IV. The Truth of Self-Certainty

In the modes of certainty treated up to this point, the true stands over against consciousness as something other than consciousness itself. Yet the concept of this true vanishes in the experience we have of it; just as the object immediately was in itself, namely the being of sense-certainty, the concrete thing of perception, the force of the understanding, so it turns out rather not to be that in truth, for this in-itself shows up instead as a way in which the object merely is for another; the concept of it is sublated on the actual object, or rather the first immediate representation is sublated within the experience, and certainty was lost in truth. Now, however, something has arisen that never came off in those earlier relationships, namely a certainty equal to its own truth, since here certainty has itself as its object, and what is true for consciousness is consciousness itself. Admittedly there is otherness in this too; consciousness does draw a distinction, but it distinguishes something that at the same time is, for it, not distinguished. If we call the movement of knowledge the concept, and call knowledge as motionless unity, or as I, the object, then what we see is that the object answers to the concept, and not merely for us but for knowledge itself. — Or, to put it the other way round: if we call concept what the object is in itself, and call object what it is as object, that is, for an other, then it becomes plain that being-in-itself is one and the same as being for another; for the in-itself just is consciousness; yet it is no less that for which there is another (namely the in-itself); and it holds for consciousness that the object's in-itself and its being for another are the same; I is at once the content of this relation and the relating itself; over against another it is itself, and simultaneously it overreaches this other, which for it is likewise nothing but itself.

With self-consciousness we have thus now entered the realm where truth is at home. We have still to see in what way the shape of self-consciousness first steps forward. Should we set this new shape of knowledge, knowledge of oneself, alongside its predecessor, the knowledge of another, then that predecessor has indeed disappeared; but its moments have equally been kept safe at the same time; and what has been lost lies in this: that here those moments are on hand just as they are in themselves. Meaning's being, the singularity and the opposed universality of perception, together with the understanding's empty inner, count no longer as essences but as moments of self-consciousness, that is, as abstractions or distinctions which, for consciousness itself, are at the same time null, or are no distinctions at all and essences that purely vanish. So it looks as though what has gone missing is only the chief moment itself, namely the simple self-subsistent subsistence for consciousness. In truth, though, self-consciousness is the reflection that comes out of the sensuous and perceived world's being, and essentially it is the return out of otherness. Movement is what it is as self-consciousness; yet in distinguishing from itself only itself as itself, the distinction is for it immediately sublated as an otherness; the distinction is not, and it is merely the tautology, devoid of movement: I am I; insofar as the distinction does not also take on for it the shape of being, it is not self-consciousness. Otherness is thereby there for it as a being, that is, as a distinguished moment; but equally there is for it the unity of itself with this distinction, as a second distinguished moment. Through that first moment self-consciousness is preserved as consciousness, and the sensuous world in its entire extension is retained for it; yet only in so far as it is related to the second moment, namely the unity that self-consciousness has with itself; and that world is accordingly for it a subsistence which is nevertheless mere appearance, or a distinction that has no being in itself. But the essence of this opposition of its appearance to its truth is nothing other than the truth itself, that is, the unity self-consciousness has with itself; this unity must become essential to it; in other words, it is desire in general. As self-consciousness, consciousness now has a doubled object: one of them immediate, the object of sense-certainty and of perceiving, which for it bears, however, the character of the negative; and the second of them, namely itself, which constitutes the true essence and which at first is present only over against the first. In this, self-consciousness presents itself as that movement wherein the opposition just named is sublated and its equality with its own self comes to be for it.

The object that counts as the negative for self-consciousness has, for its part, for us or in itself, likewise withdrawn into itself, just as consciousness has on its side. Through this reflection into itself it has become life. Whatever self-consciousness sets apart from itself as a being carries about it, insofar as it is posited as a being, not merely the mode belonging to sense-certainty and to perception; it is rather a being reflected into itself, and what immediate desire has for its object is something living. For the in-itself, the universal result, that is, of how the understanding stands to the inner of things, consists in distinguishing what admits of no distinction, or in the unity of what has been distinguished. This unity, however, is, as we have seen, just as much its own repelling of itself, and this concept splits in two into the opposition between self-consciousness and life, the former of the two being the unity for which there is the infinite unity of the distinctions; the latter, though, merely is this unity itself, so that it is not simultaneously for its own self. Consciousness, then, is self-subsistent, and its object is in itself self-subsistent to just the same degree. Self-consciousness, which is for itself pure and simple and which stamps its object right away with the character of what is negative, or which to begin with is desire, will therefore undergo rather the experience of that object's self-subsistence.

The determination of life, as it issues from the concept, or from the universal result with which we enter this sphere, suffices to designate life without our having to develop its nature any further from that result; its circle closes itself within the moments that follow. The essence is infinity, taken as the being-sublated of all distinctions, the pure movement rotating on its axis, the repose of itself as an infinity that is absolutely restless; self-subsistence itself, in which the distinctions of the movement are dissolved; time's simple essence, which in this self-equality possesses the solid shape of space. The distinctions are nonetheless present in this simple universal medium just as much as distinctions; for the negative nature of this universal fluidity belongs to it only insofar as it is a sublating of those distinctions; yet it cannot sublate the distinct ones if they have no subsistence. This very fluidity, as self-equal self-subsistence, is itself their subsistence, or their substance, in which they accordingly are as distinct members and as parts that are for themselves. Being no longer carries the meaning of the abstraction of being, nor does their pure essentiality carry that of the abstraction of universality; instead, their being consists in just that simple fluid substance which is pure movement within its own self. But the distinction of these members from one another, as distinction, rests on no determinateness whatever apart from that of the moments of infinity, in other words of pure movement itself.

The self-subsistent members are for themselves; this being-for-itself, however, is quite as immediately their reflection into unity as this unity is the splitting-in-two into self-subsistent shapes. The unity is split in two for the reason that it is unity that is absolutely negative, or infinite; and since it is the subsistence, the distinction too has self-subsistence only in it. The shape's self-subsistence shows itself as a determinate something, for an other, since the shape is something split in two; and to that extent the sublating of the splitting-in-two happens through another. Yet it lies just as much in the shape itself; for that very fluidity is the substance of the self-subsistent shapes; this substance, however, is infinite; and so the shape, in its very subsistence, is itself the splitting-in-two, that is, the sublating of its own being-for-itself.

Distinguishing more closely the moments contained in this, we find that what we have for the first moment is the subsistence of the self-subsistent shapes, or the suppression of that which distinguishing is in itself, namely of not being in itself and of having no subsistence. The second moment, by contrast, subjects that subsistence to the infinity of the distinction. In the first moment there is the subsisting shape; as being-for-itself, or as substance that is infinite in its determinateness, it steps forth against the universal substance, denies this fluidity and its continuity with it, and asserts itself as not dissolved in this universal, but rather as maintaining itself through separation from this inorganic nature of its own and through consuming that nature. Life in the universal fluid medium, a tranquil laying-out of the shapes side by side, becomes by this very fact the movement of those shapes, or life as process. The in-itself is the simple universal fluidity, while the distinction of the shapes is the other. But through this distinction the fluidity itself becomes the other; for it now is for the distinction, which is in and for itself and therefore is the infinite movement by which that tranquil medium is consumed, life as something living. — This inversion, however, is for that very reason once more the invertedness in its own self; the essence is what gets consumed; the individuality that keeps itself in being at the universal's cost, and that confers on itself the feeling of being one with itself, sublates precisely thereby its opposition to the other, by means of which it is for itself; and the unity with itself which it confers on itself is precisely the fluidity of the distinctions, or the universal dissolution. But conversely, the sublating of individual subsistence is equally the producing of it. For since the individual shape's essence, universal life and likewise what is for itself, is in itself simple substance, then in positing the other within itself it sublates this its own simplicity, or its essence; that is, it splits that simplicity in two, and this splitting-in-two of the undifferentiated fluidity is precisely the way individuality is posited. So the simple substance of life is its own splitting-in-two into shapes, and simultaneously the dissolving of these subsisting distinctions; and the dissolution of the splitting-in-two is just as much a splitting-in-two, or an articulating into members. Both sides of the whole movement that were distinguished, namely the forming of shapes laid out tranquilly in the universal medium of self-subsistence, and the process of life, thereby fall into each other; the latter is no less a forming of shapes than it is the sublating of shape ; and the first, the forming of shapes, is no less a sublating than it is the articulating into members. This fluid element is nothing but the abstraction of the essence, or else it is actual solely as shape; and its articulating itself into members is once again a splitting-in-two of what has been articulated, or a dissolving of it. Life is constituted by this entire cycle: not by what is stated first, the immediate continuity and solidity of its essence, nor by the subsisting shape and the discrete that is for itself, nor by their pure process, nor even by the simple gathering-together of these moments, but by the whole that develops itself, dissolves its own development, and in this movement maintains itself simply.

Since the starting point is the first immediate unity, and since the path runs through the moments of shape-formation and process to the unity of both these moments, thereby returning again to the simple substance we began with, this reflected unity differs from the first one. As against that immediate unity, the one stated as a being, this second unity is the universal one, which has all these moments within it as sublated. It is the simple genus, one that within the movement of life itself has no existence for itself as that simple thing; rather, in this result life refers beyond itself to something other than it is, namely to consciousness, for which life is there as this unity, that is, as genus.

That other life, though, namely self-consciousness, for which the genus as such has being and which for its own self is genus, is at first only this simple essence to itself and has pure I for its object; in its experience, which is now to be considered, this abstract object will grow richer for it and will take on the unfolding we have witnessed in life.

