a. Observation of Nature

However much the unthinking consciousness speaks of observation and experience as the source of truth, still its words may make it sound as if the whole business were only a matter of tasting, smelling, feeling, hearing, and seeing. In the enthusiasm with which it recommends tasting, smelling, etc., it forgets to say that it also in fact has no less essentially already determined the object of this sensing, and that, to itself, this determination counts for at least as much as that sensing. It will also without further ado admit that it is in general not that much concerned with perceiving, and that, for example, the perception that the penknife lies next to this tobacco-box will not count for it as an observation. The meaning of what is perceived should at least be that of a universal, not a sensuous this.

At first, this universal is only just what remains self-consistent, and its movement is only the uniform repetition of the same doing. The consciousness which finds in the object only universality, or the abstract mine, must shift the responsibility to itself for the real movement of the universal. While it is not yet the understanding of it, it must at least be the memory of it, a memory which expresses in a universal manner what is in actuality only available in a singularly individual manner. This superficial accentuation of individuality and the equally superficial form of universality into which the sensuous is only incorporated, but without the sensuous having in itself become a universal, or the describing of the thing, still does not have the movement in the object itself. Instead, the movement is in the describing. The object as it is described is no longer of interest; if one object is described, then another must be given preference and always sought out so that the describing does not itself just peter out. If it is no longer easy to find new, whole things, then it must turn back to those already found in order to divide them still further, to analyze them, and then to track down new aspects of thinghood in them. This restless, unceasing instinct can never run out of material; to find a new genus of distinctive significance, or even to discover a new planet, which, although it is an individual,⁸ nonetheless corresponds to the nature of a universal, can only fall to the lot of the lucky few. However, the boundary line that singles out, for example, what is an elephant, an oak, gold, and the line between the genus and the species itself pass through many stages into the endless particularization of the chaotic range of animals and plants, mountain ranges, metals, earth, etc., such that it is only violence and artfulness which can first put them on view. In this realm of the indeterminateness of the universal, in which particularization again approximates to singularization and into which particularization again entirely descends here and there into such singularization, what is opened up is an inexhaustible supply for observing and describing. However, here at the limits of the universal, where such an enormous field is opened up for it, what it has found is, instead of an immeasurable wealth, in fact only the limits of nature and of its own doings. It can no longer know whether what seems to have being in itself is not a contingency. What bears in itself the stamp of a confused or immature structure, of weakness and the elemental indeterminateness of a structure barely developing itself, cannot also make even a claim only to be described.

However much these acts of seeking and describing seem to be concerned only with things, still we see that in fact they do not advance into sensuous perceiving. Rather, what enables things to be known is more important for this seeking and describing than is the left-over range of sensuous properties, something which the thing itself cannot do without but from which consciousness exempts itself. By making this difference between the essential and the inessential, the concept elevates itself out of the distractions of sensibility, and, in doing so, cognition⁹ explains that what is at issue essentially has to do at least as much with itself as it does with things. Within this twofold essentiality, it slips into wavering back and forth about whether what is essential and necessary for cognition can also be said to be in the things. On the one hand, the distinguishing marks¹⁰ of things should only serve cognition as those marks through which the things are to be distinguished from each other. However, on the other hand it is not what is inessential in things which is cognized,¹¹ but rather that through which they themselves break free from the universal continuity of being as such, cut themselves loose from others, and be on their own.¹² Those distinguishing marks should not only have an essential relation to cognition; they should also be the essential determinatenesses of the things, and that artificial system should be in accordance with the system of nature itself and only express it. This follows necessarily from the concept of reason, and in its systems, the instinct of reason – for it behaves in this observing only as an instinct – has also reached this unity where its very objects are so constituted that they have an essentiality within them, or they have a being-for-itself within them, and they are not simply an accident of this moment or of just being here. The distinguishing marks of animals, for example, are taken from their claws and teeth. Indeed, not only does cognition distinguish one animal from another by this means, but it is by these means that the animal itself separates itself off from others. It is through these weapons that it preserves itself for itself and keeps itself detached from the universal. In contrast, the plant never gets as far as being-for-itself; instead, it only makes contact with the limit of individuality. It is at this limit where plants show the semblance of dividing themselves in two¹³ into sexes, and for that reason it is at this very limit that plants have been surveyed and distinguished from each other. However, what stands at an even lower level cannot itself any longer differentiate itself from an other; instead, it dwindles away as it comes into opposition. The motionless being and the being in relationships come into conflict with each other, and the thing in the latter is something different from the thing in the former, since, in contrast, the individual is what preserves itself in relations with others. However, what is incapable of this and chemically becomes something other than it is empirically, confuses cognition. It thereby brings it into the same conflict about whether cognition is to stay put with one side or with the other, since the thing itself is not consistent,¹⁴ and these two sides come undone in it.

In those systems of universal self-consistencies, this self-consistency therefore means the self-consistency of cognition as much as it means the self-consistency of the things themselves. Yet this expansion of these consistent determinatenesses, each of which peacefully describes the course of its progress and maintains a space in order to answer to itself, just as essentially passes over into its opposite, into the disarray of these determinatenesses. For the distinguishing mark, the universal determinateness, is the unity of opposites, of the determinate and of the universal in itself, and it must therefore break apart into this opposition. Now however much the determinateness overpowers, on the one hand, the universal in which it has its essence, still this universal likewise keeps, on the other hand, that determinateness under its dominance, and both forces that determinateness to its limit, and mingles its differences and its essentialities together there. Observation, which kept them apart in orderly fashion and believed that in them it had hold of something fixed, sees one principle reaching out over and across another, sees disarray and transitions forming themselves, and sees something combined in this one which it at first took to be utterly separated, and sees something separated which it had counted as belonging together. Only in the most universal determinations – for example, in what count as the essential distinguishing marks of an animal or a plant –the observing, in clinging tenaciously to motionless self-consistent being, must see itself here teased with cases that rob it of every determination, which silence the universality it has reached, and which set it back again to unthinking observing and describing.

In restricting itself to the simple or to sensuous distractions through the universal, this restrictive observing thus finds in its object the disarray of its own principle because what is determinate must by its very nature lose itself in its opposite. On those very grounds, reason must progress instead from inert determinateness, which had the semblance of lasting, to the observation of what such determinateness is in truth, namely, its relating itself to its opposite. What are called essential distinguishing marks are motionless determinatenesses, which, as they express themselves and as they are grasped as simple, do not exhibit what constitutes their nature, namely, to be vanishing moments of that movement taking itself back into itself. While the instinct of reason now gets around to seeking out these distinguishing marks, it searches for the law and the concepts of those determinatenesses. It does this according to the determinateness of the nature of those distinguishing marks, which for each of them essentially consists in not existing for itself but in passing over into its opposite. To be sure, it searches for them just as much as existing actuality, but, to itself, this actuality will in fact disappear, and the aspects of the law will become pure moments, or abstractions, such that the law itself comes to light in the nature of the concept, which has abolished in itself the indifferent stable existence of sensuous actuality.

To observing consciousness, the truth of the law is in experience in the way that sensuous being is for it, which is to say, it is not in and for itself. However much the law does not have its truth in the concept, still it is something contingent and not a necessity, or not really a law. However, that the law's being as a concept not only does not conflict with its being available for observation but for that very reason is instead in possession of necessary existence, and it is for observation. The universal in the sense of a rational universality is also the universal in the previous sense of its exhibiting itself for that consciousness as what is current and actual, or the concept presents itself in the mode of thinghood and sensuous being – but without for that reason losing its nature and falling back down into inert stable existence or indifferent succession. What is universally valid is also what is universally effective:¹⁵ What ought to be is also in fact what is, and what only should be, but is not, has no real truth. The instinct of reason remains in the right when it stands firm on this point and when it does not allow itself to be led into error by intellectual fantasies¹⁶ which only ought to be, and which, as what ought to be, are supposed to be true even if they have never been encountered in any experience at all – it does not allow itself to be led into error by hypotheses, much less by all the other invisibilities of the perennial ought, for reason is just this certainty of being in possession of reality, and what for consciousness is not an independent being,¹⁷ which is to say, what does not appear, is for consciousness nothing at all.

That the truth of law is essentially reality becomes for the consciousness which sticks to observation again an opposition to the concept and to the universal in itself, or, to itself, such a thing as its law is not an essence that stems from reason. In that law, it supposes that it has received something alien. Yet it refutes its own supposition in its taking its universality not to mean that all singular sensuous things must have provided evidence for the appearance of law in order for it to be able to assert the truth of the law. The assertion that “if you pick a stone off the ground and drop it, then it falls,” does not at all require the experiment to have been made with all stones; more likely, it just says that this experiment must have been tried with at least a good many stones, and from that we can with the greatest probability, or with perfect right by analogy, draw an inference about the rest. Yet analogy not only gives no perfect right, but its very nature refutes itself so often that the inference to be drawn from analogy itself is instead that analogy does not permit an inference to be drawn. Probability, to which the result of the inference would be reduced, loses with regard to truth every difference of lesser and greater probability; let the probability be as great as it may, vis-à-vis truth, it is nothing. However, the instinct of reason accepts such laws as the truth, and it is in the relation to its necessity, of which it does not take cognizance,¹⁸ that it first slips into making this distinction and then slips into reducing to probability the truth about what is at issue in order to designate the incomplete way that truth is available for the consciousness which has not yet achieved insight into the pure concept, for universality is present only as simple immediate universality. However, at the same time, on account of this universality, the law has truth for that consciousness: That “the stone falls” is, to that consciousness, true because, to consciousness, the stone is heavy, which is to say, because in its weight the stone has in and for itself an essential relation to the earth which is expressed in its falling. Consciousness thus has in experience the existence¹⁹ of the law, but it likewise has it there as concept, and only on account of both circumstances together is the law true, to itself. The law counts as law because it exhibits itself in appearance and at the same time is in itself the concept.

Because at the same time the law is in itself the concept, the instinct of reason of this consciousness necessarily sets itself to purifying the law and its moments into concepts but without knowing that this is what it wants to do, and it thus sets up experiments about the law. As the law at first appears, it exhibits itself impurely, as enveloped in singular sensuous being, and the concept which constitutes its nature exhibits itself as sunken into empirical material. In its experiments, the instinct of reason sets itself to finding out what follows in such and such circumstances. The law seems thereby only to be immersed even more in sensuous being, yet in all this, this sensuous being is instead lost. The inner significance of this research is that it finds the pure conditions of the law, and even if the consciousness expressing this should think that by doing so it is saying something different, it is saying that it is supposed to elevate the law entirely into the concept and to do away with all the links its moments have to determinate being. For example, negative electricity more or less first makes itself known as resin-electricity, just as positive electricity more or less first makes itself known as glass-electricity. Through experiment, both entirely lose this significance and become purely positive and negative electricity, neither of which is any longer bound up with things of a particular kind. We then can no longer say that there are bodies which are positively electrical and others which are negatively electrical. In the same way, the relation between acid and base and their movement with regard to each other constitute a law in which these oppositions appear as bodies. Yet these isolated things have no actuality; the violence which tears them apart cannot prevent them from promptly entering again into a process, for they only are this relation. They cannot last on their own,²⁰ like a tooth or a claw, and be pointed out in that way. That their essence is to pass over immediately into a neutral product makes their being into a sublated being, or into a universal, and acid and base have truth only in being universal. In the way that glass and resin thus can be positively electrical as well as negatively electrical, so too are acid and base in the same way not bound as properties to this or that actuality. Rather, each thing is only relatively acidic or basic. What seems to be decidedly a base or an acid receives in the so-called synsomates the opposite significance in relation to an other. – In this way, the result of the experiments sublates the moments, or the spiritualizations,²¹ as properties of determinate things, and it frees the predicates from their subjects. It is only as universal, as they are in truth, that these predicates are discovered. On account of this self-sufficiency, they therefore are given the names of matters, which are neither bodies nor properties. One does well to be on one's guard against using the term, “bodies,” to characterize oxygen, etc., positive and negative electricity, heat, etc.

In contrast, matter is not an existing thing but is rather being as a universal, or being in the mode of the concept. Reason, which is still instinct, correctly makes this distinction without being conscious that it, as it seeks the law in all sensuous being, sublates therein their merely sensuous being, and, as it construes the moments of the law as matters, their essentiality has become universal, and, in such a way of putting things, has expressed them as a non-sensuous sensuousness, an incorporeal and nonetheless objective being.

It is still to be seen what twists and turns its result will take for the instinct of reason and what new shape of its observing will thereby come on the scene. We see the pure law which is freed from sensuous being as the truth of this experimenting consciousness,²² as the concept, which, present in sensuous being self-sufficiently and unrestrainedly, moves itself within that sensuous being; it is immersed within sensuous being while being free-standing from it, and it is the simple concept. For this consciousness itself, what is in truth the result and the essence now makes its entrance, however, as object, and, while it is for consciousness not a result and has no relation to the preceding movement, as a particular kind of object. Its relation to this consciousness is that of another kind of observing.

Such an object, which in itself contains the process in the simplicity of the concept, is the organic. The organic is this absolute fluidity within which the determinateness, through which it would be only for others, has itself been dissolved. However much the inorganic thing has determinateness as its essence and as a result only together with other things does it constitute the completeness of the moments of the concept, nonetheless it as a result disappears when it enters the movement. In contrast, in an organic being²³ all the determinatenesses through which it is open to others are bound together under the simple organic unity. None of them come forward as essential, or as items that could relate themselves free-standingly to others, and the organic thus preserves itself in its relation.

The instinct of reason here sets itself to observing the aspects of law, which are, as it follows from this determination, at first organic nature and inorganic nature in their relation to each other. For organic nature, inorganic nature is just the free-standingness²⁴ which is opposed to the simple concept of organic nature, or of the unbound determinatenesses in which individual nature has at the same time been dissolved. From out of the continuity of those determinatenesses, individual nature at the same time isolates itself and is for itself. Air, water, earth, zones, and climate are such universal elements which constitute the indeterminate simple essence of individualities and within which they are at the same time reflected into themselves. Neither individuality nor what is elemental is utterly in and for itself. Rather, within that self-sufficient free-standingness in which they come on the scene for observation vis-à-vis each other, they relate to each other at the same time as essential relations, but in such a way that it is their self-sufficiency and mutual indifference which are dominant and which only in part pass over into abstraction. Law is therefore present here as the relation of an element to the formative generation²⁵ of the organic, which at one time has elemental being confronting itself and at another time exhibits it in its own organic reflection. Yet such laws, such as those that state that animals which belong to the air have the constitution of birds, that those which belong to water have the constitution of fish, and that animals in northerly latitudes have thick coats of fur, and so forth, all directly point to a poverty which does not correspond to the diversity of the organic. In addition, organic freedom knows how to exempt itself from the determinations of its forms, and everywhere necessarily offers exceptions to such laws or such rules, or whatever one wants to call them. This happens in such a way that these remain as only superficial determinations for all the things falling under such laws, and so too the expression of their necessity cannot be anything more than superficial; it cannot get much beyond the “great influence,” as a result of which one does not know what really belongs to this influence and what does not. Hence, relations such as that between the organic and the elemental are not really to be called laws, for in part such a relation, according to its content, does not in any way exhaust the range of the organic, and in part the moments of the relation themselves remain indifferent to each other and express no necessity. In the concept of an acid, there lies the concept of a base, just as in the concept of positive electricity there lies that of negative electricity. However, as often as a thick coat of fur may be found to go together with northerly latitudes, and that the structure of a fish is to be found to go together with water, and that the structure of birds goes together with air, nevertheless the concept of a thick covering of fur is neither contained in the concept of the north, nor does the concept of the sea contain the concept of the structure of fish, nor does the concept of air contain the concept of the structure of birds. On account of this freedom of the two aspects from each another, so too there are land animals with the essential characters of a bird, of a fish, and so on. Because it cannot be conceived to be internal to the essence, that necessity also ceases to have a sensuous existence and can no longer be observed in actuality; rather, it has departed from actuality. Since it is not to be found in the real essence itself, it is what is called a teleological relation, a relation that is external to what is related, and instead is thus the very opposite of a law. It is a thought entirely freed from nature as necessary; it leaves this necessary nature behind and moves itself for itself above it.

However much the previously treated relation of the organic to elemental nature does not express the essence of that relation, still the concept of purpose does in contrast contain it. For this observing consciousness, the concept of purpose, is to be sure, not the ownmost essence of the organic. Rather, to observing consciousness, this concept seems to fall outside the bounds of the organic, where it then is only the former external, teleological relation. Yet in the way that the organic had been previously determined, the organic is in fact the real purpose itself, for while it itself maintains itself in relation to an other, it is just that kind of natural being²⁶ in which nature reflects itself into the concept, and those moments which necessarily lie apart from each other, such as the moments of a cause and an effect, or of an active and a passive, are here combined into one. As a consequence, something comes on the scene here not only as the result of necessity, but, because it has returned into itself, it is a finality,²⁷ or the result is just as much the first which starts the movement and is, to itself, the purpose which it realizes. The organic does not engender something, it only conserves itself, or what is engendered is, as it is engendered, just as much already present.

This determination needs to be more precisely discussed both as it is in itself and as it is for the instinct of reason, and this needs to be done in order to see how the instinct of reason both is to be found therein and also how it thus does not recognize²⁸ itself in what it finds there. Thus, the concept of purpose to which observing reason has elevated itself is, in the way that it is observing reason's conscious concept, just as much present here as what is actual, and it is not only an external relation of the actual but rather its essence. This actuality, which is itself a purpose, relates itself purposively to an other, which is to say, its relation is a contingent relation with respect to what both immediately are. Immediately, they are both self-sufficient and indifferent to each other. However, the essence of their relation is something other than they themselves seem to be, and their doing has another sense than it has as it is immediately for sensuous perceiving. The necessity, which lies in what happens, is hidden, and it first shows itself at the end,²⁹ but in such a way that this end shows that it was also to have been what was first. However, the end points out this priority of itself as a result of the fact that through the change, which the doing undertook, nothing else emerges other than what was already there. Or, if we begin with what is first, then what is first only comes back round to itself in its end, or it comes back round to itself in the very result of its doing. Only thereby does it prove itself to be the kind of thing which has itself as its end, and therefore, as what is first, it has already come back round to itself, or it is in and for itself. What it therefore achieves by the movement of its doing is itself, and in achieving only itself it is its feeling of its own self.³⁰ For that reason, the difference between what it is and what it seeks is present, but this is only the mere semblance of a difference, and thereby it is the concept in its own self.

However, self-consciousness is just as much constituted by its distinguishing itself from itself and at the same time having no distinction emerge therein. Hence, it finds in the observation of organic nature nothing else but this essence, or it is to be found as a thing, as a life, and yet it differentiates between what it is itself and what it has found, a difference which is no difference at all. Just as an animal's instinct is to seek and consume food without it thereby bringing forth anything but itself, so too does the instinct of reason only find itself in its seeking. An animal stops with self-feeling. In contrast, the instinct of reason is at the same time self-consciousness. However, because it is only instinct, it is set off to one side as opposed to consciousness and has its opposite in that consciousness. Hence, the instinct of reason's satisfaction is estranged by this opposition. It does indeed find itself, namely, finds the purpose, and, just as much, finds this purpose as a thing. However, to the instinct of reason, the purpose first falls outside the bounds of the thing that presents itself as a purpose. Secondly, this purpose as purpose is at the same time objective; to the instinct of reason, it thus does not, as consciousness, fall within the bounds of itself but into those of another understanding.

When regarded more closely, this determination turns out to lie just as much in the concept of the thing, or it turns out that the thing is in its own self the purpose. Specifically, it maintains itself, i.e., it is its nature to conceal the necessity and at the same time to present that necessity in the form of a contingent relation, since its freedom, or its being-for-itself, is just its conducting itself towards what is necessary for it in the same way it would conduct itself towards what is indifferent for it. It thus exhibits itself as the kind of thing whose concept falls outside the bounds of its being. Likewise, reason has the necessity to intuit its own concept as falling outside its own bounds, and thereby to intuit itself as a thing, as the kind of thing towards which it is indifferent, which in turn is thereby indifferent towards both reason and its own concept. As instinct, it also stands pat within the bounds of this being, or within indifference, and the thing expressing the concept remains, to itself, something other than this concept and the concept something other than the thing. For reason, the organic thing is only purpose in its own self so that the necessity belongs outside of the bounds of the organic itself, or it is a necessity which presents itself as concealed within the thing's doing, while what is doing therein conducts itself as an indifferent existent-for-itself. – However, since in its own self the organic as purpose cannot conduct itself in any other way than as organic, so too it is phenomenally and sensuously currently present so that it is a purpose in its own self and is thus observed. The organic shows itself to be something self-preserving, to be both in the returning into itself and to have returned into itself. However, in this being, observing consciousness does recognize³¹ the concept of purpose, or does not recognize that the concept of purpose is not existing somewhere else in some intellect but just is here and as a thing. Observing consciousness makes a distinction between the concept of purpose and being-for-itself and self-preservation, a difference which is really no difference at all. It is not for observing consciousness that it is no difference; rather, what it is for observing consciousness, is a doing which appears to be contingent and indifferent towards what is brought about by that doing, and also towards the unity which ties both of them together – to observing consciousness, that former doing and this latter purpose come undone from each other.

On this view, what corresponds to the organic itself is the inner doing lying midway between what is first and what is last for it insofar as this doing has in it the character of singular individuality. However, this purposive doing as such would not measure up to the organic insofar as the doing has the character of universality and insofar as the doing itself is posited as the same as what as a result is engendered by it. That singular doing, which is only the mediating middle, through its very singularity falls under the determination of what is for all intents and purposes a singular, or contingent, necessity. Hence, what the organic does for the preservation of itself as a singular individual or as a genus is, according to this immediate content, fully lawless, for the universal and the concept belong outside its bounds. Its doing would accordingly be empty efficaciousness without any content in its own self; it would not even be the efficaciousness of a machine, for a machine has a purpose, and its efficaciousness thereby has a determinate content. As thus abandoned by the universal, it would only be an activity of an existent as an existent, i.e., it would be an activity that is not at the same time reflected into itself in the way an acid or a base is; it would be an efficaciousness that could neither detach itself from its immediate existence, nor could give up this existence which is lost in the relation to its opposite and still preserves itself. However, the being whose efficaciousness is here under examination is posited as a thing preserving itself in its relation to its opposite; the activity as such is nothing but the pure essenceless form of its being-for-itself, and its substance, which is not bare determinate being but rather the universal, its purpose, does not fall outside the bounds of the activity. In its own self, the activity is an activity inwardly turning back into itself, not an activity led back into itself by anything alien to itself.

However, for that reason this unity of universality and activity is not for this observing consciousness because that unity is essentially the inner movement of the organic and can only be grasped as concept. However, observing seeks the moments in the form of being and endurance, and because the organic whole is essentially that which does not have the moments in it nor lets them be found in it, consciousness transforms the opposition into the kind of opposition that conforms to its point of view.

The organic being³² emerges for consciousness in this way as a relation between two existing and fixed moments – of an opposition whose two sides thus seem to consciousness to be partly given in observation, and, according to their content, partly to express the opposition between the organic concept of purpose and actuality. However, because the concept as such a concept is therein thoroughly erased, all this takes place in an obscure and superficial manner in which thought has degenerated all the way down to representational thinking. So we see the first of these, the concept of purpose, meant (roughly speaking) in the sense of the inner, and the other, actuality, meant (roughly speaking) in the sense of the outer. Their relation creates the law that says that the outer is the expression of the inner.

Regarded more closely, this inner, with its opposites and their relation to each other, turns out to be the following. First of all, the two sides of the law are no longer to be taken as they were in the case of previous laws, in which the two sides appeared to be self-sufficient things so that each appeared as a particular body, nor are they to be taken as existing for others so that the universal would be supposed to have its existence somewhere outside the bounds of what is existing. Rather, the organic being³³ is laid as the foundation, or as undivided and as the content of inner and outer, and it is the same for both. The opposition is, as a result, still only a purely formal opposition, whose real aspects have the same in-itself for their essence, but at the same time, while inner and outer are also each an opposed reality and a different being for observation, each seems, to observing consciousness, to have a distinctive content of its own. However, this distinctive content, since it is the same substance, or the same organic unity, can in fact only be a different form of that substance, or that organic unity. Observing consciousness intimates as much in its claim that the outer is only the expression of the inner. – In the concept of purpose, we have seen the same determinations of the relationships, namely, the indifferent self-sufficiency of the various sides, and within that indifferent self-sufficiency, their unity within which they disappear.

It is now to be seen what shape the inner and outer have in their existence.³⁴ The inner as such an inner must have an outer being and a shape just like the outer as such an outer, for the inner is object, or is itself posited as existing and as available for observation.

