set over against it, and, since the two are indifferent toward each other, it is driven back to the peculiar determinateness that belongs to real individuality, an individuality that is in and for itself, one that holds the opposition of being-for-itself to being-in-itself extinguished within their absolute mediation. It is the object that has now become the object of observation, or to which observation passes over.

The individual is in and for its own self: it is for itself, or it is a free doing; but it is also in itself; or it itself has a determinate being that is original — a determinateness which, by its concept, is the same as what psychology wanted to find outside it. At the individual itself, then, the opposition emerges: to be this doubled thing, consciousness in its movement and the fixed being of an actuality that appears, an actuality immediately its own at the individual. This being, namely the body belonging to the determinate individuality, is the originality of that individuality, its not-having-done-anything. Yet inasmuch as the individual is at the same time only what it has done, its body is also the expression of itself that it has brought forth; it is at once a sign, one that has not stayed an immediate matter but through which the individual only indicates what it is, in the sense that it puts its original nature into effect.

Looking at the moments present here in their relation to the view that preceded, we find here a human shape that is universal, or at any rate the universal shape of a climate, a region of the world, a people, in the way that earlier there were the same universal customs and culture. Added to this are the particular circumstances and the particular situation within universal actuality; here, this particular actuality is the particular formation of the individual's shape. — Seen from the other side, just as earlier the free doing of the individual and the actuality that counted as its own were set over against the actuality already at hand, so here the shape stands as the expression of its actualization posited through the individual itself, the features and forms of its self-active essence. But the actuality, both universal and particular, which observation earlier came upon outside the individual, is here the individual's own actuality, its innate body, and it is precisely into this body that the expression pertaining to its doing falls. In the psychological consideration, the actuality that has being in and for itself and the determinate individuality were supposed to be related to each other; here, by contrast, it is the whole determinate individuality that observation has for its object; and each side of the opposition within it is itself this whole. What belongs to the outer whole, then, is not only the original being, the innate body, but equally the formation of that body, a formation that is the work of the inner's activity; the body is a unity of uncultivated and cultivated being, and it is the individual's actuality permeated by being-for-itself. This whole, which gathers into itself the determinate, original, fixed parts along with the features that come about solely through doing, is; and this being constitutes the expression of the inner, that is, of the individual which has been posited as both consciousness and movement. — This inner, equally, is no longer the formal, contentless or indeterminate self-activity whose content and determinateness would lie, as they did earlier, in outer circumstances; it is instead an original character already determinate in itself, and activity is merely its form. It is the relationship between these two sides, then, that comes under consideration here: how it is to be determined, and what this expression of the inner within the outer is supposed to mean.

In the first place, this outer does not make the inner visible in the manner of an organ, nor make it a being for another at all; for so far as the inner lies within the organ, it is the activity itself. Mouth in speech, hand at work, and, if one likes, the legs as well, are the organs that actualize and bring to completion; in them the doing is present as doing, or the inner taken as such; but the externality which the inner gains through them is the deed, an actuality cut off from the individual. Speech and labor count as expressions in which the individual, instead of holding on to itself and retaining itself within itself, lets the inner come entirely outside itself and hands it over to what is other. One may therefore say with equal justice that these expressions say too much of the inner and that they say too little of it; too much, — since the inner itself breaks out in them, no opposition is left standing between them and it, and what they give is not only an expression of the inner but that inner itself, immediately; too little, — since in speech and in action the inner turns itself into something other, it thereby delivers itself over to the element of transformation, which inverts the word once spoken and the deed once accomplished and turns them into something different from what, in and for themselves, they are as actions of this determinate individual. Not only do the works of actions, through this externality, lose the character of being something enduring over against other individualities, on account of the influence of others; but also, since they relate to the inner they contain as a separated, indifferent outer, they can, as inner, be something other through the individual itself than they appear to be, — either because the individual deliberately makes them, for appearance's sake, into something other than they are in truth, — or because it is too inept to give itself the outer side it actually wanted and to fix that side so firmly that its work cannot be inverted by others. Doing, then, as a completed work, carries a doubled and opposed significance: it is either the inner individuality and not that individuality's expression, or else, as something outer, an actuality free of the inner, an actuality wholly other than the inner is. — Because of this ambiguity we have to look around for the inner in the way it still is, yet visibly or outwardly, at the individual itself. In the organ, however, it is only as the immediate doing itself, which attains its externality in the deed, and the deed either represents the inner or does not. The organ, considered in terms of this opposition, therefore does not afford the expression that is being sought.

Suppose now that the outer shape were able to give expression to inner individuality only in so far as it is not organ and not doing, and so is a whole at rest: then it would relate as a subsisting thing that quietly received the inner into its passive existence as something alien and so became that inner's sign; — an outer, contingent expression whose actual side is on its own account without significance, — a language whose tones and combinations of tones are not the matter at hand itself but are attached to it by free arbitrary choice and are contingent for it.

A connection as arbitrary as this, between terms that are an outer for one another, gives no law. Physiognomy, however, is meant to set itself apart from other bad arts and hopeless studies in this: that it takes the determinate individuality within the necessary opposition between an inner and an outer, between character as a conscious essence and that same character as shape in its being, and that it puts these moments into the relation to one another in which their concept places them, so that they must accordingly make up the content of a law. Astrology, chiromancy, and sciences of that sort, by contrast, seem to relate only an outer to an outer, something or other to what is alien to it. This constellation at birth, and, if this outer is brought in closer to the body itself, these lines of the hand, are outer moments bearing on whether life is long or short, and on the destiny of the singular human being in general. As externalities they relate indifferently to one another and lack the necessity for each other that is supposed to reside in the relation between an outer and an inner.

The hand, to be sure, seems not so much to be something outer for destiny as rather to relate to destiny as an inner. For destiny, in its turn, is nothing but the appearance of that which the determinate individuality is in itself as inner original determinateness. — Now, in order to know what that individuality is in itself, the chiromancer, like the physiognomist, arrives at it by a shorter route than, for example, Solon, who held that this could be known only from and after the course of a whole life; he considered the appearance, whereas they consider the in-itself. That the hand must present the in-itself of individuality with regard to its destiny can readily be seen from this, that after the organ of speech it is above all the hand through which the human being brings himself into appearance and actualization. It is the ensouled master builder of his fortune; the hand, one may say, is what the human being does, for in the hand, as the active organ by which he brings himself to completion, he is present as the one giving soul, and since he is originally his own destiny, the hand will express this in-itself.

From this determination, that in the organ of activity a being is found just as much as the doing is within it, or that the inner being-in-itself is itself present at the organ and has a being for others, there follows a view of the organ different from the previous one. For if the organs in general proved incapable of counting as expressions of the inner, on the ground that in them the doing is present as doing, while the doing as deed is merely something outer, so that inner and outer come apart in this manner and are, or may be, foreign to one another, then, on the determination just examined, the organ must once again be taken as the middle of the two, since the very fact that the doing is present at the organ at the same time makes up an externality of that doing, and indeed an externality other than the deed is, for the former stays with the individual and at it. — This middle, this unity of inner and outer, is at first itself something outer as well; but then this externality is simultaneously drawn into the inner; being a simple externality, it confronts the dispersed one, which is either only a singular work or state, contingent as regards the individuality taken as a whole, or else, as whole externality, is destiny shattered into a multiplicity of works and states. The hand's simple lines, then, and likewise the sound and range of the voice, taken as the individual determinateness of speech, — and speech once more as it acquires through the hand a more fixed existence than it does through the voice, namely writing, and writing in its particularity as handwriting — all of this is expression of the inner, so that, as the simple externality, it in turn relates over against the manifold externality of acting and of destiny, relating to it as an inner. — So if the determinate nature and inborn peculiarity of the individual, along with whatever these have turned into through culture, are taken first as the inner, that is, as the essence of acting and of destiny, then this inner has its appearance and externality first in mouth, hand, voice, handwriting, as in the remaining organs too and their abiding determinatenesses; and only then does it express itself further outward, in its actuality in the world.

Now since this middle determines itself as that expression which is at once withdrawn into the inner again, its existence is not confined to the immediate organ of doing; it is rather the movement and form of the face and of bodily shaping in general, a movement that accomplishes nothing. These features and their movement are, according to this concept, the doing that is held back and remains at the individual, and, in accordance with the individual's relation to actual doing, they are the individual's own supervision and observation of that doing, expression as reflection upon the actual expression. — The individual is not mute toward its outer doing or in the midst of it, and this is because it is therein at the same time reflected into its own self, and it expresses this being-reflected-into-itself; this theoretical doing, or the individual's speech with itself about that doing, can be heard by others as well, for it is itself an expression.

In this inner, then, which remains inner within its expression, what gets observed is the being-reflected of the individual out of its actuality, and the question is how things stand with the necessity posited in this unity. — This being-reflected is at first different from the deed itself, and so can be, and can be taken to be, something other than the deed is; one can tell from a person's face whether he is serious about what he says or does. — Conversely, however, what is meant to serve as expression of the inner is at once an expression that has being, and with that it sinks itself into the determination of being, which for the self-conscious essence is utterly contingent. It is thus indeed an expression, yet at the same time only like a sign, so that the makeup of that by which the content is expressed is entirely a matter of indifference to the content expressed. Within this appearance the inner is indeed something invisible made visible, but without being tied to that appearance; it can just as well be in another appearance as another inner can be in this same one. — Lichtenberg therefore rightly says: Suppose the physiognomist were once to catch hold of a human being; then all it would take would be a stout resolution to make oneself incomprehensible again for thousands of years. — Just as, in the relationship that preceded, the circumstances lying to hand were something with being, out of which individuality took what it had the power and the will to take, either surrendering to them or inverting them, for which reason they did not contain the necessity and the essence of individuality, — so here too the appearing immediate being of individuality is of such a kind that it either expresses individuality's being-reflected out of actuality and its being-within-itself, or else is for individuality merely a sign, one indifferent toward what is signified and hence in truth signifying nothing; it is for individuality its face and equally its mask, one that individuality can put off. — Individuality pervades its shape, moves within it and speaks in it; yet this entire existence likewise passes over into being a being indifferent toward the will and the action; individuality wipes out in it the significance it had before, that of holding individuality's being-reflected into itself or its true essence, and places that significance instead in the will and in the deed.

Individuality gives up that being-reflected into itself which is expressed in the features, and places its essence in the work. In this it contradicts the relationship laid down by the instinct of reason, which devotes itself to observing self-conscious individuality, with respect to what is supposed to be individuality's inner and outer. From this vantage point we arrive at the thought properly underlying the physiognomic — if one cares to call it that — science. The opposition into which this observing has fallen is, as regards its form, the opposition of the practical and the theoretical, both of them posited within the practical itself, — the opposition between individuality actualizing itself in action, taken in the most general sense, — and the same individuality as it is, in this very action, at the same time out of the action, reflected into itself, with the action as its object. Observing picks this opposition up in the same inverted relationship in which the opposition determines itself in appearance. For the inessential outer it takes the deed itself and the work, whether of speech or of a more firmly established actuality, — but for the essential inner, the being-within-itself of individuality. Between the two sides that practical consciousness has at it, intending and the deed, — the meaning it has about its action and the action itself, — observation picks the former side as the true inner; and this inner, it holds, has an expression at the deed that is more or less inessential, but its true expression at its shape. The expression last named is the immediate sensuous presence of individual spirit; the inwardness that is claimed to be the true one is the ownness of the intention together with the singularity of being-for-itself; the two of them are spirit as meant. What observing has for its objects, then, is meant existence, and it is among such objects that it searches out laws.

