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

The simple substance of spirit divides itself up as consciousness, or, as consciousness of abstract sensuous being passes over into perception, so does the immediate certainty of real ethical being also pass over, and just as simple being becomes for sense-perception a thing of many properties, so for ethical perception a case of acting becomes an actuality of many ethical relations. However, to the former, the useless plurality of properties is condensed into the essential opposition between singularity and universality, and for the latter, which is purified, substantial consciousness, the plurality of ethical moments condenses itself instead into the twofoldness of a law of singular individuality and a law of universality. However, each of these social estates of substance remains the whole spirit. If the things in sense-perception have no substance other than the two determinations of singularity and universality, here they only express the superficial opposition of both aspects to each other.

In the essence we are here considering, the meaning of singular individuality is that of self-consciousness in general, not that of a singular, contingent consciousness. In this determination, the ethical substance is thus the actual substance, absolute spirit realized in the plurality of determinately existing consciousnesses. The spirit is the polity,¹¹ which, when we entered into the practical shaping of reason itself, was for us the absolute essence and which here emerges in its truth for itself as a conscious ethical essence and as the essence for the consciousness which we now have as our object. It is spirit which is for itself, while it sustains itself within the counter-glow¹² of the individuals – and which is in itself, or is substance while it sustains the individuals within itself. As the actual substance, it is a people, and as actual consciousness, it is the citizens of the nation.¹³ This consciousness has its essence in simple spirit, and its certainty of itself in the actuality of this spirit, in the whole people, and it immediately therein has its truth. But it does not have its truth in something which is not actual; it has it in a spirit which exists and is validly in force.¹⁴

This spirit can be called the human law because it is essentially in the form of actuality conscious of itself. In the form of universality, it is the familiarly known law and extant mores which are both present. In the form of singularity, it is the actual certainty of itself in the individual as such, and in the certainty of itself as simple individuality, it is the government. Its truth is the validity in force which is publicly open to the light of day. It is an existence which, for immediate certainty, takes on the form of existence¹⁵ set free-standing.

448. However, another power confronts this ethical power and public: the divine law, for the ethical power of the state has its opposite in the simple and immediate essence of ethical life as the movement of self-conscious acting. As actual universality, the power of the state is a force confronting the individual being-for-itself, and as actuality itself, it still has in the inner essence something other than itself.

We have already been reminded that each of the opposed ways in which the ethical substance exists wholly contains that substance and all the moments of its contents. However much the polity is therefore the substance as awareness of its actual doings, still the other aspect has the form of immediate, or existing, substance. In that way, the existing substance is, on the one hand, the inner concept, or the universal possibility of ethical life in general, but, on the other hand, it just as much has in it the moment of self-consciousness. This moment expressing ethical life in this element of immediacy, or in the element of being, or an immediate consciousness of itself as essence as well as being this self in an other, which is to say, as a natural ethical polity – this moment is the family. As the unaware concept of its consciously aware actuality, as the elemental unit¹⁶ of the actuality of the people, as, to the people, immediate ethical being – as the ethical life educating, acculturating, and sustaining itself through the work for the universal, as the Penates [household divinities], the family stands over and against the universal spirit.