The organic substance as inner is the simple soul, the pure concept of purpose, or it is the universal. In its division, the universal likewise remains a universal fluidity. Thus, in its being, it appears as doing, or the movement of vanishing actuality, since, in contrast, the outer, opposed to that existing inner, stably exists in the motionless being of the organic. As the relation of that inner to this outer, the law thereby expresses the content of the concept of purpose, at one time in the exhibition of universal moments, or simple essentialities, and at another time in the exhibition of that realized essentiality, or the shape. Those first simple organic properties, just to name them, are sensibility, irritability, and reproduction. These properties, or at least the first two, do not indeed seem to refer to organisms as such but only to the animal organism. The vegetable organism in fact expresses only the simple concept of the organism which does not develop its moments. Hence, in considering those moments insofar as they are supposed to be for observation, we must hold ourselves fast to what it is that puts the developed existence of those moments on display.

As for what now concerns these moments themselves, the following can be said. They immediately follow from the concept of what has itself as a purpose,³⁵ for sensibility as such expresses the simple concept of an organic reflective turn into itself, or the universal fluidity of this concept. However, irritability expresses organic elasticity, the organism's conducting itself reactively at the same time within that reflection. Irritability expresses the actualization in which the former abstract being-for-itself is a being for others, an actualization which is in opposition to that initial motionless inwardly-turned-being.³⁶ But reproduction is the action of this whole organism reflected into itself, its activity as a purpose in itself, or as genus in which the individual thus repels itself from itself and procreatively replicates either its organic parts or the whole individual. Taken in the sense of self-preservation as such, reproduction expresses the formal concept of the organic, or sensibility, but it is intrinsically the real organic concept, or the whole. This whole, as the individual, returns back into itself either through the engendering of singular parts of itself, or, as the genus, it returns back into itself³⁷ through the engendering of individuals.

The other significance of these organic elements, namely, as the significance of the outer, is the mode in which they are shaped, according to which these organic elements are present as actual but at the same time universal parts, or as organic systems. Sensibility takes the shape, say, of a nervous system, irritability, that of a muscular system, and reproduction, that of an intestinal system for the preservation of the individual and the species.

Laws which are characteristic of the organic accordingly concern a relationship between organic moments in their twofold meaning, at one time as a part of an organic shaping, and at another time as a universal fluid determinateness that runs through all those systems. In the expression of such a law, a determinate sensibility, for example, would, as a moment of the whole organism, have its expression in a determinately formed nervous system, or it would also be bound up with a determinate reproduction of the organic parts of the individual or with the propagation of the whole, and so on. – Both aspects of such a law can be observed. The outer is, according to its concept, being for others; sensibility, e.g., has its immediately actualized mode in the sensible system, and, as a universal property, it is in its expressions likewise something objective. The aspect that is called inner has its own outer aspect, which is differentiated from what on the whole is called the outer.

Both of the aspects of an organic law would therefore well be observable, but not the laws about the relation of these aspects. For that reason, observation is inadequate not because as observation it would be too short-sighted, nor because it would not be supposed to conduct itself empirically, but because it is supposed to start from the Idea.³⁸ Such laws, if they were to be something real, would in fact have to be present in actuality and would therefore have to be observable. Rather, observation would be inadequate because the thought of laws of this sort proves to have no truth at all.

It turned out that for there to be such a law, the relationship has to be such that the universal organic property would have made itself into a thing in an organic system and would have its own shaped imprint in it, so that both would be the same essence, available at one time as a universal moment and at another time as a thing. However, in addition, the inner aspect is also for itself a relationship of many aspects, and thus that at first suggests the thought of a law as a relation among universal organic activities or among properties to each other. Whether such a law is possible has to be decided on the basis of the nature of such a property. However, such a property as a universal fluidity is in part not something restricted, like a thing, and maintains itself within the differences of an existence which is supposed to constitute its shape. Instead, sensibility goes beyond the nervous system and pervades all the other systems of the organism: – In part, such a property is a universal moment which is essentially undivided and inseparable from reaction, or irritability, and reproduction, since, as the reflection into itself, it has in itself reaction itself. Mere reflectedness-into-itself is passivity, or dead being. It is not a sensibility, as little as action, which is the same as reaction, is, without reflectedness-into-itself, irritability. Reflection within action or reaction, and action or reaction within reflection is precisely the unity that constitutes the organic, a unity which is synonymous with organic reproduction. It follows from this that in every mode of actuality there must be – while we are initially considering the relationship of sensibility and irritability to each another – the same magnitude of sensibility present as the magnitude of irritability, and that an organic appearance can be comprehended and determined, or, if one pleases, explained, equally as much according to the one as it can according to the other. What one person might take for high sensibility, another might just as well take for both high irritability and an irritability of the same degree. However much they are called factors (and if this is not supposed to be a meaningless word), still what is thereby declared is that they are moments of the concept, thus of the real object, the essence of which is constituted by this concept which likewise has both of them in it, and if the object is in one way determined to be very sensitive, then in the other way it is just as well to be spoken of as very irritable.

If, as is necessary, they are distinguished, then they are distinguished according to their concept, and their opposition is qualitative. But if apart from this true difference, they are differentially posited both as existing and as being for representational thought as they might be if they were aspects of the law, then they appear in quantitative diversity. Their distinctive qualitative opposition thus enters into magnitude, and hence laws arise of the following sort, for example, that sensibility and irritability stand in inverse relations of magnitude, so that as the one increases, the other diminishes; or even better, directly taking the magnitude itself as the content so that the magnitude of something increases as its smallness diminishes. – However, should a determinate content be given to this law, say, in the following way, namely, that the magnitude of a hole increases the more that what it is filled with decreases, so too can this inverse relationship likewise be transformed into a direct relationship and expressed as the magnitude of a hole increasing in direct ratio to the amount that is decreased – a tautological proposition, which can be expressed as a direct or an inverse relation, with its distinctive expression only amounting to this, that a magnitude increases as magnitude increases. Just as the hole and what fills it and what is removed from it are qualitatively opposed, what is real in them and its determinate magnitude are one and the same. Likewise, the increase of magnitude and decrease of smallness are the same, so that their meaningless opposition peters out into a tautology. So too the organic moments are likewise inseparable both according to what is real in them and in their magnitude, which is itself the magnitude of what is real in them. The one decreases and increases only with the other, for either one of them has a meaning at all only insofar as the other is present – or rather, it is a matter of indifference as to whether an organic appearance is to be regarded as irritability or as sensibility, even in general and when one likewise speaks of its magnitude. In that way, it is a matter of indifference as to whether we speak of the increase of a hole as adding to its emptiness or as adding to the filling removed from it; or a number, for example, three, remains just as large whether I take it positively or negatively; and even if I increase the three to four, the positive as well as the negative has become four – in the way that the south pole in a magnet is precisely as strong as its north pole, or a positive electricity is precisely as strong as its negative, or an acid is as strong as the base on which it operates – an organic existence is such a quantitative size, like the number three or a magnet, and so forth. It is what is increased or diminished, and if it is increased, both of its factors are also increased, just as much as both poles of the magnet or both kinds of electricity increase if the magnet, etc., is strengthened. – Both are no more different in intension than in extension; the one is not supposed to decrease in extension and then in contrast increase in intension, while conversely the other is not supposed to diminish its intension and then in contrast increase in extension. This is subsumed under the same concept as that of an empty opposition; the real intension is likewise purely and simply as large as the extension and vice versa.

As it has become clear in the case of this legislation, the issue really has to do with the following. At the outset irritability and sensibility constitute determinate organic opposition. However, this content falls by the wayside, and the opposition runs off into a formal opposition of increase and decrease of magnitude, or of different intension and extension – an opposition which no longer has anything to do with the nature of sensibility and irritability and no longer expresses it. Hence, this empty game of legislation is not tied to organic moments; rather, it can be played everywhere with everything, and it generally rests on a lack of acquaintance with the logical nature of these oppositions.

Finally, if instead of sensibility and irritability, reproduction is brought into relation with one or other of them, then the motivation for this legislation breaks down, for reproduction does not stand in opposition to those moments as they are opposed to each other. Since that legislation rests on this opposition, the mere semblance of its taking place also falls away.

The legislation just examined contains the differences of the organism in the sense of being moments of its concept and in fact is supposed to be an a priori legislation. However, in that legislation itself there lies essentially the following thought. Those differences signify what is present, and, in any event, merely observing consciousness has to restrict itself solely to their existence. Organic actuality necessarily has in it the kind of opposition that its concept expresses, which can be determined as irritability and sensibility, and just as these again both appear to be different from reproduction. – The externality in which the moments of the organic concept are here regarded is the proper immediate externality of the inner. It is not the outer, which is the outer of the whole and is the shape. In what follows, the inner is to be considered in relation to that outer.

However, if the opposition of the moments is grasped as it is in existence itself, then sensibility, irritability, and reproduction subside into being ordinary properties, which are universals that are just as indifferent towards one another as are specific weight, color, hardness, and so on. In this sense, it can indeed be observed that one organic being could be said to be more sensitive or more irritable, or to have a greater reproductive power than another – in the way that it can be observed that the sensibility, etc., of one organic being may according to its species be said to be different from that of another, or that one may be said to behave differently from another with regard to a given stimulus in the way that a horse behaves differently towards oats than it does towards hay, and the way a dog behaves differently towards both, and so on. These differences can as easily be observed as it can be observed that one body is harder than another, and so on. – If consideration is taken of such sensuous properties such as hardness, color, etc., as well as the phenomena of responsiveness to the stimulus of oats, of irritability for burdens, or of the number and kind of young that can be born, then when they are related to and compared with each other, they essentially stand in conflict with any kind of lawfulness. For the determinateness of their sensuous being consists just in their existing in complete indifference to each other and in exhibiting the freedom of nature unbound from the concept instead of exhibiting the unity of a relation. It exhibits not so much these moments themselves as it does nature's irrational playing up and down the scale of contingent magnitudes which lie between the moments of the concept.

The other aspect is that according to which the simple moments of the organic concept are compared with the moments of its shaping, and it would only issue the real law which would express the true outer as the imprint of the inner. – Now, because those simple moments are permeating, fluid properties, they do not have a kind of segregated, real expression in organic things as what is called the singular system of the shape. Or, however much the abstract idea of the organism is truly expressed in those three moments, if only for the reason that they are nothing stable and are rather only moments of the concept and of the movement, still the organism, as shape, is in contrast not to be treated as falling into three such determinate systems in the way that anatomy articulates the organism. Insofar as such systems are supposed to be found in their actuality and to be legitimated through this kind of finding, it must also be remembered that anatomy not only features three systems of that sort but a good many others as well. – Considered apart from this, the sensitive system must mean something entirely different from what is called a nervous system, the irritable system something entirely different from the muscular system, and the reproductive system something entirely different from the intestinal system of reproduction. In the systems constituting a shape as such, the organism is understood according to the abstract side of dead existence; taken in that way, its moments belong to anatomy and to the cadaver, not to cognition and the living organism. As those kinds of parts, they have in fact ceased to be, for they cease to be processes. Since the being of an organism is essentially universality, or the reflective turn into itself, the being of its whole, like its moments, cannot consist in an anatomical system. Rather, the actual expression of the whole and externality of the moments are instead only present as a movement that runs throughout the various parts of the shaping, and within which what is torn out and rigidly set up as a singular system is shown to be essentially a flowing moment, so that what can be counted as their reality is not the former actuality in the way anatomy finds it; rather, what counts as their reality is only that actuality as a process, within which alone even the anatomical parts have a sense.

It therefore turns out that neither the moments of the organically inner, each taken for itself, are capable of offering the different sides of a law of being, while in such a law they are supposed to be capable of being asserted to be, of being differentiated from each other, and, in the same way, neither of them is supposed to be able to be mentioned instead of the other. Nor is it the case that if one of them is placed on one side, does it or the other have in the other its realization in a fixed system, for this fixed system would be far removed from having any organic truth at all and would be far removed from being the expression of those moments of the inner. Since the organic is in itself the universal, what is essential to it is instead to have its moments be just as universal in actuality, which is to say, to have them as processes running through everything, but not as giving an image of the universal in an isolated thing.

This is the way that the representational thought of a law in the organic goes wrong. The law wants to grasp and express the opposition as motionless aspects and to grasp and express in themselves the determinateness which is their relation to each other. The inner, to which that phenomenal universality belongs, and the outer, to which the parts of the motionless shape belong, were supposed to constitute the corresponding sides of the law, but in being kept apart in that way, they lose their organic significance. What precisely lies at the basis of the representation of law is that its two aspects should have a stable existence on their own part,³⁹ where each is indifferent to the other, and the relation in them would be portioned out as a dual determinateness commensurate with itself. This is instead what each aspect of the organic is in its own self. It is simple universality in which all determinations have been dissolved and which is the movement of this dissolution.

Looking into the difference between this legislation and previous forms will completely clear up its nature. – Specifically, if we look back to the movement of perceiving and to that of the understanding reflecting itself into itself and thereby determining its object, then we see that the understanding does not by doing so have before itself the relation of these abstract determinations (universal and singular, essential and external) in its object. Rather, it is itself that transition, to which this transition does not become objective. On the contrary, the organic unity here is itself the object, i.e., where the organic unity is exactly the relation of those opposites and where this relation is a pure transition. In its simplicity, this transition is immediately universality, and as that universality crosses the threshold into difference, whose relation the law is supposed to express, so too are its moments universal objects of this consciousness. The law thus goes like this: The outer is an expression of the inner. The understanding has here grasped the thought of the law itself, since formerly it only generally looked for laws, and it had those moments of the laws vaguely in mind as a determinate content but not as the thoughts of such laws. – With regard to the content, the kinds of laws which are not supposed to be preserved are those which are only a motionless incorporation of purely existing differences into the form of universality. Instead, the kinds of laws which are to be preserved are those which immediately encompass in these differences the restlessness of the concept and at the same time thereby encompass necessity in the relation between the two sides. Yet, just because the object, the organic unity, immediately unifies that infinite sublation, or unifies the absolute negation of being with motionless being, and because the moments are essentially pure transition, it turns out that there are no such existing aspects as had been demanded for there to be law.

In order to sustain such aspects, the understanding must hold itself to the other moment of the organic relationship, namely, to the reflectedness⁴⁰ into itself of organic existence. However, this being is so completely reflected into itself such that, to it, no determinateness vis-à-vis others remains left over. The immediate sensuous being is immediately at one with determinateness as such and thus expresses a qualitative difference in itself, as, for example, blue as against red, acid as against alkaloid, etc. However, organic being which has returned into itself is completely indifferent towards others; its existence is simple universality, and it refuses to offer any enduring sensuous differences to observation, or, what is the same thing, it shows its essential determinateness to be only the changing flux of existing determinatenesses. Hence, the way the difference as existing difference is expressed goes just this way. It is an indifferent difference, i.e., a difference as magnitude. However, the concept is therein erased and necessity vanishes. – But if the content along with the filling out of this indifferent being and the flux of sensuous determinations are gathered together into the simplicity of an organic determination, then at the same time this expresses that the content simply does not have that determinateness – the determinateness of the immediate property – and, as we saw above, the qualitative then falls solely within the bounds of magnitude.

Therefore, although the objective, grasped as organic determinateness, has the concept in its own self and is thereby distinguished from what is for the understanding (which in grasping the content of its laws conducts itself purely perceptually), the former comprehending⁴¹ falls back entirely within the bounds of both the principle and the style of the merely perceptual understanding, because what was grasped is put to use as moments of a law. What is thereby grasped then takes on the mode of a fixed determinateness, the form of an immediate property, or a motionless appearance. Furthermore, it is incorporated into the determination of magnitude, and the nature of the concept is suppressed. – The exchange of something merely perceived for something reflected into itself, of a mere sensuous determinateness for an organic determinateness, thus again loses its value, namely, as a result of the understanding not yet having sublated its legislative activity.

In order to give a few examples of this exchange: Something for perception, say, an animal with strong muscles, is determined to be an animal organism of higher irritability; or, what is a condition of great weakness for perception, is determined to be a condition of higher sensibility, or, if you please, an abnormal affection, namely, a potentization of it (to take an expression which translates what is sensuous into Latin – and, for all that, into bad Latin – instead of translating it into the concept). “That an animal has strong muscles” can also be expressed by the understanding as “The animal possesses a great muscular force” – in the way that great weakness similarly means a lesser force. Determination through irritability has this advantage over determination by means of force: The latter expresses the indeterminate reflective turn into itself, the former expresses the determinate reflective turn into itself, for the force that is distinctive to muscles is just irritability – and determination by means of irritability also has an advantage to that of determination as strong muscles, an advantage which, as in the case of force, already has within itself at the same time a reflective turn into itself. Likewise, weakness, or lesser force, organic passivity, is determinately expressed through sensibility. However, if this sensibility is taken for itself and rigidly fixed, and if it is still bound up with the determination of magnitude, and if, as greater or lesser sensibility, it is opposed to a greater or lesser irritability, then each is entirely reduced to the sensuous element and to the ordinary form of a property, and their relation is not that of the concept, but, on the contrary, is a relation of magnitude to which opposition now belongs and which becomes a difference devoid of thought. However much what is indeterminate in the expressions of force, strength, and weakness is excised in this way, still there now emerges the equally empty and indeterminate meandering around within the oppositions of a higher and lower sensibility and within irritabilities in their increase and decrease relative to one another. The phenomena of strength and weakness are entirely sensuous, thoughtless determinations no less so than are the phenomena of greater or lesser sensibility, as well as those of greater or lesser irritability, unthinkingly grasped and just as unthinkingly expressed as sensuous phenomena. The concept has not taken the place of those conceptless expressions. Instead, strength and weakness have been filled out by a determinateness which, taken solely for itself, rests on the concept, and although it has the concept for its content, it entirely loses this origin and character. – Therefore, through the form of simplicity and immediacy in which this content is made into an aspect of a law, and through magnitude which constitutes the element of difference for such determinations, the essence, which originally, as the concept, is and is posited as the concept, retains the mode of sensuous perception, and it thus remains as far removed from cognition as it is when it is determined according to the strength and weakness of force or according to immediate sensuous properties.

Now, what is still left to be considered for itself alone is what the outer of the organic is, and how the opposition of its inner and outer is determined in it. This is to be carried out just as the inner of the whole in relation to its own outer was first put under examination.

The outer, considered for itself, is the shaping as such, the system of life differentiating itself in the element of being, and, at the same time, is essentially the being of the organic creature⁴² as it is for an other – objective essence in its being-for-itself. – This other appears at first as its outer inorganic nature. If both of these are considered in relation to a law, then, as we saw above, inorganic nature cannot constitute the aspect of a law vis-à-vis the organic creature,⁴³ because the latter at the same time is utterly for itself and assumes a universal and free relation to inorganic nature.

To determine the relationship between these two aspects in the organic shape itself more precisely: The shape, according to one of its aspects, is thus turned against inorganic nature, while according to the other aspect, it is for itself and reflected into itself. The actual organic creature is the mediating middle, which brings together the being-for-itself of life with the outer per se, or with being-in-itself. – However, the extreme of being-for-itself is the inner as the infinite One, which takes back into itself the moments of that shape itself both from out of their stable existence and their connection with the outer. This infinite One is devoid of content; it gives itself its content in the [organic] shape, and in that shape it appears as that shape's process. In this extreme as simple negativity, or as pure singularity, the organic is in possession of its absolute freedom through which it is both safeguarded and indifferent vis-à-vis being for others and vis-à-vis the determinateness of the moments of the shape. This freedom is at the same time the freedom of the moments themselves; it is their possibility both of appearing as existing and of becoming comprehended.⁴⁴ Just as they are therein freed up with regard to the outer, so too are they freed up and indifferent with regard to each other, for the simplicity of this freedom is being, or is their simple substance. This concept, or pure freedom, is one and the same life, no matter how the shape or the being for others might yet play out here and there in so many ways. It is a matter of indifference to this stream of life what sorts of mills it drives. – First of all, it is now to be noted that this concept here is not, as it was previously, to be grasped in the examination of its own proper inner in its form of process, or in the development of its moments. Instead, it is to be grasped in its form as the simple inner, which constitutes the purely universal aspect as contrasted with the actual living being,⁴⁵ that is, as the element of the stable existence of the existing members of the shape. This is because it is this shape which is being considered here, and the essence of life appears in it as the simplicity of stable existence. Next, being for others is the determinateness of the actual shaping incorporated into this simple universality which is its essence, and it is likewise a simple universal non-sensuous determinateness, and it can only be what finds expression as number. – Number is the mediating middle of the shape, which ties together indeterminate life with actual life; it is simple like the former and determinate like the latter. What in the former, to the inner, would be number, the outer, according to its mode of existing as multiformed actuality, would have to express as kinds of life, color, and so on, or as the whole range of differences which develop themselves in appearance.

If the two aspects of the organic whole – where one is the inner and the other is the outer, such that each of them again has in its own self an inner and an outer – are compared according to the inner which both sides have, then the inner of the first was the concept as the restlessness of abstraction; but for its own inner, the second has motionless universality and therein also motionless determinateness, or number. However much therefore the former, because the concept develops its moments within it, deceptively promised laws through the mere semblance of necessity in the relation, still the latter straightaway renounces that, as number proves itself to be the determination of only one side of its laws. For number is just that entirely dead and indifferent motionless determinateness within which all movement and relation is extinguished. It has burned the bridge leading to the life of impulses, to various ways of life, and to whatever other sensuous existence there is.

However, this treatment of the shape of the organic as such and of the inner as the inner merely of the shape, is in fact no longer a treatment of the organic at all. For both the aspects which were supposed to be related are only posited indifferently to each other, and as a result the reflective turn into itself, which constitutes the essence of the organic, is sublated. Rather, the comparison that was here sought between the inner and the outer is now instead transferred to inorganic nature. The infinite concept is here only the essence, concealed and turning inward, or which externally falls within the bounds of self-consciousness. It is no longer, as it was in the organic, in possession of its objective present moment. This relation of inner and outer is thus still up for examination in its own proper sphere.

In the first place, that inner of the shape as the simple singularity of an inorganic thing is specific gravity. As a simple being, specific gravity can be observed just as well as can the determinateness of number, the sole determinateness of which specific gravity is capable; or it can in fact be found through the comparison of observations, and in this way it seems to furnish one aspect of the law. Shape, color, hardness, tenacity, and an innumerable range of other properties would together constitute the outer aspect and would have to give expression to the determinateness of the inner, or number, so that the one should find its counterpart in the other.

Now because negativity is here taken not as a movement of the process, but as unity brought to rest, or as simple being-for-itself, it appears instead as that through which the thing resists the process and through which it maintains itself within itself as indifferent with regard to the process. However, as a result of this simple being-for-itself being a motionless indifference with regard to an other, specific gravity appears as one property alongside others, and all necessary relation on its part to this plurality, or all conformity to law, thereby ceases. – The specific gravity as this simple inner does not have difference in its own self, or it only has non-essential difference in itself since its pure simplicity itself sublates every essential difference. This non-essential difference, magnitude, thus had to have its counterpart, or its other, in the other aspect, or the plurality of properties, as it is only as a result that it is difference at all. However much this plurality itself is gathered up into the simplicity of opposition, and is determined, say, as cohesion, such that this cohesion is being-for-itself in otherness in the way that specific gravity is pure being-for-itself, still this cohesion is, first of all, this pure determinateness posited in the concept in contrast to that previous determinateness, and the mode of legislation would be what has been considered above in the discussion of the relation of sensibility to irritability. – Furthermore, cohesion, as the concept of being-for-itself in otherness, is only the abstraction of that aspect opposed to specific gravity and as such has no existence. This is so because being-for-itself in otherness is the process within which the inorganic would have to express its being-for-itself as a self-conservation, which, on the other hand, would keep it from moving out of the process as a moment of a product. Yet this goes exactly against its nature, which in its own self has no purpose or universality. Rather, its process is only the determinate conduct by which its specific gravity, just like its being-for-itself, sublates itself. This determinate conduct in which its cohesion would consist in its true concept and the determinate magnitude of its specific gravity are concepts entirely indifferent to each other. However much that kind of conduct were to be entirely ignored, and however much attention was confined to the representation of magnitude, still this determination could perhaps be thought of in this way: The greater specific weight, as a higher inwardly-turned-being, would resist entering into the process more than would a less specific weight. Yet conversely, the freedom of being-for-itself preserves itself only in the ease with which it lets itself get involved with everything and maintains itself within this diversity. That intensity without the extension of relations is a vacuous abstraction, for extension constitutes the existence of intensity. However, the self-conservation of the inorganic in its relation falls, as noted, outside the bounds of its nature, since it does not contain the principle of movement in its own self, or since its being is not absolute negativity and the concept.