Immediate meaning concerning the meant presence of spirit is natural physiognomy: the rash judgment passed, at the first sight of a shape, upon the inner nature and the character that the shape has. This opinion has an object of such a kind that it lies in the object's essence to be in truth something other than merely sensuous immediate being. Admittedly what is present, and what is the object of observing, is indeed just this being-reflected-into-itself within the sensuous and out of it, visibility as the visibility of the invisible. Yet this sensuous immediate presence is the actuality of spirit only as spirit is for opinion; and on this side observing knocks about with its meant existence, with physiognomy, handwriting, the tone of the voice, and so on. — It relates such existence to just such a meant inner. What is to be cognized is not the murderer or the thief but the capacity for being one; with that, fixed abstract determinateness dissolves into the concrete infinite determinateness belonging to the singular individual, which now calls for more artful depictions than those qualifications are. Such artful depictions do say more than qualification as murderers, thieves, or as good-hearted, unspoiled, and the like, but for their purpose of articulating meant being, or the singular individuality, they are by far not enough; just as little are the depictions of the shape that go beyond the flat forehead, the long nose, and the like. For the singular shape, like the singular self-consciousness, is inexpressible as meant being. The science of acquaintance with human beings, which goes after the human being as merely supposed, and likewise physiognomy, which goes after his supposed actuality and would elevate the unconscious judging of natural physiognomy into a knowledge, is therefore something without end or ground, something that can never get so far as to say what it means, since it only means, and its content is only something meant.

The laws that this science goes out in search of are relations holding between these two meant sides, and so can themselves be nothing but an empty meaning. Moreover, since this supposed knowledge, which busies itself with the actuality of spirit, has precisely this for its object, namely that spirit reflects itself out of its sensuous existence into itself, and that determinate existence is for spirit an indifferent contingency, then it must know immediately, in the case of the laws it has discovered, that nothing is said by them, but that what is really going on is pure chatter, or that merely an opinion of one's own is being given; an expression that has the truth of stating this as one and the same, — of saying one's opinion and thereby bringing forward not the matter at hand but only an opinion of one's own. As far as their content goes, however, these observations cannot differ from ones of this sort: "It always rains when we have the annual fair, says the shopkeeper; and always too when I dry the laundry, says the housewife."

Lichtenberg, who characterizes physiognomic observing in this way, also says the following: "if someone were to say: your conduct is indeed that of an honest man, but your figure shows me that you force yourself and are a rogue at heart; truly, to the end of the world such an address will be answered by every decent fellow with a box on the ear." — The reply is telling for this reason, that it overturns what such a science of meaning presupposes first of all, namely that the actuality of the human being is his face and so on. — The true being of the human being is rather his deed; in the deed individuality is actual, and the deed is what sublates the meant in both of its sides. First, the meant as a bodily being at rest; in action, rather, individuality presents itself as the negative essence, which is only in so far as it sublates being. Then the deed likewise sublates the inexpressibility of opinion in respect of the self-conscious individuality, which in opinion is something infinitely determinate and determinable. In the accomplished deed this bad infinity is annihilated. The deed is something simply determinate, universal, something to be grasped in a single abstraction; it is murder, theft, or a benefaction, a brave deed, and so forth, and of it there can be said what it is. The deed is this, and this being of it is not a mere sign but the matter at hand itself. It is this, and what the deed is, that the individual human being is; in the simplicity belonging to this being he is a universal essence with being for others, and he ceases to be merely something meant. He is indeed not thereby posited as spirit; but since it is a question of his being as being, and since on the one hand the doubled being, that of shape and that of deed, stands opposed to itself, and both the one and the other are supposed to be his actuality, it is rather the deed alone that is to be asserted as his genuine being, — not his figure, which was supposed to express what he means with respect to his deeds, or what one supposed he might merely be able to do. Likewise, when on the other hand his work is set over against his inner possibility, capacity, or intention, it is the work by itself that counts as his true actuality, even should he deceive himself on the point and, turned inward out of his action, take himself in this inner to be something other than he is in the deed. Individuality that entrusts itself to the objective element, in becoming a work, does indeed thereby expose itself to being altered and inverted. But it is precisely this that constitutes the character of the deed, whether it is an actual being that holds up, or whether it is only a meant work that, null within itself, passes away. Objectivity does not alter the deed itself; it only shows what the deed is, that is, whether it is at all, or whether it is nothing. — The dissection of this being into intentions and refinements of that sort, by which the actual human being, that is, his deed, is to be explained back into a merely meant being, just as he himself may well fabricate particular intentions about his own actuality, must be left to the idleness of opinion, which, if it wants to set its deedless wisdom to work, to deny the character of reason in the agent, and in this way to maltreat him by declaring, instead of the deed, rather the figure and the features to be his being, has to expect the above reply, which proves to it that the figure is not the in-itself but can rather be an object of handling.

If we now survey the whole compass of relations in which self-conscious individuality admits of being observed as standing toward its outer, one of them will be left over that observation has still to make its object. In psychology it is the outer actuality of things, which is to have at spirit its own self-conscious counter-image and to render spirit comprehensible. In physiognomy, by contrast, it is in its own outer, in a being which is speech — the visible invisibility of its essence — that spirit is to be cognized. There still remains the determination of the side of actuality, that individuality articulates its essence in its immediate, fixed, purely existent actuality. — This last relation is therefore distinguished from the physiognomic in that the latter is the speaking presence of the individual, which in its acting expression at the same time presents itself as reflecting into itself and as contemplating itself, an expression which is itself movement, features at rest which are themselves in essence a mediated being. In the determination still to be considered, however, the outer is at last an actuality wholly at rest, one that is no sign speaking at its own self; separated from self-conscious movement, it presents itself for itself and is as a mere thing.

What first becomes clear about how the inner is related to this outer of its own is that this seems to have to be comprehended as the relationship of causal connection, since the relation of something with being in itself to something else with being in itself, taken as a necessary relation, just is that relationship.

If spiritual individuality is to have an effect upon the body, then as cause it must itself be bodily. But the bodily in which it is present as cause is the organ, not, however, the organ of a doing directed at outer actuality, but of the self-conscious essence's doing within itself, turned outward only toward its own body; which organs these might be is not at once evident. Were one to think merely of organs in general, the organ of labor in general would lie ready to hand, and likewise the organ of the sexual drive, and so forth. Yet organs of that sort must be viewed as tools, or as parts, which spirit, being the one extreme, has as its middle over against the other extreme, an outer object. Here, however, what is understood is an organ in which the self-conscious individual, being an extreme, holds itself for itself over against its own actuality opposed to it, an organ not turned outward at the same time but reflected in its action, and one at which the side of being does not amount to a being for another. In the physiognomic relation the organ is indeed also considered as an existence that is reflected into itself and that speaks about the doing; but this being is an objective one, and physiognomic observation yields the result that self-consciousness confronts just this actuality of its own as something indifferent. This indifference vanishes once this being-reflected-into-itself is itself efficacious; through that, the existence in question acquires a necessary relation to it; but if it is to be efficacious upon existence, it must itself have a being that is nevertheless not properly objective, and it is as this organ that it is to be exhibited.

In ordinary life anger, for example, as such an inner doing, is located in the liver; Plato even grants the liver something still higher, which according to some is even the highest of all, namely prophecy, or the gift of articulating the holy and the eternal in a non-rational way. But the movement that the individual has in liver, heart, and so forth may not count as that individual's movement wholly reflected into itself; in these organs it is rather such that it has already struck inward into the body and has an animal existence turning outward against externality.

The nervous system, by contrast, is the immediate repose of the organic in its movement. The nerves themselves are, to be sure, once again the organs of a consciousness already sunk into its outward direction; but brain and spinal cord may be taken as the abiding-within-itself — the non-objective, and likewise non-outgoing — immediate presence of self-consciousness. So far as the moment of being which belongs to this organ is a being for another, an existence, it is dead being, no longer the presence of self-consciousness. This being within its own self, however, is by its concept a fluidity in which whatever circles are cast into it dissolve immediately, and in which no difference expresses itself as one that has being. Meanwhile, just as spirit itself is not something abstract and simple but rather a system of movements within which it differentiates itself into moments while staying free in this very differentiating, and just as it articulates its body at large for various functions and assigns a singular part of it to one function alone, so too the fluid being of its being-within-itself can be represented as something articulated; and it seems that it has to be so represented, because the being of spirit reflected into itself in the brain is once more only a middle between spirit's pure essence and the articulation of its body, a middle that must accordingly, taking after the nature of both and so from the side of the latter, in turn have at it the articulation that has being.

Spiritually organic being has, along with this, the necessary side of an existence that is at rest and subsisting; the former must withdraw as the extreme of being-for-itself and have the latter facing it as the other extreme, which is then the object upon which the former acts as cause. If, then, brain and spinal cord constitute that bodily being-for-itself of spirit, skull and spinal column come in as the other extreme, the one set apart, namely the fixed thing at rest. — But since it is not the back but only the head that occurs to anyone who thinks of the proper place where spirit exists, we may, in examining a knowledge such as the one before us, content ourselves with this ground — not too poor a one for such a knowledge — in order to restrict this existence to the skull. Should the back occur to someone, on the ground that knowledge and doing are at times driven partly in and partly out through it, this would still prove nothing for taking the spinal cord as belonging to the indwelling place of spirit, and its column as the counter-image existence, since it would prove too much; for one may equally recall that other outer paths of approaching the activity of spirit, so as to rouse it or hold it back, are likewise resorted to. — The spinal column, then, if one likes, falls away with justice; and the claim that the skull by itself does not indeed contain the organs of spirit is constructed quite as well as many another doctrine of natural philosophy. For this was excluded earlier from the concept of this relation, and for that reason the skull was taken as belonging to the side of existence; or, if one may not be reminded of the concept of the matter, then experience surely teaches that, whereas one sees with the eye as an organ, one does not murder, steal, or write poetry with the skull, and so on. — For this reason one should also keep clear of the word organ when it comes to that significance of the skull which has still to be discussed. For although one is accustomed to say that for rational human beings it is not the word but the matter that counts, this gives no permission to designate a matter with a word that does not belong to it, for this is at once ineptitude and deception, which merely supposes and pretends that it does not have the right word, and conceals from itself that in fact it lacks the matter, that is, the concept; if the concept were present, it would also have its right word. — For now only this much has been determined here: that the brain is the living head and the skull the caput mortuum.

In this dead being, then, the brain's spiritual movements and determinate modes would have to give themselves a presentation as outer actuality, which is nevertheless still at the individual itself. For their relationship to the skull, which, being dead, has no spirit dwelling inside it, what offers itself first is the outer, mechanical relationship fixed above, so that the organs properly so called — and they are at the brain — press it out round in one place, beat it broad or push it flat in another, or however else one may care to present this influence. Being itself a part of the organism, the skull must indeed be thought, like every bone, to have a living self-formation, so that, considered in this light, it is rather the skull that presses the brain from its side and sets the brain's outer limit; and being the harder of the two, it has the greater capacity for this. In that case, however, the same relationship would still remain in the determination of the activity of the two toward each other; for whether it is the skull that determines or the skull that is determined alters nothing in the causal connection as such, save that the skull would in that case be made into the immediate organ of self-consciousness, since the side of being-for-itself would then be found in it as cause. But since being-for-itself, as organic vitality in both, falls to each in the same manner, the causal connection between the two in fact falls away. This continued formation of both would, however, hang together inwardly and would amount to a pre-established harmony of an organic kind, one that leaves the two mutually relating sides free toward each other and leaves each its own shape, which need not correspond to the shape of the other; and still more it leaves shape and quality free toward each other, — as the grape's form and the wine's taste are free toward each other. — But since the determination of being-for-itself falls on the side of the brain, while the determination of existence falls on the side of the skull, a causal connection between them is also to be posited within the organic unity; a necessary relation of the two as outer for each other, that is, a relation itself outer, through which their shape would be determined by each other.