However, whether or not the ethical being of the family is determined as immediate being, it is not in its ethical essence to the extent that it is the natural relationship of its members, or to the extent that their relation is the immediate relation of singular actual members, for the ethical is in itself universal, and this natural relationship is essentially just one spirit and only as spiritual essence is it ethical. How this distinctive ethical life is constituted remains to be seen. – In the first place, because the ethical is the universal in itself, the ethical relation among the members of the family is neither a relation of sentiment, nor is it the relationship of love. Now it seems that the ethical must have been placed into the relationship which the individual members of the family bear to the whole family as substance, such that the singular individual's acts and the individual's actuality have only that substance for their purpose and their content. However, the conscious purpose which is the doing of this whole, insofar as this purpose has to do with the whole, is itself the singular individual. The acquisition and sustaining of power and wealth have in part to do only with needs, and they involve desire; in their higher determination, they in part become something that is only mediated. This [higher] determination does not fall within the bounds of the family itself but concerns what is truly universal, the polity. This determination is instead negative vis-à-vis the family; it consists in taking the singular individual out of the family, in subjugating his naturalness and individuality, and thus in leading him towards virtue, towards a life lived in and for the universal. The positive purpose distinctive of the family is the individual as such a singular individual. For this relationship to be ethical, neither he who acts nor he to whom the action is related can come on the scene contingently, as happens in some form of assistance or service to be rendered. The content of the ethical action must be substantial, or, whole and universal. Hence, the action can only be related to the whole individual, or, to the individual as universal. Again, this must also not be so understood that it would be represented as doing him some service to further his entire happiness, since such service, as it is an immediate and actual action, only does something very singular to him – nor must it be represented that ethical action is actually education, in a series of endeavors having him as a whole as its object and which bring him out as its accomplished work. Apart from the purpose which is negative vis-à-vis the family, the actual action in such an education has only a restricted content – and finally, it should even less be represented that such service is a type of “help in time of need” through which the whole individual is in truth saved, for such service is itself an entirely contingent deed, the occasion for which is an everyday actuality that can just as well be as not be. Therefore the action, which embraces the entire existence of blood relations, has as its object and content the singular individual – not the citizen, for he does not belong to the family, nor does it have the singular individual who is to become a citizen and is supposed to cease counting as this singular individual – but rather, it has as the object the individual who as this singular individual belongs to the family, and who as a universal being,¹⁷ is exempted from his sensuous, i.e., singular actuality. The action no longer concerns the living but rather the dead; it concerns he who, out of the long progression of his dispersed existence, is condensed into one completed shape and who has been elevated out of the unrest of contingent life into the motionlessness of simple universality. – Because he is only actual and substantial as a citizen, the singular individual, taken not as a citizen but as belonging to the family, is only the unreal¹⁸ shadow without any core.

451. This universality to which the singular individual as such a singular individual has arrived is pure being, death; it is what has naturally and immediately come about¹⁹ and is not something a consciousness does. The duty of the family member is thus to augment this aspect so that his final being, this universal being, will also not belong solely to nature and remain something non-rational. It is to make it so that it too may be something done, and that the right of consciousness would be asserted within that being. Or, the sense of the action is instead that because the motionlessness and universality of a self-aware essence does not in truth belong to nature, the semblance that this is the kind of act which can be ascribed to nature falls by the wayside, and the truth is established. – What nature did in him is the aspect by which his coming to be the universal itself appears as the movement of an existent. To be sure, the movement itself falls within the ethical polity, and it has this polity as its purpose. Death is the consummation and the highest work that the individual as such undertakes for the polity. However, insofar as he is essentially singularly individual, it is contingent as to whether his death was both immediately connected with and was the result of his work for the universal. This is so in part because if it was, then it would be the natural negativity and movement of the individual as an existent, within which consciousness does not return into itself and become self-consciousness. Or, while the movement of the existent consists in its having been sublated and in its having arrived at being-for-itself, death is the aspect of estrangement in which the being-for-itself at which it arrived is something other than the existent which entered into the movement. – Because ethical life is spirit in its immediate truth, the aspects into which its consciousness was dispersed also fall into this form of immediacy, and singular individuality crosses over into this abstract negativity, which, without consolation or reconciliation in itself, must receive it essentially through an actual and external action. – The blood-relationship therefore supplements the abstract natural movement by adding to it the movement of consciousness, by interrupting nature's work, and by wresting the blood-relation away from destruction; or, better, because destruction, the individual's becoming pure being, is necessary, the blood-relationship takes upon itself the deed of destruction. – It thereby comes to pass that the dead, universal being, is elevated into a being returned into itself, a being-for-itself, or the powerless pure singular singularity is elevated to universal individuality. He who is dead, by having his being set free from his doing, or his negative oneness, is empty singular individuality, only a passive being for others, and is left to the mercy of every lower individuality devoid of reason and to the forces of abstract matter, both of which are now more powerful than he, or the former lower creatures on account of the life that they have and the latter forces of matter on account of their negative nature. The family keeps the dead away from those dishonoring acts of unconscious desire and abstract creatures,²⁰ and in place of them, it puts their own acts; it weds their kin to the womb of the earth, to the elemental, imperishable individuality. The family thereby makes the dead into a member of a polity which instead overwhelms and keeps in check the powers of the particular elements of matter and the lower living creatures which come to be free from him and which sought to destroy him.