On the other hand, this other aspect of the inorganic, considered not as process but as motionless being, is ordinary cohesion, a simple sensuous property that has emerged on the side that confronts the moment of otherness. This otherness itself has been set free-standing and has been laid out into a plurality of properties indifferent to each other; it itself falls under this cohesion, as does specific gravity. The range of properties then together constitute the other side to cohesion. However, in cohesion as it is in the others, number is the single determinateness, which not only does not express a relation and a transition of these properties to each other but rather is just essentially this: It has no necessary relation but rather is to exhibit the abolition of lawfulness, for it is the expression of determinateness as non-essential. Therefore, a series of bodies which express the difference as a numerical difference of their specific gravities by no means runs parallel to a series where the difference is constituted by the other properties, even if for purposes of simplification only a single one or a few of them are selected. This is so because it could indeed only be the whole bundle of the properties which could constitute the other side in this parallel series. To bring this into some kind of order within itself and to bind it into a whole, observation has available for it, on the one hand, the determinatenesses of magnitude of these various properties, but, on the other hand, their differences which come on the scene as qualitative. What in this heap would now have to be characterized as positive or negative and which would sublate itself would be what is itself the internal figuration and exposition of the formula, which itself would be very much cobbled together, and it would belong to the concept which is excluded just in the way that properties, as existing, are supposed to be just lying there and are then taken up. In this existence, none of them whatsoever points to the character of the negative with regard to the other; rather, the one is as good as the other. Nor do they indicate in any other fashion their position in the arrangement of the whole. – In the case of a series which progresses with parallel differences – whether the relation is meant to be that of simultaneous increase on both sides, or only of increase in the one and decrease in the other – what is at issue has only to do with the last simple expression of this combined whole, which should constitute the one aspect of the law with regard to specific gravity. However, this one aspect, as an existing result, is nothing but what has already been mentioned, namely, a singularly individual property, as, say, ordinary cohesion (alongside the others, specific gravity among them) is indifferently present, and every one of them can be selected equally correctly, i.e., equally wrongly, to be chosen as the representative of all the other aspects. One as well as the other would only stand for ⁴⁶ the essence, or, to put it in German, would represent⁴⁷ the essence but would not actually be the real matter itself.⁴⁸ The attempt to find series of bodies which would progress in the simple parallel of the two aspects and express the essential nature of the bodies in a law about these aspects, must be taken as a thought which is ignorant both of its task and of the means for carrying it out.

Previously, the relation between the inner and outer in the shape which was supposed to be exhibited for observation was directly taken over to the sphere of the inorganic. The determination that it brought with it can now be stated more precisely, and it yields yet another form and relation among these relationships. What in the organic completely breaks down is what seems to offer the possibility of such a comparison of inner and outer in the domain of the inorganic. The inorganic inner is a simple inner, which offers itself up to perception as an existing property. Thus, its determinateness is essentially that of magnitude, and it appears as an existing property which is indifferent towards the outer or towards the plurality of other sensuous properties. However, the being-for-itself of the organically-living does not stand off to one side as opposed to what is its outer; rather, it has the principle of otherness in its own self. If we determine being-for-itself as simple self-preserving relation to itself, then its otherness is simple negativity, and organic unity is the unity of the self-equal self-relating-to-itself and pure negativity. This unity is, as unity, the inner of the organic. The organic is thereby in itself universal, or it is the genus. However, the freedom of the genus with regard to its actuality is something other than the freedom of specific gravity with regard to the shape. The freedom of the latter is an existing freedom, or it takes its stand on one side as a particular property. However, because it is an existing freedom, it is also only One Determinateness, which essentially belongs to this shape, or it is that through which this shape as essence is a determinate essence. However, the freedom of the genus is a universal freedom and is indifferent to this shape, or indifferent to its actuality. The determinateness which corresponds to the being-for-itself of the inorganic as such therefore comes on the scene in the realm of the organic as being subsumed under the organic's being-for-itself, just as in the inorganic it is subsumed under the being of the inorganic. Hence, whether that determinateness is in that being at the same time only as a property, it nonetheless falls to its lot to have the dignity of being the essence because, as the simple negative, it confronts existence as being for an other. This simple negative, in its final singular determinateness, is number. However, the organic is a singularity, which is itself pure negativity, and it thus abolishes within itself the fixed determinateness of number which is appropriate for indifferent being. Insofar as the organic has in it the moment of indifferent being and thereby that of number, number itself can thus only be taken as a kind of play in the organic but not as the essence of its vitality.

However much now pure negativity, the principle of the process, does not already fall outside the bounds of the organic, and therefore the organic does not have within its essence pure negativity as a determinateness but instead has singularity which itself is in itself universal, still within its moments as themselves abstract or universal, this pure singularity is not developed and actual in the organic. Rather, this expression goes outside the bounds of that universality, which itself falls back into inwardness, and between the actuality, or the shape, i.e., the self-developing singularity of the organism, and the organic universal, or the genus, what emerges is the determinate universal, the species. The existence at which the negativity of the universal, or the negativity of the genus, arrives is only the developed movement of a process that runs its course in the parts of the existing shape. If the genus were to have the distinguished parts in it as motionless simplicity, and if its simple negativity as such were at the same time a movement that ran its course through just as simple parts which are immediately universal in themselves, parts which, as being those kinds of moments, would here be actual, then the organic genus would be consciousness. However, the simple determinateness as determinateness of the species is present in the genus in a manner that is totally devoid of spirit. Actuality begins with the genus, or what enters into actuality is not the genus as such, i.e., is not thought at all. As the actually organic, this genus is only represented by something standing in for it.⁴⁹ What stands in for it, is number, which seems both to designate the transition from the genus into the individual shape and provide for observation both aspects of necessity, once as a simple determinateness and then again as a shape as developed into multiplicity. The meaning of this number is instead that of the indifference and freedom of the universal and the singular vis-à-vis each other. The genus abandons the singular to the essenceless difference of magnitude, but the singular, as something living, itself likewise proves itself to be free-standing from this difference of magnitude. As it has been determined, true universality is here only inner essence; as determinateness of the species, it is formal universality, and, in contrast to the latter, true universality takes its stand on the side of singularity, which as a result is a living singularity, which through its innerness defies its determinateness as species. However, this singularity is not at the same time a universal individual, i.e., one in which universality would just as much have external actuality, but rather this universal individual belongs outside the bounds of the organically-living. However, in the way it is immediately the individual of the natural shapes, this universal individual is not consciousness itself. Its existence as a singular organic living individual must not fall outside the bounds of itself if it is supposed to be consciousness.

Hence, we see a syllogism, in which one extreme term is the universal life as universal, or as genus, but the other extreme term is that same life as singular, or as a universal individual. However, the middle term is composed out of both. The first seems to transmit itself into it as determinate universality, or as species, and the other seems to transmit itself into it as genuine singularity, or as singular singularity.⁵⁰ – And since this syllogism belongs as such to the aspect of taking shape,⁵¹ what is distinguished as inorganic nature is likewise subsumed under it.

While the universal life as the simple essence of the genus now develops the differences of the concept and must exhibit them as a series of simple determinatenesses, so this series is thereby a system of indifferently posited differences, or is a numerical series. However much the organic, in the form of singularity, was formerly posited as being in opposition to this essenceless difference, which neither expresses nor contains its living nature – and if that is what also must be said about the inorganic when it is taken according to its entire developed existence in the multitude of its properties – still it is now the universal individual which is to be investigated not only as free from all the divisions of the genus but as being the power over them. The genus may carve itself up into species according to the universal determinateness of number, or else it may take as its reasons for division the singular determinatenesses of its existence such as, for example, figure, color, etc., and in this motionless enterprise, the species suffers violence from the aspect of the universal individual, the earth, which as universal negativity makes those differences felt as it has them in itself; the nature of those differences, according to the substance to which they belong, is something other than the nature of that of the genus. It affirmatively asserts those differences against the movement of systematization. This doing on the part of the genus becomes a wholly restricted enterprise, which it may only pursue within the bounds of those powerful elements. That enterprise becomes interrupted through the unbridled violence of those elements and comes to be both full of gaps and is stunted.

It follows from all this that, to observation, in existence as it has been shaped, reason is only as life, full stop. However, life as such in its differentiation has no rational sequence and demarcation and is not a system of shapes grounded within itself. – However much in the syllogism of organic shaping, the middle term (under which is subsumed both the species and its actuality as a singular individuality) were to have in its own self the extreme terms of inner universality and universal individuality, still this middle term would have in the movement of its actuality the expression and the nature of universality, and it would be a self-systematizing development. In that way, consciousness has, for its mediating middle between the universal spirit and its singularity, or sensuous consciousness, the system of the shapes of consciousness as a life of spirit ordering itself into a whole – the system which is here under examination and which has its objective existence as world history. However, organic nature has no history; organic nature immediately descends from its universal, or life, into the singularity of existence. The moments of simple determinateness and singular liveliness united in this actuality engender coming-to-be only as a contingent movement, within which each is active in its parts and the whole is preserved, but within which this vitality is restricted for itself only to where it reaches its pinnacle. This is so because the whole is not present within it, and the whole is not present in it because the whole is not here for itself as a whole.

In addition, because it is in organic nature that observing reason only comes to the intuition of itself as universal life itself, the intuition of its development and realization, to itself, comes to be only according to systems which are distinguished only very generally and whose destiny⁵² is not to have their essence lie in the organic as such but to have it lie in the universal individual, and to intuit the series under which the earth's differences lie, and which the species seeks.

297. While in its actuality, the universality of organic life thus lets itself descend immediately into the extreme of singularity without any genuine mediation existing-for-itself, so observing consciousness only has the meaning-something⁵³ as a thing before itself. If reason can have an idle interest in observing this “meaning something,” then it is confined to the description and narration of suppositions and vagaries about nature. To be sure, this spiritless freedom in making such suppositions will offer everywhere the beginnings of laws, traces of necessity, allusions to order and sequence, and ingenious and plausible relations. However, in relating the organic to the existing differences of the inorganic, and in relating the elements, zones, and climates with a view to law and necessity, observation never gets any further than the supposition of a “great influence.” So, on the other side of the coin, where “individuality” does not signify the earth but rather signifies what to organic life is its immanent One, then this immanent One in its immediate unity with the universal does indeed constitute the genus. However, just for that reason its simple unity is determined only as number and thus it permits the qualitative appearance to be free-standing – observation cannot get any further than to make charming remarks, bring out interesting connections, and make friendly concessions to the concept. However, charming remarks are no knowing of necessity. Interesting connections are just that: interesting. However, the interest is still nothing but suppositional fancy⁵⁴ about reason. The friendliness of the individual in playing around with a concept is a childish friendliness, which is really childish when it either wants to or is supposed to count for something in and for itself.

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

Observation of nature finds the concept realized in inorganic nature as laws, whose moments are things which at the same time behave as abstractions. However, this concept is not a simplicity reflected into itself. On the other hand, the life of organic nature is only this simplicity reflected into itself, the opposition of itself as the opposition of universal and singular which does not break apart within the essence of this life itself. The essence is not the genus, which in its undifferentiated elements separates itself and moves itself, and which at the same time would be for itself undifferentiated within its opposition. This free concept, whose universality has that developed singularity just as absolutely within itself, is found by observation only in the concept existing as the concept itself, or in self-consciousness.

299. While observation now turns back around into itself, and it directs itself to the actual concept as the free concept, it finds first of all the laws of thought. This singular individuality, which thinking is in its own self, is the abstract movement of the negative taken entirely back into simplicity, and the laws lie outside the bounds of reality. – To say they have no reality generally means nothing but that they are without truth. To be sure, they are also supposed not to be the entire truth but nonetheless to be formally true. Yet “the purely formal without reality” is itself a thought-thing,⁵⁵ that is, an empty abstraction without any estrangement in it, an estrangement which, if it were there, would be nothing else but the content itself. – But on the other side of the coin, while they are the laws of pure thinking, and pure thinking is in itself the universal and is thus knowing that immediately has being and thereby has all reality in it, these laws are absolute concepts, and they are inseparably the essentialities both of form and of things. Since universality which moves itself within itself is the estranged simple concept, the concept has in this way a content in itself, the kind of content which is all content but is not a sensuous being. It is a content that is neither in contradiction to nor separated in any way from the form; rather, it is essentially the form itself, for the latter is nothing but the universal dividing itself into its pure moments.

However, just as this form or this content is for observation as observation, it also acquires the determination of a found content, a given, i.e., only existing content. It becomes a motionless being of relations, a set of detached necessities, which, as a rigidly fixed content in and for themselves, are supposed to have truth in their determinateness and in that way are in fact extracted from the form. – However, this absolute truth of fixed determinatenesses or of many various laws contradicts the unity of self-consciousness, or it contradicts the unity of thinking and form as such. What is declared to be a fixed and constant law in itself can be only a moment of the unity reflecting itself into itself; it can come on the scene only as a vanishing magnitude. However, if in the course of being studied, they are torn away from the context of movement and are arranged as singulars, then these determinatenesses are not lacking in content since they in fact have a determinate content. What they lack is form, which is their essence. In fact, it is not because they are supposed to be only formal and to have no content that these laws are not the truth of thinking; rather, it is for the very opposite reason, namely, because it is in their determinateness, or just as a content from which the form has been taken, that they are supposed to count as something absolute. In their truth, as vanishing moments in the unity of thinking, they would have to be taken to be knowing, or to be the thinking movement, but not taken to be laws of knowing. However, observation is not knowing itself, and it does not recognize⁵⁶ that it is not knowing; rather, observation inverts its nature into the shape of being, i.e., it grasps its negativity only as laws of being. – Here it is sufficient to have pointed out the invalidity of the so-called laws of thinking on the basis of the universal nature of what is at issue. The more precise development of this belongs to speculative philosophy, in which those laws prove themselves to be what they are in truth, namely, singular vanishing moments whose truth is only the whole of the thinking movement, or knowing itself.

This negative unity of thinking is for itself, or it is instead being-for-itself, the principle of individuality, and within its reality it is an active consciousness. Observing consciousness will thus by the very nature of the matter which is at issue⁵⁷ be guided towards it according to its being the reality of those laws. While the way this all hangs together is not something which itself is for observing consciousness, the observing consciousness supposes that in the laws of thinking, thinking itself in one respect stands off to the side to observational consciousness, and in another respect thinking acquires another way of being⁵⁸ in what is now to observing consciousness the object, namely, the acting consciousness which is for itself in such a way that it sublates otherness and has its actuality in this intuition of itself as the negative.

For observation, a new field is thus opened up in the acting actuality of consciousness. Psychology contains the class of laws according to which spirit conducts itself in various ways towards the various modes of its actuality as an only found otherness. In part, spirit receives these into itself so that it comes to be according to these only unearthed habits, mores, and ways of thinking as the kinds of items within which it is, to itself, as actuality and as an object. – In part, it knows itself to be self-active against them, and with inclination and passion, it selects out for itself only what is particular in them, and thus makes what is objective come to be adequate to itself. In the former, it conducts itself negatively towards itself as singularity, and in the latter it conducts itself negatively towards itself as universal being. – According to the first aspect, self-sufficiency gives to that which is only found the form of conscious individuality as such, and in view of the content, it remains within the bounds of the only found universal actuality. However, according to the other aspect, it at least gives universal actuality a distinctive modification which does not contradict its essential content, or else it also gives it the kind of modification by which the individual, as particular actuality and distinctive content, opposes itself to that universal actuality – and as the individual sublates that universal actuality in an only singular manner, that opposition becomes a crime; but when it does so in a universal manner which thereby acts for all, it brings about another world, other rights, other laws, and other mores which replace what had been present.

Observational psychology, which at first expresses its perceptions of the universal modes which present themselves for it in active consciousness, discovers all sorts of faculties, inclinations, and passions, and while in its recounting of this collection, the recollection of the unity of self-consciousness does not allow itself to be suppressed, observational psychology must at least get to the point of being astonished that in spirit so many sorts of contingent things of so many heterogeneous sorts can be alongside one another in the way they would be in a sack, especially since they show themselves to be not motionless dead things but to be instead restless movements.

In recounting these various faculties, observation stays put within the universal aspect. The unity of these diverse abilities is the aspect opposed to this universality, that of actual individuality. – It can grasp and recount again the different actual individualities, for example, that one person has more inclination to this, whereas another person has more inclination to that, that one person has greater intellect than another, but all this is even less interesting than enumerating the species of insects, mosses, and so on, for these latter give observation the right to take them singularly and as devoid of concepts because they essentially belong to that element of contingent separation. Conversely, to take conscious individuality so spiritlessly as a singular existing phenomenon has the contradiction that the essence of individuality is the universal of spirit. However, while comprehension allows individuality at the same time to come on the scene in the form of universality, comprehension finds individuality's law, and now it seems to have a rational purpose and a necessary task to pursue.

The moments constituting the content of the law are, on the one hand, individuality itself, and on the other hand, its universal inorganic nature, namely, its circumstances, situations, habits, mores, religion, and so forth, and it is from these moments that determinate individuality is to be comprehended. They contain what is determinate as well as what is universal, and they are at the same time something present and available⁵⁹ which both presents itself for observation and in another respect expresses itself in the form of individuality.

The law of this relation of both sides must now contain what kind of effect and influence these determinate circumstances exercise on individuality. However, this individuality is precisely this: An individuality which is just as much the universal and which thus flows together in a motionless, immediate manner with those universals which are present (those mores, habits, etc.), and comes to be in accordance with them as conducting itself in opposition to them and even as inverting them, and it does this in addition to conducting itself with complete indifference towards them in its singularity, neither allowing them to exert an influence over it, nor being itself active in its opposition to them. What is supposed to have an influence on individuality and which influence it is supposed to have – which really means the same thing – depends for that reason entirely on individuality itself. As a result, this individuality has become this determinate individuality, which is to say nothing more than that it has already been this all along. Circumstances, situations, mores, and the like, which on the one hand show themselves to be present and on the other hand show themselves to be within this determinate individuality, themselves express only the indeterminate essence of individuality, which is not the issue here. However much these circumstances, this style of thought, those mores, or the whole state of the world itself were not to have existed, still the individual would not have become what he is, for all individuals are this universal substance when they are situated in this state of the world. – In whatever way the state of the world has been particularized in this individual – and it is such an individual that is supposed to be comprehended – the state of the world would have to have been particularized in and for itself, and within this determinateness which it gave itself, to have had an effect on an individual. Only in that way could it have made the individual into the determinate individual that he is. However much the state of the world had been so constituted in and for itself as it appears in individuality itself, still the latter would be comprehended on the grounds of the former. We would have a double gallery of pictures, each of which would be the reflection back of the other. The one would be the gallery of complete determinateness and the complete encompassing of external circumstances; the other would be the same gallery translated into the way in which those circumstances are in the conscious being.⁶⁰ The former would be the spherical surface, the latter the center which represents that surface within itself.

307. However, the spherical surface, the world of the individual, immediately bears the double meaning of the world existing in and for itself and the situation, and that of the world of the individual. This would be so either insofar as this individual were to have only merged with the world, or insofar as the individual would have let that world in the way that it is, enter into it, and would have conducted itself towards it only as a formal consciousness – or else, it would be the world of the individual in the sense in which what is present and available has been inverted by that individual. – Since actuality is capable of having this twofold meaning on account of this freedom, the world of the individual is only to be comprehended on the basis of the individual himself, and the influence of actuality upon the individual, an actuality that is represented as existing in and for itself, receives through this individual absolutely the opposite sense. The individual either lets the stream of actuality with its flowing influence have its way in him, or he breaks it off and turns that stream of influence on its head. Psychological necessity thereby becomes such an empty phrase that it includes the absolute possibility that what is supposed to have had this influence could very well also not have had any influence whatsoever.

Being, which is supposed to be in and for itself and which is supposed to constitute one aspect, which to be sure is the universal aspect of a law, thereby falls by the wayside. Individuality is what its world is as its own. Individuality itself is the circle of its own doing, within which it has exhibited itself as actuality and within which it is plainly only the unity of only present and made being,⁶¹ a unity whose aspects do not come undone as they did in the representational thought of psychological law, where they fell apart into a world present in itself and an individuality existing for itself. Or, if those aspects are thus each considered for themselves, then there is neither any necessity present, nor is there any law governing their relation to each other.

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

Psychological observation finds no law relating self-consciousness to actuality or to the world opposed to it, and, through their mutual indifference to each other, such observation is driven back to the distinctive determinateness of real individuality which is in and for itself, or which contains the opposition of being-for-itself and being-in-itself as erased in their absolute mediation. It is individuality which has now become the object for observation, or has become the object to which observation now turns its gaze.⁶²

The individual is in and for itself; the individual is for itself, or he is a free doing. However, the individual is also in itself, or he himself has an original determinate being – a determinateness which, according to the concept, is the same as that which psychology had wanted to find outside of him. Opposition thus emerges in its own self as twofold. There is a movement of consciousness and the rigidly fixed being of a phenomenal actuality, the kind of actuality that in the individual is immediately his own. This being, the body of the determinate individuality, is its primordiality,⁶³ its own “what-it-has-not-done.” However, while the individual is at the same time only what he has done, so is his body also the expression of himself which is brought forth by him. At the same time, it is a sign, which has not remained an immediate matter but is that in which the individual only makes known what he is, in the sense of putting his original nature into practice.

If we consider the moments that are present here in relation to the previous outlook, then there is here a universal human shape, or, at least, the universal human shape of a climate, or of a portion of the world, or of a people, in the way that there were previously the same universal mores and culture. The particular circumstances and the situation within the bounds of the universal actuality come into play here; here is this particular actuality as a particular formation of the shape of the individual. – On the other side of the coin, in the way that the free doing of the individual and actuality as his own were posited in contrast to that actuality present, the shape here stands as an expression of his own actualization posited by the individual himself, or the traits and forms of his self-active essence. However, actuality, which is just as much universal as it is particular and which observation formerly encountered as external to the individual, is here the actuality of the individual, his inborn body, and here the expression belonging to his own doing belongs to this very body. In psychological examination, both actuality existing in and for itself and determinate individuality had to be related to each other. However, here it is the whole determinate individuality which is the object of observation, and each aspect of its opposition is itself this whole. To the outer whole, there thus belongs not only the original being, the inborn body, but just as well the formation of the body, which belongs to the activity of the inner. The body is the unity of uncultured and cultured being and is the actuality permeated by the being-for-itself of the individual. This whole embraces the determinate original fixed parts and the traits which emerge solely through acting. This whole is, and this being is an expression of the inner, of the individual posited as consciousness and as movement. – This inner is likewise no longer formal, no longer without content, or no longer without indeterminate self-activity, whose content and determinateness, just as in the way it was previously, would lie in external circumstances. Rather, it is an original character determinate in itself, whose form is only the activity. What is up for examination here are the relationships between both aspects. More specifically, what is up for examination is how this relation is to be determined and how we are to understand the expression of the inner in the outer.

To start with, it is only as an organ that this outer makes the inner visible, or into a being for others. This is so because the inner, insofar as it is in the organ, is the activity itself. The speaking mouth, the laboring hand, and, if one pleases, the legs too, are the organs of actualization and accomplishment that have the doing as doing, or the inner as such, in themselves. However, the externality which the inner achieves through the doing is the deed, in the sense of an actuality cut off from the individual. Language and labor are expressions in which the individual on his own no longer retains and possesses himself; rather, he lets the inner move wholly outside of him and he thus abandons it to the other. For that reason, we can just as well say that these expressions express the inner too much as we can say that they express it too little. Too much – because the inner itself breaks out in these expressions, no opposition remains between them and the inner; they do not only provide an expression of the inner, they immediately provide the inner itself. Too little – because in speech and action the inner makes itself into an other and thereby abandons itself to the mercy of the element of transformation, which twists the spoken word and the accomplished deed and makes something else out of them than what they, as the actions of this determinate individual, are in and for themselves. Through this externality of influence which is exerted by others, the products of actions not only lose the character of being something constant with regard to other individualities. While they relate themselves to the inner, which they contain, they relate in the same way to a detached, indifferent externality, and then as inner they can also be, through the individual himself, something other than they appear. – Either for the sake of appearance the individual intentionally makes them into something else than they are in truth, or he is too incompetent to give himself the external bearing which he genuinely wanted and too incompetent to secure it so that the product of his action could not be twisted around by others. Thus the act as an accomplished piece of work has the double and opposite significance of being either the inner individuality and not its expression; or, as external, to be an actuality free-standing from the inner, which is something entirely different from the inner. – On account of this two-sidedness, we must be on the lookout for the inner as it is visible, or external, and yet still in the individual himself. However, in the organ it is only as the immediate act itself which achieves its externality in the deed which itself either does or does not represent the inner. Regarded according to this opposition, the organ does not completely underwrite the expression which is sought.