There is room, however, for talk back and forth in a variety of ways about the determination under which the organ belonging to self-consciousness would be the cause active upon the side that faces it; for what is under discussion is how a cause is constituted when it is regarded in respect of its indifferent existence, its shape and its magnitude, a cause whose interior and being-for-itself is precisely supposed to be such that immediate existence has no bearing on it. To begin with, the skull's organic self-formation is indifferent to mechanical action upon it, and since that formation consists in relating itself to itself, the relationship of these two relationships is precisely this indeterminateness and boundlessness itself. Suppose next that the brain did receive into itself the differences of spirit as differences that have being, and were a multiplicity of inner organs each taking up a space of its own — which contradicts nature, for nature grants the moments of the concept an existence proper to them and accordingly places the fluid simplicity of organic life purely on the one side, while placing that life's articulation and division in its differences on the other side just as much, so that, on the construal intended here, they show themselves as separate anatomical things — even so it would be left undetermined whether a moment of spirit, depending on whether it was originally the stronger or the weaker, would have to possess in the one case a more expanded and in the other a more contracted brain organ, or whether just the reverse holds. — Likewise whether its development enlarged the organ or shrank it, whether it made it clumsier and thicker, or finer. Because the constitution of the cause is left undetermined, it is equally undetermined in what way the action on the skull comes about, whether by widening, or by constricting and letting collapse. Should this action be determined, more genteelly perhaps, as a stimulating, it stays undetermined whether it happens after the manner of a cantharides plaster, swelling things up, or after that of vinegar, shrivelling them. — Plausible grounds can be adduced for every view of this kind, for the organic relation, which intervenes just as much, lets the one pass as readily as the other and is indifferent to all this understanding.

Observing consciousness, however, has no interest in wanting to pin down this relation. For what occupies the one side is at all events not the brain as an animal part, but the brain qua being of self-conscious individuality. — Individuality, as a standing character and as conscious activity in motion, is for itself and within itself; confronting this being-for-itself and being-within-itself stands its actuality, its existence for another; and it is being-for-itself and being-within-itself that constitutes the essence, the subject, which possesses in the brain a being subsumed under it, one that acquires its worth solely from the significance dwelling within. The other side of self-conscious individuality, however, the side of its existence, is being in the character of something self-subsistent, of a subject, or of a thing, namely a bone; the human being's actuality and existence is his skull-bone. — Such is the relationship, and such the understanding of it, which the two sides of this relation possess in the consciousness that observes them.

What now concerns this consciousness is the more determinate relation between these sides; broadly speaking, the skull-bone does signify the immediate actuality of spirit. But spirit, being many-sided, endows its existence with a correspondingly manifold significance; what has to be won is the determinateness of significance belonging to the several spots into which this existence is divided, and one must see how those spots bear in themselves the pointing toward it.

The bone of the skull is neither an organ of activity nor a movement that speaks; nothing is stolen or murdered and so forth with the skull-bone, nor does it so much as twist its expression at such deeds so as to become a speaking gesture. — Nor does this existent carry the value of a sign. A facial expression and a gesture, a tone, and likewise a column, or a stake driven into the ground on a desert island, announce themselves at once as intending something other than what they immediately and merely are. They give themselves out straightaway as signs, since they bear on themselves a determinateness which points to something else by virtue of not belonging to them as their own. Faced with a skull one may, like Hamlet before Yorick's, let all manner of things come to mind; yet the skull-bone on its own is so indifferent and ingenuous a thing that nothing else is immediately to be seen in it or meant by it than just the bone itself; it may recall the brain and the brain's determinateness, and skulls of a different formation, but it recalls no conscious movement, since it possesses neither facial expression nor gesture, nor anything stamped upon it that would give notice of having come from a conscious deed; for it is that actuality which was to exhibit, on individuality, an other side of such a kind as to be no longer a being that reflects itself into itself, but purely immediate being.

Since, moreover, the bone does not itself feel, a more determinate significance for it might still seem obtainable in roughly this way: that determinate sensations in the neighborhood would make recognizable what is meant by it; and given that some conscious mode of spirit locates its feeling at a determinate spot of the skull, that place might, through its shape, hint at the mode and at what is particular to it. For instance, just as many people complain of a painful tension felt somewhere in the head when they think strenuously, or indeed merely when they think at all, so too stealing, murdering, writing poetry, and so on could each be attended by a sensation of its own, one that would additionally have to occupy its own particular spot. That spot of the brain, being in this way more agitated and more active, would probably also develop the adjacent spot of the bone more strongly; or that spot of bone, out of sympathy or consensus, would for its part not be sluggish either, but would enlarge or diminish itself, or form itself in whatever manner. — What renders this hypothesis improbable, however, is that feeling in general is an indeterminate affair, and that the head, being the center, would have as its feeling the universal fellow-feeling with all suffering, so that the thief's, murderer's, or poet's head-tickling or head-pain would have others mixed in with it, and these could be told apart from one another, and from those that may be called merely bodily, as little as the disease admits of being determined out of the symptom of a headache, supposing we restrict the symptom's significance to the bodily alone.

In fact, no matter which side one considers the matter from, every necessary reciprocal relation drops away, along with any indication of one that would speak for itself. Should the relation be supposed to hold all the same, what remains, and remains as a necessity, is a conceptless, free, pre-established harmony between the corresponding determination on either side; for the one side is to be spiritless actuality, a mere thing. — Thus on the one side there stand a host of skull-spots at rest, on the other a host of spirit-properties whose multiplicity and determination will hang on whatever state psychology happens to be in. The more paltry the representation of spirit, the more this side of the business is made easy; for the properties grow fewer, and at the same time more segregated, harder and bonier, and by that very token more like determinations of bone and more readily compared with them. Still, though the paltriness of the representation of spirit makes much of it easier, a very great host always remains on either side; and what remains for observation is the utter contingency of their relation. Were each of the children of Israel to pick out for himself, from the sand by the sea to which they are said to correspond, the grain whose sign he is, the indifference and arbitrariness that gave each his own would be quite as strong as the indifference and arbitrariness that assigns skull-sites and bone-shapes to each soul-faculty, to each passion, and, what would have to be brought in here no less, to those shadings of character which a more refined psychology and acquaintance with human beings likes to talk about. — The murderer's skull has this — not organ, and not sign either, but this bump; yet this murderer has a whole crowd of other properties besides, as well as other bumps, and along with the bumps hollows too; one has one's pick among bumps and hollows. And conversely his murderous bent may be referred to any bump or hollow you please, and these in turn to any property you please; for the murderer is not just this abstract murderer, any more than he has but one protuberance and one hollow. The observations that are set up about this must therefore come out exactly as well as the shopkeeper's and the housewife's rain at the annual fair and on washday. Shopkeeper and housewife might just as well have observed that it always rains whenever this particular neighbor goes by, or whenever roast pork is served. Just as the rain is indifferent to those circumstances, so, for observation, is this determinateness of spirit indifferent to this determinate being of the skull. For among the two objects that this observing has, the one is a dry being-for-itself, a bony property of spirit, while the other is a dry being-in-itself; a thing as bony as either of them is completely indifferent to everything else; it is all one to the high bump whether a murderer happens to be its neighbor, and all one to the murderer whether flatness is close by him.

To be sure, the possibility that a bump at some spot or other is bound up with some property, passion, and so forth remains left over, insuperably. One can represent the murderer to oneself as bearing a high bump right here at this spot on the skull, the thief as bearing one over there. On this side skull-science admits of great further extension; for to begin with it seems to restrict itself merely to the joining of a bump to a property within the same individual, so that both belong to this one individual. But even natural skull-science — for such a thing must exist just as surely as a natural physiognomy does — passes beyond this limit; it does not merely judge that a cunning man carries a fist-thick bump behind his ears, it also forms the representation that the bumps on the forehead belong not to the unfaithful wife herself but to the other marital individual. — In the same way one can equally well represent to oneself the man who lodges under one roof with the murderer, or his neighbor as well, and further afield his fellow townsmen and so on, as carrying high bumps at some spot or other of the skull, quite as well as the flying cow that was first fondled by the crab that rode the donkey and then, and so on. — But take the possibility in the sense not of what can be represented but of inner possibility, of the concept, and the object turns out to be an actuality that is, and is meant to be, a pure thing devoid of any such significance, one that can therefore carry such significance only in representation.

Yet suppose the observer, heedless of how indifferent the two sides are, does set about determining relations, kept in good heart partly by the general ground of reason that the outer is the expression of the inner, partly leaning on an analogy drawn from animal skulls — animals whose character may indeed be simpler than that of human beings, though for that very reason it grows correspondingly harder to say what character they have, since it cannot be easy for just anybody's representation to project itself properly into the nature of an animal — then, in vouching for the laws he claims to have discovered, the observer finds an excellent aid in a distinction that must necessarily occur to us here too. — The being of spirit at least cannot be taken as anything simply immovable and unshiftable. The human being is free; it is conceded that original being consists only in predispositions, over which he has much power, or which require favorable circumstances in order to be developed, that is, an original being of spirit is just as much to be pronounced a being that does not exist as being. So if observations were to contradict whatever anyone takes it into his head to vouch for as a law, — were the weather fine at the annual fair or on washday, shopkeeper and housewife could say that properly it ought to be raining, and that the predisposition to rain is present all the same; and skull-observing says the like, — that this individual properly ought to be as the skull declares it to be by the law, and does have an original predisposition which, however, was never developed; the quality is not there, yet it ought to be there. — Law and ought rest on the observing of rain that actually falls and of a disposition that is actual given this determinateness of the skull; but where the actuality is missing, empty possibility passes for just as much. — This possibility, that is, the non-actuality of the law as set up, and with it the observations that run counter to it, are bound to enter in precisely because an individual's freedom, together with the circumstances that develop him, stands indifferent toward being altogether, indifferent toward it as original and inner no less than as outer and bony, and because the individual can also be something other than what it inwardly and originally is, and other still than what a bone is.

We thus obtain the possibility that this bump or hollow of the skull designates both something actual and also merely a predisposition, indeterminately so, toward something or other, hence that it designates something non-actual; we see a bad excuse fare as it always fares, namely that it stands available for use against the very thing it is supposed to help out. We see the act of meaning brought by the nature of the matter to the point of itself saying, and saying thoughtlessly, the opposite of what it holds fast to — of saying that something or other is indicated by this bone, but equally well is not.