This last duty thus constitutes the consummate divine law, or it constitutes the positive ethical action vis-à-vis the singular individual. All other relationships in regard to him, those which do not remain stalled in love [for him] but rather which are ethical, belong to human law, and their negative meaning is that of the elevation of the singular individual above his confinement within the natural polity to which he belongs as an actual individual. Now, however much human law²¹ has for its content and power the actual ethical substance conscious of itself, the whole people; and divine right and law have their content and power in the singular individual who is in the other-worldly realm beyond actuality, still the singular individual is not powerless. His power is that of the abstract pure universal, the elemental individual, which constitutes the individuality which tears itself loose from the elements and the self-conscious actuality of the people, withdraws back into the pure abstraction as into its essence as their ground. – How this power will exhibit itself in the people themselves is something which is still to be further developed.

Now, there are differences and levels in the one law as well as in the other. For while both essences have the moment of consciousness in themselves, the difference unfolds itself within themselves, which constitutes their movement and distinctive life. The examination of these differences shows the way in which they engage themselves²² and the self-consciousness of the two universal essences of the ethical world, as well as showing their connection and their transition into each other.

The polity, the higher, valid law open to the light of day, has its actual liveliness in the government within which it is individual. The government is actual spirit reflected into itself, the simple self of the whole ethical substance. This simple force allows the essence to diffuse itself into its members and to give to each part both a stable existence and its own being-for-itself. It is there that spirit has its reality, or its existence, and the family is the elemental unit²³ of this reality. However, spirit is at the same time the force of the whole, which again assembles these parts into a negative One, gives them the feeling of their non-self-sufficiency, and sustains them in the consciousness that they have their life only in the whole. On the one hand, the polity may thus organize itself into the systems of personal self-sufficiency, property, personal rights, and rights in things; and it may just as well organize the various ways of working for what are initially singular purposes – those of acquisition and consumption – such that it subdivides them into their own assemblies and makes those assemblies self-sufficient. The spirit of the universal gathering is the simplicity and the negative essence of these self-isolating systems. In order not to let them become rooted and rigidly fixed within this activity of isolating themselves, which would otherwise let the whole come undone and the spirit within it fade away, the government must from time to time shake them to their core by means of war. As a result, it infringes on their established order, violates their right to self-sufficiency, and throws them into disarray. By the labor the government imposes on them, those individuals, who have become more and more absorbed in their own lives and who thereby tend to tear themselves loose from the whole in striving after inviolable being-for-itself and personal security, are made to feel the power of their lord and master, death. Through this dissolution of the form of stable existence, spirit wards off its descent from out of ethical life into only natural existence, and it sustains and elevates the self of its consciousness into freedom and into its force. – The negative essence shows itself to be the polity's underlying power and the force of its self-preservation. The polity therefore has the truth and substantiation of its power in the essence of the divine law and in the realm of the netherworld.

Likewise, the divine law prevailing in the family has for its part differences within itself, and the relations among those differences constitute the living movement of its actuality. However, among the three relationships of man and wife, parents and children, and siblings as brothers and sisters, it is the relationship of man and wife which is initially the immediate self-cognizance²⁴ of one consciousness in another and the cognizance of reciprocal recognition. Because it is natural self-cognizance and not ethical self-cognizance, it is only the representation and picture of spirit, not actual spirit itself. – However, the representation, or the picture, has its actuality in an other than itself; this relationship therefore does not have its actuality in its own self but in the child – in an other whose coming into being is that relationship and in which the relationship disappears. This progression from one generation to another has its stable existence in the people. – The piety of man and wife towards each other is thus intermixed with both a natural relation and with sentiment, and their relationship does not in its own self have its return into itself, nor does the second relationship, that of the piety of parents and children to each other. The piety of parents towards their children is affected by the emotion brought on by their awareness that they have their actuality in an other and that they see their children come to their own being-for-itself without the parents being able to get it back. The child's being for itself remains an alien actuality, an actuality all its own. – But conversely the devotion of children towards their parents is affected by the emotion of their coming-to-be, or having their own in-itself in an other who is vanishing, and in achieving being-for-itself and their own self-consciousness only through separation from their origin – a separation within which the origin recedes.