Now however much the external shape could express the inner individuality only insofar as the external shape is neither an organ nor a doing, and thereby only insofar as it is a motionless whole, still it would then conduct itself as a stably existing thing which should have motionlessly received into its own passive existence the inner as something alien. It thereby would have become the sign of the inner – an external contingent expression, whose actual aspect is for itself⁶⁴ meaningless, a language whose sounds and sound-combinations are not the real thing itself but are intertwined with it through free arbitrary choice and for that language are contingent.

Such an arbitrary combination of the kinds of things that are external to each other yields no law. However, physiognomy is supposed to distinguish itself from other spurious arts and hopeless studies by the fact that it examines determinate individuality in terms of the necessary opposition of an inner and an outer; it examines character as a conscious essence and as an existing shape, and it relates these moments to each other as they are related to each other through their concept, and these relations thus must constitute the content of a law. In contrast, in astrology, palmistry, and other such similar sciences, only externalities related to externalities seem to be present, or anything whatsoever related to something or another which is completely alien to it. It is this constellation at time of birth, and, if that kind of externality is brought even closer to the body itself, these lines on the hand are both external moments for a long or a short life, and the fate of singular people themselves. As externalities they relate themselves indifferently to each other, and neither has the necessity for the other which is supposed to lie in the relation of the outer to the inner.

The hand, of course, does not seem nearly as much to be an externality to such fate. Instead, as the inner, it seems to relate itself to destiny. This is so because destiny is also again only the appearance of what the determinate individuality as inner original determinateness is in itself. – Now, to know what this individuality is in itself, the palm reader as well as the physiognomist takes a shorter path than, for example, Solon, who thought he could only begin to think about this on the basis of and after the course of his whole life. Solon studied the appearance whereas the former studies the in-itself. However, that the hand must exhibit the in-itself of individuality vis-à-vis its fate is easily seen from the following. After the organ of speech, it is by and large the hand by which a person brings himself to appearance and actualizes himself. It is the ensouled artisan of his fortune; we may say of the hand that it is what a man does, for in the hand, as the active organ of his self-accomplishment, the person is currently present as ensouling the hand, and while he is the origin of his own fate, the hand will thus express this in-itself.

One moves from this determination, namely, that the organ of activity is just as much a being as it is a doing in the organ, or that the inner being-in-itself is itself current in it and has a being for others, to another point of view about the matter which itself differs from the preceding. However much the organs in general were shown to be incapable of being taken as expressions of the inner because even though the doing as doing is current within them, still the doing as deed ⁶⁵ is only the outer; therefore, the inner and outer come undone from each other and thus either are or can be alien to each other. Therefore, according to the determination of the organ which we examined, the organ must also again still be taken as a mediating middle for both of them. This is so just for the reason that while the doing is both currently present in the organ and at the same time constitutes an externality of the organ and to be sure an other than the deed, the organ in fact remains with the individual and is in him. – Now, this mediating middle and unity of the inner and outer is initially itself also external. However, this externality is thereby at the same time incorporated into the inner. As simple externality it stands opposed to the dispersed externality, which either is a singular piece of work, which for the whole individuality is contingent, or else is an entire externality, a fate splintered into a plurality of works and conditions. Therefore, the simple lines of the hand along with the tone and range of the voice as the individual determinateness of language – these too again acquire through the hand a steadier existence than they do through the voice, specifically in writing, namely, in its particularity as handwriting – all of these are an expression of the inner, so that as simple externality, the expression again relates itself as an inner vis-à-vis the diverse externality of action and fate. – However much therefore the determinate nature and inborn distinctiveness of the individual, along with what these have become through cultural formation, are initially taken to be the inner, to be the essence of acting and of fate, still this inner has its appearance and externality in the first instance in the individual's mouth, hand, voice, and handwriting, as well as in the other organs and their enduring determinatenesses. Only then does it thereby express itself even further outwardly in its actuality in the world.

Because this mediating middle is itself determined as the outward expression, which is at the same time taken back into the inner, its existence is not confined to the immediate organ of action. This mediating middle is instead the non-consummating movement and form of the face and the embodiment of the face itself. According to this concept, these traits and their movements are the doings that remain repressed in the individual and, according to his relation to the actual doing, are his own oversight and observation of the doing, are the outer expression as reflection upon the actual expression. – For that reason, the individual is not silent both in the face of and within his external doing because in that doing he is at the same time reflected into himself, and he outwardly expresses this being-reflected-into-himself. This theoretical doing, or the individual's speaking with himself on the matter, is also audible to others, for it is itself an outward expression.

In this inner, which in its outward expression remains an inner, the individual's being-reflected out of his actuality is to be observed, and it remains to be seen what relation it has to the necessity that is posited in this unity. – At the outset, this being-reflected is different from the deed itself and therefore can be something other and can also be taken for something other than the deed. One sees from a face whether the person is serious about what he says or does. – But conversely, there is the following. What is supposed to be an expression of the inner is at the same time an existing expression and hence itself subsides into the determination of being, which is absolutely contingent for the self-conscious essence. It is thus indeed an expression, but at the same time it is so only in the sense of a sign, so that the makeup of that through which it is expressed is completely indifferent to the content expressed. The inner within this appearance is indeed a visible invisible but without itself being intertwined with this appearance. It can be in some other appearance just as well as some other inner can be in that same appearance. Lichtenberg is thus right in saying: Supposing the physiognomist did once take the measure of a man; it would only be a matter of decent resolve on the man's part to make himself again incomprehensible for centuries. – In the way that in the previous relationships, in the circumstances lying before us, there was an existent, and the individuality took for itself what he could and what he wanted from it, and he either submitted to this existent or he twisted it around, and for that reason the existent did not contain the necessity and essence of individuality – likewise, the appearing, immediate being of individuality is here the sort that either expresses its reflectedness from out of actuality and its inwardly-turned-being, or is only a sign of individuality, a sign which is indifferent to the signified and for that reason in truth signifies nothing. To the individual, the sign is as much its face as it is its mask, which it can remove. – Individuality permeates its shape and both moves itself and speaks in it. But this entire existence just as much passes over into an indifferent being vis-à-vis the will and action. Individuality abolishes the significance that being formerly had, namely, for it to have individuality's reflectedness into itself, or for individuality to have its true essence in it, and, by the same token, individuality puts its true essence instead into the will and into the deed.

Individuality gives up that being-reflected-into-self which is expressed in various traits and instead places its essence in the work. It therein contradicts the relationships which have taken root through the instinct of reason, which descends into observations of self-conscious individuality with regard to what is supposed to be its inner and its outer. This point of view brings us to the genuine thought that lies at the basis of – if one wishes to call it this – the science of physiognomy. The opposition which this observing stumbles into is, according to the form, that of the practical versus the theoretical, and it posits that both of them lie within the bounds of the practical itself – that is, it is the opposition of individuality actualizing itself in action (taken in its most general sense) versus individuality actualizing itself at the same time as reflecting itself into itself from out of this action and making this action into its object. Observation takes up this opposition according to the same inverted relationships in which the opposition takes its determination in appearance. For observation, the deed itself and the work, whether it be that of speech or a stabilized actuality, counts as the non-essential outer, – However, the inwardly-turned-being of individuality counts as the essential inner. Between the two aspects which practical consciousness has in it, intention and deed – that is, what the action is meant to be and the action itself – observation selects the former aspect as the true inner. This is supposed to have its more or less inessential outward expression in the deed, but its true outward expression in its shape. This latter outward expression is an immediate sensuous presence of individual spirit. The inwardness, which is supposed to be the true, is the ownness of the intention and the singularity of being-for-itself. Both are the spirit which is meant. What observation has for its objects is an existence which it “means,” and it is between them that it looks for laws.

The immediate act of meaning to say something about the present moment of spirit is natural physiognomy, a hasty judgment made at first glance about the inner nature and the character of its shape. The object of this supposition is the kind of object such that in its essence, it is in truth something other than only sensuous immediate being. To be sure, it is also, within the sensuous, this being-reflected-into-itself from out of the sensuous. It is current, and it is the visible as the visibility of the invisible which is the object of observation. However, this sensuously immediate present is the actuality of spirit as it is only for the act of “meaning to say something.” According to this aspect, observation occupies itself with the existence which spirit is meant to have, or it occupies itself with physiognomy, handwriting, the sound of the voice, etc. – Observing relates such an existence to the same kind of “intended” inner⁶⁶to exist. It is not the murderer or the thief who is supposed to be known;⁶⁷ rather, it is the capacity to be a murderer, a thief. The rigid abstract determinateness is lost in the concrete infinite determinateness of the singular individual, a determinateness that now calls for more skillfully contrived depictions than those qualifications really are. Such skillfully contrived depictions certainly give voice to a lot more than the qualification of being a murderer, a thief, or of being good-hearted, unspoiled, and so on, but they are far from adequate for the purpose of expressing the being that is meant, or the singular individuality, any more than do the depictions of shape which go further than only providing a picture of a flat brow, a long nose, etc. As a being about which one aims to say something, the singular shape, like the singular self-consciousness, is inexpressible. The “science of knowing man,” which is concerned with such alleged people, as well as the science of physiognomy, which is concerned with the person's presumed actuality and seeks to raise the unconscious judging of natural physiognomy to the level of knowing, is thus something that has neither a foundation nor an end in sight. It can never manage to say what it means because all it does is to “mean something,” and its content is thus only fancy.⁶⁸

The laws which this science sets out to find are the relations between these two aspects it means to talk about,⁶⁹ and thus the laws can themselves be no more than empty opinionating.⁷⁰ Since this alleged knowing takes it upon itself to deal with the actuality of spirit, it also has as its object precisely the following. Spirit is reflected out of sensuous existence back into itself. For spirit, determinate existence is an indifferent contingency, and so it must immediately know that in the laws which it has stumbled upon, nothing has thereby really been said. Rather, it must immediately know that these laws are in fact just pure chatter, or they only amount to saying what is on one's mind.⁷¹ It is an expression that is true in that it expresses just that – it states one's view⁷² and does thereby say anything about the thing itself; it only adds that it is one's own view.⁷³ However, according to their content, such observations cannot differ from these: “It always rains at our annual fair,” says the retailer, and “It also rains every time,” says the housewife, “when I put my washing out to dry.”

Lichtenberg, who characterizes physiognomic observation in this way, adds this remark: “If someone said, 'To be sure, you act like an honest man, but I can see from your face that you are forcing yourself to do so and are a knave at heart,' then any upright fellow, when addressed in that fashion, will, until the end of time, respond with a slap in the accuser's face.” – This retort is for that reason exactly to the point, because it is the refutation of the first presupposition of such a science of what people mean, namely, that the actuality of a person is supposed to be his face, etc. – The true being of a person is rather his deed. Individuality is actual in the deed, and the deed is what sublates what is only meant there in both aspects. At one time, what is meant is a motionless bodily being, and individuality exhibits itself instead in action as the negative essence which only is insofar as it sublates being. The deed thereupon likewise sublates the inexpressibleness of the meaning with a view towards self-conscious individuality, which in that meaning is infinitely determined and determinable. In the achieved deed, this bad infinite is done away with. The deed is something simply determinate, universal, to be grasped in an abstraction; it is murder, theft, beneficence, a courageous act, and so on, and what it is can be said of it. The deed is this, and its being is not only a sign, it is the matter at issue itself. The deed is this, and the individual person is what the deed is. In the simplicity of this being, the individual person is for others an existing, universal essence, and he ceases to be only something conjectured.⁷⁴ To be sure, the individual is not posited therein as spirit, but while it is his being as being that is talked about, and while on the one hand the twofold being, the shape and the deed, stand over and against each other and each one is supposed to be his own actuality, so too the deed alone is instead to be asserted to be his genuine being – not his physique, which is supposed to express what he means by his acts, or what one might suppose that only he could do. Likewise, on the other side of the coin, while his accomplished work⁷⁵ and his inner possibility, capacity, or intention are opposed, it is the former alone which is to be regarded as his true actuality even if he deceives himself about it, or, after he has taken an inward turn away from his action and back into himself, even if he then means this inner to be different from what is in the deed. Individuality, which entrusts itself to the objective element while becoming an accomplished work, makes itself vulnerable to being altered and inverted. However, just what constitutes the character of the deed is whether the deed is an actual being that holds its own ground, or whether it is only a work intended to be,⁷⁶ which, being nothing in itself, comes to nothing. Objectivity does not alter the deed itself; rather, it only shows what the deed is, which is to say, whether it is, or whether it is nothing. –What must be left to the idleness of mere opinionating,⁷⁷ namely, the parsing of this being into intentions and into those kind of nuances, through which the actual person, i.e., his deed, is supposed to be explained away into a being of such opinionating, in the same way that the individual himself may surely to himself fabricate particular intentions about his actuality. If this idle conjectural opinionating wishes to put its deedless wisdom into practice, and if it wishes to deny the character of reason to the person who acts and also to misuse him in this manner by explaining what he is in terms of his physique and the lines on his face and not in terms of his deed, then it will run into the riposte mentioned above, which demonstrates to it that the physical shape⁷⁸ is not the in-itself, but instead can be the object itself for certain sorts of treatment.

If we look now at the range of the relationships themselves in which self-conscious individuality can be observed to be standing with regard to its outer, there will still be one relationship left over which observation has as yet to make its object. In psychology it is the external actuality of things which is supposed to have its self-aware counterpart within spirit and which is supposed to make spirit comprehensible. In physiognomy, on the other hand, spirit is supposed to be cognized in its own outer as in a being, which is language – the visible invisibility of its essence. What remains still open is the determination of the aspect of actuality which concerns individuality expressing its essence in its immediate, fixed, purely existing actuality. – This latter relation is therefore to be distinguished from the physiognomic as a result of its being the speaking presence of the individual, who in his expressive speech-act⁷⁹ exhibits at the same time the outward expression reflecting itself into itself and studying itself, an expression which is itself movement, and motionless physical traits which are themselves essentially a mediated being. However, in the determination still up for examination, the outer is finally an entire motionless actuality which is not in its own self a speaking sign but which, separated from self-conscious movement, presents itself for itself and is as a mere thing.

One thing becomes initially clear about the relation of the inner to its outer, and it is that it seems that it must be conceived as a relationship of causal connection, while the relation of an existent-in-itself to another existent-in-itself as a necessary relation is this relationship of causal connection.

If spiritual individuality is now to have an effect on the body, then as a cause, it must be itself bodily. However, the bodily nature, in which there is spiritual individuality as a cause, is the organ, but not the organ for acting on external reality; rather, it is the organ within itself of the self-conscious creature⁸⁰ acting outwardly only on its own body. It is not easy to see at one glance which things could be these organs. If we were only to think of organs in general, then the organ for work as such would be obvious, as it would be likewise obvious which was the organ of sexual impulse, and so on. Yet such organs are to be considered as instruments or as parts, which spirit, as one extreme, has as the mediating middle between the other extreme, the external object. However, an organ is here understood to be that in which the self-conscious individual as an extreme sustains himself for himself against his own actuality which is opposed to himself, while at the same time the individual is not turned outwards but is instead reflected in his action and by virtue of which the aspect of being is not a being for others. In the physiognomic relation, the organ is, to be sure, also regarded as an existence reflected into itself and as reviewing the act. However, this being is an objective being, and the result of physiognomic observation is that self-consciousness ends up confronting its actuality as something indifferent. This indifference vanishes because this being-reflected-into-itself is itself efficacious. As a result, the former existence supports a necessary relation to this being-reflected-into-itself. However, for this being-reflected-into-itself to be effectively acting on existence, it must itself have a being which is not for all intents and purposes itself objective, and it is as such an organ that it is supposed to be shown.

Now, for example, in ordinary life anger, as itself such an inner doing, is mistakenly located as lying in the liver. Plato assigns to the liver something even higher, something which to many is even the highest of all, namely, prophesying, or the gift of making pronouncements about the holy and the eternal in an irrational manner. Yet the movement which the individual has in his liver, heart, and so forth cannot be regarded as the individual's movement entirely reflected into itself. Rather, that movement is instead in those places where it has already acquired a bodily stamp and where it is in possession of an animal existence which is moving itself outwards towards external reality.

In contrast, the nervous system is the immediate motionlessness of the organism within its movement. The nerves themselves are no doubt again organs of the consciousness which is already engulfed in an outward direction. However, the brain and spinal cord may be considered as the immediate presence of self-consciousness persisting within itself – a presence that is not objective and which is also not moving outwards. Insofar as the moment of being which this organ has is a being for others, an existence, it is a dead being and is no longer the presence of self-consciousness. However, this inwardly-turned-being is, according to its concept, a fluidity in which the cycles thrown into it have themselves immediately been dissolved and in which no difference is expressed as existing. Meanwhile, in the way that spirit itself is not an abstract-simple but rather a system of movements in which it both distinguishes itself into moments but remains free within this difference, and in the way that spirit articulates its body into various performances and determines one singular part of the body for only one performance, so too can the fluid being of its inwardly-turned-being be represented as differentiated. It also seems that it must be represented in this way because the being reflected-into-itself of spirit in the brain itself is again only a mediating middle between its pure essence and its bodily articulation, a middle which must thus have the nature of both and also of the existing articulation in it.

The spiritual-organic being has at the same time the necessary aspect of a motionless stable existence.⁸¹ The former, as the extreme term of being-for-itself, must step back and have this latter as the other extreme over and against it, which is then the object on which the former acts as a cause. However much the brain and spinal cord are that bodily being-for-itself of spirit, still the skull and spinal column are the other extreme which is separated off and added to it, or, to be specific, are the motionless fixed thing. – However, while anyone who thinks of the genuine location of the existence of spirit thinks not of the spine but only of the head, it follows that in the course of an investigation into the kind of knowing here before us, we can content ourselves with the following reason – and in the present case not too bad a reason at that – if we are to confine this existence of spirit to the skull. Insofar as, from time to time, knowing and acting are also indeed in part driven in – and indeed in part driven out – through the spine, then, even if it should strike anyone to regard the spine as the location of spirit, this would not demonstrate either that the spinal cord must equally be taken as the indwelling location of spirit or that the spinal column should be taken as the existing counter-image for the simple reason that this would prove too much. One can just as well remember that there are also other equally beloved external paths to come by the activity of spirit if one is to awaken it or inhibit it. – Thus, the spinal column, if you please, rightly falls by the wayside. That the skull alone surely does not contain the organs of spirit is something that is as well contrived as are many other doctrines of nature-philosophy. This is what was previously excluded from the concept of this relation, and it was for this reason that the skull was taken to be the aspect of existence. Or, if we are forbidden to be reminded of the concept of what is at stake here, experience still surely teaches that just as one sees with the eye as the organ of sight, then it is not with the skull that we commit murder, steal, write poetry, etc. – For that reason, one should also abstain from using the expression, “organ,” for the meaning of the skull, a meaning about which there is still something to be said. For although people are accustomed to saying that for rational people what matters are not words but the matters themselves, that still does not entitle anybody to designate a thing in terms that are not appropriate to it, for it is at the same time both a matter of clumsiness and deceit to suppose that one only does not have the right word or that the word is lying dormant, when in fact, what is lacking is the relevant matter itself, i.e., the concept. If the latter were available, one would also have the right word for it. – What has been here determined is, first of all, that just as the brain is the living head, the skull is the caput mortuum.

In this dead being, the spiritual movements and determinate modes of the brain would have to give themselves their own display of their external actuality, an actuality which is nonetheless still in the individual himself. For the relation between those movements to the skull, that dead being which does not have spirit indwelling within it, what presents itself is the external mechanical relation which was previously established, so that the genuine organs – and these are in the brain – press the skull here into a round shape and there widen it or flatten it or however else one might illustrate this kind of influence. Itself a part of the organism, it must be thought of as having within it, as is the case with every bone, a self-formation, so that seen from this point of view, it instead presses on the brain and thus for its part fixes the brain's external boundary, which, since the bone is the harder of the two, is something it has the capacity to do. However, there would still continue to be the same relation in the determination of the activity of both to each other, since whether the skull is the determining or the determined, nothing at all in the causal connection would be altered, except that the skull would then be turned into the immediate organ of self-consciousness because within it the aspect of being-for-itself would be found as cause. Yet while being-for-itself as organic living activity belongs to both in the same way, the causal connection between them in fact breaks down. However, this further formation of both would inwardly hang together and would be an organic pre-established harmony which permits both aspects which relate themselves to each other to be free-standing vis-à-vis each other. Each would have its own shape which would not need to correspond to that of the other. Even more free-standing would be the relation of the shape and quality to each other – just as the form of the grape and the taste of wine are free-standing vis-à-vis each other. – However, while the determination of being-for-itself falls within the bounds of the brain, whereas that of existence falls within the bounds of the skull, it is within the bounds of the organic unity that there is also a causal connection to be posited between the two aspects. There is a necessary relation between them as external to each other, or there is a relation which is external to itself and through which the shape of each would therefore be determined through the other.

However, in light of the determination according to which the organ of self-consciousness would be the active cause working on the aspect confronting it, there is much which could be said from this or that angle about it since the issue concerns the makeup of a cause that is studied according to its indifferent existence, its shape and magnitude, of a cause whose inner and whose being-for-itself are what is precisely supposed to have nothing to do with immediate existence. The organic self-formation of the skull is initially indifferent to mechanical influence, and the relation between these two relations, since the former is a relating itself to itself, is this very indeterminateness and boundlessness itself. Furthermore, even if the brain were to incorporate into itself the differences of spirit as existing differences, and if it were to be a plurality of inner organs that each occupied various spaces – this would contradict nature, which gives to each of the moments of the concept their own existence. Nature places the fluid simplicity of organic life purely off to one side, and it likewise places the articulation and division of organic life within its differences off to the other side, so that in the way that they are supposed to be taken here, they would prove themselves to be particular anatomical things – and thus it would be left undetermined whether a spiritual moment, depending on whether it was originally stronger or weaker, would in the former case either have to possess a more expanded brain-organ, or in the latter case a more contracted brain-organ, or else just the other way around. – The same would apply to whether the brain's training enlarges or reduces the organ, or whether it makes it thicker or finer. Since it remains undetermined how the cause is constituted, it is as a result likewise left undetermined how the influence exerted on the skull is to come about, or whether it is a widening or a narrowing and collapsing of it. Or, to put the matter in somewhat genteel terms, if this influence is determined as a stimulating influence, then it is left undetermined whether this takes place in the manner of a swelling, like that brought about by a cantharides-plaster, or by a shriveling like that brought about by vinegar. – Plausible grounds can be put forward for all those kinds of views since the organic relation, which plays a just as important part, allows one of those views to fit as well as the other, and it is indifferent to all these intellects.⁸²

However, to the observing consciousness, the question about determining this relation is of no concern. This is so because, in any event, it is not the brain that stands on one side of the relation as an animal part. Rather, it is the brain as the being of self-conscious individuality. – This individuality, as settled character and self-moving conscious doing, is for itself and is inwardly turned to itself.⁸³ Its actuality and its existence for others stand in opposition to being-for-and-inwardly-turned-to-itself. This being-for-and-inwardly-turned-to-itself is the essence and subject, which has a being in the brain, but this being, the brain, is subsumed under the former, and it receives its value only through the indwelling meaning. However, the other side of self-conscious individuality, namely, that of its existence, is being as self-sufficient and as subject, or as a thing, namely, a bone. The actuality and existence of man is his skull-bone. – This is the relationship, and this is the way the observing consciousness understands the two sides of this relationship.

332. The issue now for observing consciousness has to do with the more determinate relationship between these aspects. The meaning of the skull-bone is generally that of being the immediate actuality of spirit. However, the many-sidedness of spirit gives just as many multiple meanings to its existence. What is still to be achieved is a more determinate grasp of the meaning of the singular areas into which this existence is divided. It also remains to be seen just how these areas in themselves indicate those meanings.

The skull-bone is not an organ of activity, nor is it even a speaking movement. Neither theft, nor murder, etc., is committed by the skull-bone, nor does it even in the least make a change in countenance such that it would thereby become a verbal gesture. – Nor does this existent even have the value of a sign. Countenance and gesture, tone of voice, for that matter, even a post hammered onto a deserted island, all directly proclaim that they mean something other than what they immediately only are. Without further ado, they proclaim themselves to be signs, as they have a determinateness in themselves which points to something else that does not distinctively belong to them. In the presence of a skull, one can surely think of many things, just like Hamlet does with Yorick's, but the skull-bone for itself is such an indifferent, unencumbered thing that there is nothing else immediately to be seen in it nor to think about; there is just it itself. To be sure, it is a reminder of the brain and its determinateness, and it reminds us of other skulls with different formations, but it is not a reminder of any conscious animation,⁸⁴ while neither a countenance nor a gesture is impressed on it, nor is there anything which would indicate that it came from a conscious act, for it is the kind of actuality which is supposed to put on view a different aspect in individuality. This other aspect would no longer be a being reflecting itself into itself; rather, it would be pure immediate being.