What hovers before opinion itself in this evasion is the true thought that wipes opinion out, the thought that being as such is in no way the truth of spirit. The predisposition already counts as an original being having no part in spirit's activity, and the bone is, on its side, a being of just that kind. What has being apart from spiritual activity is for consciousness a thing, and so far from being consciousness's essence that it is rather the reverse of it, consciousness being actual to itself only through the negation and obliteration of such being. — Seen from this side, passing a bone off for the actual existence of consciousness has to be counted a total repudiation of reason; and passed off for it the bone is, once it is regarded as spirit's outer, since the outer is precisely actuality in the mode of being. It is no use to say that from this outer one only draws an inference to the inner, which is something else, and that the outer, far from being the inner itself, is merely the inner's expression. For within the relationship of the two to each other, what falls to the side of the inner is precisely the determination of what thinks itself and is thought, while to the side of the outer falls the determination of actuality in the mode of being. — So when someone is told: you (your inner) are this, because your bone is constituted thus, that means nothing other than: I take a bone to be your actuality. The riposte to such a judgment by a box on the ear, mentioned in connection with physiognomy, in the first place dislodges the soft parts from their appearance and their situation, and shows no more than that these are no genuine in-itself, not the actuality of spirit; — here the riposte would properly have to go the length of smashing the skull of anyone who judges so, in order to demonstrate, quite as palpably as his wisdom deserves, that for a human being a bone amounts to no in-itself whatever, still less to his true actuality. —

Such a science of the skull will be thrown out unexamined by the crude instinct of self-conscious reason — thrown out along with that other, observing instinct of the same reason, which, having ripened into an inkling of cognition, has laid hold of cognition in the spiritless manner of supposing the outer to be an expression of the inner. But the worse a thought is, the less it sometimes stands out just where its badness lies, and the harder it is to lay that badness out. For a thought is called worse in proportion as the abstraction that counts for it as the essence is purer and emptier. But the opposition that matters here has as its members individuality conscious of its own self, together with the abstraction of an externality grown wholly into a thing, — spirit's inner being, that is, apprehended as fixed, spiritless being and set over against a being of exactly the same sort. — With this, however, observing reason does seem in fact to have reached its apex, from which it must abandon itself and turn head over heels; for only what is wholly bad carries in itself the immediate necessity of inverting itself. — It is as with the Jewish people, of whom one may say that its standing immediately before the gateway of salvation is precisely why it is, and has been, the most reprobate of peoples; the self-essentiality that it was to be in and for itself it is not for itself, but relocates beyond itself; through this externalization it makes a higher existence possible for itself, supposing it could take its object back into itself once more, than would have been open to it had it stayed put inside the immediacy of being; for spirit's greatness grows with the greatness of the opposition out of which it comes back into itself; and this opposition it creates for itself in sublating its immediate unity and in externalizing its being-for-itself. Yet where such a consciousness fails to reflect itself, the middle in which it stands is a hapless emptiness, since what was to have filled that middle has hardened into a fixed extreme. And so observing reason's final stage is at the same time its worst, and for that very reason its reversal is necessary.

For if we survey the series of relationships considered up to now, the series that makes up what observation has for content and object, it emerges that already in observation's first mode, in the observing of the relationships of inorganic nature, sensuous being vanishes from view; the moments of that relationship come forward as pure abstractions, as simple concepts that were to have been tied fast to the existence of things, an existence which is nevertheless lost, so that the moment proves to be pure movement and something universal. This process, free and complete within itself, keeps the significance of something objective, yet it now steps forward as a One; within the process of what is inorganic, the One is the inner that does not exist; but existing as One, the process is the organic. — Confronting the universal, the One stands there as being-for-itself or negative essence, withdraws from the universal and stays free on its own account, so that the concept, realized solely in the element of absolute singularization, fails to find in organic existence its genuine expression, namely that of being there as universal, and stays instead an outer or, what comes to the same, an inner of organic nature. — Only in itself is the organic process free; for its own self it is not; in purpose the being-for-itself of its freedom sets in, and exists as another essence, as a wisdom conscious of its own self and lying outside that process. Observing reason accordingly turns to that wisdom, to spirit, to the concept that exists as universality, or the purpose that exists as purpose, and from this point on its own essence is what stands before it as object.

It turns first to spirit's purity; but since it is an apprehending of its object, which moves in its differences, as something that has being, what it arrives at are laws of thinking, relations of what endures to what endures; and since the content of these laws consists of nothing but moments, the laws run off into self-consciousness's One. — Taken in the same way as something that has being, this new object is the singular, contingent self-consciousness; observing thus keeps within the compass of spirit as merely meant, and of the contingent relationship between actuality that is conscious and actuality that is not. Only in its own self is spirit the necessity of that relation; observation accordingly closes in on spirit bodily, setting its willing and acting actuality alongside the actuality in which it is reflected into itself and contemplative, an actuality which is itself objective. This outer, though it is a language of the individual which the individual possesses on its own self, is at the same time, being a sign, indifferent toward the content it was to designate, just as whatever sets up the sign for itself is indifferent toward the sign.

Away from this shifting language, then, observation retreats at last to fixed being, and declares, in keeping with its concept, that externality is spirit's outer and immediate actuality neither as organ nor as language and sign, but as a dead thing. The very earliest observation of inorganic nature sublated the demand that the concept be present as a thing; this last mode restores that demand, and does so by making spirit's own actuality into a thing, or, put the other way round, by conferring on dead being the significance of spirit. — With this, what our concept of observation was has come to be pronounced by observation itself: that reason's certainty is in search of its own self as objective actuality. — Admittedly one does not thereby mean that spirit, in being represented by a skull, is being pronounced a thing; no materialism, as people call it, is supposed to lie in this thought, spirit being rather something else again than these bones; yet to say of spirit that it is comes to nothing else than calling it a thing. So when being as such, or thinghood, gets predicated of spirit, the truthful expression of that is that spirit is something of the sort that a bone is. Hence it has to count as a matter of the highest importance that we have hit upon the true expression for what is said of spirit when it is said, quite baldly, that it is. When elsewhere it is said of spirit, it is, has a being, is a thing, a singular actuality, then what is thereby meant is not something one could see, or take into one's hand, or bump against, and so on; yet something of just that kind is what is said, and what in truth is said accordingly expresses itself thus: that spirit's being is a bone.

This result now carries a twofold significance, first the true one, insofar as it completes the result of the movement that self-consciousness went through before. Self-consciousness in its unhappiness externalized its self-subsistence and wrung its being-for-itself out into a thing. By that it went back out of self-consciousness into consciousness, that is, into the consciousness whose object is a being, a thing; — but this, which is a thing, is self-consciousness itself; so it is the unity of the I with being, the category. Since the object is for consciousness determined in this way, it has reason. Consciousness, like self-consciousness, is in itself reason properly speaking; but only that consciousness for which the object has determined itself as the category can be said to have reason; — and distinct from this again is knowing what reason is. — The category is the immediate unity of being with what is its own, so it must run through both forms, and observing consciousness is precisely the consciousness before which the category sets itself out in the form of being. Consciousness, in its result, utters as a proposition what it is unconsciously certain of — the proposition lying in reason's concept. It is the infinite judgment to the effect that the self is a thing — and it is a judgment that sublates its own self. — What this result has thus added to the category, in a determinate way, is that the category is this self-sublating opposition. In the form of being or of immediacy the pure category is there for consciousness as an object still unmediated, merely present at hand, and consciousness is a relating just as unmediated. That infinite judgment has for its moment immediacy's transition into mediation, or negativity. Accordingly the object present at hand is determined as a negative one, while consciousness over against it is determined as self-consciousness; or the category, which in observing ran through the form of being, is posited now under the form of being-for-itself; no longer will consciousness find itself immediately, but it will bring itself forth through its own activity. It itself is for itself the purpose of its doing, whereas in observing it had to do only with things.

The result's other significance is that of conceptless observing, which we have already looked at. This observing knows no other way to grasp and pronounce itself than by ingenuously declaring the bone, as it is found to be a sensuous thing that does not at the same time lose its objectivity for consciousness, to be the actuality of self-consciousness. Yet it has no clear consciousness that it is saying this, and it does not grasp its proposition in the determinateness of subject and predicate and of their relation, much less in the sense of the concept and of that judgment which is infinite and dissolves its own self. — Rather, out of a deeper-lying self-consciousness belonging to spirit, which shows up here as a natural decency, it conceals from itself how disgraceful the conceptless, naked thought is of taking a bone for the actuality of self-consciousness, and it whitewashes that thought by means of thoughtlessness itself, mixing in a variety of relationships that have no sense here, those of cause and effect, of sign, of organ, and so on, and hiding the glaring character of the proposition behind distinctions borrowed from them.

Brain fever and the like, regarded as spirit's being, already amount to an actuality merely thought and merely hypothetical, — not one that exists, not felt, not seen, not the true actuality; once they are there, once they come into view, they are dead objects, and at that point they no longer pass for spirit's being. Genuine objectivity, however, has to be an immediate, sensuous one, so that spirit, in this objectivity taken as dead — for the bone is the dead element insofar as it occurs on the living being itself — gets posited as actual. — The concept of this representation is that reason is to itself all thinghood, including thinghood that is purely objective; but reason is so in the concept, or rather the concept alone is its truth, and the purer that concept, the more foolish is the representation into which it sinks when its content is present not as concept but as representation, — when the self-sublating judgment is taken without any consciousness of this its infinity, and taken instead as an abiding proposition whose subject and predicate each hold good on their own, the self fixed as self and the thing as thing, and yet the one is supposed to be the other. — Reason, being essentially the concept, is immediately split into its own self and its opposite, an opposition which for that very reason is just as immediately sublated. But when reason, thus presenting itself as its own self and as its opposite, is held fast in the wholly singular moment of this stepping apart, it has been apprehended unreasonably; and the purer the moments of that stepping apart are, the more garish is the appearance of this content, which alone either is there for consciousness or is alone pronounced by it ingenuously. — The depth which spirit drives out from inside, yet only so far as its representing consciousness, leaving it to stand there — and the ignorance of this consciousness as to what it is that it says, is the very same linking of high and low that nature naively expresses in the living creature when it links the organ of its highest completion, the organ of procreation, — with the organ of pissing. — The infinite judgment, taken as infinite, would be the completion of life that grasps its own self, whereas the consciousness of that life which remains within representation relates itself as pissing.

B. The Actualization of Rational Self-Consciousness through Itself

Self-consciousness came upon the thing as being itself, and upon its own self as being a thing; that is, it is for it that in itself it is objective actuality. It has ceased to be that immediate certainty which consists in being all reality; it is instead a certainty for which everything immediate has taken on the form of the sublated, so that its objectivity now ranks only as a surface, the inner core and essence of which is itself. — The object to which it relates itself positively is therefore a self-consciousness; that object stands in the form of thinghood, that is, it is self-subsistent; yet self-consciousness carries the certainty that this self-subsistent object is nothing alien to it; it thereby knows that in itself it is recognized by that object; it is spirit, which has the certainty of possessing its unity with itself within the doubling of its self-consciousness and within the self-subsistence of the two. This certainty must now raise itself for spirit to the level of truth; what has validity for it, namely what it is in itself and in the inner certainty it holds, is to step into its consciousness and become for it.

Which general stations this actualization will pass through is already indicated in a broad way by comparison with the path traveled so far. For just as observing reason, taking the category as its element, went back over the movement made by consciousness, namely sense-certainty, perceiving, and the understanding, so too will this reason travel a second time through the doubled movement of self-consciousness, passing over out of self-subsistence into its freedom. At the outset this active reason is aware of itself as nothing more than an individual, and as such it must demand its actuality in the other and bring it forth there — but then, as its consciousness raises itself to universality, it turns into universal reason and knows itself as reason, as that which in and for itself has already been recognized and which gathers all self-consciousness into its pure consciousness; it is the spiritual essence in its simplicity, which, in that it likewise arrives at consciousness, is the real substance, the ground into which the earlier forms go back, so that measured against this ground they are only single moments of its becoming, moments that do indeed break loose and show themselves as shapes in their own right, though in fact they are borne by it alone and have existence and actuality, while they have their truth only to the extent that they are and remain within it.