Both these relationships come to a standstill in the transitions and the inequality of the aspects that are assigned to them. – However, the unmixed relationship is found between brother and sister. They are the same blood; however, in them it has reached its state of rest and equilibrium. Hence, they neither desire each other, nor have they given or received this being-for-itself to each other. Rather, they are free individualities with respect to each other. The feminine, as the sister, hence has the highest intimation of ethical essence. This intimation does not rise to a consciousness of the actuality of ethical essence because the law of the family is the inner essence existing-in-itself, which does not lie in the daylight of consciousness. Rather, it remains inner feeling, the divine displaced from actuality. The feminine is bound to these Penates, and it is in those Penates that she partly intuits her universal substance and partly intuits her singular individuality, though at the same time this relation of singular individuality is not the natural relation of pleasure. – As a daughter, the woman must now see her parents vanish, and she must be herself both naturally moved by that loss and be at ethical peace, for it is only at the expense of this relationship that she can achieve the being-for-itself of which she is capable. She thus cannot intuit her being-for-itself positively in her parents. However, the relations of mother and wife have singular individuality partly as something natural, something to which pleasure is appropriate, and partly as something negative, which in the relationship can only behold therein its own disappearance, and in part as something contingent which can be replaced by another individuality. In the household of ethical life, it is not this man, and it is not this child; rather, it is a man, children as such – these female relationships are grounded not on sentiment but on the universal. The difference between her ethical life and the man's ethical life consists in this, that in her destiny²⁵ for singular individuality and in her pleasure, she remains both immediately universal and alien to the individuality of desire, whereas in the man, these two aspects become separated; and while as a citizen, he possesses the self-conscious power of universality, the life of the social whole, as a result he purchases for himself the right of desire while at the same time maintaining his freedom from such desire. While singular individuality is thus mingled into the woman's relationship, her ethical life is not pure. However, insofar as she is ethical, singular individuality is a matter of indifference, and the wife dispenses with the moment of cognizing herself as this self in an other. – But to the sister, the brother is the motionless essence itself, equal to her, and her recognition²⁶ in him is pure and unmixed with any natural relation. The indifference of singular individuality and its ethical contingency is thus not present in this relationship. Rather, the moment of the singular self, as recognizing and being recognized, may here assert its right because it is bound up with the equilibrium of blood relations and with relations utterly devoid of desire. The loss of a brother is thus irreplaceable to the sister, and her duty towards him is the highest.

This relationship is at the same time the limit at which the self-enclosed family dissolves and moves outside of itself. The brother is the aspect according to which the family's spirit becomes that of individuality that turns itself against the other and makes its transition into the consciousness of universality. The brother leaves this immediate, elemental, and for that reason genuinely negative ethical life of the family in order to acquire and to bring out the actual ethical life which is conscious of itself.

He makes a transition from the divine law, in whose sphere he had lived, to the human law. However, either the sister becomes, or the wife remains, the overseer of the household and the guardian of the divine law. In this way, both the sexes overcome their natural essence, and they emerge in their ethical significance as diversities who divide between them the two differences that ethical substance gives itself. These two universal essences of the ethical world have their determinate individuality in naturally differentiated self-consciousnesses, because the ethical spirit is the immediate unity of substance with self-consciousness, an immediacy which thus, according to the aspect of reality and difference, at the same time appears as the existence of a natural difference. – It is the aspect which appeared in the shape of the individuality which is real, to itself, or in the concept of spiritual essence, as original determinate nature. This moment loses the indeterminateness which it still had there and loses the contingent diversity of aptitudes and capacities. It is now the determinate opposition of the two sexes, whose naturalness at the same time sustains the meaning of their ethical destiny.