Furthermore, since the skull does not itself feel, it seems that perhaps a more determinate significance could be given to it. Through their proximity to the skull, certain determinate sensations would allow us to recognize⁸⁵ what the skull is supposed to mean, and as a conscious mode of spirit has its feeling in a determinate place on the skull, then perhaps this place on the skull will indicate by its shape that mode of spirit and its particularity. For example, when engaged in strenuous thinking, some people complain of feeling a painful tension somewhere in the head, or sometimes they even complain when they are thinking at all; likewise, stealing, committing murder, writing poetry, and so forth, might each be accompanied by its own proper feeling, which moreover would have to have its own particular location as well. This location of the brain, which in this manner would be more in motion and be more activated, would most likely also even further develop the neighboring location of the bone. Or this latter location would, out of sympathy or consensus, not be inert but would enlarge or diminish or in whatever way it might compile itself. – What makes such a hypothesis nonetheless improbable is the following. Feeling as such is something indeterminate, and feeling in the head as the center might well be the universal sympathy in all suffering, so that blended in with the thief's, the murderer's, or the poet's tickling or pain in the head, there would be other feelings, and these would be no more easily distinguished from each other than they could be from those which one can call mere bodily feelings. Distinguishing these feelings from each other would be no easier than determining an illness by the symptom of a headache, if we were indeed to restrict its meaning only to bodily matters.

In fact, it does not matter from which aspect the matter is examined. Any necessary and reciprocal relation between them, as well as any obvious indication of the relation, breaks down. If the relation is still supposed to come about, what remains left over and necessary is a conceptless and free-standing pre-established harmony of the corresponding determination of both aspects, since one of them is supposed to be a spiritless actuality, a mere thing. – On one side stands a whole set of motionless locations on the skull, and on the other side stands a whole set of spiritual properties whose plurality and whose determination will depend on the state of psychology. The poorer the representational thought of spirit is, the easier the matter becomes on this side, for the properties in part become all the fewer, and in part they become more isolated, fixed, and ossified. As a result, they are both more similar to the determinations of the bones and more comparable with them. Yet, although the poverty of the representational thought of spirit makes much of that easier, a very large set of items on both sides still remains. The total contingency of their relation for observation remains. However much each of the children of Israel, who were supposed to be like the sand on the seashore, was supposed to take for himself the grain of sand which was a sign of him, still the indifference and arbitrariness by which each would be allotted his very own grain of sand would be just as great as the indifference and arbitrariness which allocates to a place on the skull and to the form of the bones every capacity of the soul and every passion, and, what must also be noted here, all the nuances of character which the more refined psychology and knowing of human nature are accustomed to discussing. – The skull of a murderer has this feature – that it is neither an organ nor a sign, but just this knotty protuberance, a bump. However, this murderer still has a set of other properties as well as other bumps. And, to go along with the bumps, he has indentations as well; one has the choice between bumps and indentations. And again his murderous propensity can be related to any bump or indentation whatsoever, and this in turn to any property whatsoever, for the murderer is neither only this abstraction of a murderer, nor does he have only one protuberance and one indentation. For that reason, the observations which are made about this must sound just about as good as those of the retailer at the annual fair about the rain, or of the housewife at the fair about her laundry. Both the retailer and the housewife could also make the observation that it always rains when this particular neighbor passes by or when roast pork is eaten. Just as rain is indifferent to these circumstances, so too for observation this determinateness of spirit is also indifferent in relation to this determinate being of the skull. This is so because of the two objects of this observing, the one is a desiccated being-for-itself, an ossified property of spirit, just as the other is a desiccated being-in-itself. Such an ossified thing, as both are, is completely indifferent to everything else. It is just as much a matter of indifference to the high bump itself whether a murderer is in its vicinity as it is to the murderer whether its flatness is close to him.

There certainly remains the possibility that a bump at any location may be associated with any kind of property, passion, etc. One can imagine⁸⁶ the murderer with a high bump here at this place on the skull and the thief with a bump over there. Viewed from this side, phrenology is capable of yet greater extension, for at first it seems only to be restricted to the association of a bump with a property in the same individual, so that this individual possesses both a bump and a property. However, natural phrenology – for if there is a natural physiognomy, there must be such a thing as natural phrenology – already goes beyond this restriction. It not only judges that a crafty person has a bump as thick as a fist lying behind the ear; it also imagines that it is not the unfaithful wife herself but the other individual in the marriage who has bumps on his forehead. – Likewise, one may also imagine⁸⁷ that the person living under the same roof with the murderer, or even the murderer's neighbor, or, to take it still further, his fellow citizens, etc., have high bumps on some location on the skull, just as one may just as well imagine the flying cow which was first caressed by the crab that rode on the donkey, and after that…, etc. – However, if possibility is taken not in the sense of a possibility of imagining⁸⁸ but in the sense of inner possibility, or in the sense of the concept, then the object is the kind of actuality which both is and should be a pure thing and which is not supposed to have the sort of meaning which it can have in representational thought⁸⁹ alone.

Taking no note of the indifference of the two sides, the observer nonetheless sets himself to work to determine these relations. He does this in part because he is supported anew by the universally rational premise that the outer is the expression of the inner, and in part because he finds support for his views in the analogy to the skulls of animals – although those animal skulls may well have a simpler character than those of people's skulls, at the same time it becomes all the more difficult to say what character they do have while it cannot be easy on anybody's imagination to insert himself truly into the nature of an animal. – In that way, to affirm the laws that he wishes he had discovered, the observer finds first-rate assistance in a difference that must also occur to us here. – At least the being of spirit cannot be taken as something so utterly unmoved and immovable. Man is free; one admits that his original being only consists of dispositions over which the person has much influence or which require favorable circumstances to be developed, i.e., one can talk about an original being of spirit with the same ease that one can talk about the kind of item that does not exist as “what is.”⁹⁰ If observations were thus to contradict what everyone would affirm as law, or if there were to be to be fine weather at the annual fair or on washing day, then the retailer and the housewife could say that it really is supposed to rain, and thus that the disposition to rain is nonetheless present. The same goes for observing the skull – this individual really is supposed to be what his skull proclaims him to be according to the law, but he has an original disposition which has not been cultivated and developed. This quality is only not present, but it is supposed to be present. – The law and the supposed-to-be are grounded on observing actual rain and on the actual sense of the determinateness of the skull. However, if that actuality is not present, the empty possibility is just as valid. – This possibility, i.e., the non-actuality of the stated law and the observations contradicting the law, must as a result be allowed in the door, since the freedom of the individual and the developing circumstances are indifferent towards what is, full stop,⁹¹ both as the original inner as well as the external bone structure, and because the individual can be something other than what he internally originally is and even more than what he is as a bone.

338. We therefore have the possibility that this bump or indentation on the skull may indicate both something actual as well as a disposition, namely, it is something so indeterminate that it may indicate something not actual at all. As always, we see how things go with a bad subterfuge, namely, that it is itself ready to be used against what it is supposed to support. We see the conjecturing⁹² brought by the nature of the matter at issue into saying, however unthinkingly, the opposite of what it affirms – into saying that there is something indicated by this bone but also into saying with the same ease that the same thing is not indicated by this bone.

As it indulges in this subterfuge, what this conjecturing⁹³ has in mind is the true thought that being as such is not the truth of spirit at all, and this thought straightaway demolishes such a subterfuge. As the disposition already is an original being that has no share in the activity of spirit, such an original being, for its part, is also the bone. The existent without spiritual activity is a thing for consciousness. It is so little the essence of consciousness that it is instead the opposite of it, and consciousness is only actual, to itself, through the negation and abolition of such a being. – Taken from this aspect, it is to be regarded as a complete denial of reason to offer a bone as the actual existence of consciousness, and that is what it is professed to be while it is regarded as the outer of spirit, for the outer is just the existing actuality. It is of no help to say that we only infer from the outer to the inner, which is supposed to be something other than the outer, and that the outer is supposed to be not the inner itself but only its expression. For in the relationship of both to each other, the determination of the actuality which thinks of itself and which has subjected itself to thinking falls within the bounds of the inner, and that of existing actuality falls within the bounds of the outer. – However much therefore a person is told, “You, your inner, are constituted in this way because your bones are so constituted,” still this means nothing but that I regard a bone as your actuality. The riposte to such a judgment, namely, a slap in the face as was mentioned in the case of physiognomy, initially brings the soft parts out of their high regard and lofty position, and it only proves both that neither of them is a true in-itself and that they are not the actuality of spirit. – The retort here would really have to go as far as smashing the skull of the person who makes a statement like that in order to demonstrate to him in a manner as palpable as his wisdom that for a person a bone is nothing in-itself and is even less his true actuality.

340. Without hesitation, the raw instinct of self-conscious reason will reject such a science of phrenology – as well as reject this other observing instinct of self-conscious reason, which, once it has blossomed into a foreshadowing of cognition, has spiritlessly grasped cognition as, “The outer is supposed to be an expression of the inner.” However, the worse the thought is, the less easy it sometimes is to say exactly where its badness lies, and it becomes even more difficult to explicate it. This is so because the thought can be said to be even worse when the abstraction which counts, to itself, as the essence becomes itself all the more pure and all the more empty. However, the opposition which is at issue here has for its elements the individuality which is conscious of itself and the abstraction of an externality that has become entirely a thing – that inner being of spirit grasped as a fixed, spiritless being standing in opposition to that kind of being. – However, it also seems that observing reason has thereby in fact reached its pinnacle, the point where it must abandon itself and upend itself, for only what is entirely bad in itself has the immediate necessity to reverse itself. – As it can be said of the Jewish people that precisely because they immediately stand before the gates of salvation, they are both supposed to be and actually have been the most corrupted of all peoples. What this people should be in and for themselves, this being-themselves,⁹⁴ is what to themselves they are not; instead, they shift it off into an other-worldly beyond of themselves. Through this self-relinquishing,⁹⁵ they make a higher existence possible for themselves which they could achieve if only they could again take their object back into themselves rather than if they had remained within the immediacy of being. This is so because spirit is all the greater, the greater the opposition out of which it returns into itself. Spirit itself produces this opposition in the sublation of its immediate unity and in the self-relinquishing of its being-for-itself. Yet if such a consciousness does not reflect itself, the mediating middle where it stands is the unsanctified void, while what is supposed to bring that mediating middle to its fulfillment has become an unyielding extreme. In that way, this last stage of observing reason is its very worst, and for that reason its complete reversal is necessary.

The overview of the series of relations which have been examined up to this point itself constitutes the content and object of observation. It shows that in its first mode, namely, the observation of the relationships obtaining in inorganic nature, sensuous being has, to observation, already vanished. The moments of its relations are exhibited as pure abstractions and as simple concepts which are supposed to be kept firmly tied to the existence of things. However, this latter point breaks down so that the moment proves itself to be a pure movement and a universal. This free movement, complete within itself, retains the meaning that it is something objective, but it now comes on the scene as a One. In the process of the inorganic, that One is the non-existing inner. As One but as existing, it is the organic. – That One, as being-for-itself, or as negative essence, confronts the universal, extracts itself from it, and remains free-standing on its own,⁹⁶ such that the concept, which is realized only in the elements of an absolute isolation,⁹⁷ does not find its true expression in organic existence, namely, to be there as a universal. Rather, it remains an outer, or, what is the same thing, an inner of organic nature. – The organic process is only free in itself but not for-itself. It is in the purpose that the being-for-itself of its freedom emerges, and it exists as another essence, as a wisdom aware of itself which is external to the process. Observing reason thus addresses itself to this wisdom, to spirit, to the concept existing as universality, or to the purpose existing as purpose, and henceforth, to observing reason, its own essence is the object.

Observing reason at first addresses itself to its purity. While observing reason is a grasping of the object (which is self-moving within its differences) as an existent, the laws of thinking become, to observing reason, relations between the permanent and another permanent. But since the content of these laws are only moments, these laws blend together in the One of self-consciousness. – This new object, likewise taken as existent, is singular, contingent self-consciousness. Observation thus stands both within the bounds of spirit as it meant spirit to be and within the bounds of the contingent relationships of conscious actuality to unconscious actuality. Spirit in itself is only the necessity of this relation. Observation therefore approaches spirit even more closely and compares its own actuality, willing and acting, with its own actuality, contemplating⁹⁸ and reflecting itself into itself, which is itself objective actuality. This outer, although it is a language of the individual which he has on his own, is, as a sign, at the same time something indifferent to the content which it is supposed to designate just as that which, to itself, posits the sign is indifferent to the sign itself.

For this reason, observation finally turns away from this changeable language and goes back to hard and fast being. According to its concept, it expresses externality as the outer immediate actuality of spirit, neither in the sense of an organ, nor as a language or a sign, but in the sense of a dead thing. What was sublated by the very first observation of inorganic nature, namely, that the concept is supposed to be present as a thing, is established by this last mode of observation so as to make the actuality of spirit itself into a thing, or, to put it conversely, so as to give dead being the significance of spirit. – Observation has thus reached the point where it gives expression to what our concept of observation was, namely, that the certainty of reason seeks itself as an objective actuality. – By this it is not meant that spirit, represented by a skull, is declared to be a thing. What is supposed to lie in this thought is certainly not materialism, as it is called. Rather, spirit must instead be something very different from these bones. However, that spirit is means nothing other than that it is a thing. However much being as such, or being-a-thing, is predicated of spirit, still, for that reason, this is genuinely expressed by saying that spirit is the sort of thing that a bone is. Hence, it must be considered to be of supreme importance that the true expression of this has been found. Of spirit it is simply to be said, “it is.” However much it is otherwise said of spirit that it is, it has a being, it is a thing, a singular actuality, still it is not thereby meant that it is something we can see, or take in our hands, or push around and so forth, but that is what is said of it, and what in truth the foregoing has been saying may be expressed in this way: The being of spirit is a bone.

This result now has a twofold meaning. One is its true meaning insofar as it is a complement to the results of the preceding movement of self-consciousness. The unhappy self-consciousness emptied itself of its self-sufficiency and agonizingly rendered its being-for-itself into a thing. As a result, it returned from self-consciousness into consciousness, i.e., into that consciousness for which the object is a being, a thing. – However, this, the thing, is self-consciousness. The thing is thus the unity of the I and of being; it is the category. While the object for consciousness is determined in that way, consciousness has reason. Consciousness, as well as self-consciousness, is authentically in itself reason. However, it is only of consciousness, for which the object has been determined as the category, that it can be said that it has reason. – But this is still distinct from the knowing of what reason is. – The category, which is the immediate unity of being and what is its own, must pass through both forms, and observing consciousness is just the following. It is that to which the category exhibits itself in the form of being. In its result, consciousness expresses as a proposition that of which it is the unconscious certainty – the proposition which lies in the concept of reason. This proposition is the infinite judgment that the self is a thing – a judgment which sublates itself. – Through this result the category has thus definitely reached the point where it is this self-sublating opposition. The pure category, which is for consciousness in the form of being, or immediacy, is the still unmediated object, the object that is present, and consciousness is likewise an unmediated conduct. The moment of that infinite judgment is the transition from immediacy into mediation, or negativity. The object that is present is thus determined as a negative object, whereas consciousness is determined as self-consciousness with regard to the object. That is, the category, which, in observing, has traversed the form of being, is now posited in the form of being-for-itself. Consciousness no longer wants to find itself immediately. Rather, it wishes to engender itself by its own activity. It itself is, to itself, the purpose of its own doing in the way that in observing it was, to itself, concerned only with things.

The other meaning of the result is the one already considered, that of observation without concepts. This does not know any other way to grasp itself and express itself other than by naively declaring that the bone, as it is to be found as a sensuous thing which does not lose its determinateness as an objectivity for consciousness, is the actuality of self-consciousness. However, it also has no clear consciousness about what it is saying in this proposition, and it grasps neither the determinateness of the subject and predicate, nor their relation to each other. Even less does it grasp the proposition in the sense of an infinitely dissolving judgment and of the concept. – From out of a kind of natural honesty which lies at a deeper level of self-conscious spirit, it instead conceals from itself the ignominiousness of brute, conceptless thought which takes a bone to be the actuality of self-consciousness. It then whitewashes that thought by means of an unthinking mixture of all sorts of relations between cause and effect, between sign and organ, etc., relations which make no sense here, and by then relying on distinctions derived from that senseless mixture, it conceals just how tawdry the proposition really is.

Viewed as the being of spirit, brain-fibers and the like are already only a hypothetical actuality that has itself only been thought about – they are not existing, not felt, not seen actualities, or they are not the true actuality. If they are there, if they are seen, they are dead objects, and then they no longer count as the being of spirit. However, its genuine objectivity must be immediate and sensuous, so that in this objectivity as dead – for the bone is dead insofar as what is dead is in the living being itself – spirit is posited as actual. – The concept of this representational thought is the following. Reason is, to itself, all thinghood, also purely objective thinghood itself. However, it is this within the concept; or, the concept alone is the truth of reason, and the purer the concept itself is, the more foolish is the representational thought into which it sinks if its content is [taken] not as concept but instead as representation – if the self-sublating judgment is not taken with the consciousness of its infinity but is instead taken to be an enduring proposition, whose subject and predicate each count as valid on their own⁹⁹ and where the self is fixed as self, the thing as thing, and, for all that, where one is supposed to be the other. – Within itself, reason, or essentially the concept, is immediately estranged into itself and its opposite, an opposition which, just for that reason, is immediately sublated. However, if reason presents itself in this way both as itself and its opposite, and if it is held fast in the entirely singular moments of this falling apart, then reason is grasped irrationally.¹⁰⁰ The purer the moments of this falling-apart are, the more tawdry is the appearance of this content, which is either solely for consciousness, or is solely expressed naively by consciousness. – The depth from which spirit pushes out from its inwardness but which it only manages to drive to the level of representational consciousness and then abandons it there – and the ignorance of this consciousness about what it says – are the same kind of connection of higher and lower which, in the case of the living being, nature itself naively expresses in the combination of the organ of its highest fulfillment, the organ of generation, with the organ of urination. – The infinite judgment as infinite would be the completion of self-comprehending life, whereas the consciousness of the infinite judgment which remains within representational thought conducts itself like urination.

a. Pleasure and Necessity

The self-consciousness which is, to itself, reality has in its own self its object, but as the sort of object which it initially has only for itself and which does not yet exist. Being stands over and against it as an actuality other than its own, and self-consciousness undertakes to intuit itself as another self-sufficient essence by way of putting its being-for-itself into practice. This first purpose is to become conscious of itself as a singular essence within that other self-consciousness, or to make this other into itself. It has the certainty that in itself this other already is itself. – Insofar as it has elevated itself from out of the ethical substance and from out of the motionless being of thinking, to its being-for-itself, so does it have the law of ethos and existence, together with the skills¹¹⁶ related to observation and theory, only as a gray and gradually vanishing shadow behind it, for this is instead the knowing of the kind of thing whose being-for-itself and whose actuality is other than that of self-consciousness. Instead of the seemingly heavenly spirit of the universality of knowing and doing in which the feeling and the gratification of singular individuality fall silent, the spirit of the earth has entered into it, a spirit to whom the only being which counts as the true actuality is that of the actuality of singular consciousness.

It therefore plunges into life and puts into practice the pure individuality in which it comes on the scene. It does not so much make its own good fortune as it immediately takes it and takes pleasure in it. The shadows cast by science, laws, and principles, which alone stand between it and its own actuality, vanish like a lifeless fog which it cannot absorb with the certainty of its reality. It helps itself to life in the way that a ripe fruit is plucked which itself accommodates itself to its being so taken.

Its doing is, according to one of the moments, a doing of desire. It is not a matter of erasing the entire objective essence, but rather, of erasing the form of its otherness, or of its self-sufficiency, which is an essenceless semblance. For in itself that otherness counts, to itself, as the same essence, or as its selfhood. The element in which desire and its object both self-sufficiently and indifferently stably exist vis-à-vis each other is that of living existence. The indulgence of desire sublates this existence insofar as that living existence corresponds to its object. However, here this element which gives separate actuality to both is instead the category, a being which is essentially a represented being. It is thus the consciousness of self-sufficiency – whether it be that of natural consciousness or a consciousness educated in a system of laws which sustains each of the individuals for itself. This separation is not in itself for self-consciousness, which knows the other as its own selfhood. It therefore arrives at the enjoyment of pleasure, or it arrives at the consciousness of its actualization in a consciousness which is in appearance self-sufficient, or it arrives at the intuition of the unity of both self-sufficient self-consciousnesses. It achieves its purpose, and it then experiences in that achievement what the truth of its purpose is. It comprehends itself as this singular being existing-for-itself. However, the actualization of this purpose is itself the sublation of the purpose, since self-consciousness becomes not an object to itself as this singular individual but instead as the unity of itself and the other self-consciousness, and thereby as a sublated singular individual, or as universal.

The pleasure enjoyed indeed positively signifies that it has come to be objective self-consciousness to itself, but it just as much negatively signifies that it has sublated itself. While it conceives of its actualization only in the former sense, its experience enters its consciousness as a contradiction in which the attained actuality of its singular individuality sees itself destroyed by the negative essence, which confronts it as empty and devoid of actuality, but which nonetheless is its all-consuming power. This essence is nothing but the concept of what this individuality is in itself. However, this individuality is still the poorest shape of self-actualizing spirit, since it is, to itself, the very abstraction of reason, or it is the immediacy of the unity of being-for-itself and being-in-itself. Its essence is therefore only the abstract category. However, it no longer has the form of immediate, simple being, a form which it had for the observing spirit, where it was abstract being, or posited as alien, or was thinghood itself. Here, being-for-itself and mediation have entered into this thinghood. Therefore, they come on the scene here as a circle whose content is the developed pure relation of the simple essentialities. The attained actualization of this individuality thus consists in nothing more than this, namely, that this cycle of abstractions has been cast out from the self-enclosed confines of simple self-consciousness into the element of being-for-itself, or into the element of objective expansion. Thus, to self-consciousness, what in its savoring of its pleasure comes to be the object as its essence is the further expansion of those empty essentialities, or of pure unity, of pure difference, and of their relation. Furthermore, the object, which individuality experiences as its essence, has no content. It is what is called necessity, since necessity, fate, and the like, is just this: That we do not know how to say what it is doing or what its determinate laws and its positive content are supposed to be because it is the absolute pure concept itself intuited as being, the simple and empty but nonetheless inexorable and impassive relation whose work is only the nothingness of singular individuality. The relation is this firm connection because what is connected are the pure essentialities, or the empty abstractions. Unity, difference, and relation are categories, each of which is in and for itself nothing and each of which is only in relation to its opposite. Thus, they cannot be decoupled from each other. They are related to each other through their concept, since they are the pure concepts themselves, and it is this absolute relation and abstract movement which constitutes necessity. Instead of having plunged from dead theory into life, the only singular individuality, which at first has only the pure concept of reason for its content, has thus instead plunged into the consciousness of its own lifelessness, and, to itself, has come to be only as empty and alien necessity, as dead actuality.

The transition takes place from out of the form of the One into that of universality, out of one absolute abstraction into the other, out of the purposes of pure being-for-itself, which has jettisoned all community with others, into the pure opposite, which as a result is just as abstract being-in-itself. It thereby appears so that the individual has only perished, and the absolute aloofness of singular individuality is pulverized on that hard but continuous actuality. – While, as consciousness, it is the unity of itself and its opposite, this transition is still for consciousness. It is its purpose, and its actualization as well as the contradiction of what to it was the essence and what in itself is the essence. – It experiences the twofold meaning which lies in what it did. It helped itself to life, but in doing so, it instead laid hold of death.

This transition of its living being into lifeless necessity thus appears to it to be an inversion mediated by nothing. What would mediate it would have to be that in which both aspects would be one, in which consciousness would therefore recognize¹¹⁷ one moment in the other, or recognize its purpose and its doing in its fate and its fate in its purpose and its doing, or recognize its own essence in this necessity. However, this unity is for consciousness just pleasure itself, or the simple singular feeling, and the transition from the moment of its purpose into the moment of its true essence is for it a pure leap into the opposite, since these moments are not contained and connected with each other in feeling but only in the pure self, which is a universal, or is thinking. To itself, consciousness is consequently through its experience, within which its truth was, to consciousness, supposed to have come to be, instead become a riddle to itself. To it, the consequences of its deeds are not its deeds themselves, and what befalls it is for it not the experience of what it is in itself. The transition is not a mere alteration in form of the same content and essence, which is represented at one time as the content and essence of consciousness, and at another time as object, or as the intuited essence of itself. Abstract necessity therefore counts as the only negative and uncomprehended power of universality in which individuality is shattered.