Suppose we take up in its reality this goal, the concept that has arisen for us already, namely the self-consciousness that is recognized, which in the other free self-consciousness has the certainty of its own self and precisely therein has its truth — or suppose we lift out this still inward spirit as the substance that has by now matured into its existence: then what unfolds within this concept is the realm of ethical life. For ethical life is nothing other than the absolute spiritual unity that the essence of individuals has within their self-subsistent actuality; it is a self-consciousness universal in itself, one that is actual to itself within a second consciousness in such fashion that this second consciousness possesses complete self-subsistence, or is a thing for it, and that just therein it knows its unity with that other, and only in this unity with the objective essence is it self-consciousness at all. This ethical substance, when it is held in the abstraction of universality, amounts to no more than the law as thought; but it is quite as much self-consciousness actual in an immediate way, or it is custom. Conversely, the singular consciousness is this existent One only insofar as it is conscious, in its singularity, of the universal consciousness as its own being, and insofar as its doing and its existence are the universal custom.

Within a people's life the concept of self-conscious reason's actualization, the concept of intuiting one's complete unity with the other in the very self-subsistence of that other, or of having as one's object this free thinghood of another, which I find before me and which is the negative of my own self, as being mine for me — that concept has in fact its consummated reality. Reason is on hand as the universal substance in its fluidity, as the simple unalterable thinghood, which shatters into many wholly self-subsistent beings much as light shatters into the stars, into countless points shining for themselves, beings that in their absolute being-for-itself are dissolved in the simple self-subsistent substance not merely in themselves but for their own selves; they know themselves to be these singular self-subsistent beings by the very fact that they sacrifice their singularity and that this universal substance is their soul and their essence; and this universal is conversely the doing of them as singular beings, or the work that they have brought forth.

The purely singular doings and dealings of the individual bear upon the needs it has as a natural being, that is, as existent singularity. The fact that even these, its most ordinary functions, are not brought to nothing but instead possess actuality, is due to the universal medium that preserves them, to the power of the people taken as a whole. — Yet it is not only this form of the subsistence of its doing in general that the individual has in the universal substance, but just as much its content; what it does is the universal skill and custom of all. This content, insofar as it individuates itself completely, is in its actuality interlaced with the doing of everyone. The individual's labor for its own needs satisfies the needs of others no less than its own, and it attains satisfaction of its own only by way of the labor of others. — Just as the single individual, in its singular labor, already carries out a universal labor unconsciously, so it carries out the universal labor once more as an object of which it is conscious; the whole, precisely as a whole, turns into its work, and for that work it sacrifices itself, receiving itself back from it by that very act. — Nothing is present here that would not be mutual, nothing in which the self-subsistence of the individual would fail to confer on itself its positive significance of being for itself, and to confer it precisely where its being-for-itself dissolves, in the negation of that self-subsistence. It is within the customs and the laws of its people that this universal substance, this unity of being-for-another, or of making oneself into a thing, with being-for-itself, utters its universal language; but this existent unalterable essence is nothing other than the expression of the very singular individuality that appears to stand opposed to it; the laws declare what each single individual is and does; the individual cognizes them not only as its universal objective thinghood but equally cognizes itself within them, or cognizes them as individuated in its own individuality and in every one of its fellow citizens. Each one, then, possesses within the universal spirit nothing but the certainty of his own self, the certainty of finding in existent actuality nothing other than himself; of the others he is as certain as he is of himself. — In all of them I intuit that for their own selves they are just these self-subsistent beings, as I too am; and the free unity with the others I intuit in them in such a way that it exists through the Others themselves just as it exists through Me. They as Me, Me as Them.

In a free people, therefore, reason is actualized in truth; it is living spirit at hand in the present, and within it the individual does not merely find its determination, that is, its universal and singular essence, pronounced and available as thinghood, but is itself this essence and has attained its determination as well. This is why the wisest men of antiquity issued the dictum that wisdom and virtue lie in living in keeping with the customs of one's people.

But self-consciousness, which to begin with is spirit only in an immediate way and according to the concept, has stepped out of this happiness of having attained its determination and of living within it, or else, — it has not yet reached that happiness; for either statement holds equally well.

Reason must step out of this happiness; for a free people's life is real ethical life only in itself or immediately, or rather it is an ethical life that merely is, and with that this universal spirit is itself a singular one as well, the totality of customs and laws, a determinate ethical substance which strips off its restriction only at the higher moment, namely in the consciousness about its own essence, and whose absolute truth lies in that cognition alone and not immediately in its being; within that being it is in part something restricted, and in part the absolute restriction consists in just this, that spirit stands in the form of being.

Further, then, the singular consciousness, taken as it exists immediately within real ethical life, that is, within the people, is a solid trust, one for which spirit has not resolved itself into its abstract moments, and which therefore does not know itself as pure singularity that is for itself. But once it has come to this thought, as come it must, what is lost is its trust, that is, its immediate unity with spirit and its being therein; isolated for itself, it is now the essence to itself, and the universal spirit is that essence no longer. This moment of singularity belonging to self-consciousness does indeed lie within the universal spirit itself, yet only as a vanishing quantity which, in stepping forth for itself, dissolves within that spirit just as immediately and reaches consciousness only in the form of trust. In fixing itself in this manner — and each moment, since it is a moment of the essence, must itself come to exhibit itself as essence — the individual has taken up a position over against the laws and customs; these count for no more than a thought lacking absolute essentiality, an abstract theory lacking actuality, while the individual, as this I, is the living truth to itself.

Or else self-consciousness has not yet attained this happiness, namely that of being the spirit of a people, of being ethical substance. For spirit, on its return from observation, is at the start not yet actualized as such by its own doing; it is posited only as inner essence, or as the abstraction. — Or spirit as yet only is, and immediately so; but existing immediately, it is singular; it is that practical consciousness which steps into the world it finds before it with the purpose of doubling itself in this determinateness of a single individual, of producing itself as This One, its own existent counterpart, and of arriving at consciousness of the unity between its actuality and the objective essence. This unity it possesses as a certainty; what counts for it is that the unity holds in itself, that this agreement between itself and thinghood is already on hand and has merely still to come about for it through its own doing, or that its making is equally the finding of that agreement. Since this unity goes by the name of happiness, the individual is hereby sent out by its spirit into the world to seek its happiness.

Since for us, then, the ethical substance is what this rational self-consciousness truly is, what begins here for self-consciousness itself is its ethical experience of the world. Insofar as it has not yet become that substance, this movement presses toward it, and what gets sublated in the movement are the singular moments that hold for self-consciousness in isolation. These moments take the shape of an immediate willing, or of a natural drive, which reaches its satisfaction, and that satisfaction is in turn the content of a further drive. — But insofar as self-consciousness has forfeited the happiness of being within the substance, these natural drives are joined with a consciousness of their purpose as the true determination and essentiality; the ethical substance has sunk into a selfless predicate whose living subjects are the individuals, who must fill out their universality by their own means and must see to their determination out of themselves. — Taken in that first significance, then, those shapes constitute the becoming of the ethical substance and run ahead of it; taken in the second, they come after it and unravel for self-consciousness what its determination is; on the first side, within the movement in which their truth is experienced, the immediacy or rawness of the drives is what falls away, and the content of the drives crosses over into a higher content; on the second side, what falls away is the false representation of a consciousness that places its determination in those drives. On the first side the goal they reach is the immediate ethical substance; on the second, however, it is the consciousness of that substance, a consciousness that knows the substance as the essence belonging to itself; and to this extent the movement would be the becoming of morality, a shape standing higher than the first. These shapes, however, make up at the same time only One side of that becoming, namely the side falling within being-for-itself, the side in which consciousness sublates the purposes that are its own; not the side along which morality proceeds out of the substance itself. These moments are not yet able to carry the significance of being turned into purposes in opposition to an ethical life now lost, and so they do indeed hold good here according to their unprejudiced content, and the goal toward which they press is the ethical substance. But since the form these moments take once consciousness has forfeited its ethical life and, in searching for it, repeats those very forms, lies nearer to our own age, they may better be presented in the idiom of this latter manner.

Self-consciousness, which as yet is only the concept of spirit, sets out upon this path with the determinateness of being the essence to itself as a singular spirit, and its purpose is accordingly to give itself actualization as something singular and, as this singular, to enjoy itself within that actualization.

In the determination of being the essence to itself as something being for itself, it is the negativity of the other; within its consciousness it therefore steps forth as the positive over against something that indeed is, but that for it has the significance of not being in itself; consciousness appears split in two, into this actuality it finds before it and into the purpose that it carries out by sublating that actuality and that it makes actual in place of it. Its first purpose, however, is the abstract being-for-itself that belongs to it immediately, that is, to intuit itself as this singular individual within another, or to intuit another self-consciousness as being itself. What it experiences as the truth of this purpose sets self-consciousness higher, and it is now a purpose to itself insofar as it is universal as well and carries the law immediately upon it. It learns, however, in fulfilling this law of its heart, that the singular essence cannot maintain itself in the process, and that the good can be carried out only by sacrificing that essence, and so it becomes virtue. The experience that virtue undergoes can be none other than this: that its purpose is in itself already executed, that happiness is found immediately within the doing itself, and that the doing itself is the good. Within the movement of this whole sphere its concept, namely that thinghood is spirit's own being-for-itself, comes to be for self-consciousness. Having found this concept, self-consciousness is thus reality to itself as an individuality that expresses itself immediately, one that no longer meets any resistance in an opposed actuality, and for which this expressing alone is object and purpose.

a. Pleasure and Necessity

Self-consciousness, which quite generally is reality to itself, has its object in itself, yet has it as an object that so far it holds only for itself and that is not yet in being; over against it stands being as an actuality different from the one it is itself; and it now aims, by carrying out its being-for-itself, to intuit itself as another self-subsistent essence. Its first purpose is this: that it should become conscious, within the other self-consciousness, of itself as a singular essence, or, to put it otherwise, that it should turn this other into itself; and it proceeds with the certainty that in itself the other is already it itself. — To the extent that it has lifted itself out of the ethical substance and out of the settled being of thought and up into its being-for-itself, the law of custom and of existence, the acquaintances gathered by observation, and theory all lie behind it like a gray shade just now fading away, since what these amount to is instead a knowledge whose object has a being-for-itself and an actuality different from those belonging to self-consciousness. The earth-spirit has entered into it, displacing the seemingly heavenly spirit that belonged to universality in knowledge and in doing, a universality in which the sensation and the enjoyment of singularity fall mute; and to the earth-spirit only the being that constitutes the actuality of the singular consciousness counts as the true actuality.

| It scorns understanding and science, | the human being's very highest gifts — | it has surrendered itself to the devil | and must go to ruin.

It therefore hurls itself into life and carries out the pure individuality in which it makes its appearance. It is less a matter of its making its happiness than of its taking that happiness immediately and enjoying it. The shades of science, of laws and of principles, which are all that intervenes between it and an actuality of its own, vanish like a lifeless fog that cannot contend with the certainty of its reality; it takes life for itself as a ripe fruit is plucked, a fruit that comes toward the hand quite as much as it is taken.

Only according to one moment is its doing a doing of desire; it is directed not at the extermination of the whole objective essence, but solely at the form of that essence's otherness, or of its self-subsistence, which is an essenceless shine; for in itself this essence counts for it as the same essence, or as the selfhood belonging to it. Living existence is the element within which desire and desire's object have their subsistence, self-subsistent and indifferent toward each other; and the enjoyment of desire sublates that element in so far as it accrues to desire's object. Here, however, this element, which gives each of the two its separated actuality, is rather the category, a being that is essentially a represented one; it is therefore the consciousness of self-subsistence; — whether it be the natural consciousness, or the consciousness elaborated into a system of laws, which maintains the individuals each for itself. For a self-consciousness that knows the other to be its own selfhood, this separation has no being in itself. And so it attains the enjoyment of pleasure: consciousness of its own actualization within a consciousness that has the appearance of self-subsistence, or intuition of the unity of the two self-subsistent self-consciousnesses. It does reach its purpose, but in doing so it undergoes the experience of what the purpose truly is. What it comprehends itself to be is this singular, for-itself-existing essence, yet actualizing that purpose amounts to sublating it, since it becomes an object to itself not as this singular but instead as the unity that it forms together with the other self-consciousness, and hence as a sublated singular or as a universal.