The difference between the sexes and their ethical content nonetheless remains within the unity of the substance, and the difference's movement is just the abiding coming to be of that substance. The spirit of the family sends the man out into the polity, and he finds his self-conscious essence in that polity. Just as the family has its universal substance and its stable existence in the polity, the polity conversely has the formal element of its own actuality in the family and its force and proof in the divine laws. Neither of the two alone is in and for itself. In its vital movement, human law originates from the divine law, the law in force on earth originates from the law of the netherworld, the conscious law originates from the unconscious law, mediation originates from immediacy, and all just as much return to that from whence they came. In contrast, the netherworldly power has its actuality on the earth, and through consciousness, it becomes existence and activity.

The universal ethical essences are thus the substance as universal consciousness and as singular consciousness. They have the people and the family for their universal actuality, and they have man and wife for their natural self and their activating individuality. In this content of the ethical world, we see that the purposes which the previous substanceless shapes of consciousness had set for themselves are now achieved. What reason only grasped as an object has become self-consciousness, and what self-consciousness only possessed within itself is here present as true actuality. – What observation knew as an item as it found it, in which the self would have had no share, is here a set of given mores, an actuality which is at the same time the deed and work of those who are finding themselves in it. – The singular individual seeking the pleasure of relishing his singular individuality finds it in the family, and the necessity within which that pleasure slips away is his own self-consciousness as a citizen of his nation – or, it is the knowing of the law of the heart as the law of all hearts, the consciousness of the self as the recognized universal order of society – it is virtue, which enjoys the fruits of its own sacrifice and which brings about what it is concerned with, namely, to lift the essence out of the actual present, and its own relish to be in this universal life. – Finally, consciousness of the crux of the matter is satisfied within the real substance, which contains and sustains in a positive manner the abstract moments of that empty category. The substance has a genuine content in the ethical powers, a content that takes the place of the insubstantial commands which healthy rationality wanted to give and to know – just as it thereby obtains a material standard which in its own self is self-determined,²⁷ not for the testing of laws but for testing what is done.

The whole is a peaceful equilibrium of all the parts, and each part is a local spirit that does not seek its satisfaction beyond itself. Rather, each local spirit has its satisfaction within itself because it is itself in this equilibrium with the whole. – To be sure, this equilibrium can only be a living equilibrium because of an inequality that arises within it, an inequality which is then brought back to equality by justice. However, justice is neither an alien essence which is situated somewhere off in the other-worldly beyond, nor is it the actuality of mutual maliciousness, treasonous behavior, ingratitude, etc., an actuality unworthy of the name of justice and which would execute judgment in an unthinking and arbitrary way without even thinking about the context, or in unconscious acts of omission and commission. Rather, as the justice of human law, it is that which brings back into the universal the being-for-itself, or the self-sufficiency, of the estates and singular individuals who are moving out of and away from that equilibrium. As such, justice is the government of the people, which is, to itself, the current individuality of the universal essence and the self-conscious will of all. – However, in bringing the universal back into equilibrium, a universal which is becoming ever more dominant over singular individuals, justice is likewise the simple spirit of he who has suffered wrong. – It has not been subverted into he who has suffered wrong and an other-worldly essence. He himself is the power of the netherworld, and it is his Erinyes [the Furies] which take vengeance, since his individuality, his blood, still lives on in the household, and his substance has an enduring actuality. In the realm of ethical life, the wrong that can be inflicted upon the singular individual would only be this, that something purely and simply happens to him. Nature is the power that commits this wrong to consciousness, that makes it into a pure thing, and the wrong is the universality not of the polity but rather that of the abstract universality of being. In undoing the wrong it has suffered, singular individuality does not turn against the polity because it has not suffered at the polity's hands; rather, he or she turns against nature. As we saw, the consciousness of the blood [relations] of the individual undoes this wrong so that what was a mere event becomes, on the contrary, a work, and, as a result, being, a finality, is supposed to be something also willed and hence also something gratifying.