The appearance of this shape of self-consciousness only gets this far. The final moment of its existence is the thought of its loss within necessity, or the thought of itself as an essence absolutely alien to itself. However, in itself self-consciousness has survived this loss, for this necessity, or this pure universality, is its own essence. This reflection of consciousness into itself, knowing necessity as itself, is a new shape of consciousness.

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

What necessity is in truth in consciousness is what it is for the new shape of self-consciousness in which self-consciousness is, to itself, necessity. It immediately knows that it has the universal, or the law, within itself, which on account of this determination, that it is immediately in the being-for-itself of consciousness, is called the law of the heart. As singular individuality, this shape is for itself the essence as was the former shape, but it is richer on account of the determination that, to itself, this being-for-itself counts as necessary, or as universal being-for-itself.

The law is immediately self-consciousness' own law, or it is a heart which in itself has a law and is therefore the purpose which self-consciousness sets itself to realize. It remains to be seen whether its actualization corresponds to this concept, and whether, within this actualization, it will come to experience this, its law, as the essence.

An actuality confronts this heart, for in the heart, the law is first only for itself as the concept. It is not yet actualized and thus at the same time it is something other than the concept. As a result, this other determines itself as an actuality which is the opposite of what is to be actualized, and it is thus the contradiction between the law and singular individuality. On the one hand, actuality is thus a law by which singular individuality is oppressed, a violent order of the world which contradicts the law of the heart – and on the other hand, it is humanity suffering under that order, a humanity that does not follow the law of the heart, but which is instead subjected to an alien necessity. – This actuality, which appears in the present shape of consciousness as confronting it, is, as light is cast on it, nothing but the preceding estrangement between individuality and its truth, or a relationship of dreadful necessity by which individuality is crushed. For that reason, for us the preceding movement confronts the new shape because the new shape has in itself originated out of it, and the moment from which it stems is necessary for it. However, to itself, that moment appears as something it just finds as given, while it has no consciousness of its origin and, to itself, the essence is instead for itself, or it is the negative in-itself opposed to this positive in-itself.

This necessity contradicting the law of the heart as well as the present suffering arising out of it, are what this individuality aims at sublating. This individuality is thereby no longer the recklessness of the previous shape, which only wanted individual pleasure. Rather, it is the seriousness of a high purpose that seeks its pleasure in the exhibition of its own admirably excellent essence and in authoring the welfare of mankind. What it actualizes is itself the law, and its pleasure is at the same time universal for all hearts. Both are, to itself, inseparable; its pleasure is lawful, and the actualization of the law of universal humanity is its own individual pleasure. For in its own self, individuality and necessity are immediately one; the law is a law of the heart. Individuality has not yet been jiggled out of its place, and the unity of both has neither been brought about by the mediating movement of individuality nor has it yet been established through discipline. The actualization of the immediately wicked essence counts as exhibiting its own excellence and as authoring the well-being of mankind.

In contrast, the law which is opposed to the law of the heart is separated from the heart and is free-standing.¹¹⁸ Humanity, which belongs to this law, does not live in the gratifying unity of the law and the heart, but rather, lives either in dreadful separation and suffering, or at least in the deprivation of enjoying itself in obeying the law, and it lives in the defect of the consciousness of its own excellence in the transgression of the law. Because that divine and human order, a binding order, is separated from the heart, it is to the heart a semblance which is supposed to forfeit what is joined to it, namely, power and actuality. In its content, that order may contingently coincide with the law of the heart, at which point the law of the heart can acquiesce in it. However, it is not lawfulness purely as such which, to the heart, is the essence but rather the consciousness of itself in such lawfulness, its consciousness that it has therein satisfied itself. However, where the content of universal necessity does not correspond to the heart, then, according to its content, universal necessity is also nothing in itself, and it too must give way to the law of the heart.

The individual thus accomplishes the law of his heart. The law becomes a universal order, and pleasure becomes an actuality which is in and for itself lawful. However, in this actualization, the law has in fact escaped the individual, and it immediately becomes only the relationship which was supposed to be sublated. Through its actualization, the law of the heart just ceases to be a law of the heart, for it thereby receives the form of being and is now the universal power for which this heart is a matter of indifference, so that as a result, the individual in establishing his own order no longer finds it to be his own. Hence, through the actualization of his law, he does not produce¹¹⁹ his law. However, while both in itself the order is his own but is, for him, alien, what he authors is only that of his own entanglement in the actual order, indeed, he is entangled in an order which is not only alien to him but which is also a hostile dominance. – Through his deed the individual posits himself as being in, or instead, as, the universal element of existent actuality, and his deed itself is by his own lights supposed to have the value of a universal order. However, he has thereby set himself free from himself. As universality, the individual continues for itself to grow and purify itself of singularity. The individual who wishes only to cognize¹²⁰ universality in the form of his immediate being-for-itself does not therefore cognize himself in this free-standing universality, but at the same time he belongs to it, for it is his own doing. This doing thus has the inverted significance of contradicting the universal order, for his deed is supposed to be the deed of his singular heart, not some free-standing universal actuality. At the same time, he has in fact recognized this universal actuality, for his doing means that he posits his essence as free-standing actuality, which is to say, bestowing recognition on actuality as his essence.

Through the concept of his doing, the individual has determined the more precise way in which actual universality, to which he himself belongs, turns against him. As actuality, his deed belongs to the universal; however, its content is his own individuality, which wants to preserve itself as this singular individual in opposition to the universal. One is not speaking about establishing any determinate law. The immediate unity of the singular heart with universality is the thought which is supposed to be valid and to be elevated to the status of law, that every heart must recognize¹²¹ itself in the law. However, only this individual's heart has posited his actuality in his deed, which, to himself, expresses his being-for-itself, or his pleasure. The deed is supposed to count immediately as universal, which is to say that it is in truth something particular and only has the form of universality. But his particular content is as such content supposed to count as universal. Hence, others do not find the law of their hearts in this content; rather, they find instead that it is the law of another's heart which has been accomplished. It is according to the universal law that each is supposed to find the law in his own heart, such that they just as much turn themselves against the actuality which his heart established, just as he had turned against what their hearts had established. Therefore, just as the individual initially found only the rigid law, now he finds that the hearts of people are opposed to his admirable intentions, and they are thus themselves to be loathed.

Because this consciousness is aware of universality at first only as immediate and of necessity as the necessity of the heart, to itself, it is unfamiliar with the nature of actualization and efficaciousness, that this actualization as the existing¹²² in its truth is instead the universal in itself, within which the singularity of consciousness, which puts its trust in this actualization in order to be as this immediate singular individuality, instead founders. Instead of attaining its own being, the being it therefore attains is the alienation of itself from itself. It is no longer dead necessity in which it does not recognize¹²³ itself, but rather it is necessity which is brought to life through universal individuality. He took this divine and human order as he found it validly in force, as a dead actuality, within which, just like himself, who had fixated on himself as this heart existing for itself and thus opposed to the universal, so would each of the others belonging to this order have no consciousness of itself. However, it instead finds that order is animated by the consciousness of all and is a law for all hearts. This consciousness learns from experience that actuality is a living order, and in fact at the same time learns this just as a result of actualizing the law of its own heart, since this means nothing else but that individuality becomes, to itself, an object as the universal but in which it does not know¹²⁴ itself.

Therefore, for this shape of self-consciousness, what emerges from its experience as the truth contradicts what this shape is for itself. What it is for itself has the form of absolute universality for it, and it is the law of the heart which is immediately one with self-consciousness. At the same time, the stably existing and living order is just as much its own essence and handiwork. What it originates is nothing other than what this shape itself originates, and that shape is in an equally immediate unity with self-consciousness. In this way, this self-consciousness, which belongs to a doubly opposed essentiality, is in itself contradictory and, in what is most inner to it, has broken down. The law of this heart is only that in which self-consciousness cognizes¹²⁵ itself, but through the actualization of that law, the universally valid order has just as much become to self-consciousness its own essence and its own actuality. What is therefore self-contradictory in its consciousness is both in the form of essence and in the form of its own actuality for it.

While it expresses both this moment of its own self-aware downfall and therein the result of its experience, it shows itself to be this inner inversion of its self, as the madness of a consciousness for which its essence is immediately a non-essence and its actuality a non-actuality. – The madness cannot be taken to mean that in general the essenceless is taken to be the essence, or that the non-actual is taken to be actual, so that what for one person would be essential or actual would not be so for another, and the consciousness of the actual and of the non-actual, or of the essential and the inessential, would come apart. – However much something is in fact actual and essential for consciousness per se but is not so for me, still I have at the same time in the consciousness of its nullity the consciousness of its actuality since I too am consciousness per se – and while they are both fixed, so is this a unity that is insanity in general. However, in such a condition, there is for consciousness only an object which has gone mad, not consciousness per se within itself and for itself. As a consequence of the experience which has resulted here, consciousness is, however, in its law aware of itself as this actuality, and, at the same time, while it is, to itself, just this same essentiality, this same actuality is alienated, it is as self-consciousness, as absolute actuality aware of its own non-actuality; or, according to their contradictions, both aspects immediately are valid to it as its essence, which thus in its innermost aspects has gone mad.

The heart-throb for the welfare of mankind therefore passes over into the bluster of a mad self-conceit. It passes over into the rage of a consciousness which preserves itself from destruction as a result of the very inversion which is itself which it casts out of itself and which makes every effort to regard and to express that inversion as other than itself. It therefore pronounces the universal order to be an inversion of the law of its heart and its own happiness; it pronounces that the universal order is an inversion completely fabricated by fanatical priests and gluttonous despots, along with their various lackeys, who, by having lowered themselves to such abjection, now seek compensation for their own humiliation by humiliating and oppressing those further below them. It is an inversion which has as its cost the nameless misery of deceived humanity. – In its madness, consciousness expresses that it is individuality itself which, as alien and contingent, drives one mad and which is itself what is inverted. But it is the heart, or the singularity of consciousness immediately willing to be universal, which drives one mad and which is inverted, and its doing is only the production of what makes this contradiction become its consciousness. For the truth is to this consciousness the law of the heart – something merely fancied¹²⁶ which has not stood the test of time as has the stably existing order but rather, instead, as it has shown itself to this consciousness, to founder. This, its law, is supposed to have actuality. As actuality, as a valid order, the law is, to itself, its own purpose and essence, but actuality, or just the law as the valid order, is to it, immediately and instead null and void. – Likewise, its own actuality, itself as the singularity of consciousness, is, to itself, the essence, but, to itself, its purpose consists in positing that singularity as existing. To it, its own self as non-singular is thus instead immediately the essence, or purpose as law, therein as a universality which is said to be the law for its consciousness itself. – This, its concept, becomes, through its doing, its object. Therefore, its self thus experiences instead the law as non-actual and the non-actuality as its own actuality. It is thus not a contingent and alien individuality but rather just this very heart, which, according to all of its aspects, is in itself the inverted and inverting.

However, while the immediately universal individuality is both the inverted and the inverting, this universal order, since it is the law of all hearts, which is to say, the law of the inverted, is in itself the inverted, just as the blustering madness declared it to be. At one time, this order proves to be a law for all hearts in the resistance which the law of one heart encounters in other singular individuals.¹²⁷ The stably existing laws are defended against the law of an individual, and they are defended because they are not unconscious, empty, dead necessity, but rather because they are spiritual universality and substance, within which those in which spiritual universality and substance have their actuality, live as individuals and are aware of themselves, so that when they also complain about this order and when they affirm the opinions of the heart against the laws of that order (as if this substance were indeed running contrary to their own inner law), they are in their hearts in fact clinging to that substance as their essence. If this order is taken from them, or if they set themselves outside of it, then they lose everything. While the public order's actuality and power consists just in that, the public order appears as the universal essence which is animated and self-equal, and individuality appears as its form. – However, this order is just as much the inverted itself.

For it is in this order being the law of all hearts that all individuals immediately are this universal, that this order is an actuality which is only the actuality of individuality existing for itself, or the actuality of the heart. Consciousness, which proposes the law of its heart, experiences resistance from others because it contradicts the equally singular laws of their own hearts, and in their resistance the latter are doing nothing but establishing their own laws and putting them in force. Hence, the universal which is present here is only a universal resistance, a combat of all against all, within which each both asserts his own singular individuality but at the same time fails at it because each individuality experiences the same resistance and is reciprocally brought to dissolution by the others. What seems to be the public order is therefore this universal feud within which each in itself wrests for himself what he can, in which each executes justice upon the singular individuality of others, and where each establishes his own singular individuality which then likewise vanishes at the hands of others. We have here the way of the world, the semblance of an enduring course of events, a fancied universal,¹²⁸ whose content is instead the essenceless game of setting up and then dissolving these singular individualities.

If we examine both aspects of the universal order in relation to each other, then this final universality has for its content restless individuality, for which opinion or singularity is law, the actual is non-actual, and the non-actual is actual. However, universality is at the same time the aspect of the actuality of the order, for the being-for-itself of individuality belongs to it. – The other aspect is the universal as the motionless essence and just for that reason only as an inner, which is not nothing but is nonetheless not an actuality, and which can itself become actual only through the sublation of the individuality which has arrogated to itself actuality. This shape of consciousness must, to itself, come to be in the laws, in the true and good in themselves, not as singularity but only as essence, knowing individuality to be the inverted and inverting, and consequently it will have to sacrifice the singularity of consciousness. This shape of consciousness is virtue.

c. Virtue and the Way of the World

In the first shape of active reason, self-consciousness was, to itself, pure individuality, and confronting it was empty universality. In the second shape, both parts of the opposition had both of those moments, law and individuality, in themselves. However, the one part, the heart, was their immediate unity, and the other was their opposition. Here, in the relationships between virtue and the way of the world, each of the members is both the unity and the opposition of the moments, or each is a movement of law and individuality vis-à-vis each other but it is an opposing movement. For the consciousness of virtue, the law is the essential, and individuality is to be sublated, and therefore to be sublated in its consciousness as well as in the way of the world. In the former, one's own individuality is to be brought under the discipline of the universal, or of the good and true in itself, but it still remains therein a personal consciousness. True discipline solely consists in the sacrifice of one's entire personality as proof that personal consciousness in not in fact still fixated on minutiae. At the same time, in this individual sacrifice, individuality is eradicated in the way of the world, for individuality is also a simple moment common to both. – In the way of the world, individuality behaves in a completely opposite way than it does when it is posited in the virtuous consciousness. In the way of the world, it makes itself the essence and subordinates the good and the true in themselves to itself. – Furthermore, for virtue the way of the world is only the universal inverted through individuality. Rather, the absolute order is likewise a common moment, but in the way of the world, it is only not as existing actuality that it is present for consciousness but rather as the way of the world's inner essence. Hence, that order is instead not to be first brought out by virtue, for such bringing out is, as doing, the consciousness of singular individuality, and it is singular individuality which is instead to be sublated. However, through this sublating, there is, as it were, only a space which has been opened to the in itself of the way of the world so that it may in and for itself come into existence.

The universal content of the actual way of the world has already emerged. Taken more precisely, it is again nothing but the two preceding movements of self-consciousness. It is from them that the shape of virtue has emerged; while they are its origin, virtue has them prior to itself. However, virtue both sets itself to sublating its origin and to realizing itself, or to becoming for itself. On the one hand, the way of the world is thus singular individuality which seeks its pleasure and gratification, therein finding only its downfall, and as a result satisfying the universal. However, this satisfaction itself, just like the rest of the moments of these relations, is both an inverted shape and movement of the universal. Actuality is only the singularity of pleasure and gratification, but the universal is opposed to it. Actuality is a necessity which is only the empty shape of the universal, only a negative reaction, a content-less doing. – The other moment of the way of the world is individuality, which wills to be a law in and for itself, and which, in this conceit, disturbs the stably existing order. To be sure, the universal law holds its own against this sort of self-conceit, and it no longer comes on the scene as opposed to consciousness, or as empty, as a dead necessity; it comes on the scene rather as a necessity within consciousness itself. In the way it is as the conscious relation of an absolutely contradictory actuality, it is madness, but in the way it exists as an objective actuality, it is utter invertedness itself. In both aspects, the universal therefore exhibits itself as the power of their movement, but the existence of this power is only the universal inversion.

The universal is now supposed to receive from virtue its true actuality through the sublating of individuality, through the principle of inversion. Virtue's purpose is thereby again to invert the inverted way of the world and to bring out its true essence. This true essence initially is in the way of the world only as the in-itself of the way of the world. The true essence is not yet actual, and thus virtue only has faith in it. Virtue proceeds to elevate this faith to the level of vision, but without enjoying the fruit of its labor and sacrifice. This is so because insofar as virtue is individuality, in engaging in the struggle,¹²⁹ it engages with the way of the world; but its purpose and true essence lie in defeating the actuality of the way of the world. As a result, the existence of the good which is thereby brought about is the cessation of its doing, or of the consciousness of individuality. – How this struggle itself will survive, what virtue will experience in the course of this struggle, whether the way of the world will be defeated, and whether virtue shall triumph through the sacrifice it makes – all this must be decided on the basis of the nature of the living weapons the combatants carry, for the weapons are nothing but the essence of the combatants themselves, an essence which reciprocally comes on the scene for both of them. What their weapons are is the result of what is present in itself in this struggle.

The universal is for the virtuous consciousness in faith, or truly in itself. It is not yet an actual but rather an abstract universality. In this consciousness itself, it is as purpose, and in the way of the world it is as the inner. For the way of the world, it is in this very determination that the universal also exhibits itself in virtue, for virtue just wills to put the good into practice; it does not pretend to give it actuality. This determinateness can also be regarded in this way, that the good, while it emerges in the struggle with the way of the world, thereby exhibits itself as existing for an other and not as something existing in and for itself, for otherwise it would not want to give itself its truth by means of conquering its opposite. The good is only at first for an other, which means the same as what was shown in the previous and opposite way of regarding the matter, namely, that the good is an abstraction which only has reality in and for itself in those relationships themselves.

The good, or the universal as it here comes on the scene, are what are called gifts, abilities, powers. It is a mode of the spiritual in which the spiritual is represented as a universal; it requires the principle of individuality to bring it to life and give it movement, and it has its actuality in this, its individuality. This universal is well used by this principle insofar as it is deployed in the consciousness of virtue, and it is misused by it as far as it is deployed in the way of the world – it is a passive instrument, ruled by the hand of free individuality. It is indifferent to the use that individuality makes of it, and it can be misused to bring out an actuality which is that instrument's own destruction, or bring out a lifeless matter which lacks its own self-sufficiency and which can be formed in all kinds of ways, even all the way down to its own ruin.

While this universal is in the same way at the disposal of the virtuous consciousness just as it is at the disposal of the way of the world, it is not foreseeable whether virtue, so equipped, will triumph over vice. The weapons are the same; they are these abilities and powers. To be sure, virtue has set up an ambush with its faith in the original unity of its purpose and the essence of the way of the world, a unity which during the course of the fight is supposed to attack the enemy from the rear and accomplish that purpose in itself. But by doing so, the result is that the knight of virtue's own doing and struggle turn out in fact to be mere shadow-boxing,¹³⁰ something which he cannot take seriously because he holds that his real strength consists in the good's existing in and for itself, i.e., in the good accomplishing itself – it is shadow-boxing which he dare not even allow to become serious. This is so because what he turns against the enemy and which he then both finds turned against himself and which he dares to put at risk of deterioration and damage in its own self as well as in the enemy, is not supposed to be the good itself. He fights to preserve the good and to put it into practice, but what is put at risk are only indifferent gifts and abilities. Yet these indifferent gifts and abilities are in fact the very universal itself as utterly devoid of the individuality which is supposed to be sustained and actualized through the struggle. – However, through the struggle, what is at stake is at the same time already immediately realized, and it is the in-itself, the universal. Its actualization means only that at the same time it is supposed to be for an other. The two aspects mentioned above, according to which the universal became an abstraction, are no longer separated, but rather, in and through the struggle, the good is posited especially in both modes. – However, the virtuous consciousness enters into its struggle with the way of the world as a struggle against something opposed to the good. What the way of the world offers to the virtuous consciousness is the universal, and it offers it not only as an abstract universal but as a universal brought to life by individuality and which is for an other, or the actual good. Where virtue comes to grips with the way of the world, it always meets with those places which are themselves the existence of the good. It is the good, which as the in-itself of the way of the world is inseparably intertwined with everything in the appearance of the way of the world, and which also has its existence in the actuality of the way of the world. For virtue, the way of the world is thus invulnerable. But all the moments which virtue itself was supposed to put at risk and all those which it was supposed to sacrifice are just those existences of the good which are thereby inviolable relationships. The struggle can thus only be an oscillation between preservation and sacrifice, or instead, what can come to pass is neither a sacrifice of what is one's own, nor an injury to what is. Virtue is not only like the combatant whose sole concern in the fight is to keep his sword shiny; rather, it was in order to preserve its weapons that virtue started the fight. Not only can it not use its own weapons, it also must preserve intact those of its enemy and protect them against virtue itself, for they are all noble parts of the good on behalf of which it went into the fight in the first place.

In contrast, to this enemy the essence is not the in-itself; rather, the essence is individuality. Its power is thus the negative principle, for which nothing endures or is absolutely sacred but which can risk and bear the loss of everything and anything. Thereby, to itself, victory is in its own self guaranteed just as much as it is guaranteed by the contradiction in which its opponent entangles himself. What for virtue is in itself is to the way of the world only for the way of the world itself. The latter is free-standing from each of those moments which are firmly fixed for virtue and to which virtue is bound. As a result, the way of the world has that kind of moment in its power so that such a moment counts for it only as something it can sublate with the same ease as it can allow it to continue to exist, and it can do the same to the knight of virtue who is bound to that moment. This knight of virtue cannot shake himself loose from that moment as he might from a cloak thrown round him, where he could set himself free simply by leaving it behind. The knight of virtue cannot do that since to himself such a moment is the essence which is not to be surrendered.

Finally, the hope is in itself futile that the good in-itself is cunningly supposed to attack the way of the world from behind. The way of the world is the self-certain, alert consciousness which never lets itself be attacked from behind; rather, it stands on its guard in all directions, since everything is for it and stands before it. But if the good in-itself is for its enemy, it is in the struggle we have seen. However, insofar as the good is not for its enemy but rather is in itself, it is the passive instrument of gifts and abilities, mere matter without actuality. If one were to represent the good as existing, it would be a sleeping consciousness remaining somewhere off stage, who knows where?

Virtue is therefore defeated by the way of the world because virtue's purpose is in fact the abstract non-actual essence, and because, taking actuality into consideration, what it does rests on differences which are only verbal. Virtue wanted to consist in bringing the good to actuality through the sacrifice of individuality, but the aspect of actuality is itself nothing but the aspect of individuality. The good was supposed to be what is in itself, to be opposed to what is, but the in-itself, taken according to its reality and truth is instead being itself. The in-itself is initially the abstraction of essence in relation to actuality. However, the abstraction is just what is not really, but is only as a difference for consciousness. However, this means that what is as a difference for consciousness is itself what is called actual, for the actual is what is essentially for an other, or it is being. However, the consciousness of virtue rests on this difference between the in-itself and being, a difference that has no truth. – The way of the world was supposed to be the inversion of the good because it would have individuality for its principle. However, this latter is the principle of actuality, for it is the very consciousness through which what is-in-itself is likewise for an other. The way of the world inverts the unchangeable, but it in fact inverts it from the nothingness of abstraction into the being of reality.

The way of the world is victorious over what constitutes virtue in opposition to it. It is victorious over that for which the essenceless abstraction is the essence. However, it is not victorious over something real but only over the creation of differences which are no differences, over this pompous talk about what is best for humanity and about the oppression of humanity, this incessant chattering about sacrifice for the good and the misuse of gifts. – Those kinds of ideal essences and purposes all slip away from sight since they are only empty words which elevate the heart but leave reason empty; they edify but erect nothing; they are only declamations whose content is this: The individual who pretends to act for such noble ends and who masters such admirable oratory counts to himself as an excellent creature¹³¹ – he gives himself and others a swelled head, although the swelling is only due to self-important puffery. – Ancient virtue had its own determinate, secure meaning since it had its basis, itself rich in content, in the substance of the people, and it had an actual, already existing good for its purpose. Hence, it was also oriented neither against actuality as a universal invertedness nor against the way of the world. However, the virtue which has been just considered has left that substance behind, and it is a virtue with no essence, a virtue only of ideas and words which have dispensed with that content. The emptiness of these oratorical flourishes in their struggle with the way of the world would be revealed at once if what its oratory really means were simply to be stated. – It is therefore presupposed that what these oratorical flourishes mean is well known. The demand to put this familiarity into words would either be fulfilled by a new torrent of fancy oratory, or by an appeal to the heart, which internal to itself is supposed to state what those fine words mean, which is to say, it would amount to an admission that it cannot in fact say what it means. – It seems that the culture of our own time has unconsciously come to a kind of certainty about the emptiness of that kind of fancy oratory, while any interest in those oratorical flourishes has disappeared along with any interest in the kind of self-puffery involved in them. This finds expression in the way such oratory nowadays only produces boredom.