This genus, or the simple universal, one for which there are no distinctions, is what the simple I amounts to only in being the negative essence of those moments that are shaped and self-subsistent; and self-consciousness is accordingly certain of itself only by sublating this other, which presents itself to it as self-subsistent life; it is desire. Being certain that this other is null, it posits that nullity for itself as its truth, annihilates the self-subsistent object, and in that way gives itself certainty of itself as a certainty that is true, as one that has come to be for it in an objective manner.

In this satisfaction, however, it comes to experience the self-subsistence of its object. Desire, together with the self-certainty reached in desire's satisfaction, is conditioned by the object, for it comes about by sublating this other; and if such sublating is to be, this other must be. Self-consciousness is thus unable, by its negative relation, to sublate the object; it therefore produces the object again instead, and desire along with it. In fact the essence of desire is something other than self-consciousness; and by way of this experience that very truth has come to be for self-consciousness itself. Yet at the same time it is quite as absolutely for itself, which it is only by sublating the object, and its satisfaction must come to be for it, since it is the truth. Because the object is self-subsistent, then, satisfaction can be reached only if the object itself carries out the negation upon itself; and the object must carry out this negation of itself on itself, for in itself it is what is negative, and it must be for the other that which it is. In being the negation upon its own self, and in being therein at the same time self-subsistent, the object is consciousness. In the case of life, which desire has for its object, the negation falls either upon an other, namely upon desire, or it is there as determinateness over against some other indifferent shape, or as life's inorganic universal nature. But this universal self-subsistent nature, on which the negation obtains absolutely, is the genus as such, that is, as self-consciousness. Only in another self-consciousness does self-consciousness attain its satisfaction.

Only in these three moments is the concept of self-consciousness brought to completion; a) pure undifferentiated I is the first immediate object it has. b) This immediacy, however, is absolute mediation in its own right; it consists only in the sublating of the self-subsistent object, in other words it is desire. The satisfaction that desire gets is indeed self-consciousness reflected into its own self, or certainty that has turned into truth. c) The truth of that certainty, however, is rather the doubled reflection, the redoubling of self-consciousness. It is an object for consciousness which in its own self posits its otherness, or the distinction, as something null, and which is therein self-subsistent. The distinct shape that is merely living does indeed sublate its self-subsistence as well within the process of life itself, but along with its distinction it ceases to be what it is; whereas the object of self-consciousness is just as self-subsistent in this negativity of its own; and thereby it is genus for its own self, universal fluidity within the ownness of its separating off; it is living self-consciousness.

What is present here is a self-consciousness for a self-consciousness. Only through this is it in fact what it is; for only herein does its unity with itself in its otherness come to be for it; the I that is the object of its own concept is in fact no object; the object of desire, by contrast, is merely self-subsistent, for it is the universal, indestructible substance, the fluid self-equal essence. Since a self-consciousness is the object, that object is I just as much as it is object. — With this the concept of spirit is already present for us. What comes to be for consciousness from here on is its experience of what spirit is, namely this absolute substance which, in the complete freedom and self-subsistence of its opposite, that is, of distinct self-consciousnesses that are for themselves, constitutes their unity; an I that is We, and a We that is I as well. It is only in self-consciousness, taken as the concept of spirit, that consciousness has its turning point, the point at which it steps out of the colorful semblance of the sensuous here below, and out of the empty night of the supersensible beyond, into the spiritual day of the present.

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

Self-consciousness is in and for itself insofar as, and because, it is for another something in and for itself; that is, its being lies wholly in being recognized. The concept of this its unity in its doubling, the concept of the infinity that realizes itself within self-consciousness, is an intertwining of many sides and many senses, so that its moments must partly be held rigorously apart, and partly, within this very distinguishing, be grasped and cognized as at once undistinguished as well, or always in the significance opposed to their own. That what is distinguished carries a double sense has its ground in the essence of self-consciousness, which is to be infinite, that is, immediately the contrary of whatever determinateness it gets posited in. What sets the movement of recognition before us is the unfolding of this spiritual unity's concept in its doubling.

Another self-consciousness is there for self-consciousness; it has come to be outside itself. This carries a doubled meaning: first, it has lost its own self, since what it finds itself to be is an other essence; second, the other has thereby been sublated by it, for what it sees as essence is not the other either, but its own self in the other.

It must sublate this, its otherness; that is the sublating of the first double sense and hence a second double sense in its own right: first, it must aim at sublating the other self-subsistent essence, thereby gaining certainty of itself as the essence; second, its aim in this is to sublate its own self, since this other is itself.

This double-sensed sublating of its double-sensed otherness is just as much a double-sensed return into itself; for first, by the sublating it recovers its own self, becoming equal to itself once more through the sublating of its otherness; but second, the other self-consciousness is in the same way restored to itself by it, for it was present to itself in the other, and in sublating this, its being in the other, it releases the other back into freedom.

This movement whereby self-consciousness relates itself to another self-consciousness has, however, been depicted in this fashion, as the doing of the one; but that doing of the one itself carries the doubled meaning of being its own doing quite as much as the doing of the other; for the other is equally self-subsistent, sealed within itself, and nothing is in it that is not there through itself. The first does not have the object before it in the way the object at first is merely for desire, but rather has a self-subsistent object that is for itself, and over that object it can by itself accomplish nothing unless the object does to its own self what the first does to it. The movement is thus, plainly and simply, the doubled movement of both self-consciousnesses. What each sees the other doing is the very same thing that it does itself; each does on its own part what it requires of the other; and hence does what it does only to the extent that the other does the same; a doing that stayed one-sided would be pointless, since what is to happen can be brought off by the two alone.

The doing, then, is double-sensed not only in that it is a doing directed just as much upon itself as upon the other, but also in that, undivided, it is just as much the doing of the one as of the other.

In this movement we watch the process that displayed itself as the play of forces recur, but now within consciousness. What there held only for us holds here for the extremes themselves. Self-consciousness is the middle, and it decomposes into the extremes; each extreme, for its part, consists in this exchange of its own determinateness, this absolute transition into its opposite. As consciousness, though, it certainly does get outside itself, and yet in this being-outside-itself it is at the same time held back within itself, for itself, and its outside-itself is for it. For it there is this: that it immediately is another consciousness and is not; and likewise that this other is only for itself insofar as it sublates itself as something that is for itself, and is for itself only inside the other's being-for-itself. To the other, each is the middle by means of which each mediates and joins together with itself, and each is, both to itself and to the other, an essence that immediately is for itself, an essence which at once is so for itself only by way of this mediation. They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another.

We must now consider this pure concept of recognition, of the doubling of self-consciousness within its unity, in respect of the way its process makes its appearance for self-consciousness. It will first set forth the two in the aspect of their inequality, or the stepping-out of the middle into the extremes, which as extremes are opposed to each other, the one being merely something recognized, the other merely something recognizing.

To begin with, self-consciousness is simple being-for-itself, self-equal by excluding all that is other from itself; what counts for it as essence and absolute object is I; and it is a singular in this immediacy, or in this being that belongs to its being-for-itself. Whatever is other for it stands there as an unessential object, one stamped with the character of the negative. The other, however, is a self-consciousness too; one individual steps forth confronting another individual. Stepping forth thus immediately, they are for one another after the manner of ordinary objects; self-subsistent shapes, consciousnesses submerged in the being of life — for it is as life that the object with being has determined itself here — consciousnesses which, for one another, have not yet carried through the movement of absolute abstraction, the movement of wiping out every immediate being and of being nothing but the pure negative being which self-equal consciousness is, and which have not yet set themselves before one another as pure being-for-itself, that is, as self-consciousness. Each is indeed certain of its own self, though not of the other, so that the certainty it has of itself possesses as yet no truth; for its truth would lie solely in this, that its own being-for-itself had presented itself to it as a self-subsistent object, or, what amounts to the same, that the object had presented itself as this pure certainty of its own self. By the concept of recognition, however, this is possible only in the following way: that just as the other is for it, so it is for the other, and each in its own self, through its own doing and once again through the doing of the other, brings this pure abstraction of being-for-itself to completion.

What the presentation of itself, taken as self-consciousness's pure abstraction, amounts to, however, is showing itself to be the pure negation of its own objective manner, or showing that it is tied to no determinate existence, not tied to the universal singularity of existence at all, not tied to life. This presentation is the doubled doing: the doing of the other, and the doing through one's own self. Insofar as it is the doing of the other, each therefore aims at the death of the other. But therein the second is also present, the doing through one's own self, since the former includes within itself the staking of one's own life. The relationship of the two self-consciousnesses is accordingly determined thus: that through a struggle of life and death they corroborate themselves and each other. — They must enter this struggle, for they have to raise the certainty of their own selves, of being for themselves, into truth in the other and in themselves. And the staking of life is the sole thing by which freedom, by which it is corroborated, that for self-consciousness the essence is neither being, nor the immediate manner in which it steps forth, nor its submersion in the spread of life, — but rather that nothing is to be found in it which would not be for it a moment that vanishes, that it is nothing but pure being-for-itself. The individual who has not risked life can no doubt be recognized as a person; but it has not attained the truth of being thus recognized as a self-subsistent self-consciousness. Equally, each must go for the death of the other just as it stakes its own life; for the other counts to it as no more than its own self; its essence presents itself to it as another, it is outside itself; it must sublate its being-outside-itself; the other is a consciousness with being, entangled in manifold ways; it must intuit its otherness as pure being-for-itself, or as absolute negation.

