VII. Religion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A. Natural Religion

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

a, The Light-Essence

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

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

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

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

b. The Plant and the Animal

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

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

c. The Master Builder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

B. The Religion of Art

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

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

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

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

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

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

a. The Abstract Work of Art

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

b. The Living Work of Art

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

c. The Spiritual Work of Art

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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