The ethical realm is in this way an undefiled world in its stable existence, a world unpolluted by any division. Likewise, its movement consists in one of its powers peacefully coming to be the other so that each preserves and brings forth the other. To be sure, we see it dividing itself into two essences and their actuality, but their opposition is instead the proof of one through the other, and their mediating middle and element is the immediate permeation of each by the other in which they immediately come into contact with each other as actual powers. One of the extremes, universal spirit conscious of itself, is integrated²⁸ with its other extreme, its force and its element, or it is integrated with unconscious spirit through the individuality of the man. In contrast, the divine law has its individualization, or the singular individual's unconscious spirit has its existence in the woman through which, as the mediating middle, the unconscious spirit rises out of its non-actuality into actuality and steps out of the realm of unknowing and the unknown into the conscious realm. The union of man with woman constitutes the active mediating middle of the whole, and it constitutes the elemental unit²⁹ which, estranged into the extremes of divine and human law, is just as much their immediate union. It makes the first two syllogisms into the same syllogism and unites the opposed movements into one movement from actuality down to non-actuality – a downward movement of the human law, which has organized itself into self-sufficient members, towards danger and trial by death – and an upward movement of the laws of the netherworld towards the actuality of daylight and to conscious existence. Of these movements the former falls to man, the latter to woman.

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

The way in which the opposition is constituted in this realm is such that self-consciousness has not yet emerged in its right as singular individuality. From one aspect, individuality counts in self-consciousness only as the universal will, but from another aspect, it counts in it as the blood of the family. This singular individual counts only as the non-actual shade. – As yet, no deed has been committed; but the deed is the actual self. – It disturbs the peaceful organization and movement of the ethical world. What appears as order and harmony between both of its essences, each of which proves the worth of the other and completes the other, becomes through the deed a transition of opposites within which instead each proves itself to be the nullity, not the authentication, of itself and the other – it becomes the negative movement, or the eternal necessity of a dreadful fate which in the abyss of its simplicity engulfs both the divine and the human law as well as that of the two self-consciousnesses in which these powers have their existence – and for us it makes a transition into the absolute being-for-itself of pure singularly individual self-consciousness.

The ground from which this movement both starts and on which it advances is the realm of ethical life, but this movement's activity is self-consciousness. As ethical consciousness, it is the simple, pure direction towards ethical essentiality, or duty. Within it, there is neither arbitrary choice nor is there struggle or indecision, as it has forsaken both giving the law and testing the law. Rather, to itself, the ethical essentiality is the immediate, the unwavering, what is free of contradiction. There is therefore neither the painful spectacle of a collision between passion and duty, nor the comical spectacle of a collision between duty and duty – a collision, which according to its content is the same as that between passion and duty, for passion is just as capable of being represented as duty. This is because duty, like consciousness withdrawing itself back into itself from out of its immediate essentiality, becomes a formal-universal with which, just as it did before, any content corresponds equally well. However, the collision of duties is comical because it expresses the contradiction in an absolute which is opposed to itself and thus an absolute which is immediately the nullity of this so-called absolute or duty. – However, ethical consciousness knows what it has to do, and it has decided whether it is to belong to divine or to human law. This immediacy is a being-in-itself and hence, as we have seen, its meaning is at the same time that of a natural being. It is nature, not the accident of circumstances or of choice, which assigns one sex to one law and the other to the other law – or, conversely, it is both ethical powers which give themselves their individual existence and their actualization in the two sexes.