This corroboration by way of death, however, sublates the truth that was meant to issue from it, and with that truth it sublates the certainty of one's own self altogether; for if life is the natural position of consciousness, self-subsistence lacking absolute negativity, then death is its natural negation, a negation lacking self-subsistence, and one that therefore remains without the significance recognition calls for. Death has indeed produced the certainty that both risked their lives and held life in contempt, in themselves and in the other; yet not for those who survived this struggle, who sublate their consciousness as posited in that alien essentiality, natural existence, or who sublate themselves and are sublated as the extremes that wanted to be for themselves. With this, though, the essential moment disappears from the play of exchange, namely the decomposing of itself into extremes of opposed determinatenesses; the middle collapses into a dead unity, one decomposed into dead extremes that merely have being and are not opposed; and the two do not give and receive each other back mutually through consciousness, but only release each other indifferently, as things. What they have done is abstract negation, not the negation of consciousness, which sublates in such a way that it stores up and preserves what has been sublated, and so survives its own being sublated.

In this experience self-consciousness comes to find that life matters to it just as essentially as pure self-consciousness does. Within immediate self-consciousness the absolute object is the simple I, which for us, or in itself, is nevertheless absolute mediation and has subsisting self-subsistence for its essential moment. That simple unity dissolves, and this dissolution is what the first experience results in; through it a pure self-consciousness is posited, alongside a consciousness that is not purely for itself but rather for another, that is, a consciousness that has being, or consciousness having the shape of thinghood. Both of these moments are essential; — inasmuch as they are at first unequal and opposed, with no reflection of theirs into unity having yet come about, they stand as two opposed shapes of consciousness: the self-subsistent one, whose essence is being-for-itself, and the non-self-subsistent one, whose essence is life, or being for another; the first of these is the master, the second the servant.

The master is consciousness that is for itself, no longer the mere concept of such consciousness but consciousness being for itself whose mediation with itself runs through an other consciousness, one whose essence involves its being synthesized with self-subsistent being, or with thinghood as such. Two moments are what the master relates to: a thing as such, which is the object of desire, and the consciousness for which what is essential is thinghood; and since a) he is, as the concept of self-consciousness, an immediate relation of being-for-itself, while b) he is now at the same time mediation, a being-for-itself that is for itself only through another, he relates a) in an immediate way to both, and b) in a mediated way to each of them through the other. The master relates to the servant in a mediated way, through self-subsistent being; for this is exactly what holds the servant bound; it is the chain he could not abstract from during the struggle, which is why he proved to be non-self-subsistent, proved to have his self-subsistence in thinghood. The master, by contrast, holds power over this being, since in the struggle he proved that it is valid for him merely as something negative; and as he is the power over it while this being is the power over the other, he keeps that other beneath him in this syllogism. In the same way the master relates to the thing in a mediated way, through the servant; being self-consciousness as such, the servant likewise relates negatively to the thing and sublates it; but for him the thing is self-subsistent at the same time, so that his negating cannot finish it off to the point of annihilation, and he merely works on it. For the master, on the other hand, this mediation yields the immediate relation as the pure negation of the thing, that is, enjoyment; what desire did not manage, he manages: to have done with the thing and to satisfy himself in enjoyment. Desire did not manage this, on account of the thing's self-subsistence; but the master, having pushed the servant in between himself and the thing, thereby joins together only with the thing's non-self-subsistence and enjoys it purely; the side of self-subsistence he leaves to the servant, who works on it.

In these two moments the master comes to be recognized by another consciousness; for in them the other consciousness posits itself as the unessential one, first in working on the thing, then in its dependence on a determinate existence; in neither can it become master over being and reach absolute negation. Present here, then, is this moment of recognition: the other consciousness sublates its own being-for-itself and in doing so does itself what the first does to it. So too the other moment, that this doing of the second is the first one's doing of its own; for what the servant does is in truth the master's doing; to the master, being-for-itself alone is essence; he is pure negative power, to which the thing is Nothing, and hence the pure essential doing within this relationship; the servant's doing, however, is not pure but unessential. But recognition proper lacks the moment in which the master would also do to himself what he does to the other, and the servant would also do to the other what he does to himself. What has thereby come about is a one-sided and unequal recognition.

Here the unessential consciousness is, for the master, the object in which the truth of his certainty of his own self consists. But it comes to light that this object fails to answer to its concept, and that in the very place where the master has brought himself to completion, what has come to be for him is something else entirely than a self-subsistent consciousness. It is not such a consciousness that is there for him, but a non-self-subsistent one; so he has no certainty of being-for-itself as the truth; on the contrary, his truth is the unessential consciousness and the unessential doing that belongs to it.

Accordingly, the truth of the self-subsistent consciousness is the servile consciousness. The latter does indeed appear at first to be outside itself, and appears not to be self-consciousness's truth. Yet mastery showed its essence to be the inverted form of what it wills to be, and likewise servitude, once it reaches its completion, will surely turn into the contrary of what it immediately is; being a consciousness pressed back into itself, it will withdraw into itself and reverse itself into true self-subsistence.

We have seen only what servitude is within the relationship of mastery. But it is self-consciousness, and what it accordingly is in and for its own self is what we must now consider. At first the master is the essence for servitude; hence the self-subsistent consciousness that is for itself counts for it as the truth, a truth that, for it, is nevertheless not yet in it. Yet this truth of negativity in its purity and of being-for-itself it does in fact have in its own self; for it has experienced this essence within itself. For this consciousness has been anxious not over this or that, nor for this or that moment, but over its whole essence; since what it has felt is the fear of death, of the absolute master. Therein it was inwardly dissolved, it shook through and through within its own self, and everything fixed quaked inside it. But this pure universal movement, the absolute becoming-fluid of all subsistence, is what constitutes the simple essence of self-consciousness, namely absolute negativity, pure being-for-itself, which is thereby in this consciousness. Pure being-for-itself as this moment is for it too, since in the master it is its object. Furthermore, it is not merely this universal dissolution in general, for in serving it brings that dissolution about actually; therein it sublates, across all the singular moments, its attachment to natural existence, and works that existence away.

The feeling of absolute power, however, whether taken in general or in the singular details of service, amounts only to dissolution in itself, and even granted that fear of the master makes the start of wisdom, consciousness in that fear is for its own self, not being-for-itself. Through work, though, it arrives at its own self. At the moment that answers to desire in the master's consciousness, it did look as though the side of the unessential relation to the thing had fallen to the serving consciousness, since there the thing retains its self-subsistence. Desire had kept back for itself the pure negating of its object and, along with that, the unmixed feeling of self. For just that reason, however, the satisfaction is itself nothing but a vanishing, since it lacks the objective side, or subsistence. Work, by contrast, is inhibited desire, a vanishing held up, or, to put it otherwise, it shapes. What relates negatively to the object turns into that object's form, and into something enduring; precisely because for the one who works the object possesses self-subsistence. This negative middle, the forming doing, is at once singularity, the pure being-for-itself of consciousness, which in work now steps outside consciousness into the element of what endures; by this route, then, the working consciousness arrives at the intuition of self-subsistent being as its own self.

Forming, however, carries not merely that positive significance whereby the serving consciousness, within it, becomes for itself, as pure being-for-itself, something that has being; it carries a negative significance as well, directed against its first moment, fear. For in shaping the thing, its own negativity, its being-for-itself, becomes an object to it only through its sublating the opposed form that has being. But that alien essence, the one it trembled before, is exactly this objective negative. Now, however, it destroys this alien negative and posits itself as such a negative in the element of what endures; and thereby it becomes, for its own self, something that is for itself. In the master, being-for-itself is for it another, or is only for it; under fear, being-for-itself lies in its own self; in shaping, being-for-itself comes to be for it as its own, and it becomes conscious that it is itself in and for itself. Being posited outward does not make the form into something other than it; for this very form is its pure being-for-itself, which therein becomes truth for it. Through this rediscovery of itself by its own means, then, it becomes a mind of its own, and precisely in the work in which it had seemed to be only a mind belonging to another. — For this reflection both moments are necessary, fear and service in general as well as shaping, and both at once in a universal manner. Lacking the discipline of service and obedience, fear stops short at the merely formal and does not spread over the conscious actuality of existence. Lacking shaping, fear stays inward and mute, and consciousness does not come to be for its own self. Should consciousness form without that first absolute fear, it is nothing but a vain mind of its own; for the form or negativity belonging to it is not negativity in itself; and its forming can therefore not give it consciousness of itself as the essence. If what it has endured is not absolute fear but only some anxiety, the negative essence has stayed something external to it, and its substance has not been infected by that essence through and through. Since not every filling of its natural consciousness has been set tottering, it still belongs in itself to determinate being; the mind of its own is obstinacy, a freedom that still remains standing inside servitude. Just as the pure form cannot become essence for it, so too, viewed as a spreading beyond the singular case, that form is no universal shaping, no absolute concept, but a skill holding sway over some things only, and not over that power which is universal, nor over the objective essence as a whole.