Pleasure once enjoyed does bear the positive significance of having become itself in the form of objective self-consciousness, but it bears no less the negative significance of having sublated itself; and because it grasped its actualization under the former significance alone, what it has undergone makes its way into its consciousness as a contradiction, one in which the actuality that its singularity had reached sees itself annihilated by the negative essence, which, itself void of actuality, confronts that actuality as an emptiness and is nevertheless the power that devours it. This essence amounts to nothing other than the concept of what, in itself, this individuality is. Yet among the shapes of the spirit that actualizes itself, this individuality still remains the poorest; for as yet it is to itself no more than the abstraction of reason, or the immediacy belonging to the unity of the for-itself and of being-in-itself; hence its essence is merely the abstract category. The form of immediate, simple being, however, is no longer what it has, as it did for observing spirit, where it is abstract being, or, when posited as something alien, thinghood as such. What has now entered into this thinghood is being-for-itself along with mediation. Accordingly it steps forward as a circle, and its content is the pure relation of the simple essentialities in developed form. Hence the actualization this individuality has achieved consists in nothing beyond this: that it has flung the circle of abstractions out of the closed confines of simple self-consciousness and into the element of being-for-it, the element of objective spreading-out. So what becomes the object for self-consciousness, as its essence, in the pleasure it enjoys, is the spreading-out of those empty essentialities: pure unity, pure difference, and the relation between them; apart from that, the object that individuality undergoes as its essence possesses no content at all. This object is what one calls necessity; for necessity, along with fate and similar names, is just that of which one cannot say what it does, what determinate laws and positive content belong to it, because it is itself the absolute pure concept intuited as being, the relation that is simple and empty yet unstoppable and undisturbable, whose work is merely the nothingness of singularity. Necessity is this firm interconnection because what hangs together in it are the pure essentialities, the empty abstractions; unity, difference and their relation are categories of which each, in and for itself, is nothing and has being only in relation to its opposite, so that they can never fall apart from one another. What relates them to each other is their concept, since they are the pure concepts themselves; and necessity is constituted by this absolute relation, this abstract movement. The merely singular individuality, whose content so far is nothing but the pure concept of reason, has therefore not hurled itself out of dead theory and into life; what it has hurled itself into is rather the consciousness of a lifelessness that is its own, and it falls to its own lot only as the empty and alien necessity, as dead actuality.

The transition takes place out of the form of the One and over into the form of universality, out of one absolute abstraction and over into another; out of a purpose that is pure being-for-itself, one that has thrown off community with others, and over into the pure opposite, into the being-in-itself that is thereby just as abstract. Thus the matter appears as though the individual has merely gone to ruin, and as though the absolute brittleness of singularity has been pulverized against an actuality that is just as hard but continuous. — Because, as consciousness, it constitutes the unity of itself with its own opposite, this downfall is still there for it: there for it are its purpose and the actualization of that purpose, together with the contradiction between what counted for it as the essence and what in itself is the essence; — it undergoes the double sense residing in what it did, namely in having taken its own life; life is what it took, but what it thereby seized was death instead.

This transition, whereby its living being passes into lifeless necessity, therefore strikes it as an inversion for which nothing at all supplies the mediation. A mediating term would have to be something in which the two sides were one, so that consciousness could cognize each moment within the other: its purpose and its doing within fate, its fate within its purpose and its doing, and its own essence within this necessity. For this consciousness, however, that unity is precisely pleasure itself, that is, the simple, singular feeling, and when it passes from the moment constituted by this purpose of its own over to the moment of its true essence, this is for it a bare leap into the opposite; for feeling neither contains these moments nor links them together; they are contained and linked solely within the pure self, a self that is something universal, or thinking. By way of its experience, in which its truth was to have come to it, consciousness has therefore turned into a riddle for itself instead: the consequences of its deeds do not count for it as its own deeds; what happens to it is not, for it, an experiencing of what it in itself is; and the transition is not a mere change of form in one and the same content and essence, represented at one time as the content and essence of consciousness, at another as its object or as its own essence intuited. Abstract necessity therefore counts as the merely negative and uncomprehended power of universality, against which individuality is dashed to pieces.

The appearance that this shape of self-consciousness makes reaches just this far; the final moment of its existence lies in thinking its own loss within necessity, or in thinking itself to be an essence that is absolutely alien to itself. In itself, however, self-consciousness has outlived this loss, for its own essence is precisely this necessity, or pure universality. Consciousness reflected into itself in this way, knowing necessity as itself, constitutes a new shape of consciousness.

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

Necessity, as it is in truth in self-consciousness, is precisely what it is for the latter's new shape, wherein self-consciousness stands to itself as the necessary; immediately it takes itself to have the universal, or the law, within it, and this law, given the determination that it lies immediately within the being-for-itself of consciousness, goes by the name of the law of the heart. This shape is, for itself, essence as singularity, just as the previous shape was, yet it is richer by one determination, namely that this being-for-itself is valid for it as something necessary or universal.

The law, then, which is immediately self-consciousness's own, or a heart which nonetheless has a law within it, is the purpose that self-consciousness sets out to actualize. It remains to be seen whether the actualization will correspond to this concept, and whether in it self-consciousness will experience this law of its own as the essence.

This heart has an actuality standing over against it; for within the heart the law is as yet only for itself, not actualized, and therefore at the same time an other than what the concept is. By that very fact this other is determined as an actuality standing opposed to whatever is to be actualized, and so as the contradiction between the law and singu larity. So it is, for one thing, a law that weighs down upon singular individuality, an ordering of the world grounded in violence, standing in contradiction with the law of the heart itself; — and, for another, a humanity suffering beneath such an ordering, a humanity subject to an alien necessity rather than following the law of the heart. — That actuality, showing itself over against the present shape of consciousness, is plainly nothing else than the relationship already gone through, the relationship split in two between individuality and its truth, a relationship of merciless necessity under which individuality is crushed. For us the preceding movement comes to stand over against the new shape, since that shape has in itself issued from the movement, so that the moment from which it derives is necessary to it; to the shape, however, the movement appears as something already found on hand, for it possesses no consciousness of its own origin, and its essence lies rather in being for itself, that is, in being the negative over against this positive in-itself.

This individuality, then, is bent upon sublating the necessity that contradicts the law of the heart, together with the suffering that necessity brings with it. It is therefore no longer the frivolity of the earlier shape, which wanted nothing but singular pleasure; it is instead the seriousness of a lofty purpose, seeking its pleasure in the display of its own excellent essence and in producing the welfare of humanity. That which it brings into actuality is the law itself, so that its pleasure is at once the pleasure universal to all hearts. The two are for it undivided: pleasure on its part is what conforms to law, while actualizing the law of humanity at large prepares its own singular pleasure. For within this individuality itself, the necessary and individuality are immediately one and the same; the law of the heart is precisely this law. Nothing has as yet displaced individuality from its position, and the unity of the two has come about neither through any mediating movement between them nor through discipline. The actualization of the immediate, undisciplined essence passes for the display of an excellence and for the producing of the welfare of humanity.

The law which stands over against the law of the heart, by contrast, is severed from the heart and free for itself. Humanity as it belongs to that law has no life in the happy unity of law with heart; its life is one either of cruel separation and suffering, or at the very least of a privation, the privation of enjoying itself while complying with the law, and the lack of any consciousness of its own excellence while transgressing it. Since that divine and human ordering, which has power on its side, stands severed from the heart, the heart takes it for a mere semblance, one destined to lose what still attends it, namely its power and its actuality. In its content this ordering may of course chance to fall in with the law of the heart; where it does, the heart can put up with it; yet what counts as essence for the heart is not lawfulness purely as such, but rather that within the ordering it possesses consciousness of itself, that it has been satisfied there. But wherever universal necessity has a content out of accord with the heart, that necessity, in respect of its content as well, is nothing in itself and has to yield before the law of the heart.

So the individual carries out the law of its heart; that law becomes a universal ordering, and pleasure becomes an actuality lawful in and for itself. But the law, in becoming actual, has in fact escaped the individual; what it immediately becomes is nothing but the very relationship that was to have been sublated. The law of the heart ceases, precisely by being actualized, to be the law of the heart. For in the process it acquires the form of being and has become a universal power to which this particular heart is indifferent, with the result that the individual, in the very act of setting up what is its own ordering, no longer finds that ordering to be its own. By actualizing its law, therefore, it does not bring forth its law; since the actual ordering is in itself its own but for it something alien, all it brings forth is its own entanglement in that actual ordering, and indeed in an ordering that confronts it as a superior power, not merely alien but hostile. — Through its deed the individual posits itself in, or rather as, the universal element of the actuality that has being, and by its own reckoning its deed is to carry the worth of a universal ordering. But with that it has let the deed go free of itself; the deed grows on as universality for itself and purges itself of singularity; the individual, which wants to cognize universality only in the form of its immediate being-for-itself, thus does not cognize itself in this free universality, even though it belongs to that universality all the same, for the universality is its own doing. This doing therefore takes on the inverted meaning of contradicting the universal ordering, since the individual's deed is meant to be the deed of its singular heart and not a free universal actuality; and yet at the same time the individual has in fact recognized that ordering, for its doing amounts to positing its essence as free actuality, that is, to recognizing actuality as its essence.

By the concept of what it does, the individual has itself settled the closer manner in which actual universality, the universality to which it has made itself belong, turns against it. Its deed, as actuality, belongs to the universal; the content of the deed, however, is its own individuality, which wills to maintain itself as this singular individuality opposed to the universal. No determinate law is at issue whose setting up would be under discussion; what is at issue is that universality and the singular heart stand in immediate unity, a thought elevated into law and claiming to be valid, the thought that in whatever counts as law each heart must cognize itself. Yet it is this individual's heart alone that has posited its actuality in its own deed, a deed expressing for it its being-for-itself, or its pleasure. This deed is to be valid immediately as something universal; that is, in truth it is particular and wears universality only as a form, its particular content being supposed to count as such for universal. In this content, accordingly, the others find carried out not the law of their own heart but instead that of someone else, and by the very universal law which says that each is to find its heart in whatever is law, they turn against the actuality which this individual set up, exactly as it had turned against theirs. Where at first it found only the rigid law, the individual now finds the very hearts of human beings ranged against its excellent intentions, and finds them detestable.

Since this consciousness knows universality as yet only in its immediate form, and knows necessity only as a necessity of the heart, it has no acquaintance with what actualization and efficacy are by nature, namely that, as what has being, they are in their truth the universal in itself, wherein the singularity of consciousness, which entrusts itself to them so as to be as this immediate singularity, instead goes under; and so, in place of its own being, what it gains within being is estrangement from itself. What it fails to cognize itself in, however, is not dead necessity any more, but necessity enlivened by universal individuality. It had taken this divine and human ordering, which it found already in force, for a dead actuality in which those who belong to it would have no consciousness of themselves, any more than the individual has, fixing its heart as it does as this heart that has being for itself and stands opposed to the universal; what it finds instead is that the ordering is enlivened by the consciousness of all, and that it constitutes the law of all hearts. It undergoes the experience that actuality is an enlivened ordering, and it does so, indeed, by the very act of actualizing the law of its heart; for this means nothing other than that individuality makes itself into an object as something universal, an object in which, however, it does not cognize itself.