Now, because on the one hand ethical life consists essentially in this immediate decisiveness, and for that reason only one law is the essence for consciousness, on the other hand, it is because the ethical powers are actual in the self of consciousness that these forces receive the significance of excluding each other and of being opposed to each other – they exist for itself in self-consciousness just as they only exist in itself within the realm of ethical life. Because it has decided in favor of one of them, ethical consciousness is essentially character. It is not the equal essentiality of both which is for ethical consciousness; and for that reason, the opposition appears only as an unfortunate collision of duty with an actuality utterly devoid of any right. Ethical consciousness is in this opposition as self-consciousness, and as such it sets itself to subordinate by force the actuality opposed to the law to which it belongs, or to deceive this opposed actuality. While it sees right only on its own side and sees only wrong on the other, the consciousness that belongs to divine law beholds on the other side human, contingent violence; and that consciousness which belongs to human law beholds on the other side the obstinacy and disobedience of inward being-for-itself. For the commands of government have a universal, public sense lying open to the light of day, but the will of the other law is the sense of the netherworld, sealed up in innerness, a sense which in its existence appears as the will of singular individuality and, when it stands in contradiction to the first, is sacrilege.

There thereby arises in consciousness the opposition between the known and the not known, just as in substance, there was an opposition between the conscious and the unconscious, and the absolute right of ethical self-consciousness comes into conflict with the divine right of essence. For self-consciousness as consciousness, objective actuality as such objective actuality has essentiality, but according to its substance, self-consciousness is the unity of itself and this opposite, and ethical self-consciousness is the consciousness of substance. For that reason, the object as opposed to self-consciousness has entirely lost the significance of having for itself essence.³⁰ Just as the spheres in which the object is only a thing have long since disappeared, so too have these spheres within which consciousness fixes itself on something and then makes a singular moment into the essence. Against such one-sidedness, actuality has a force of its own; it is in league with the truth against consciousness and only presents to consciousness what the truth is. However, from the cup of absolute substance, ethical consciousness has drunk the forgetfulness of all the one-sidedness of being-for-itself, its purposes and its distinctive concepts, and for that reason, it has at the same time drowned all of its own essentiality and the self-sufficient meaning of objective actuality in this Stygian water. Hence, while it acts according to the ethical law, its absolute right is that it find in this actualization nothing but the attainment of this law itself, and it finds that the deed shows nothing other than ethical doing. – The ethical, as the absolute essence and at the same time the absolute power, cannot suffer any inversion of its content. If it were only absolute essence without power, it could experience inversion through individuality. However, as ethical consciousness, this individuality has forgone the inverting activity when it forsook one-sided being-for-itself, just as conversely mere power would be inverted by essence if that power were still such a one-sided being-for-itself. On account of this unity, individuality is the pure form of substance which is the content, and the act is the transition from thought to actuality, but only as the movement of an essenceless opposition whose moments have no particular content and no essentiality distinct from each other. Thus the absolute right of ethical consciousness is that the deed, the shape of its actuality, is supposed to be nothing other than what it knows.