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

In the self-subsistent self-consciousness the essence is, for one thing, merely the pure abstraction of the I, while for another, once that abstraction elaborates itself and supplies itself with differences, the act of differentiating fails to become for it an objective essence that has being-in-itself; so the I this self-consciousness arrives at is not one that genuinely differentiates itself in its own simplicity, nor one that stays equal to itself in that absolute act of differentiating. The consciousness that has been pressed back into itself, by contrast, comes to be an object for itself in shaping, namely as the form of the things it shapes, and in the master it looks upon being-for-itself as consciousness at the same time. For the serving consciousness as such, however, these two moments fall apart — itself as a self-subsistent object, and this object as a consciousness, and with that its own essence. Since, however, the form and being-for-itself amount, for us or in itself, to the same, and since within the concept of self-subsistent consciousness it is consciousness that constitutes being-in-itself, the side of being-in-itself, or of thinghood, which took on form in labor, is no substance apart from consciousness, and we have arrived at a new shape of self-consciousness: a consciousness that is the essence to itself as infinity, or as consciousness's pure movement; one that thinks, that is to say, one that is free self-consciousness. For to think means being an object to oneself not as the abstract I but as an I that carries at once the significance of being-in-itself, or relating to the objective essence so that this essence carries the significance of the being-for-itself belonging to that consciousness for which it is. — For thinking, the object's movement takes place not in representations or in shapes but in concepts, that is to say, in a being-in-itself that is differentiated yet is, immediately, for consciousness nothing differentiated from consciousness. What is represented, shaped, existent, taken as such, bears the form of being other than consciousness; a concept, though, is at the same time something existent, — and this difference, so far as it belongs to the concept itself, makes up the concept's determinate content, — but because that content is at once a content grasped in a concept, consciousness stays immediately conscious of being one with this determinate, differentiated existent; matters do not stand as with representation, where consciousness has first to recall separately that the representation is its own; the concept, rather, is straightaway my concept. Within thinking I am free, since I do not stand within another but stay purely alongside myself, and since the object that counts as the essence for me is, in unsevered unity, my being-for-myself; and the movement I make in concepts is a movement inside myself. — In determining this shape of self-consciousness, though, one point must be kept firmly in view: that the shape is thinking consciousness as such, or that what stands before it is being-in-itself together with being-for-itself in immediate unity. Consciousness that is like-named with itself, and that repels itself away from itself, becomes for itself an element having being-in-itself; but so far it is this element to itself only as universal essence in general, and not yet as that objective essence within the unfolding and the movement of its own manifold being.

This freedom of self-consciousness, as is well known, has been called Stoicism, in that it came forward in the history of spirit as an appearance conscious of itself. Its principle is that consciousness is a thinking essence, and that something has essentiality for it, or is true and good for it, only insofar as consciousness relates itself therein as a thinking essence.

The manifold expansion of life, differentiating itself within itself, its singularization and entanglement, is the object against which desire and labor are active. This manifold doing has now contracted into the simple differentiation that lies in the pure movement of thinking. Essentiality no longer belongs to the difference that establishes itself in the guise of a determinate thing, or of consciousness of a determinate natural existence, of a feeling, or of desire and of purpose for that desire, whether it be posited through one's own consciousness or through an alien consciousness; essentiality belongs solely to the difference that is a thought one, immediately not differentiated from Me. This consciousness therefore stands negatively toward the relationship of mastery and servitude; what it does is to find its truth neither in the servant, when it holds mastery, nor, as servant, in the master's will and in serving him, but to be free in fetters exactly as on the throne, free throughout every dependence of its singular existence, and to preserve in itself that lifelessness which perpetually withdraws, out of the movement of existence, out of acting as much as out of suffering, into thought's simple essentiality. Stubbornness is a freedom that attaches itself to a singularity and keeps its stand inside servitude, whereas Stoicism is the freedom that steps immediately and always out of servitude and back into thought's pure universality; as a universal form taken by the world-spirit it could make its appearance only at a time of universal fear and servitude, though also of a universal culture that had heightened formative activity into thinking.

Now granted that what counts as the essence for this self-consciousness is neither another over against it nor yet the I's pure abstraction, but an I that has otherness within it, yet has it as a thought difference, so that within its otherness the I has immediately gone back into itself; even so, that essence of its remains at the same time merely an abstract essence. Toward natural existence this freedom of self-consciousness is indifferent, and has for that reason let natural existence go free in equal measure, so that the reflection here is a doubled one. Freedom within thought possesses as its truth nothing but pure thought, a truth that lacks the fulfillment of life; hence it is likewise no more than the concept of freedom, and not living freedom itself; for so far its essence is only thinking at large, the form as such, which has turned back into itself away from the self-subsistence of things. But if individuality, as acting, were to exhibit itself as living, or, as thinking, were to take in the living world under the form of a thought-system, then thought itself would have to contain, for the former unfolding, a content of what is good, and for the latter, of what is true; so that throughout, in whatever is for consciousness, no ingredient would occur besides the concept that constitutes the essence. Yet in the very way the concept here severs itself, as abstraction, from the manifoldness of things, it holds no content of its own, but only a given content. Consciousness does indeed wipe out the content as an alien being when it thinks that content; but the concept is a determinate concept, and just this determinateness of the concept is the alien element carried within it. Stoicism was accordingly thrown into difficulty once it was asked, as the phrase ran, after the criterion of truth in general, that is, after a content belonging to thought itself, properly speaking. Asked what the good and the true are, it answered once again with contentless thinking itself; rationality is where the true and the good are supposed to reside. But this self-equality of thinking is once more only the pure form in which nothing determines itself; the universal words about the true and the good, about wisdom and virtue, at which it must come to a halt, are therefore no doubt in a general way uplifting, but since in fact they can never arrive at any expansion of content, they soon begin to be tedious.

This thinking consciousness, in the way it has determined itself, namely as abstract freedom, therefore amounts to no more than an unfinished negation of otherness; having merely drawn back into itself out of existence, it has not carried itself out upon existence as the absolute negation of it. Content is valid for it, to be sure, only as thought, yet along with that as determinate thought, and so determinateness as such is valid for it too.

Skepticism realizes what Stoicism supplies only the concept of, — and it is the experience, in actuality, of what freedom of thought amounts to; such freedom is in itself the negative, and has to exhibit itself accordingly. Once self-consciousness has reflected itself into the simple thought of itself, self-subsistent existence, or enduring determinateness, has in fact fallen out of infinity and confronts that freedom; in skepticism this other's complete unessentiality and non-self-subsistence now arises for consciousness; thought turns into the thinking that wholly annihilates the being of the manifoldly determined world, and free self-consciousness's negativity turns, upon this manifold formation of life, into real negativity. — Clearly, then, Stoicism answers to the concept of that self-subsistent consciousness which appeared as the relationship of mastery and servitude, while skepticism answers to the realization of that same consciousness, namely to the negative directedness upon otherness, to desire and to labor. But if desire and labor proved unable to execute the negation for self-consciousness, this polemical directedness against the manifold self-subsistence of things will succeed instead, since what turns upon those things is a free self-consciousness already completed within itself; more precisely, since it has thinking, or infinity, within it, and since therein the self-subsistent things, taken in their difference, count for it as nothing but magnitudes in the course of vanishing. Differences that within self-consciousness's pure thinking of itself amount only to the abstraction of difference here become every difference, and differentiated being in its entirety becomes one difference within self-consciousness.

With this, the doing of skepticism in general, and its manner, has been determined. It points out that dialectical movement which sense-certainty is, and perception, and the understanding; and it points out likewise the unessentiality of whatever passes for something determinate within the relationship of ruling and serving, and of whatever so passes for abstract thinking itself. That relationship comprises at the same time a determinate manner within which ethical laws, too, occur as commands issued by mastery; the determinations in abstract thinking, on the other hand, are concepts of science, into which contentless thinking spreads out, hanging the concept, in a way that is in fact merely external, onto the being that stands self-subsistent over against it and makes up its content, and holding as valid only determinate concepts, granted that these are pure abstractions as well.

As negative movement in the way it immediately is, the dialectical appears to consciousness at first as something to which consciousness has been abandoned, something that is not there through consciousness itself. As skepticism, by contrast, that movement is a moment of self-consciousness, and it is not something that merely befalls self-consciousness, that its true and its real vanish without its knowing how; rather, in the certainty of its freedom, self-consciousness itself lets this other, which passes itself off as real, vanish; not the objective alone, taken as such, but its own relating to the objective, wherein the objective is valid and is made valid as objective, and hence its perceiving as well, together with its securing of what stands in danger of being lost, its sophistry, and the truth it has determined out of itself and fixed; by which self-conscious negation it procures the certainty of its freedom for its own self, brings forth the experience of that certainty, and so raises it to truth. The determinate is what vanishes, that is, the difference which, in whatever manner and from whatever quarter, sets itself up as fixed and unchangeable. Nothing enduring belongs to it, and it must vanish for thinking, since precisely this is what the differentiated is: not being in its own self, but holding its essentiality in another alone; thinking, however, is the insight into that nature which the differentiated has, it is the negative essence taken as simple.

Amid the changing of everything that would make itself fixed for it, skeptical self-consciousness thus undergoes the experience of its own freedom as something it gives to itself and preserves by itself; to itself it is that ataraxy of thinking that thinks itself, the unchangeable and genuine certainty of itself. This certainty does not emerge out of anything alien whose manifold development would have collapsed together within it, emerging as a result with its own becoming left behind it; on the contrary, what constitutes the absolute dialectical unrest is consciousness itself, this mixture of sensuous and thought representations whose differences coincide, and whose equality likewise, — for equality is itself the determinateness over against the unequal — dissolves once more. Yet precisely in this, rather than being a self-equal consciousness, this consciousness is in fact nothing but a wholly contingent confusion, the vertigo of a disorder that keeps generating itself. It is this for its own self; for it is itself what maintains this self-moving confusion and brings it forth. It owns up to this as well: it owns up to being an entirely contingent, singular consciousness, — a consciousness that is empirical, that takes its lead from what possesses no reality for it, that obeys what for it is no essence, that does and brings into actuality what for it holds no truth. But just as in this manner it is valid to itself as a singular, contingent and in truth animal life, and as a lost self-consciousness, so conversely it makes itself once more into the universal, self-equal one; for negativity of every singularity and of every difference is what it is. Out of this self-equality, or rather within it, it drops back into that contingency and confusion, for this self-moving negativity has dealings with nothing but the singular and knocks about among contingent things. So this consciousness is that unconscious drivel of passing back and forth from the one extreme, self-equal self-consciousness, over to the other, the contingent, confused, and confusing consciousness. These two thoughts of itself it does not itself bring together; on the one occasion it cognizes its freedom as an elevation above all confusion and all contingency of existence, and on the other occasion it just as much owns up to being a relapse into unessentiality and a drifting about within it. In its thinking it lets the unessential content vanish, but just therein it is a consciousness of something unessential; it utters absolute vanishing, and yet the uttering is, and what has been uttered as vanishing is this consciousness itself; it utters the nullity of seeing, of hearing, and so on, and it sees, hears, and so on, itself; it utters the nullity of the ethical essentialities, and itself makes them into the powers of its acting. What it does and what it says stand perpetually in contradiction, and it likewise carries within itself the doubled and contradictory consciousness of unchangeableness together with equality, and of utter contingency together with inequality with itself. But it keeps this contradiction of its own apart; and it relates to that contradiction as it does within its purely negative movement generally. Point out equality to it, and it will point out inequality; and when that inequality, which it has just uttered, is now held up before it, it passes over to pointing out equality; its chatter is in fact the wrangling of stubborn boys, where the first says A whenever the second says B, and says B again whenever the second says A, and where, at the price of contradicting themselves, they buy the pleasure of staying in contradiction with each other.