What emerges as the true for this shape of self-consciousness out of its experience contradicts what the shape is for itself. Yet what the shape is for itself has, in its own eyes, the form of absolute universality, namely the law of the heart, immediately at one with self-consciousness. The subsisting, living ordering is at the same time no less its own essence and its own work; it produces nothing else than this ordering; and it stands united with self-consciousness with equal immediacy. Self-consciousness, then, belonging in this manner to a doubled and mutually opposed essentiality, is in contradiction with its own self and shattered at its very core. The law of this heart is the sole thing in which self-consciousness cognizes itself; but through the actualizing of that law the ordering valid for all has equally become for it its very own essence and its very own actuality; what contradicts itself within its consciousness therefore confronts it in both cases under the form of essence and of an actuality belonging to it.

As it gives voice to this moment of a downfall of which it is conscious, and thereby to what its experience has resulted in, it exhibits itself as just this inward inverting of itself, as the derangement of a consciousness whose essence is immediately un-essence and whose actuality is immediately unactuality. — Derangement must not be taken to lie in this, that something essenceless gets held for essential and something unactual for actual at all, such that whatever is essential or actual for one person would fail to be so for someone else, with the consciousness of actuality and of unactuality, or of essentiality and unessentiality, drifting apart from one another. — Suppose something really does count as actual and essential for consciousness at large, yet not for me: then, together with my consciousness of its nullity, I also have, being myself consciousness at large, a consciousness of its actuality, — and when both are held fast the result is a unity, and that unity is what madness amounts to in general. In madness, though, what is deranged is merely an object for consciousness, and not consciousness itself in and for itself. In the result of the experience that has come out here, by contrast, consciousness within its law is conscious of itself as this actual consciousness; and since at the same time that very essentiality, that very actuality, is estranged from it, then, being self-consciousness, being absolute actuality, it is conscious of its own unactuality; or rather, the two sides, in their contradiction, hold immediately for it as its essence, which is therefore deranged in its inmost depths.

The heart's throbbing on behalf of the welfare of humanity therefore passes over into the rampaging of deranged self-conceit, into the fury of a consciousness bent on preserving itself against its own destruction, and doing so by hurling out of itself the invertedness which it is, and straining to view and to pronounce that invertedness as another. So what it pronounces the universal ordering to be is something devised by fanatical priests, by despots wallowing in luxury and by servants of theirs who make up for their own debasement by debasing and crushing those beneath them, and then wielded to the nameless misery of a deceived humanity: an inversion, that is, of the law of the heart together with the heart's happiness. — In this derangement of its own, consciousness pronounces individuality to be what does the deranging and the inverting, though an alien and contingent individuality. But the heart, or the immediate, wanting-to-be-universal singularity of consciousness, is itself this deranging and inverted element, and its doing merely brings it about that this contradiction becomes a contradiction for its own consciousness. For the truth, in its eyes, is the law of the heart — a thing merely meant, which, unlike the subsisting ordering, has not withstood the daylight, but rather goes to ruin the moment it shows itself to that daylight. This law of its own was supposed to have actuality; in that respect the law as actuality, as a valid ordering, is for it purpose and essence, yet just as immediately actuality, precisely the law as a valid ordering, is for it rather what is null. — In the same way its own actuality, it itself as singularity of consciousness, is essence to itself; but its purpose is to posit that actuality as having being, so that immediately it is rather its self as non-singular that is essence for it, or the purpose as law, and therein as a universality which it is to be for its own consciousness. — This concept of its own becomes its object through its doing; hence it experiences its self rather as the unactual, and unactuality as its actuality. It is therefore no contingent, alien individuality that is at work here, but precisely this heart, which on every side within itself is what is inverted and what inverts.

But since immediately universal individuality is what is inverted and what inverts, this universal ordering, itself the law of all hearts, that is, of what is inverted, is no less in itself inverted, exactly as raving derangement declared; in the first place, the ordering proves to be the law of all hearts through the resistance that one heart's law meets in the other singular individuals. When the subsisting laws are upheld against one individual's law, this is because they are no dead, empty, unconscious necessity, but rather spiritual universality and substance, a substance in which those who give it its actuality live as individuals and possess consciousness of themselves; hence, however much such people may complain of this ordering as though it ran counter to the inner law, and may set the heart's opinions against it, they cling to it in their hearts as to their own essence, and were the ordering taken from them, or were they to put themselves outside of it, all would be lost to them. Because just here lie the actuality and the power of the public ordering, this ordering appears as the self-equal essence enlivened throughout, with individuality as the form it takes. — But this ordering is just as much what is inverted.

For since this ordering is the law of all hearts, since every individual is immediately this universal, it constitutes an actuality that is nothing but the actuality of individuality that has being for itself, or of the heart. A consciousness that sets up the law of its own heart accordingly runs into resistance from the others, since it contradicts the no less singular laws belonging to their own hearts, and in resisting these others do nothing but set up their own law and press its validity. The universal that is on hand comes therefore to no more than a universal resisting and a mutual combat, everyone against everyone, in which each presses the validity of its own singularity and yet never arrives at it, since that singularity runs into the same resistance and is reciprocally dissolved by the others. So what passes for a public ordering is this universal state of feud, in which everyone snatches for himself what he can, exercises justice upon the singularity of the others and secures his own, which just as surely vanishes at the hands of others. This is the way of the world, a semblance of some abiding course, which is really only a merely meant universality, while its content is in truth the essenceless play in which singularities are fixed and dissolved again.

If we set the two sides of the universal ordering against each other, the content of this last universality turns out to be restless individuality, individuality for which opinion, or singularity, counts as law, for which the actual is unactual and the unactual actual. And yet this same individuality constitutes the ordering's side of actuality, since to it belongs the being-for-itself of individuality. — On the other side stands the universal as quiescent essence, but for just that reason only as something inner, which is not nothing at all and yet is no actuality either, and which can attain actuality itself only when the individuality that has arrogated actuality to itself is sublated. This shape of consciousness, becoming, within the law, within what is true and good in itself, not singularity but only essence, while knowing individuality as what is inverted and what inverts, and therefore obliged to sacrifice the singularity of consciousness, is virtue.

c. Virtue and the Way of the World

Within the first shape that active reason took, self-consciousness was pure individuality to itself, and standing over against it was empty universality. In the second, each of the two parts of the opposition had both moments in it, law and individuality; but the one part, the heart, constituted their immediate unity, while the other constituted their being set in opposition. In the present relationship, that of virtue to the way of the world, each of the two members is at once a unity and an opposition of these moments, or a movement of law and of individuality against one another, though one that runs oppositely. To the consciousness of virtue, law counts as what is essential and individuality as what must be sublated, and that holds within its own consciousness no less than in the way of the world. Within the former, one's own individuality has to be taken under discipline beneath the universal, beneath what is true and good in itself; yet even there a personal consciousness still remains; the only true discipline is the sacrifice of the entire personality, serving as the corroboration that consciousness has in fact not gone on clinging to singularities. In this singular sacrifice individuality is at the same time extinguished in the way of the world, since it too is a simple moment that the two have in common. — In the latter, individuality relates itself in the manner inverse to the way it is posited in the virtuous consciousness, namely by making itself into the essence and, in turn, subordinating to itself what is good and true in itself. — Moreover, what the way of the world amounts to for virtue is not merely this universal inverted by individuality; absolute order is just as much a moment the two have in common, one that is on hand within the way of the world not as an actuality that has being for consciousness, but as its inner essence. Order, therefore, is not something virtue would first have to produce in any proper sense, for producing is, as doing, the consciousness of individuality, and individuality is precisely what is to be sublated; by this sublating, though, all that happens is that space is cleared for what the way of the world is in itself, so that it may enter existence in and for itself.

What the actual way of the world holds as its universal content has already come out; examined more closely, it is once more nothing but the two movements of self-consciousness that went before. Out of them the shape of virtue has arisen; being its origin, they lie before it; what virtue is bent on, however, is sublating its origin and realizing itself, that is, becoming for itself. So the way of the world is, on the one hand, the singular individuality that goes after its pleasure and enjoyment, that admittedly meets its ruin in doing so, and that thereby gives the universal satisfaction. But this satisfaction itself, and likewise the remaining moments of this relationship, is an inverted movement and shape of the universal. Here actuality is nothing but the singularity of pleasure and of enjoyment, with the universal set over against it; a necessity that amounts to no more than the empty shape of that universal, a reaction that is merely negative and a doing void of content. — As its other moment the way of the world has individuality, which wills to be law in and for itself and which, in this delusion, disrupts the order that subsists; against such self-conceit the universal law does indeed hold itself, and it now comes forward no longer as something empty and set over against consciousness, no longer as a dead necessity, but as necessity within consciousness itself. But taken as it exists in the shape of the conscious relation of an actuality that contradicts itself absolutely, it is derangement; taken as it is in the shape of objective actuality, it is invertedness in general. So in both sides the universal does present itself as the power behind their movement, but the existence of that power is nothing but inversion become universal.

Now it is from virtue that the universal is to receive its genuine actuality, by way of the sublating of individuality, the principle of inversion; virtue's purpose is, in this way, to invert the inverted way of the world back again and to bring its true essence forth. As it stands in the way of the world, this true essence is as yet only its in-itself, not yet anything actual; virtue accordingly does no more than believe in it. What virtue sets out to do is to raise this faith into beholding, though without enjoying the fruits of its labor and its sacrifice. For insofar as virtue is individuality, it is the doing of the struggle that it takes up against the way of the world; its purpose and its true essence, however, lie in defeating what is actual in the way of the world; and so the existence of the good that this brings about is the cessation of virtue's doing, that is, of the consciousness of individuality. — In what way this struggle is actually withstood, what virtue comes to experience in it, whether the sacrifice it takes upon itself makes the way of the world succumb and virtue prevail — that has to be settled by the nature of the living weapons that the two fighters wield. For those weapons are nothing else than the fighters' own essence, which comes forth only for each of them in relation to the other. Their weapons have thereby already resulted from what is on hand in itself within this struggle.

To the virtuous consciousness the universal is what is true in faith, or in itself; it is a universality that is not yet actual but still abstract; within this consciousness itself the universal stands as purpose, within the way of the world as what is inner. It is in precisely this determination that the universal exhibits itself, in virtue, for the way of the world as well; for virtue as yet only wills to carry out the good and does not itself yet give it out as actuality. This determinateness admits of being viewed in another way too: the good, by entering the struggle against the way of the world, thereby exhibits itself as having being for another; as a something which is not in and for itself, since otherwise it would not be looking to acquire its truth only through the subjugation of its opposite. To say that it is as yet only for an other amounts to the same thing that emerged about it earlier under the opposite consideration, namely that it is as yet no more than an abstraction, one whose reality lies solely in the relationship and not in and for itself.

The good, or the universal, in the form in which it here comes on the scene, is what one calls gifts, capacities, forces. It is one way for the spiritual to be, a way in which the spiritual is represented as a universal requiring the principle of individuality for its animation and its movement, and having its actuality in that principle. Where that principle lies in the consciousness of virtue, this universal is put to good use by it; where the principle lies in the way of the world, the same universal is misused; — a passive tool which, ruled by the hand of free individuality and indifferent toward whatever use that individuality makes of it, can also be misused to bring forth an actuality that spells its destruction; a lifeless matter, devoid of any self-subsistence of its own, which can be shaped one way or another, and even shaped to its own ruin.

