VI. Spirit

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

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

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

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

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

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

A. True Spirit, Ethical Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

c. The Condition of Right

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

B. Self-Estranged Spirit; Culture

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

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

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

I. The World of Self-Estranged Spirit

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

a. Culture and its Realm of Actuality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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