Within skepticism consciousness comes to know itself, in truth, as a consciousness that contradicts itself inwardly; from this experience a new shape proceeds, one that draws together the two thoughts which skepticism holds apart. Skepticism's thoughtlessness regarding itself has to vanish, since what carries these two modes within it is in truth one consciousness. This new shape is thereby one that for itself has a doubled consciousness of itself: consciousness of itself as what liberates itself, as unchangeable and self-equal, and consciousness of itself as what absolutely confuses and inverts itself, — and that is the consciousness it has of this contradiction of its own. — Under Stoicism self-consciousness amounts to the simple freedom of itself; under skepticism that freedom realizes itself, annihilates the other side, determinate existence, but rather doubles itself, and is now twofold to itself. By this means the doubling that formerly spread itself over two singular individuals, over master and over servant, has entered into one; self-consciousness's doubling within itself, which belongs essentially to the concept of spirit, is thereby at hand, though not yet the unity of that doubling, and the unhappy consciousness amounts to the consciousness it has of itself as a doubled essence that merely contradicts itself.

This unhappy, inwardly divided consciousness must therefore, because this contradiction of its essence is for itself one consciousness, always have the other consciousness also within the one, and so must be immediately driven out again from each, just when it supposes it has attained the victory and the repose of unity. Its true return into itself, however, or its reconciliation with itself, will exhibit the concept of spirit that has come alive and stepped into existence, since it already carries this within it, that as one undivided consciousness it is a doubled one; it itself is the beholding of one self-consciousness within another, and it itself is the two of them, and the unity of the two counts for it as the essence as well, yet it for itself is not yet this essence itself, not yet the two in their unity.

Being to begin with no more than the immediate unity of the two, while for it the two are not the same but opposed, it takes the one, namely the simple unchangeable, for the essence; the other, however, the manifold changeable, it takes for the unessential. For it the two are essences alien to one another; being itself the consciousness of this contradiction, it ranges itself alongside the changeable consciousness and is to itself the unessential one; but qua consciousness of unchangeableness, that is, of the essence in its simplicity, it must at once aim at liberating itself from the unessential, which is to say, at liberating itself from itself. For although for itself it is only the changeable, the unchangeable being something alien to it, it is itself simple and hence unchangeable consciousness, conscious of that consciousness as its own essence, yet in such a way that it itself is once again, for itself, not this essence. The standing it grants to the two cannot, then, be an indifference of the one toward the other, that is, not an indifference of itself toward the unchangeable; rather, immediately, it is both of them itself, and the relation of the two is for it a relation of essence to unessence, so that the latter is what must be sublated; but since the two are for it equally essential and equally contradictory, it is only that contradictory movement wherein one opposite finds no rest within its opposite, but instead generates itself there anew precisely as opposite.

There is thus at hand a struggle against an enemy over whom victory is rather a defeat, where to have attained the one is rather the loss of it in its opposite. The consciousness of life, of its existence and doing, is only pain over this existence and doing, for in it consciousness has only the consciousness of its opposite as the essence, and of its own nullity. Out of this it passes over into the elevation toward the unchangeable. But that elevation is itself this very consciousness; hence it is immediately a consciousness of the opposite, that is, of itself as singularity. The unchangeable that steps into consciousness is for just that reason touched at the same time by singularity, and is present only in company with it; far from singularity having been wiped out within the consciousness of the unchangeable, it does nothing there but keep coming forth.

Within this movement, however, what it experiences is precisely this coming-forth of singularity in the unchangeable, together with that of the unchangeable in singularity. There arises for it singularity in general in the unchangeable essence, and along with that its own singularity there. For the truth of this movement is precisely the being-one of this doubled consciousness. This unity comes to be for it, but at first as itself one in which the diversity of the two is still what dominates. Thereby a threefold manner in which singularity is bound up with the unchangeable is at hand for it; on the first occasion it comes forth to itself once more as standing in opposition to the unchangeable essence, and it finds itself flung back to where the struggle began, a struggle that stays the element of the relationship throughout. On the second occasion, however, the unchangeable itself has within it the singularity for consciousness; so that singularity is a shape of the unchangeable, to which the whole manner of existence thereby passes over. On the third occasion, it finds itself as this singular one within the unchangeable. The first unchangeable counts for it merely as the alien essence that passes sentence upon singularity; since the second is a shape of singularity such as consciousness itself is, consciousness becomes, thirdly, spirit, takes joy in finding itself there, and grows conscious that its singularity stands reconciled with the universal.

What presents itself here as the manner and relation of the unchangeable emerged as the experience which the divided self-consciousness undergoes in its unhappiness. Admittedly this experience is not a movement that is one-sidedly its own, for it is itself unchangeable consciousness, and the latter is therewith singular consciousness as well, so that the movement belongs no less to the unchangeable consciousness, which enters into it quite as much as the other does; for the movement runs through these moments: being at first unchangeable over against the singular in general, then being itself singular over against the other singular, and finally being one with it. But this consideration, so far as it belongs to us, comes too early here, for what has so far arisen for us is only unchangeableness taken as consciousness's unchangeableness, which on that account is not the true one but is still saddled with an opposition, and not the unchangeable taken in and for itself; so we do not know how the latter will relate. What has emerged here is only this, that to the consciousness which is our object here these indicated determinations appear in the unchangeable.

For this reason the unchangeable consciousness too retains, even in its own formation, the character and the basis of being divided and of being-for-itself over against the singular consciousness. For the singular consciousness, then, that the unchangeable takes on the shape of singularity is simply an occurrence; and in the same way it merely finds itself standing opposed to the unchangeable, so that it holds this relationship through nature; that in the end it finds itself within the unchangeable appears to it in part, to be sure, as produced through itself, or as taking place because it is itself singular; yet one part of this unity appears as belonging to the unchangeable, both as regards how the unity arose and in so far as it is; and the opposition persists inside this unity itself. In point of fact the formation of the unchangeable has not merely left the moment of the beyond standing but has fortified it still further; for while on one side the shape of singular actuality seems to have brought that moment nearer to consciousness, on the other side it now confronts consciousness as an opaque sensuous One, with all the brittleness that belongs to something actual; the hope of coming to be one with it is bound to stay hope, which is to say, to stay without fulfillment and without presence, since what stands between the hope and its fulfillment is precisely that absolute contingency, or unmoving indifference, residing in the formation itself, in what grounds the hope. Through the nature of the existent One, through the actuality it has put on, it necessarily comes about that it has vanished in time, and has been somewhere in space and far away, and simply remains far away.

Whereas at first the mere concept of the divided consciousness determined itself as aiming at the sublation of itself as singular and at becoming unchangeable consciousness, its striving now has this determination, that it rather sublates its relation to the pure unshaped unchangeable and gives itself only the relation to the shaped unchangeable. For what now counts for it as essence and as object is the being-one of the singular with the unchangeable, whereas within the concept the essential object had been the shapeless, abstract unchangeable alone; and the relationship constituted by that absolute dividedness of the concept is now the thing from which it must turn away. Its relation to the shaped unchangeable, at first an external one that takes that unchangeable as something alien and actual, it has to raise into an absolute becoming-one.

The movement by which the unessential consciousness strives after this being-one is itself threefold, answering to the threefold relationship it will bear to its shaped beyond; first as pure consciousness; secondly as a singular essence relating to actuality as desire and labor; and thirdly as consciousness of its being-for-itself. — In what way these three modes of its being stand and are determined within that universal relationship is what must now be seen.

Taking it first, then, as pure consciousness: the shaped unchangeable, in being for pure consciousness, seems to get posited just as it is in and for its own self. Only what it is in and for its own self has not yet arisen, as was already recalled. For it to be in consciousness just as it is in and for its own self would have to proceed from it rather than from consciousness; as it stands, though, this presence of its is so far at hand only one-sidedly, through consciousness, and for that very reason is neither complete nor genuine, but stays weighed down with incompleteness, or with an opposition.

Although the unhappy consciousness therefore lacks this presence, it has at the same time gone past pure thinking, so far as pure thinking is Stoicism's abstract thinking, which looks away from singularity altogether, and skepticism's merely restless thinking, — which is in fact only singularity as the unconscious contradiction and its unresting movement; — it lies beyond the two of them, it brings pure thinking and singularity together and holds them so, and yet it has not risen to that thinking for which consciousness's singularity has been reconciled with pure thinking itself. It stands rather at this middle point, where abstract thinking touches the singularity of consciousness qua singularity. It itself is this touching; it is pure thinking and singularity in their unity; and for it too there is this thinking singularity, or pure thinking, and the unchangeable itself essentially as singularity. But it is not for it that this its object, the unchangeable, which for it essentially has the shape of singularity, is it itself, it itself which is the singularity of consciousness.