The result which therefore emerges from this opposition consists in the following. Consciousness drops the representation of a good in-itself which yet could have no actuality; it casts it off as if that representation were only an empty cloak. In its struggles, consciousness has learned from experience that the way of the world is not as wicked as it seemed to be, for its actuality is the actuality of the universal. With this experience, the mediating middle of producing the good through the sacrifice of individuality falls by the wayside, for it is individuality which is exactly the actualization of what is-in-itself. The inversion itself ceases to be viewed as an inversion of goodness, for it is instead the very inverting of the good itself as mere purpose into actuality. The movement of individuality is the reality of the universal.

However, what in fact has been just as much defeated and which has vanished is what as the way of the world stood opposed to the consciousness of the existing-in-itself. There the being-for-itself of individuality opposed the essence, or the universal, and it appeared as an actuality separated from being-in-itself. However, while it has turned out that actuality is in undivided unity with the universal, the being-for-itself of the way of the world likewise proves to be nothing more than just a point of view, just like the in-itself of virtue is itself only a point of view. The individuality of the way of the world may well think it acts only for itself or in its own self-interest, but it is better than it thinks; its doing is at the same time a universal doing which is in-itself. However much it acts in its own self-interest, it simply does not know what it is doing, and however much it affirms that all men act in their own self-interest, still it only asserts that all men are not really aware of what acting is. – However much it acts for itself, still what this does is just to bring forth into actuality what is existing-in-itself, which is therefore the purpose of being-for-itself, which in turn thinks it is opposed to the in-itself. – Its empty cleverness, as well as its finely tuned explanations which know how to point out that self-interest surfaces everywhere, have likewise themselves all vanished, just as the purpose of the in-itself and its fancy oratory has also done.

Therefore, what is going-on¹³²with individuality is an end in itself, and the use of powers, along with the game of giving them outward expression is what gives life to what otherwise would be the dead in-itself. The in-itself is not an abstract universal without existence, not something which is never accomplished. Rather, it is immediately itself this present moment and this actuality of the processes of individuality.

a. The Spiritual Kingdom of Animals and Deception; or the Crux of the Matter (die Sache selbst)

First of all, this individuality which is real in itself is again singular and determinate. The absolute reality which it knows itself to be is, as it will become aware, therefore the abstract universal which is without fulfillment and without content and is only the empty thought of this category. – It remains to be seen how this concept of individuality which is real in itself determines itself within its moments, and how, to itself, individuality's concept of itself enters into its consciousness.

The concept of this individuality (in the way that individuality, as such individuality, is for itself all reality) is initially a result. It has not yet displayed its movement and reality, and it is here immediately posited as simple being-in-itself. However, negativity, which is the same as what appears as movement, is in the simple being in itself as determinateness, and being, or the simple in-itself, becomes a determinate extent.¹³⁵ Individuality thus comes on the scene as an original determinate nature. It comes on the scene as original nature, for individuality is in itself – as original determinate, for the negative is in the in-itself and as a result the in-itself is a quality. However, this restriction on being cannot limit the doing of consciousness, for this latter is here an unqualified relating of itself to itself. The relation to an other, which would be a restriction of it, is sublated. The original determinateness of nature is thus only a simple principle – a transparent universal element in which individuality likewise remains free and self-equal as it unfolds its differences, and as it is without hindrance in pure reciprocity with itself in its actualization. In the same way indeterminate animal life injects the breath of life into the element of water or air or earth, within these more determinate principles, and immerses all of its moments in them, but nevertheless, notwithstanding the restriction of the elements, keeps those moments in its own control, preserves itself in its oneness, and remains, as this particular organization, the same universal animal life.

This determinate original nature of consciousness, which remains free and whole within that nature, appears as the immediate, sole, and proper content of what is, to the individual, the purpose. To be sure, the content is determinate content, but it is only content to the extent that we consider being-in-itself in isolation. However, in truth it is reality permeated with individuality, or actuality in the way that consciousness, as singular, initially has it in its own self, namely, as existing but not yet posited as acting. However, for the doing, that determinateness is on the one hand not a restriction which it would want to transcend; this is so because if it is regarded as an existing quality, then it is the simple color of the element within which it moves itself. However, on the other hand, it is only in [the sphere of] being that negativity is determinateness, but the doing is itself nothing but negativity. In the acting individuality, determinateness has thus been dissolved into utter negativity, or into the embodiment¹³⁶ of all determinateness.

Within the doing and within the consciousness of acting,¹³⁷ the simple original nature now enters into the difference which belongs to the consciousness of acting. At first, the doing is an object in the way that the object still belonged to consciousness, an object which is present as purpose, and as thus opposed to an actuality which is present. The other moment is the purpose's movement represented as motionless, the actualization as the relation of the purpose to the wholly formal actuality, thereby the representation of the transition itself, or the mediating middle. Finally, the third moment is the object in the way that it is no longer the purpose of which the actor is immediately conscious as his own purpose. Rather, it is the object as it has emerged from the actor to be outside of him and to be for him as an other. – However, according to the concept of this sphere, these various aspects are now to be held on to so that the content in them remains the same and so that no difference enters, neither the difference between individuality and being per se, nor that between purpose as opposed to individuality as original nature, nor that of purpose as opposed to the present actuality, and likewise neither that between the mediating middle as opposed to actuality as absolute purpose, nor that between effectuated actuality as opposed to the purpose, or to the original nature, or to the mediating middle.

First of all, therefore, the original determinate nature of individuality, its immediate essence, is not yet posited as acting and thus is called a particular ability, talent, character, and so forth. This distinctive tincture of spirit is to be regarded as the individual content of the purpose and to be regarded solely as reality. If one represents consciousness as going beyond all that and as wanting to bring some other content to actuality, then one represents it as a nothing working its way into nothing. – Furthermore, this original essence is not only the content of the purpose; it is also in itself the actuality which otherwise appears as the given material of the doing, as just found, and which is to be fashioned into actuality. The doing is, in particular, the pure translation of the form of the being not yet exhibited into the form of the being that is exhibited. The being-in-itself of the former, the actuality opposed to consciousness, has degenerated into that of an only empty semblance. As it determines itself into acting, this consciousness thus is not to let itself be led astray by the semblance of the present actuality, and, from aimlessly roving about in empty thoughts and purposes, it just as much has to bind itself to the original content of its essence. – To be sure, this original content is just for this consciousness as consciousness has actualized the content. However, what has fallen by the wayside is the difference between a content which is only for consciousness internally and an actuality existing in itself which is external to consciousness. – Only because what is for consciousness is what consciousness is in itself must it act, or acting is just the coming to be of spirit as consciousness. What it is in itself, it therefore knows on the basis of its own actuality. Hence, the individual cannot know what he is prior to having brought himself to actuality through action. – But he thereby seems not to be able to determine the purpose of his doing before he has taken the action. However, at the same time, while he is consciousness, he must, prior to the action, have the action itself as wholly his own, i.e., the purpose in front of him. The individual who sets himself to act therefore seems to be situated in a circle in which every moment already presupposes the other. It thus seems that he is incapable of finding a beginning for his actions because he only gets to know his original essence, which must be his purpose, first from his deed, but, in order to act, he must have the purpose beforehand. However, precisely for that reason, he has to begin immediately and, whatever the circumstances may be, without any further reservations about beginnings, middles, and ends, to set himself to act, since his essence and his nature (which is-in-itself) are beginning, middle, and end all rolled into one. As beginning, the individual's nature is present in the circumstances of action, and the interest which the individual finds in some particular thing is the answer already given to the question: Whether he should act and what is here to be done? For what seems to be an actuality only found is in itself his original nature, which only has the semblance of that of a being – a semblance which lies in the very concept of a self-estranging doing – but which, as his original nature, is expressed in the interest which his original nature finds in it. – Likewise the how, or the mediating middle, is determined in and for itself. By the same token, talent is nothing but determinate original individuality regarded as the inner mediating middle, or the transition of purpose into actuality. However, the actual mediating middle and the real transition are the unity of talent with the nature of the matter at issue present in the interest. In the mediating middle, the former (talent) represents the aspect of acting, while the latter (the nature of the matter at issue), represents the aspect of content. Both are individuality itself as the permeation of being and doing. What is thus present are the given circumstances, which in themselves are the individual's original nature. Next, there is the interest that posits those found circumstances as its own, or as purpose. Finally there is the linkage and the sublation of these opposites in the mediating middle. This linkage itself still falls within consciousness, and the whole which has been just now considered is only one side of an opposition. This remaining semblance of opposition is sublated through the transition itself, or through the mediating middle – for the mediating middle is the unity of the outer and the inner, the contrary of the determinateness which it has as an inner mediating middle, and it likewise sublates them and posits itself, this unity of doing and being, as the outer, as individuality itself actually having come to be, i.e., as individuality which is posited for individuality itself as the existing. In this way, neither as circumstances, nor as purpose, nor as means, nor as a work¹³⁸ does the entire action ever step out from itself.

However, in the case of a work the difference among the original natures seems to come on the scene. The work, like the original nature it expresses, is something determinate, for negativity, as an existing actuality freed from the doing, is as a quality in the work. However, consciousness determines itself over and against the work as what has in it determinateness as negativity, full stop, or as doing. Consciousness is thus the universal confronting the work's determinateness; it can therefore compare one kind of work with another, and, from that, can grasp individuality itself as different individualities. It can grasp the individual who, in his work, is more comprehensive, either as being a stronger energy of will or as a richer nature, i.e., a nature whose original determinateness is less restricted – in contrast, it can grasp another individual as a weaker and more meager nature. In contrast to this purely inessential difference of quantity, good and bad would express an absolute difference, but this does not occur here. Whatever would be taken one way or another is in the same manner the goings-on, the self-presentation, and the self-expression of an individuality, and for that reason, all of it is good, and, in effect, one could not say would be bad here. What would be called a bad work is the individual life of a determinate nature realizing itself in the work. It would only be debased into a bad work by a comparative thought, which is itself empty, for it goes beyond the essence of the work, which is to be a self-expression of an individuality seeking and demanding who knows what. – The comparative thought could only concern itself with the difference previously mentioned, but that difference, being one of magnitude, is in itself an inessential difference, especially so in this case, where it would be various works or individualities which would be compared with each other. However, these individualities have nothing to do with each other; each relates itself only to itself. The original nature is alone what is in-itself, or it is it alone which could be laid down as a standard for evaluating the work or vice versa. However, both correspond to each other; there is nothing for individuality that does not come about through individuality, or there is no actuality, not individuality's nature and its activities, nor any activities nor an in-itself of individuality which is not actual, and it is only these moments which are to be compared.

Consequently, there is in this matter neither exaltation nor lament nor remorse. Anything of that sort arises from imagining another content and another in-itself than what is in the individual's original nature and the way it is to be worked out in actuality. Whatever the individual does and whatever happens to him, it is he who has done it, and it is himself. He can only have the consciousness of having purely translated his own self from the night of possibility into the daylight of the present, from the abstract in-itself into the meaning of actual being, and he can have the certainty that what to him is to be found in the latter is nothing but what lay dormant in the former. The consciousness of this unity is to be sure likewise a comparison, but what is compared only has the very semblance of opposition. It is a semblance of form which, for the self-consciousness of reason (that individuality in its own self is actuality) is nothing more than mere semblance. Therefore, because the individual knows that he can find in his actuality nothing but its unity with him, or can find only self-certainty in its truth, and because he thus always achieves his end, the individual can experience only joy in itself.

This is the concept that consciousness, which is certain of its concept as the absolute permeation of individuality and being, makes of itself. Let us see whether this concept is confirmed by its experience and whether its reality thereby corresponds to it. The work is the reality which consciousness gives itself; it is that in which the individual is for the individual¹³⁹ what he is in itself, so that the consciousness for which the individual comes to be in the work is not a particular consciousness but rather universal consciousness. In his work, he has placed himself outside of himself and into the element of universality, into the determinateless space of being. The consciousness which steps back from its work is in fact the universal consciousness – because it becomes absolute negativity, or activity within this opposition – which confronts its work, which is determinate. As a work, consciousness thus goes beyond itself, and consciousness is itself the determinateless space which does not find itself fulfilled in its work. However much its unity was previously sustained in the concept, still this took place simply as a result of the sublation of the work as an existing work. But the work is supposed to be, and it remains to be seen how individuality will sustain its universality in the work's being and how it will know how to satisfy itself therein. – Initially, what is up for examination is the work for itself which has come to be. It has received the whole nature of individuality; hence, its being is itself an activity in which all differences permeate each other and dissolve into each other. The work is thus cast out into a stable existence in which the determinateness of the original nature in fact plays the part of itself against other determinate natures and intervenes in their affairs, just as they in their turn intervene in the affairs of others, and within this universal movement, each loses itself as a vanishing moment. However much it is in the concept of individuality which is real in and for itself that all the moments, circumstances, purpose, means, and actualization are all the same as each other, and however much the original determinate nature only counts as a universal element, still, while this element becomes objective being, its determinateness as such a determinateness reaches the light of day in the work, and the individuality receives its truth in its dissolution. This dissolution exhibits itself in detail so that the individual, as this individual, has, to himself, in this determinateness, become actual. However, this determinateness is not only the content of actuality but is just as much the form of actuality, or actuality as such actuality is the very determinateness which consists in being opposed to self-consciousness. From this standpoint, actuality exhibits itself as the actuality which has vanished from the concept, or which exhibits itself as only an alien actuality which one only finds oneself. The work is, i.e., it is for other individualities, and it is for them an alien actuality in whose place they must posit their own actuality in order to give themselves through their activity the consciousness of their unity with actuality. That is, their interest through their original nature is placed¹⁴⁰ into the work, is something other than a proper¹⁴¹ interest in this work, and the work is thereby transformed into something different. The work is thus something utterly transitory which is erased by the counter-play of other powers and interests and which instead exhibits the reality of individuality itself as disappearing rather than as achieved.

To consciousness, in its work the opposition of being and doing emerges, an opposition which in the earlier shapes of consciousness was at once the beginning of action but which is here only a result. However, that opposition has in fact likewise been established as the basis by consciousness as individuality setting itself to action as real in itself. This is so because the determinate original nature as the in-itself was presupposed for action, and the original nature's content was pure achievement for the sake of achievement. However, the pure doing is the self-equal form which is thereby not equal to the determinateness of the original nature. Here, as is usual, it is a matter of indifference which of the two is called concept and which is called reality. The original nature is what has been thought, or it is the in-itself confronting the doing within which that original nature initially has its reality; or the original nature is the being both of individuality as such individuality and of individuality as its work. However, the doing is the original concept as absolute transition, or as becoming. In its work, consciousness learns from its own experience about this inadequation¹⁴² of concept and reality that lies in the essence of consciousness. Therefore, it is in its work that, to itself, consciousness comes to be as it is in truth, and its empty concept of itself vanishes.

In this ground-level contradiction in the work, which is the truth of this individuality (which, to itself, is real in itself), all of individuality's aspects again come on the scene as contradicting each other, or the work is taken as the content of the whole individuality turning out from doing, which is the negative unity that holds all the moments captive, into being. The work frees those moments, and in the element of stable existence, those moments become indifferent to each other. Concept and reality thus separate themselves from each other as purpose and that which is original essentiality. It is contingent that the purpose has a genuine essence, or that the in-itself is made into a purpose. By the same token, concept and reality again separate from each other as the transition into actuality and as the purpose; or it is contingent that the means expressing the purpose are the ones chosen. Finally, these inner moments taken all together, whether they have a unity in themselves or not – the individual's doings are again contingent with regard to actuality as such. It is fortune that decides in favor of a badly determined purpose and badly chosen means just as much as it decides against them.

However much now, to consciousness in its work, what comes to be is the opposition between willing and achievement, between purpose and means, and, again, between this innerness taken all together and actuality itself, which in general encompasses the contingency of its doing within itself, still the unity and the necessity of this consciousness is also just as present. This latter aspect overlaps with the former, and the experience of the contingency of the doing is itself only a contingent experience. The necessity of the doing thereby consists in the purpose being purely and simply related to actuality, and this unity is the concept of doing. Action is undertaken because the doing is in and for itself the essence of actuality. In the work, to be sure, there turns out to be a contingency which contrasts being achieved to willing and achieving, and this experience, which seems as if it must count as the truth, contradicts that concept of action. But if we look at the content of this experience in its completeness, then that content is the work which is vanishing. What sustains itself is not the vanishing itself, but rather it is the vanishing itself which is both actual and bound up with the work, and it vanishes with the work. The negative, together with the positive which is its negation, itself perishes.

This vanishing of the vanishing lies in the concept of individuality that is real in itself, for it is objective actuality which is that in which the work, or what is in the work, vanishes, and it is objective actuality which was supposed to give what was called “experience” its supremacy over individuality's concept of itself. However, objective actuality is a moment which, within this consciousness itself, also no longer has any truth for itself. Truth consists only in the unity of the work with the doing, and the true work is only that unity of being and doing, of willing and accomplishing. To consciousness, in virtue of the certainty lying at the basis of its acting, the actuality opposed to this certainty is the actuality itself that only is for consciousness. To consciousness, which as self-consciousness has returned into itself and to which all opposition has vanished, the opposition can no longer take this form of its being-for-itself over and against actuality. Rather, the opposition and the negativity which come to light in the work thereby affects more than just the content of the work or of consciousness but rather also affects actuality as such actuality and thereby affects the opposition present in that actuality through actuality itself and thereby affects the work's vanishing. In this manner, consciousness thus reflects itself into itself from out of its transitory works and affirms its concept and certainty as the existing and the enduring vis-à-vis the experience of the contingency of the doing. It experiences in fact its concept, within which actuality is only a moment, or is something for consciousness, and not what is in-and-for-itself. It experiences actuality as a vanishing moment, and actuality thus counts, to itself, only as being, full stop, whose universality is the same as its doing. This unity is the true work; it is the crux of the matter, which unreservedly affirms itself and is experienced as what endures, independently of the contingency of the individual's doing and of the contingency of circumstances, means, and actuality.

The crux of the matter is opposed to these moments only inasmuch as they are supposed to be valid in isolation, but it is essentially their unity as the permeation of actuality and individuality. It is to the same extent a doing, and, as doing, it is a pure doing, and thereby is to the same extent the doing of this individual. As still belonging with the individual, it is this doing, as a purpose, in opposition to actuality. Likewise, it is the transition from this determinateness into an opposing determinateness and finally into an actuality that is present for consciousness. The crux of the matter thereby expresses the spiritual essentiality in which all these moments are sublated as valid for themselves, and therefore valid only as universal moments, and in which the certainty that consciousness has of itself is, to consciousness, an objective essence, a crux of the matter.¹⁴³ It is an object born out of self-consciousness as its own object, without thereby ceasing to be a free-standing, genuine object. – The thing¹⁴⁴ of sensuous-certainty and perception now has its significance for self-consciousness alone. On this rests the difference between an ordinary thing and a matter at issue.¹⁴⁵ – Running its course within this will be a movement which corresponds to the movement in sensuous-certainty and perception.

Therefore, in the crux of the matter as the permeation of individuality and objectivity which has objectively come to be, to self-consciousness, its true concept of self-consciousness has come to be, or self-consciousness has arrived at a consciousness of its substance. As it is here, it is at the same time a consciousness of its substance, or a consciousness that has now come to be, and it is thus immediate consciousness. This is the determinate way in which spiritual essence is present here and has not yet progressed to the point of becoming truly real substance. In this immediate consciousness of the crux of the matter, the crux of the matter itself has the form of simple essence, which, as universal, contains all its various moments within itself and which accords with them, but it is also again indifferent to them as determinate moments. It is free-standing for itself,¹⁴⁶ and, as this free-standing, simple, abstract crux of the matter, it counts as the essence. On the one hand, the various moments of the original determinateness, or what constitutes this individual's crux of the matter, namely, his purposes, his means, his acts and his actuality, are for this consciousness singular moments which it can abandon and surrender vis-à-vis the crux of the matter. However, on the other hand, they all have the crux of the matter for their essence only so that the crux of the matter finds itself to be the abstract universal in each of these various moments and can be their predicate. The crux of the matter is not yet the subject, but rather those moments count as subjects because they fall within the bounds of singularity as such; however, the crux of the matter is first just the simple universal. It is the genus which is to be found in all these moments as its species and which is likewise free-standing from all of them.

Consciousness is called honest which on the one hand has arrived at this idealism which the crux of the matter expresses, and on the other hand has the truth as this formal universality in the crux of the matter. To the honest consciousness, what it has to deal with is always the crux of the matter, and in its dealings with it, it meanders within its various moments or species. While it does not attain the crux of the matter in one of these moments or in one meaning, as a result it gets a hold of it in some other moment or meaning, thereby always gaining the satisfaction which, according to its concept, is supposed to be its lot. However things may happen to turn out, the honest consciousness achieves and attains the crux of the matter, for as this universal genus of those moments, the crux of the matter is the predicate of all of them.

Even if the honest consciousness does not bring a purpose into actuality, he has nonetheless willed the purpose, i.e., he makes the purpose as purpose, as the pure doing that does nothing, into the crux of the matter. He can therefore console himself by saying that something has nonetheless always been impelled and done. Since the universal itself subsumes the negative, or the vanishing, under itself, it is also the case that if the work is wiped out, then that too is something he did. He has incited others to do this, and he finds satisfaction in the vanishing of his actuality in the way that wayward boys themselves take a certain pleasure in getting spanked for the simple reason that they are its cause. Or, if he has not even tried to work out the crux of the matter and in fact has done nothing at all, it is because he did not want to do it. The crux of the matter is to himself the very unity of his decision and reality; he asserts that actuality could be nothing else than what matters to him. – If finally something of interest to him has come to be without his own involvement in it, then to himself it is this actuality itself which is the crux of the matter just because of the interest that he himself finds in it, which is quite independent of whether or not he brought about that actuality. However much it is good luck that has personally befallen him, still he counts it as his deed and his desert; however much it is just a worldly event having nothing further to do with him, he still makes it just as much his own; and an interest unbound to any deed counts to himself as his taking a stand, which he was either for or against, and for which he either fought or supported.

As it has become clear, the honesty of this consciousness, along with the satisfaction that it everywhere experiences, consists in its not getting its thoughts together about the crux of the matter. The crux of the matter is to himself just what is his crux of the matter just as much as it is not a work at all, or it is just as much pure doing as it is empty purpose or perhaps an actuality unencumbered by deeds. It makes one meaning after another into the subject of this predicate, and then it forgets one after the other. Now in the mere “having either willed it or else not even having wanted to,” the crux of the matter assumes the significance of both an empty purpose and the unity of willing and achieving in thought alone.¹⁴⁷ The consolation for the eradication of the purpose, whether willed or whether simply done, as well as the satisfaction of having given others something to do, makes the pure doing or the entirely bad work into the essence, for what is called a bad work is no work at all. Finally, where a stroke of good luck means one just finds the actuality, then what simply is (without a deed to its name) becomes the crux of the matter.

However, the truth of this honesty is that it is not as honest as it seems, for it cannot be so thoughtless as to let these various moments in fact come undone from each other in that way. Rather, it must have an immediate consciousness of their opposition because they are so plainly related to each other. The pure doing is essentially this individual's doing, and this doing is likewise essentially an actuality, or a fact. Conversely, actuality essentially is only as his doing as well as a doing, full stop, and just as his doing is at the same time only as a doing, full stop, it is also actuality. While to himself, what seems to be his concern is only the crux of the matter as abstract actuality, it is also the case that he is concerned with it as his doing. However, while, to him, just as much as it has only to do with what's going on,¹⁴⁸ he is thereby not really serious about the whole affair. Rather, to himself, he is concerned with a real fact¹⁴⁹ and that real fact as his own. While finally it seems to be an issue of only willing what is his real fact¹⁵⁰ and only willing his doing, he again is concerned with what is the real fact, full stop,¹⁵¹ that is, with an actuality that endures in and for itself.