Since this universal is equally at the command of the consciousness of virtue and of the way of the world, one cannot foresee whether virtue, thus equipped, will get the better of vice. The weapons on either side are identical; they are these capacities and forces. Virtue, to be sure, has placed in ambush its faith that its own purpose and the essence belonging to the way of the world were originally one, a faith that is to strike the enemy from behind during the struggle and to accomplish that purpose in itself; so that in truth the knight of virtue finds his own doing and fighting to be nothing but shadow-boxing, which he cannot take seriously, since he stakes his genuine strength on the good's being in and for itself, that is, on its accomplishing itself — shadow-boxing which he moreover may not let become serious. For whatever he directs at the enemy, and finds directed back at himself, and whatever wearing-down and damage he risks in himself no less than in his enemy, is not meant to be the good as such; for it is for the good's preservation and execution that he fights; rather, what gets risked in this are merely the indifferent gifts and capacities. These, however, are in fact nothing but that same universal without individuality which the struggle is supposed to preserve and actualize. — Yet through the concept of the struggle itself it is at the same time immediately already actualized; it is the in-itself, that is, the universal; and its actualization signifies nothing more than that it should be at the same time for an other. The two sides specified above, on each of which it became an abstraction, are no longer separated; rather, by means of the struggle and within it the good is posited in both manners at once. — The virtuous consciousness, though, enters the struggle against the way of the world as against something set over against the good; and what the way of the world holds out to it in this is the universal, and not the abstract universal alone but one quickened by individuality and having being for another, that is, the actual good. So wherever virtue takes hold of the way of the world, it always hits upon places that are themselves the existence of the good, a good inseparably interwoven with every appearance of the way of the world, as its in-itself, and having its existence within that way's actuality as well; the way of the world is therefore invulnerable to virtue. Existences of the good of just this kind, and hence inviolable relationships, are all the moments that virtue was to stake and sacrifice in its own case. The fighting can accordingly amount to no more than a vacillation between preserving and sacrificing; or rather, neither a sacrifice of what is one's own nor an injury to what is another's can occur at all. Virtue is like that fighter whose one concern in combat is to keep his sword unstained; but more than that, the very reason it took up the fight was to keep the weapons intact; and it is not merely unable to employ its own weapons, it must also keep the enemy's from harm and shield them against itself, since all of them are noble portions of the good on whose behalf it went into combat.

To this enemy, by contrast, the essence is not the in-itself but individuality; its force is therefore the negative principle, for which nothing is subsistent and absolutely sacred, a principle able to stake and to bear the loss of anything and everything. On this basis victory is as certain for it in its own right as it is by virtue of the contradiction into which its adversary entangles itself. Whatever counts for virtue as being in itself counts for the way of the world merely as something for it; the way of the world is free of every moment that virtue holds fixed and is bound to. It holds such a moment in its power for the very reason that the moment is valid for it only as something it can just as readily sublate as leave subsisting; and with the moment it holds the virtuous knight who is fastened to it. The knight cannot extricate himself from it the way one slips out of a cloak flung over one from outside, becoming free by abandoning it; for to him this moment is the essence that cannot be surrendered.

As for the ambush, finally, from which the good in-itself is supposed to fall cunningly upon the way of the world from behind, that hope is null in itself. The way of the world amounts to the alert consciousness that is certain of itself, one that does not let itself be approached from the rear but presents its brow on all sides; for what it consists in is just this, that everything is for it, that everything stands before it. As for the good in-itself: if it is for its enemy, then it stands within the struggle we have watched; but insofar as it is not for it and is instead in itself, it is that passive tool made of gifts and capacities, the matter lacking actuality; represented as existence, it would be a consciousness asleep and lingering somewhere at the rear, one knows not where.

Virtue is therefore defeated by the way of the world, since what it actually has for its purpose is the abstract, non-actual essence, and since, where actuality is concerned, its doing rests on distinctions that reside in words alone. Virtue was to have consisted in this, that through the sacrifice of individuality the good should be brought to actuality; yet the side of actuality is itself nothing other than that very side of individuality. The good was meant to be what is in itself and stands opposed to what is, but the in-itself, when one takes it in its reality and its truth, is instead being itself. In the first instance the in-itself is the abstraction of essence as against actuality; but abstraction is just that which is not something true and is only for consciousness; and this means that abstraction is itself the very thing one calls actual; for what is actual is that which essentially has being for an other, or it simply is being. The consciousness of virtue, however, is founded on just this difference of the in-itself from being, a difference that possesses no truth whatever. — The way of the world, having individuality for its principle, was meant to count as the inversion of the good; but individuality is the very principle of actuality; for it is precisely the consciousness by which what has being in itself is just as much for an other; and the way of the world does indeed invert the unalterable, but the inversion it actually accomplishes leads away from the nothingness of abstraction and over into the being of reality.

The way of the world thus wins out over whatever constitutes virtue in its opposition to it; it wins out over a virtue for which the essenceless abstraction counts as the essence. What it wins out over, though, is nothing real; it is the fabrication of differences that are none, that grandiloquent talk about the good of humanity and about humanity's oppression, about sacrifice for the good and the misuse of gifts; — ideal essences and purposes of this kind sink together into empty words that lift up the heart while leaving reason empty; that edify without building anything up; declamations whose one definite content is that the individual who pretends to act for such noble purposes, and who deals in such superb phrases, takes himself to count as a superb being; — a swelling-up that enlarges its own head and other people's, but enlarges them with a hollow bloatedness. — The virtue of antiquity had a determinate, secure significance, for its ground filled with content lay in the substance of a people, and its purpose was a good that was actual and already in existence; and so it was not directed against actuality as a universal invertedness or against a way of the world. The virtue under consideration here, by contrast, has stepped outside the substance; it is an essenceless virtue, a virtue belonging merely to representation and to words, both of which go without that content. — The emptiness of this oratory that battles the way of the world would uncover itself immediately if one were required to state what its phrases mean; — hence they are presupposed as familiar. The demand to state what is thus familiar would be met either by a fresh flood of phrases, or else countered by an appeal to the heart, which is said to say inwardly what they mean, that is, an inability to state it in fact would be conceded. — The nullity of that oratory seems to have won a kind of unconscious certainty for the culture of our own age as well, inasmuch as all interest has drained away from the entire mass of those phrases and from the manner of puffing oneself up with them; a loss that finds its expression in their producing nothing but boredom.

The result issuing from this opposition, then, is that consciousness drops, as an empty cloak, the representation of something good in itself that would as yet have no actuality. In its struggle it has undergone the experience: the way of the world is nowhere near as bad as it seemed; for the actuality it has is the universal's own actuality. Along with this experience there falls away the means of bringing the good forth through the sacrifice of individuality; for individuality is precisely the actualization of what has being in itself; and inversion ceases to be looked upon as an inversion of the good, since it is rather nothing else than the inverting of the good, taken as a mere purpose, into actuality; individuality in its movement is the very reality of the universal.

In fact, however, what confronted the consciousness of what has being in itself as the way of the world has thereby been defeated and has disappeared as well. In it the being-for-itself of individuality stood opposed to the essence, or to the universal, and made its appearance as an actuality cut off from being-in-itself. But since it has now shown itself that actuality and the universal stand in unseparated unity, the being-for-itself belonging to the way of the world proves to be gone as well, exactly as the in-itself of virtue proves to be nothing more than a view. Individuality within the way of the world might well suppose that its acting is merely for itself or self-interested; it is better than it supposes, for its doing is at once a doing that has being in itself, a universal doing. When it acts out of self-interest, it merely fails to know what it is doing, and when it assures us that all human beings act out of self-interest, it is only claiming that no human being has any consciousness of what doing is. — When it acts for itself, this is precisely the bringing forth into actuality of what so far only has being in itself; the purpose of being-for-itself, then, which supposes itself opposed to the in-itself, — its hollow craftiness, as well as its subtle explanations that manage to point out self-interest everywhere, have vanished quite as much as has the purpose of the in-itself together with its oratory.

And so the doing and driving of individuality is purpose in itself; the use of forces, the play of their expressions, is what gives life to them, which apart from this would be nothing but the dead in-itself, and the in-itself is not an uncompleted, existenceless, abstract universal, but is itself immediately this presence and actuality of the process of individuality.

C. Individuality, Which to Itself Is Real In and For Itself

Self-consciousness has now seized upon the concept of itself which to begin with was merely our concept of it, namely, that in the certainty of its own self it is all reality; and what now stands to it as purpose and as essence is the self-moving interpenetration of the universal — endowments and abilities — with individuality. — The purposes considered up to this point are the singular moments of that fulfillment and interpenetration, taken before the unity in which they came together. They have disappeared as abstractions and chimeras belonging to those first vapid shapes of spiritual self-consciousness, shapes whose truth lies solely in the being merely meant by the heart, by imagination, and by talk, and not in reason, which, now certain in and for itself of its reality, no longer strives to bring itself forth first as purpose set in opposition to the actuality that immediately is, but rather takes the category as such to be the object of its consciousness. — For what has been sublated is the determination of the self-consciousness that is for itself or is negative, the determination in which reason made its entrance; it found an actuality on hand that would be the negative of itself, and only by sublating that actuality did it make its purpose real. But now that purpose and being-in-itself have shown themselves to be one and the same with what being for an other and the actuality found on hand are, truth no longer separates itself from certainty; it is now indifferent whether one takes the posited purpose for the certainty of itself and its realizing for the truth, or instead the purpose for the truth and actuality for certainty; rather, what essence and purpose are in and for themselves is immediate reality's own certainty, the interpenetration of the in-itself with being-for-itself, and of the universal with individuality; in the doing itself lie its truth and its actuality, and the presentation or the uttering of individuality is for it a purpose in and for itself.

With this concept, then, self-consciousness has returned into itself out of the opposed determinations which the category had for it and which its relating to the category had, first as observing and then as active. The pure category itself is now its object, or rather it is the category that has become conscious of itself. Its reckoning with its previous shapes is thereby closed; they lie behind it, forgotten, and they do not confront it as a world it finds on hand, but develop only inside it as transparent moments. Still, within its consciousness they do come apart as a movement of differentiated moments, one that has not yet drawn itself together into its substantial unity. Yet in all of them it holds firmly to the simple unity of being and of the self, which is their genus. —

Consciousness has herewith thrown off all opposition and every condition of its doing; it starts out freshly from itself, directed not at another but at its own self. Because individuality is, in its own self, actuality, both the material that is worked upon and the purpose of the doing lie within the doing itself. The doing therefore takes on the appearance of a circle in motion, one that moves within its own self freely in the void, now widening and now narrowing without hindrance, and playing, wholly content, only in and with its own self. Whatever element individuality presents its shape in has the significance of a pure receiving of that shape; it is the day in general, to which consciousness wants to show itself. This doing changes nothing and is turned against nothing; it is the pure form of translation out of not being seen into being seen, and the content that is brought to light and presents itself is nothing else than what this doing already is in itself. It is in itself — such is its form qua unity that is thought; and it is actual — such is its form qua unity that is; it is itself content only under this determination of simplicity, in contrast to the determination in which it transitions and moves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

b. Law-Giving Reason

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

c. Law-Testing Reason

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI. Spirit

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

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

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

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

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

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

A. True Spirit, Ethical Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

c. The Condition of Right

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

B. Self-Estranged Spirit; Culture

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

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

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

I. The World of Self-Estranged Spirit

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

a. Culture and its Realm of Actuality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

b. Faith and Pure Insight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II. The Enlightenment

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

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

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

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