In this first mode, accordingly, the mode in which it stands before us as pure consciousness, it does not relate to its object by thinking; rather, since it is indeed in itself pure thinking singularity and its object is just that too, while their relation to one another is not itself pure thinking, it goes, so to speak, no further than up to thinking, and is devotion. Its thinking as such remains the shapeless droning of a peal of bells or a warm suffusion of mist, a musical thinking that never arrives at the concept, which would be the only immanent objective mode. Its object does indeed come to be for this infinite pure inner feeling; but it makes its entry so as not to enter as something grasped in a concept, and therefore enters as something alien. What is thereby at hand is the inner movement belonging to the pure heart, a heart that feels itself, but feels itself painfully as dividedness; the movement of an infinite longing which carries the certainty that its own essence is just such a pure heart, pure thinking that thinks itself as singularity; and the certainty that, precisely because this object thinks itself as singularity, the longing is cognized and recognized by it. This essence, however, is at the same time the unattainable beyond, which flees in the very grasping, or rather has fled already. It has fled already; for it is on one side the unchangeable that thinks itself as singularity, so that consciousness reaches its own self in it immediately, reaches itself, but as that which is opposed to the unchangeable; rather than grasping the essence it merely feels, and has dropped back into itself; unable, in reaching, to hold off itself as this opposed one, it has grasped, in place of the essence, only unessentiality. Just as on the one side, in striving to reach itself in the essence, it grasps only its own separated actuality, so on the other side it cannot grasp the other as singular, or as actual. Search where one will, it is not to be found, for it is meant to be precisely a beyond, the sort of thing that admits of no finding. Sought as something singular, it is not a universal, thought singularity, not a concept, but something singular as object, or something actual; an object of immediate sense-certainty; and precisely for that reason only something that has vanished. For consciousness, therefore, only the grave of its life can come to presence. But because the grave is itself an actuality, and it runs counter to the nature of actuality to grant any enduring possession, this presence of the grave too is only the struggle of an effort that is bound to be lost. Yet once it has undergone the experience that the grave belonging to its actual unchangeable essence possesses no actuality, that the vanished singularity, qua vanished, is not the true singularity, it will abandon the search for the unchangeable singularity as something actual and abandon holding fast to it as something vanished, and only thereby does it become capable of finding singularity as the most genuine, or as the universal.

To begin with, however, the heart's return into itself must be understood thus, that the heart has itself as singular actuality. It is the pure heart which has found itself, for us or in itself, and is sated within itself, for although for it the essence severs itself from it in its feeling, in itself that feeling is self-feeling: what it has felt is the object of its own pure feeling, and that object is the heart itself; so it comes forward out of this as self-feeling, or as something actual having being for itself. Within this return into itself there has come to be, for us, its second relationship, that of desire and labor, which corroborates for consciousness the inner certainty of itself that it has attained for us, doing so by sublating and enjoying the alien essence, namely that essence in the form of self-subsistent things. The unhappy consciousness, though, finds itself merely as desiring and laboring, and it is not at hand for it that what underlies finding itself in this way is the inner certainty it has of itself, and that what it feels as the essence is this self-feeling. Since it does not possess that certainty for its own self, its inner being remains rather a broken certainty of itself; the corroboration it would obtain through labor and enjoyment is for that reason equally a broken one; or rather it must itself annihilate this corroboration, so that within it it does find corroboration, yet only corroboration of what it is for itself, namely of its dividedness.

For this consciousness the actuality against which desire and labor turn is no longer something null in itself, to be merely sublated and consumed by it, but something of the same sort as consciousness itself, an actuality broken in two, which on one side alone is null in itself while on the other side is also a hallowed world; it constitutes a shape of the unchangeable, since the unchangeable has preserved singularity within itself, and since, being universal qua unchangeable, its singularity carries the significance of all actuality whatsoever.

If consciousness were for itself a self-subsistent consciousness, and if actuality were for it null in and for itself, then in labor and in enjoyment it would arrive at the feeling of its self-subsistence, in that it would itself be the one which sublated actuality . Yet since actuality is for it a shape of the unchangeable, it is unable to sublate that actuality through itself. Rather, although it does arrive at the annihilation of actuality and at enjoyment, this happens for it essentially through the unchangeable itself surrendering its own shape and handing it over to consciousness for enjoyment. — Here consciousness on its own part steps forward likewise as something actual, but equally as inwardly broken, and this dividedness exhibits itself in its laboring and enjoying as a breaking apart into a relationship to actuality, that is, into being-for-itself, and into a being-in-itself. The former relationship to actuality is altering, or doing, the being-for-itself that belongs to the singular consciousness as such. But therein it is also in itself; this side belongs to the unchangeable beyond; the side in question consists of capacities and forces, an alien gift that the unchangeable likewise leaves to consciousness for its use.

In its doing, accordingly, consciousness stands at first within the relationship of two extremes; on one side it stands as the active here below, and facing it stands passive actuality, the two of them related to one another and yet the two of them also withdrawn into the unchangeable and holding fast to themselves. From either side, therefore, only a surface comes loose toward the other, a surface that enters the play of movement directed against the other side. — The active extreme sublates the extreme of actuality; actuality on its side, however, admits of being sublated only because its own unchangeable essence sublates it, repels it away from itself, and surrenders what has been repelled to the activity. Active force makes its appearance as the power within which actuality dissolves; but for that reason, for this consciousness, whose in-itself or essence is another over against it, this power, in the guise of which it steps forward in its activity, is the beyond of its own self. So instead of returning into itself out of its doing and having corroborated itself for its own self, it reflects this movement of doing back into the other extreme, which is thereby exhibited as purely universal, as the absolute power out of which the movement issued in every direction, and which is said to be the essence alike of the extremes as they first stepped forward, now breaking up, and of the alternation itself.

The unchangeable consciousness makes renunciation of its shape and surrenders it, whereas the singular consciousness renders thanks, that is, refuses itself the satisfaction of the consciousness of its self-subsistence and consigns the essence of the doing away from itself over to the beyond; and through these two moments in which both parties reciprocally give themselves up, consciousness does after all come to have its unity with the unchangeable. But this unity is simultaneously afflicted with separation, broken within itself anew, and from it the opposition of the universal and the singular steps forth once more. For consciousness forswears the satisfaction of its self-feeling only ostensibly, whereas what it obtains is the actual satisfaction of that feeling; after all, desire, work, and enjoyment are what it has been; as consciousness, it is the one that has willed, done, and enjoyed. Its giving of thanks is no different: in it consciousness acknowledges the essence in the other extreme and sublates itself, and yet this thanking is its very own doing, one that offsets the doing of the other extreme and confronts the self-abandoning benefaction with a doing of equal weight; if the other leaves it nothing but its surface, consciousness thanks all the same, and therein, by surrendering its own doing, that is, its essence, it accomplishes rather more than the other does, which merely sheds a surface of itself. So the entire movement bends back into the extreme of singularity, and it does so not merely in the course of actual desiring, working, and enjoying, but even within the thanking, where the reverse appears to be taking place. In this consciousness feels itself to be this singular, and the semblance of its renouncing does not take it in, for the truth of that renouncing is that it has surrendered nothing of itself; what has been brought about is merely a reflection redoubled into the two extremes, and what results is a cleavage repeated once more: on one side the counterposed consciousness of the unchangeable, on the other the consciousness of the willing, accomplishing, and enjoying that stands over against it, and of the renouncing of self as such, or of singularity that exists for itself in general.

What has now entered is the third relationship belonging to the movement of this consciousness, a relationship issuing from the second inasmuch as consciousness has there put itself to the test, through its willing and accomplishing, and shown itself in truth to be self-subsistent. In the first relationship consciousness was merely the concept of actual consciousness, that is, the inward heart, which in doing and enjoyment is not yet actual; the second relationship is this actualization, in the form of outward doing and enjoying; but on returning from that, consciousness is one that has experienced itself as actual and effective consciousness, or one for which its being in and for itself is true. Here, however, the enemy has now been found out in his most proper shape. Within the struggle of the heart the singular consciousness exists merely as a musical and abstract moment; and where that essenceless being gets realized, namely in work and in enjoyment, consciousness can straightaway forget itself, while the conscious ownness that has arisen in this actuality is beaten down by the recognition that thanks. Yet this beating down amounts, truly considered, to consciousness returning into itself, and indeed into itself as the actuality that is genuine for it.

In this third relationship the one extreme is that genuine actuality, and what the relationship consists in is this actuality's relation, as a nullity, to the universal essence; the movement of that relation still remains to be considered.

As regards, first, the opposed relation of consciousness, in which its reality is immediately the null for it, its actual doing accordingly becomes a doing of nothing, and its enjoyment becomes the feeling of its unhappiness. With this, doing and enjoyment lose all universal content and significance, for through such content they would have a being in and for itself, and both withdraw into the singularity upon which consciousness is directed in order to sublate it. Consciousness is conscious of itself as this actual singular in the animal functions. Instead of being performed without further ado, as something that is in and for itself null and can acquire no importance or essentiality for spirit, these functions, since they are the ones in which the enemy shows himself in his peculiar shape, are rather the object of earnest exertion and become precisely what matters most. But since this enemy engenders himself in his very defeat, and consciousness, in fixing him for itself, far from becoming free of him, always lingers with him and always sees itself defiled, while at the same time this content of its striving is, instead of something essential, the lowest thing, and instead of something universal, the most singular, we see only a personality confined to itself and to its petty doing, brooding over itself, as unhappy as it is impoverished.

But to both of these, the feeling of its unhappiness and the impoverishment of its doing, there attaches itself no less the consciousness of its own unity with the unchangeable. For it is the thought of the unchangeable that mediates the annihilation which consciousness attempts immediately upon its actual being, and this occurs within this very relation. The mediated relation is what makes up the essence of the negative movement wherein consciousness sets itself against its own singularity, a movement that is nonetheless positive as well, being a relation in itself, and that will bring this unity of its into being for consciousness itself.