Just as the crux of the matter and its moments appear here as content, they are likewise also necessary as forms in consciousness. The moments make their appearance as content only in order to vanish, and each gives way to the other. Consequently, they must be present in their determinateness as sublated, but, sublated in that way, they are aspects of consciousness itself. The crux of the matter is present as the in-itself, or the in-itself's reflection into itself. However, the suppression of the moments by each other is expressed in consciousness so that they are not posited in itself in consciousness but only for an other. One of the moments of the content is exposed by consciousness to the light of day and is represented as being for others. But consciousness is at the same time reflected into itself, and thus what is opposed to it is just as present within consciousness, and consciousness retains it for itself as its own. At the same time, it is not that any one of those moments would only be placed outside of consciousness and another would be retained within the innerness of consciousness. Rather, consciousness alternates between them since it has to make one of them into what is essential for itself, and has to make the other moment into what is essential for others. The whole is the self-moving permeation of individuality and the universal. However, because this whole for consciousness is present only as the simple essence and thereby as the abstraction of the crux of the matter, its moments, as separated moments, fall outside of the whole and thus come undone from each other, and, as the whole, it [the whole] is exhausted and exhibited¹⁵² only through the dividing alternation between putting out on display and of retaining for itself. While in this alternation consciousness has one moment for itself as essential in its reflection, but another only externally in consciousness, or for others, what thus comes on the scene is a game individualities play with each other, in which they reciprocally deceive each other as well as themselves, so that each is equally deceiver and deceived.

An individuality therefore sets himself to put something into practice.¹⁵³ He seems thereby to get to the point about the crux of the matter. He acts, and in that action he comes to be for others, and to himself it seems that this all has to do with actuality. Others therefore take his doing as an interest in the crux of the matter as such and to be an interest in the aim of putting into practice the crux of the matter as it is in itself, regardless of whether this is done by himself or by the others. While they accordingly point out that the crux of the matter has already been put into practice by themselves (or, if not, they offer their assistance and actually provide it), still the former consciousness is instead far beyond the point where they think he is supposed to be. What interests him about the crux of the matter is what it has to do with his own goings-on,¹⁵⁴ and by becoming fully aware that was what he meant by the crux of the matter, they find that they have been hoodwinked.¹⁵⁵ – However, their haste to offer their assistance in fact itself consisted in nothing but their own desire to see and to show off not the crux of the matter but only their own activities, i.e., they wanted to deceive the others in exactly the same manner in which they complain about having been deceived themselves. – While it has now been put back fully on view that what counts as the crux of the matter is his own goings-on and his alone, the play of his own powers, so consciousness seems to be engaged with its own essence for itself and not for others, or only to be concerned with doing as its own doing and not as the doings of others, and thereby permitting those others equally as much to do as they please with respect to the crux of the matter for them. But they are mistaken again; that consciousness is already somewhere else than where they thought it was. To this consciousness, this does not have to do with the thing's substantiality as something singular to him. Rather, it has to do with the thing's substantiality as a universal, something which is for everyone. Hence, that consciousness mixes itself into their doings and their works, and if consciousness can no longer take their work or their doings away from them, it at least takes an interest in their works by way of passing judgment on them. However much it gives them its stamp of approval and its praise, still this just means that in dealing with the work, it not only praises the work itself but at the same time praises its own generosity and its own moderation so that it does not spoil the work as a work through its reproach of it. In showing an interest in the work, it takes pleasure in itself in doing so. Likewise, to itself, the work that it reproached is welcomed just for this enjoyment of its own doing, which is the result of the reproach. However, those who hold that they have really been deceived by this kind of intrusion, as well as those who just pretend to be deceived, are instead themselves only wanting to deceive in the same way. They pretend that what they are engaged in is something that is only for themselves and in which their sole aim is to bring themselves and their own essence to fulfillment. Yet while they act and thereby present themselves to the light of day, they immediately contradict by their deed their very pretense of wanting to shut out the daylight, to keep out universal consciousness, and to keep out everyone else's participation. Actualization is instead a matter of putting into the universal element an exhibition of what is one's own in the universal element, through which what is one's own both becomes and indeed ought to become the fact of the matter at issue¹⁵⁶ for everyone.

There is therefore just as much deception of oneself and of others when what is at stake is supposed be the pure fact. A consciousness that brings into the open a fact¹⁵⁷ instead learns from experience that others come hurrying over like flies to freshly poured milk, and they too want to know themselves to be busily engaged with it. Likewise, those others then likewise learn from experience that this consciousness is not concerned with such a fact as an object but only with it insofar as the fact is his.¹⁵⁸ Conversely, however much it is only the doing itself, the use of powers and abilities, or the expression of this individuality, which is supposed to be the essential, still they all mutually learn from experience that everyone is on the move and considers himself invited, and that instead of a pure doing or a distinctive individual doing, there is something which is just as well for others, or it is a crux of the matter which has been brought into the open. The same happens in both cases, and it only takes on a different sense vis-à-vis what had been thereby accepted and supposed to count as valid. Consciousness experiences both aspects as equally essential moments, and it therein learns from experience about the nature of the crux of the matter, namely, that it is neither only a thing,¹⁵⁹ which would be opposed both to doing in general and to individual doing, nor is it doing which would be opposed to stable existence and would be the free genus of these moments as its species. Rather, it is an essence whose being is the doing of singular individuals and of all individuals, and whose doing is immediately for others, or it is a fact¹⁶⁰ and is only a fact insofar as it is the doing of each and all, the essence that is the essence of all essence, that is spiritual essence. What consciousness experiences is that no single one of these moments is the subject but rather that each one instead dissolves into the universal crux of the matter. Each of the moments of individuality, taken one after another, were in force for the mindlessness of this consciousness as subject, and now they gather themselves up into the simple individuality which, as this individuality, is just as immediately universal. As a result, the crux of the matter sheds the relation of the predicate and the determinateness of lifeless, abstract universality and is instead substance permeated by individuality. It is the subject within which individuality is just as much itself as much as it is this individual, as much as it is all individuals. It is the universal, which is a being only as this doing which is the doing of each and all. It is an actuality because this consciousness knows it as its own singular actuality and as the actuality of all. The pure crux of the matter is what was determined above as the category. It is being which is the I, or, the I which is being but as thinking, which still distinguishes itself from actual self-consciousness. However, the moments of actual self-consciousness are here posited as being one with the simple category itself to the extent that we designate the content of actual self-consciousness as purpose, doing, and actuality and designate its form as being-for-itself and being for an other. As a result, the category is at the same time all content.

b. Law-Giving Reason

In its simple being, spiritual essence is pure consciousness and is this self-consciousness. The original-determinate nature of the individual has lost its positive significance of being in itself the element and purpose of the individual's activity. It is only a sublated moment, and the individual is a self as the universal self. Conversely, the formal crux of the matter has its fulfillment in individuality distinguishing itself within itself in its doings, for the differences within individuality constitute the content of that universal. As the universal of pure consciousness, the category is in itself. It is just as much for itself, for the self of consciousness is just as much its moment. It is absolute being, for that universality is the simple self-equality of being.

What is the object to consciousness therefore has the meaning of being the true. It is, and it is valid in the sense that it is in and for itself and it is validly in force. It is the absolute fact of the matter¹⁶¹ which no longer suffers from the oppositions of certainty and its truth, the universal and the singular, purpose and its reality. Rather, its existence is the actuality and the doing of self-consciousness. This fact is thus the ethical substance, and the consciousness of it is ethical consciousness. Likewise, the object of this consciousness counts, to itself, as the true, for it unifies self-consciousness and being in one unity. It counts as the absolute, for self-consciousness neither can nor does it any longer want to transcend this object, for consciousness is therein at one with itself.¹⁶² It cannot go beyond the object, for the object is all being and all power – it does not will to do so, for the object is the self, or the willing of this self. The object is the real object in its own self as object, for it has in it the difference of consciousness. It divides itself into social estates¹⁶³ which are the determinate laws of the absolute essence. However, these social estates do not obscure the concept, for the moments of being, pure consciousness, and the self remain included within its bounds – a unity which constitutes the essence of these social estates and which no longer permits these moments in these differences to come undone from one another.

These laws or social estates of the ethical substance are immediately given recognition. Their origin and legitimacy cannot be questioned and something other than them cannot be sought, for such an other as the essence existing in and for itself, would only be self-consciousness itself. However, self-consciousness is nothing but this essence, for it is itself the being-for-itself of this essence, which for that very reason is the truth because it is just as much the self of consciousness as it is the in-itself of consciousness, or pure consciousness.

While self-consciousness knows itself as a moment of the being-for-itself of this substance, so does it therefore express the existence of the law within itself so that the healthy reason¹⁶⁴ immediately knows what is right and good. Just as it knows this immediately, the law is also immediately validly in force for it, and the law immediately states: This is right and good. In fact, this is right and good. The right and the good are determinate laws. That is the fulfilled crux of the matter full of content.

What is so immediately given must be just as much immediately accepted and reflected upon. Just as we had to see how what it was that sensuous-certainty immediately expressed as existing was constituted, we now still have to see just what constitutes the being which is expressed by this ethically immediate certainty or by the immediately existing social estates of ethical essence. Examples of a few such laws will demonstrate this, and while we take them in the form of pronouncements knowingly made by healthy reason,¹⁶⁵ we do not have to first bring along the moment which is to be claimed for them when they are considered as immediate ethical laws.

“Every one ought to speak the truth.” – When this is expressed as an unconditional duty, the condition will at once be added: If he knows the truth. The command will accordingly now state: Everyone should speak the truth, at all times according to his knowing and conviction of it. Healthy reason, which is just this ethical consciousness which immediately knows what is right and good, will also explain that this condition is already so closely linked with its universal pronouncements that it is how it meant that the command was to be taken. However, it thereby admits that it has instead already immediately violated the pronouncement in its own expression of it. It said: Each ought to speak the truth; however, it meant: One ought to speak the truth according to his knowing and conviction, i.e., it said something other than it meant, and saying something other than one means is what one calls “not speaking the truth.” The improved untruth, or the improved lack of adroitness, is now expressed: Each ought to speak the truth according to his knowing and conviction about it at the time. – However, therewith what is universally necessary, what is valid in itself, or what the proposition wanted to express is instead inverted into a complete contingency: Whether the truth will be spoken is left up to the contingency of whether I know it and can convince myself of it; and with that there is nothing further said, other than that it is a confused muddle of truth and falsity which ought to be said and relative to what one knows, intends, and comprehends. This contingency of content has universality only in the form of the proposition in which it is expressed; but as an ethical proposition, it promises a universal and necessary content, and it thus contradicts itself through the contingency of its content. – Finally, if the proposition were to be improved so that the contingency of knowing and conviction of the truth were to be dropped, and if it were that the truth is supposed to be known, then it would be a command that completely contradicts its starting point. Healthy rationality was at first supposed to have the ability to express the truth immediately; however, now what is being said is that it ought to know the truth, i.e., that it does not immediately know how to state the truth. – Viewed from the aspect of content, in the demand that we should know the truth, the proposition has fallen by the wayside, for this demand is related to knowing, full stop: One ought to know; therefore what is demanded instead is thus something which is free of every determinate content. However, the talk here was of a determinate content, or of a difference in ethical substance. But this immediate determination of ethical substance is the kind of content which was shown instead to be a matter of complete contingency, and when that content is thus elevated into universality and necessity so that knowing is expressed as the law, that content instead vanishes.

Another famous command is: Love thy neighbor as thyself. It is directed to a singular individual in a relationship with another singular individual, and it asserts it as a relationship between a singular individual and a singular individual, or as a relationship of sentiment. Active love – for an inactive love has no being and is for that reason surely not what is meant here – aims at removing an evil from someone and adding some good to him. To this end, the difference must be drawn between what is evil in regard to him,¹⁶⁶ what is the appropriate good vis-à-vis this evil, and what in general is his welfare; i.e., I must love him intelligently.¹⁶⁷ Unintelligent love will do him harm, perhaps even more so than hatred. However, intelligent, essential beneficence is in its richest and most important shape an intelligent and universal doing of the state – a doing compared with which what a singular individual does is in general something so trivial that it is hardly worth the trouble to talk about it. What the state does is of such great power that if the singular individual's activity were to oppose it and directly choose for himself the life of crime, or if out of love for another person he were to will that he cheat the universal out of its right and out of the share it has in him, then his doing would be entirely without utility and would be irresistibly destroyed. The only significance that remains to beneficence is that of sentiment, or that of a wholly singular act, an act of assistance in time of need which is itself just as contingent as it is momentary. Chance not only determines its occasion but also whether it amounts to a work at all, or whether it has not directly dissolved and instead inverted into evil. Therefore, acting for the welfare of another, which is expressed as necessary, is so constituted that maybe it can exist, also maybe not, and if quite contingently such a case turns up, it may perhaps turn out to be a work, perhaps even a good work, but then again perhaps not. This law thereby has no more universal content than did the first law which was considered, and it does not express something that is in and for itself, which, as an absolute ethical law, it is supposed to do; or, such laws stay fixed at the ought but have no actuality. They are not laws; they are only commands.

It is in fact clear from the nature of the crux of the matter that what must be waived is the appeal to a universal, absolute content, for every determinateness posited in the simple substance – and its essence is to be simple – is inadequate to it. In its simple absoluteness, the command itself expresses immediate ethical being. The difference which appears in it is a determinateness and thus a content subsumed under the absolute universality of this simple being. While appeal to an absolute content must thereby be waived, only formal universality which corresponds to this content, or does not contradict itself, can be adequate. Contentless universality is formal universality, and “absolute content” only signifies a difference that is no difference, or a complete absence of content.

All that remains for such law-giving is thus the pure form of universality, or in fact the tautology of the consciousness which confronts the content and is a knowing neither of what is nor of genuine content but is instead a knowing of the essence, or of the self-equality of such content.

The ethical essence is thereby not itself immediately a content but is only a standard for determining whether a content is capable of being a law on the basis of its simply not contradicting itself. Law-giving reason is demoted to a reason that only tests laws.

c. Reason as Testing Laws

A difference in the simple ethical substance is a contingency for that substance, a contingency which we saw arise in determinate commands as the contingency of knowing, actuality, and acts. The comparison of that simple being with its determinateness, which in turn did not correspond to that simple being, was made by us. The simple substance therein showed itself to be formal universality, or to be pure consciousness which, free-standing vis-à-vis the content, confronts it and is a knowing of it as determinate content. In this manner, this universality remains the same as the crux of the matter was. However, within consciousness this universality is an other; it no longer is the inert, utterly unthinking genus but is related to the particular and counts as its power and truth. – This consciousness initially seems to be the same testing which was formerly what we were doing, and its doing seems incapable of being anything else than what has already taken place, a comparison of the universal with the determinate, from which their inadequacy [to each other], just as it did previously, results. However, the relationship of content to universal is here something different because this universal has obtained a different significance. It is formal universality, something with which the determinate content is compatible, for within that universality the content is considered only in relation to itself. In our testing, the universal, solid substance stood over and against that determinateness, which developed itself as the contingency of the consciousness into which the substance entered. Here, one member of the comparison has vanished; the universal is no longer the existing substance validly in force, or the right in and for itself, but is rather simple knowing or form which compares a content only with itself and which looks at it in order to see whether it is a tautology. Laws are no longer given laws but are tested, and for the consciousness that is doing the testing, the laws have already been given. It takes up their content as the content simply is, without (as we did) going into any consideration of the content's individuality and contingency sticking on to its actuality. Instead, it comes to a standstill in the face of the command as a command, and it conducts itself just as simply towards this command, as the command is its standard.

However, for that very reason this testing does not get very far. Just because the criterion is a tautology and is indifferent with regard to the content, it incorporates one content into itself with the same ease that it does its opposite. – Take the question: Ought it be a law in and for itself that there should be property? In and for itself, not because of utility for other ends? The ethical essentiality consists precisely in the law's being only in agreement with itself¹⁶⁸ and, through this agreement with itself, being supposed to be grounded in its own essence and not supposed to be conditional. Property in and for itself does not contradict itself; it is an isolated determinateness, or a determinateness posited as being in agreement with itself. It would be no more self-contradictory to have no property at all, or no dominion over things, or to have a community of goods. That something belongs to nobody, or that it belongs to the first-comer who takes possession of it, or that it belongs to everyone together and belongs to each according to his need, or that it is owned in equal portions, is a simple determinateness, a formal thought, like its opposite, property. – However much a thing under no dominion is regarded as an object necessary for needs, still it is necessary that it become the possession of some singular individual, and it would be contradictory instead to make the free-standingness¹⁶⁹ of the thing into a law. However, by “absence of dominion over things,” what is meant is not the absolute absence of dominion, but that the thing ought to come into someone's possession in accordance with the singular individual's needs, namely, not in order to be preserved but to be immediately used. However, a concern for need so totally in accordance with contingency is contradictory to the nature of the conscious beings about which we are speaking here, for such a being must represent his need in the form of universality, must be concerned for his whole existence, and he must acquire for himself a lasting good. The thought that a thing is contingently to be awarded to the first self-conscious living creature according to his needs is thus not in agreement with itself. – If in a community of commonly owned goods which takes care in both a universal and lasting way to see to it that each gets as much as he requires for his share, then in such a community there will be a contradiction between this inequality and the essence of consciousness, for which the principle is the equality of individuals. Or, according to the latter principle, if the goods are equally divided, then the share granted will have no relation to need, a relation which, after all, is the very concept of “a share.”

But if in this way no-property appears to be contradictory, this is only for the reason that it has not been left as a simple determinateness. The same thing happens to property when it has been dissolved into its moments. The singular thing which is my property thereby counts as something universal, established, and lasting, but this contradicts its nature, which consists in its being used and in its vanishing. At the same time it counts as mine, which all others recognize and from which they are excluded, but my being recognized therein is the basis of my equality with all others, which is the contrary of exclusion. – What I possess is a thing,¹⁷⁰ i.e., a being for others as such, but which is universally and indeterminately for me alone. That I possess it contradicts its universal thinghood. Property therefore contradicts itself in all aspects as much as non-property does; each has in it both of these opposing and self-contradictory moments of singularity and universality. – However, when each of these determinatenesses is represented simply as property or non-property without any further development, one is as simple as the other, i.e., is not self-contradictory. The standard of the law which reason has in its own self therefore fits every case equally well and is thus in fact no criterion at all. – It would also be very peculiar if tautology, the principle of non-contradiction, which everyone concedes to be only a formal criterion for knowing of theoretical truth, i.e., as something which is supposed to be wholly indifferent to truth and untruth, were for the knowing of practical truth supposed to be more than that.

In both of the moments which were just now under examination, namely, the moments of the fulfillment of the previously empty spiritual essence, there were the positing of immediate determinatenesses in ethical substance and then the knowing of whether those determinatenesses are laws; both of them have now been sublated. What seems to be the result is that neither determinate laws nor a knowing of these determinate laws is able to transpire. Yet substance is the consciousness of itself as absolute essentiality, a consciousness which can therefore neither relinquish the difference in the substance nor relinquish the knowing of this difference. That both law-giving and law-testing have shown themselves to be null and void means that both, when taken individually and in isolation, are only moments of the ethical consciousness which never ceases to be in movement; and the movement in which they come on the scene has the formal sense that the ethical substance as a result presents itself as consciousness.

Insofar as both of these moments are more detailed determinations of the consciousness of the crux of the matter, they can be seen as forms of honesty, which, as is usual with its formal moments, now gads about in a content which is supposed to be the good and the right and now gads about in testing such a fixed truth, and thinks it has the force and validity of commands in healthy rationality and intelligent insight.

However, without this honesty, the laws do not count as the essence of consciousness, and likewise the testing of laws does not count as a doing internal to consciousness. Rather, in the way that each of these moments on its own¹⁷¹ comes on the scene immediately as an actuality, one of them expresses an invalid establishment and existence of actual laws, while the other expresses a liberation from them which is just as invalid. As a determinate law, the law has a contingent content – which here means that it is a law of a singular consciousness of an arbitrary content. That immediate law-giving is thus the tyrannical outrage that makes arbitrariness into law and ethical life into obedience to such arbitrary laws – into obedience to laws that are only laws and are not at the same time commands. So too the second moment means, to the extent that the moment is isolated, the testing of laws, the moving of the immovable, and the iniquity of a knowing which cleverly argues itself into a freedom from absolute laws and takes absolute laws to be for him an issuance of an alien arbitrary will.

In both forms these moments are negative relations to the substance, or to the real spiritual essence; or the substance does not yet have its reality in those moments. Rather, consciousness still contains the substance in the form of its own immediacy, and the substance is first only this individual's own willing and knowing, or it is the ought of a non-actual command and a knowing of formal universality. However, while these modes have been sublated, consciousness has returned back into the universal, and those oppositions have vanished. As a result, the spiritual essence is actual substance, in that these modes are not in force singularly but are in force only as sublated, and the unity within which they are only moments is the self of consciousness, which henceforth is posited as being in the spiritual essence, which makes it into an actual, fulfilled self-conscious spiritual essence.

At first the spiritual essence thereby is for self-consciousness as a law existing in itself; the universality of testing laws, which was formal universality and not universality existing in itself, has been sublated. Likewise, it is an eternal law that does not have its ground in the will of this individual, but which is in and for itself and is the absolute pure will of all and has the form of immediate being. The law is also not a command which only ought to be; rather, it is and is validly in force; it is the universal I of the category which is immediately actuality, and the world is only this actuality. However, while this existing law is unreservedly valid and in force, the obedience given by self-consciousness is not that of service rendered to a master, whose orders would be only arbitrary and in which it would not recognize¹⁷² itself. Rather, the laws are the thoughts of its own absolute consciousness, thoughts which it itself immediately has. It also does not have faith in them, for faith, to be sure, also sees the essence, but it sees it as an alien essence. Through the universality of its own self, ethical self-consciousness is immediately at one with the essence. In contrast, faith begins with a singular consciousness; it is a movement of this consciousness as forever approaching this unity without ever reaching the present moment of its essence. – On the contrary, that former consciousness has sublated itself as a singular individual, this mediation is completed, and only in its being completed is it the immediate self-consciousness of ethical substance.

The difference between self-consciousness and the essence is thus completely transparent. As a result, the differences in the essence itself are not contingent determinatenesses, but, on account of the unity of the essence and self-consciousness from which alone such an inequality could arise, they are the social estates of its structure permeated by its life, non-estranged spirits clear to themselves, unblemished heavenly shapes, which in their differences sustain the unprofaned innocence and unanimity of their essence. – Self-consciousness stands in a just as simple, clear relationship to them. They are and nothing more than that. – This constitutes the consciousness of their relationships. That way they count for Sophocles' Antigone as the unwritten and unerring law of the gods:

They are. If I inquire about their emergence and confine them to their point of origin, so have I gone beyond them, for it is I who am henceforth the universal, and they are the conditioned and restricted. However much they are supposed to be legitimated through my insight, still I have already set their unwavering being-in-itself into motion, and I regard them as something which is perhaps true for me but perhaps not. An ethical disposition just consists in immovably sticking to what is right and in abstaining from any movement, any undermining, and any reduction. – Suppose something is entrusted to me: It is the property of another, I recognize it because it is so, and remain unwavering in this relationship. If I keep the entrusted item for myself, then according to the principle I use in testing laws, namely, that of tautology, I commit no contradiction whatsoever, for I then no longer see it as the property of another. To keep something that I do not view as somebody else's property is perfectly consistent. Changing the point of view is no contradiction, for what is at stake is not the point of view but the object and the content, and it is those which are not supposed to contradict themselves. If I can alter the point of view that something is mine into the point of view that it is the property of another – as I do when I give something away as a gift – without becoming thereby guilty of a contradiction, then I can just as well take the opposite route. – It is not therefore because I find something's not being self-contradictory that it is right; rather, it is right because it is the right. That something is the property of another is the basic underlying reason for this. I am not to argue cleverly at length on this, nor am I to look around for a variety of thoughts, contexts, considerations, or, for that matter, even just to let such things occur to me, nor am I to think of legislating laws or of testing them. In those sorts of movements of my thoughts, I would dislocate those relations while I could in fact quite arbitrarily and quite easily make the opposite fit onto my indeterminate tautological knowing and also make that into the law. But rather, whether this or the opposite determination is the right is determined in and for itself. For myself, if I wanted, I could have just as easily made none of them into law, and, when I start putting myself in the position of testing them, I have already started down an unethical path. Because the right for me is in and for itself, I am within the ethical substance. The ethical substance is thus the essence of self-consciousness; however, self-consciousness is ethical substance's actuality and existence, its self, and its will.