This mediated relation, accordingly, has the form of a syllogism: the singularity that initially fixes itself in opposition to the in-itself is conjoined with that other extreme only by way of a third term. It is through this middle that the extreme of unchangeable consciousness exists for the unessential consciousness, and contained in that at the same time is this, that the latter likewise exists for the former only through this middle; the middle is accordingly one that presents each of the two extremes to the other and acts as the reciprocal servant of each before the other. The middle is a conscious essence in its own right, for it is a doing through which consciousness as such gets mediated; and what this doing has for its content is the extirpation that consciousness performs upon its own singularity.

In this extirpation, then, consciousness sets itself free from doing and from enjoyment as its own; being the extreme that exists for itself, it pushes the essence of its will away from itself and unloads onto the middle, onto the servant, the ownness and the freedom of the decision, and along with these the guilt attaching to its doing. This mediator, standing in immediate relation to the unchangeable essence, serves by giving his counsel as to what is right. The action, being the carrying out of a decision that is alien, ceases on the side of the doing or of the will to be its own. But its objective side still remains to the unessential consciousness, namely the fruit of its work and the enjoyment. So it thrusts these away from itself as well, making renunciation of the actuality that accrued to it in work and enjoyment just as it did of its will; renunciation of that actuality in part as the achieved truth of its self-conscious self-subsistence — inasmuch as it goes about representing and voicing something entirely foreign to it and senseless; — in part as external property — inasmuch as it parts with a portion of what work had earned it in the way of possessions; in part renunciation of the enjoyment it has had — inasmuch as by fasting and mortification it once again refuses it to itself altogether.

By these moments, the giving up of its own decision, then of property and enjoyment, and finally the positive moment of pursuing a business that it does not understand, consciousness genuinely and entirely strips itself of the consciousness of inner and of outer freedom, of actuality as its being-for-itself; it possesses the certainty of having truly externalized its I, and of having made a thing of its immediate self-consciousness, an objective being. — Only through this actual sacrifice was consciousness able to corroborate its renunciation of itself; for it is there and nowhere else that the fraud disappears which resides in the inward recognition given by thanking with heart, disposition, and mouth, a recognition that does indeed shove all the power of being-for-itself off itself and credit it to a bestowal from above, but that in this very shoving-off retains the outer ownness for itself in the possession which it does not surrender, while retaining the inner ownness in the consciousness of a decision it has itself arrived at, and in the consciousness of a content of its own determining, which it has not exchanged for an alien content that fills it senselessly.

But in the sacrifice that has actually been carried out, just as consciousness has sublated the doing as its own, so too, in itself, its unhappiness has let go of it. That this letting-go has taken place in itself is, however, something done by the syllogism's other extreme, the extreme that is the in-itself-existing essence. Yet that sacrifice on the part of the unessential extreme was at once no one-sided doing; it held within itself the doing of the other as well. For the surrender of one's own will is negative on one side only, namely according to its concept or in itself, while being positive at the same time: it posits the will as an other, and determinately as a will that is not singular but universal. For this consciousness the positive significance carried by the negatively posited singular will is nothing other than the will belonging to the other extreme, a will that accrues to it, precisely because it is another for it, not by its own agency but by way of the third, the mediator in the form of counsel. Hence for it its will does indeed become the universal will, the will that is in itself, but it itself is not for itself this in-itself; the giving up of its own will as singular is not for it, according to the concept, the positive of the universal will. Likewise its giving up of possession and enjoyment has only the same negative significance, and the universal that comes to be for it thereby is not for it its own doing. This unity of the objective and of being-for-itself, a unity residing in the concept of doing and on that account becoming for consciousness the essence and object, — since this unity is not for consciousness the concept of its own doing, neither is it the case that the unity comes to be object for it immediately and by its own agency; instead, consciousness has the mediating servant articulate for it this certainty, itself still broken, that only in itself is its unhappiness the inverted, namely a doing self-satisfying in its own doing, or blessed enjoyment; that its impoverished doing is likewise in itself the inverted, namely absolute doing; and that according to the concept, doing is doing at all only as the doing of the singular. But for it itself, doing, and its actual doing, remains an impoverished one, and its enjoyment remains pain, and their having-been-sublated, taken in the positive significance, remains a beyond. But in this object, wherein its doing and being as this singular consciousness is being and doing in itself for it, there has arisen for it the representation of reason, of the certainty of consciousness that in its singularity it is absolutely in itself, or is all reality.

V. Certainty and Truth of Reason

Consciousness goes back into itself within the thought it has laid hold of, the thought that the singular consciousness is in itself absolute essence. Being-in-itself, for the unhappy consciousness, amounts to the beyond of itself. Yet its movement has already carried this out on it: singularity in its full development, or singularity as actual consciousness, has been posited as the negative of itself, namely as the objective extreme, and its being-for-itself has been wrestled outward from it and turned into being; in that, its unity with this universal has likewise come to be for it, a unity which, for us, no longer falls outside it, since the singular that has been sublated is the universal; and because consciousness preserves itself within this negativity of its own, its essence lies in it as such. Its truth is what shows itself as the middle in that syllogism where the extremes had stepped forth absolutely held apart, the middle which announces to the unchangeable consciousness that the singular has renounced itself, and announces to the singular that the unchangeable is for it no longer an extreme, but is instead reconciled with the singular itself. This middle is that unity which has immediate knowledge of both and relates them to one another, and it is the consciousness of their unity, which it announces to consciousness and thereby to its own self, namely as the certainty that it is all truth.

Since self-consciousness is reason, the relationship it has had to otherness, negative up to this point, swings over into a positive one. What has mattered to it hitherto was solely its self-subsistence and its freedom: to salvage and hold on to itself, for its own sake, at the cost of the world or of the actuality belonging to it, both of which it had seen as the negative of its own essence. But as reason that is assured of its own self, it has received calm in the face of them and is able to bear them; for it has certainty of its own self as the reality, or rather certainty that all actuality is nothing other than it; its thinking is immediately the actuality itself; and so it relates itself to actuality as idealism. In grasping itself in this way, it seems to it as if the world were only now coming to be for it; earlier it does not understand the world; it desires it and works on it; it withdraws out of it into itself, and annihilates it for itself, and annihilates itself as consciousness, as consciousness of the world as the essence, and equally as consciousness of the world's nullity. It is at this point and no earlier, once the grave of its truth has been lost, once the annihilating of its actuality has itself been annihilated, and once the singularity of consciousness is for it in itself absolute essence, that it discovers the world to be its own new actual world, a world that holds interest for it now in its remaining, as earlier only in its vanishing; for the subsistence of that world becomes for it the truth and presence that are its own; and it is certain that what it experiences there is nothing but itself.

Reason is consciousness's certainty of being all reality: in these terms idealism states reason's concept. Just as the consciousness that steps forth as reason possesses that certainty immediately in itself, so too does idealism enunciate it immediately: I am I, and the sense of this is that the I which is my object is not, as it is in self-consciousness generally, nor as in free self-consciousness, in the former case merely an empty object in general, in the latter merely an object that pulls back from the others which are still valid alongside it, but is rather an object accompanied by the consciousness of the non-being of any other whatever, the one and only object, all reality and presence. But self-consciousness is all reality not only for itself but also in itself, and it is so only by becoming this reality, or rather by proving itself to be such. It proves itself so along the path on which, first, in the dialectical movement of meaning, perceiving, and the understanding, otherness as in itself vanishes, and then, in the movement through the self-subsistence of consciousness in mastery and servitude, through the thought of freedom, the skeptical liberation, and the struggle for the absolute liberation of the consciousness split in two within itself, otherness, insofar as it is only for it, vanishes for it itself. Two sides came forward in succession: on the one, the determinateness of being belonged, for consciousness, to the essence or the true; on the other, the essence had merely to be for it. Yet the two of them came down to a single truth: that whatever is, or the in-itself, has being only to the extent that it is for consciousness, while whatever is for it is likewise in itself. In stepping forth immediately as reason, the consciousness which is this truth has that path behind its back and has let it fall into forgetting; or, otherwise put, reason in its immediate stepping forth arises solely as the certainty belonging to that truth. So it merely gives assurance of being all reality, without itself comprehending what it says; for the comprehension of this immediately expressed assertion is precisely that forgotten path. And likewise, for anyone who has not traveled it, this assertion — heard in this pure form, since in a concrete shape he no doubt makes it himself — is incomprehensible.

Idealism, which does not exhibit that path but begins with this assertion, is therefore likewise pure assurance, one that neither comprehends itself nor can make itself comprehensible to others. It pronounces an immediate certainty that faces other immediate certainties standing over against it, certainties which were lost on that path alone. By the same right, then, the assurances belonging to these other certainties set themselves alongside the assurance given for that certainty. Reason invokes the self-consciousness present in each consciousness: I am I; what is object and essence to me is I; and none will deny reason this truth. But by founding it upon this appeal, reason gives its sanction to the truth of that other certainty as well, namely to this one: there is something other for me; what is other than I counts as object and essence for me, or, when I am my own object and essence, I am so only insofar as I draw back from the other in general and take my place as an actuality alongside it. — Only when reason steps forth as reflection out of this opposed certainty does its assertion about itself step forth not merely as certainty and assurance but as truth; and not alongside others, but as the sole one. The immediate stepping forth is the abstraction of its being-at-hand, whose essence and being-in-itself is the absolute concept, that is, the movement of its having-become. — How consciousness determines its relationship to otherness, that is, to its object, will vary with the particular stage of the world-spirit's becoming conscious of itself at which consciousness happens to stand. The manner in which, on each occasion, it immediately comes upon itself and its object and gives them their determination, or the manner in which it is for itself, turns on this: what it has by now become, or what it in itself already is.

Reason is the certainty of being all of reality. This in-itself, however, or this reality, remains something wholly universal as yet, reality in its pure abstraction. What we have here is the first positivity that self-consciousness has in its own self, for itself, so that the I amounts to nothing more than the pure essentiality of what is, in other words the simple category. Formerly the category signified the essentiality of what is, indeterminately the essentiality of what is in general or of what is as set over against consciousness; now it is the essentiality, or the simple unity, that what is has only as thinking actuality; that is to say, it is this: that being and self-consciousness are one and the same essence; and they are the same not through any comparison, but in and for itself. Only the one-sided, bad idealism lets this unity step forth once more as consciousness on the one side, with an in-itself over against it. — This category, though, this simple unity of being and of self-consciousness, has difference in it all the same; for its essence consists in just this, in being immediately equal to itself within otherness, within absolute difference. Difference therefore is; but it is completely transparent, and is a difference that at the same time is none. It makes its appearance as a multiplicity of categories. When idealism pronounces self-consciousness's simple unity to be all reality, and when it makes that unity the essence immediately, without having comprehended it as absolutely negative essence — only such an essence has negation, determinateness, or difference in itself — then this second point, that within the category there are differences or species, proves still more incomprehensible than the first. This assurance in general, as well as the assurance of any determinate number of the category's species, is a new assurance, though one that contains in itself the point that it no longer needs to be put up with as an assurance. For since difference begins within the pure I, within the pure understanding itself, it is thereby posited that here immediacy, the assuring and the finding, are to be given up, and that comprehending is to begin. But to pick up the multiplicity of categories once again in one way or another as something found, from the judgments, for example, and simply to acquiesce in them, is in truth to be counted a disgrace for science; where else could the understanding show a necessity, if it cannot show one in its own case, the case of pure necessity itself.

Since the pure essentiality that things have, along with their difference, now belongs to reason, strictly speaking there could no longer be any talk at all of things, that is, of anything that for consciousness would be nothing but the negative of itself. For if the pure category has the many categories as its species, this says that it remains their genus or essence and is not set over against them. But they are already the ambiguous, which at the same time has in itself the otherness against the pure category in its multiplicity. By this multiplicity they do in fact contradict it, and the pure unity is bound to sublate them within itself, whereby it constitutes itself as the differences' negative unity. In its character as negative unity, however, it shuts out from itself the differences taken as such no less than it shuts out that first pure unity, the immediate one, taken as such; and so it is singularity, a new category, one that is excluding consciousness, that is, one that consists in there being something other for it. Singularity is the transition the category makes out of its concept toward an external reality: the pure schema that is consciousness quite as much as, in being singularity and an excluding One, it is the pointing toward something other. But what counts as this other of this category is nothing but the other first categories, namely pure essentiality together with pure difference; and within this category, that is, precisely within the being-posited of the other, or within that other itself, consciousness is just as much its own self. Every one of these distinct moments points to another; yet within them it never comes to any otherness. It is to the species that the pure category points, and they in turn make their transition into the negative category, or singularity; the latter, though, points back to the former; the latter is itself pure consciousness, which in each of them remains for itself this clear unity with itself, though a unity that is likewise directed toward something other, toward what has vanished in the very act of being and is generated once more in the very act of having vanished.

We see pure consciousness posited here in a doubled way: at one time as the restless going back and forth that runs through all its moments, with otherness hovering before it in them, an otherness that sublates itself in the act of grasping; at another time rather as the calm unity which has certainty of its truth. That movement counts as the other where this unity is concerned, while this calm unity counts as the other where the movement is concerned; and consciousness and object take turns in these reciprocal determinations. So at one time consciousness is for itself the searching that goes back and forth, having as its object the pure in-itself and essence; at another time it is for itself the simple category, and the object is then the differences in their movement. But consciousness as essence is this whole course itself: passing over out of itself as simple category into singularity and into the object, intuiting this course in the object, sublating it as something distinct, appropriating it, and giving voice to itself as this certainty: that it is all reality, both it itself and its object.

What it pronounces first is nothing but this abstract, empty word: that everything is its own. This is because the certainty that it is all reality is as yet nothing more than the pure category. Empty idealism gives expression to this first reason that cognizes itself in the object, an idealism which apprehends reason only as reason at first is for itself, and which, by exhibiting within all being this pure Mine belonging to consciousness and by pronouncing things to be sensations or representations, imagines it has shown that Mine to be completed reality. It must therefore be absolute empiricism at the same time, for in order to fill out the empty Mine, that is, for difference and for all development and shaping of that Mine, its reason requires an alien impetus, in which alone the manifoldness of sensing or representing is supposed to reside. This idealism therefore becomes the same sort of self-contradicting ambiguity as skepticism, except that skepticism expresses itself negatively and idealism positively, though it just as little brings together its contradictory thoughts, pure consciousness as all reality, and equally the alien impetus, or sensuous sensing and representing, as an equal reality, but instead flings itself back and forth from the one to the other and has lapsed into the bad, namely the sensuous, infinity. Inasmuch as all reality, for reason, has the significance of the abstract Mine, while the other is to it an indifferent alien, what gets posited in this is precisely the knowledge reason has of another, the very knowledge that showed up earlier as meaning, perceiving, and as the understanding that apprehends what is meant and what is perceived. At the same time it is the concept of this idealism itself that asserts such knowledge not to be true knowledge, since the truth of knowledge lies in the unity of apperception and nowhere else. So the pure reason of this idealism, in order to arrive at this other which is essential to it, that is to say, which is the in-itself, and which it nevertheless does not possess within its own self, is sent back by its own doing to a knowledge that is no knowledge of the true; knowingly and willingly it thus sentences itself to an untrue knowledge, and it proves unable to give up meaning and perceiving, though these hold no truth for it. It stands in an immediate contradiction, asserting as the essence a doubled and flatly opposed pair, the unity of apperception and equally the thing, which, whether one calls it an alien impetus, or an empirical essence, or sensuousness, or the thing in itself, stays in its concept just what it was, something alien to that unity.

What holds this idealism inside the contradiction is its asserting reason's abstract concept to be the true; hence reality arises for it immediately, and arises just as much as a reality that is precisely not reason's reality, whereas reason was meant at the same time to be all reality; and so it stays a restless searching, one that in the very searching declares the satisfaction of finding to be flatly impossible. — Actual reason, however, is not so inconsistent as that; rather, being as yet no more than the certainty that it is all reality, it is aware within this concept that as certainty, as I, it is not yet the reality in truth, and it is driven on to lift its certainty into truth and to fill out the empty Mine.

A. Observing Reason

This consciousness, for which being carries the significance of what is its own, we now see entering once more into meaning and perceiving, yet not as entering the certainty of something merely other, but with the certainty of itself being this other. Formerly it had merely befallen this consciousness to perceive and to experience this or that about the thing; here it sets up the observations and the experience on its own. Meaning and perceiving, which earlier sublated themselves for us, consciousness now sublates for itself; reason's aim is to know the truth, to locate as concept whatever counts as a thing for meaning and perceiving, which amounts to having within thinghood nothing but the consciousness of itself. Reason's interest in the world is therefore now universal, for reason is the certainty that it has presence there, or that presence is rational. It searches for its other while knowing that in it there is nothing to possess but itself; what it searches for is only its own infinity.

At first merely sensing itself in actuality, or knowing actuality only as its own in a general way, reason advances in this sense to a universal taking-possession of the property guaranteed to it, and upon every height and in every depth it plants the emblem of its sovereignty. But this superficial "mine" is not reason's ultimate interest; the joy of this universal taking-possession still finds within its property another that stays alien to it, another abstract reason does not have in its own self. Reason senses itself to be an essence deeper than the pure I is, and it has to demand that difference, manifold being, become for it its own, that it intuit itself as actuality, and that it find itself present as shape and thing. But though reason burrow through all the innards of things and lay open all their veins so that it might leap forth to meet itself out of them, it will not arrive at this good fortune; rather, it must beforehand have brought itself to completion in itself, so as then to be capable of experiencing its completion.

Consciousness observes; that is, reason wants to discover itself and to have itself as an object that has being, as an actual, sensuously present mode. This observing consciousness does, to be sure, mean and say that it wants to experience not itself but, on the contrary, the essence that things have as things. This consciousness means and says so because it is reason while reason is not yet an object for it as such. If it knew reason to be the same essence in things as in itself, and knew that only within consciousness can reason be present in the shape proper to it, then it would descend into its own depth and look for reason there rather than in things. Had it found reason in that depth, reason would be sent back out from there to actuality, so as to intuit within actuality its sensuous expression, yet would at once take that expression essentially as concept. Reason, in the way it comes forward immediately as consciousness's certainty of being all reality, understands its reality to mean the immediacy of being, and likewise understands the I's unity with this objective essence to mean an immediate unity, a unity in which it has not yet held the moments of being and I apart and then joined them again, or which it has not yet cognized. As observing consciousness it therefore goes at things under the opinion that it is taking them in truth as sensuous things set over against the I; yet its actual doing runs counter to that opinion, for it cognizes things, it transforms their sensuousness into concepts, that is, precisely into a being that is simultaneously I, and thereby transforms thinking into a thinking that has being, or being into a being that is thought, and in fact it asserts that only as concepts do things have truth. What emerges in this for this observing consciousness is only what the things are, while for us it is what it itself is; the result of its movement, though, will be that it comes to be for itself what it is in itself.

The doing of observing reason has to be examined through the moments belonging to its movement, in which it takes up nature, spirit, and finally the relation between the two as sensuous being, and searches for itself as an actuality that has being.