However, the ethical essence has split itself into two laws, and, as a non-estranged conduct towards the laws, consciousness is only assigned to one of them. Just as this simple consciousness insists on the absolute right that the essence shall have appeared to it as it is in itself, this essence insists on the right of its reality, or on the right to be a doubled essence. However, this right of essence does not at the same time stand over and against self-consciousness, as if it were to exist somewhere else, but rather, it is self-consciousness' own essence, and only there does it have its existence and its power; its opposite is self-consciousness' own deed. Just because it is, to itself, a self and sets itself to action, self-consciousness elevates itself out of simple immediacy and itself posits this estrangement. Through the deed, it abandons the determinateness of ethical life, of being the simple certainty of immediate truth, and it posits a separation of itself within itself as that between what is active and what is for it the negative actuality confronting it. Through the deed, it thus becomes guilt, since the deed is its own doing, and its own doing is its ownmost essence. Guilt also takes on the meaning of crime, for as simple ethical consciousness, it has addressed itself to one of the laws but has rejected the other, and, by its deed it thus violates that other law. – Guilt is not the indifferent, ambiguous essence; it is not as if the deed, as it actually lies open to the light of day, might or might not be the guilty self's own doing, as if something external and accidental could be attached to the doing which did not belong to it and according to which the doing would therefore be innocent. Rather, the doing is itself this estrangement; it is this positing of itself for itself and this positing of an alien external actuality confronting itself. It belongs to the doing itself that such an actuality is, and it only is through the act. Hence, innocence amounts to non-action, like the being of a stone, not even that of a child. – However, according to the content, ethical action has the moment of crime in itself because it does not sublate the natural distribution of the two laws to the two sexes. Rather, within natural immediacy, it remains instead as a non-estranged directedness to the law, and, as doing, it makes this one-sidedness into guilt, grapples with only one of essence's aspects, and conducts itself negatively towards the other, i.e., violates it. Where exactly it is that guilt and crime, along with doing and acting, will belong in universal ethical life will be given more determinate expression later, but this much is immediately clear. It is not this singular individual who acts and is guilty, for as this self, he is just the non-actual shade, or he is only as the universal self. Individuality is purely the formal moment of doing anything at all, and the content of the laws and mores is determined by his station in life. He is the substance as genus which through its determinateness becomes a species, but the species remains at the same time the universal of the genus. In the life of a people, self-consciousness descends from the universal only down to the point of particularity; it does not get as far as the point of singular individuality, which in its doings posits an excluding self, an actuality negative to itself. Rather, self-consciousness' action rests on a secure trust in the whole, where there is no admixture of anything alien, neither that of fear nor that of enmity.

In its deed, ethical self-consciousness now experiences the developed nature of actual acting, indeed, as much as it did when it submitted to both the divine and the human law. The law which is revealed to it is the essence bound up with its opposite. The essence is the unity of both, but the deed has only carried out the terms of one law in opposition to the other. However, interrelated in the essence with this other, the fulfillment of one law calls forth the other, and, with the deed having made it so, it calls forth the other as a violated and hostile essence now demanding revenge. As concerns the action, only one aspect of the decision itself lies open to the light of day. However, the decision is in itself the negative, which confronts an other to itself, an alien to itself, which is knowing. Hence, actuality keeps concealed within itself this other aspect which is alien to knowing and which does not show itself to consciousness as it is in and for itself – which neither shows the son that the man insulting him and whom he strikes dead is his father, nor shows him that the queen whom he takes as his wife is his mother. In this way, a power that shuns the daylight preys on ethical self-consciousness, a power which bursts forth only after the deed is done and when it has taken self-consciousness in its grip. This is so because the completed deed is the sublated opposition between the knowing self and the actuality confronting it. The agent can neither deny the crime nor deny his guilt. – The deed consists in setting the unmoved into motion, which thereby brings forth what had been sealed off as mere possibility, and it links the unconscious to the conscious and the non-existent to being. In this truth, therefore, the deed comes to light – as that in which the conscious is combined with the unconscious and in which what is one's own is combined with what is alien. It comes to light as the estranged essence, whose other aspect consciousness also experiences as its own, as a power violated by it and thereby roused to hostility.

It can be that the right which lay in reserve is not present in its distinctive shape for the acting consciousness but is only present in itself, or in the inner guilt of the decision and the action. However, ethical consciousness is more complete and its guilt more pure if it knows beforehand the law and the power against which it takes an opposing stance, takes them to be violence and wrong, to be an ethical contingency, and then, like Antigone, knowingly commits the crime. The accomplished deed inverts its point of view. What the accomplishment itself expresses is that the ethical must be actual, for the actuality of the purpose is the purpose of acting. Acting directly expresses the unity of actuality and substance. It says that actuality is not accidental to essence, but rather that, in league with essence, there is nothing which is granted that is not a true right. On account of this actuality ethical consciousness must bestow recognition on its opposite, and on account of its own doing, ethical consciousness must acknowledge its guilt:

470. This recognition expresses the sublated conflict between ethical purpose and actuality, and it expresses the return to the ethical disposition which knows that nothing counts but the right. However, as a result the agent gives up his character and the actuality of his self and is brought to his downfall. His being is to belong to his ethical law as his substance, but in the recognition of the opposition, this law has ceased for him to be his substance, and instead of attaining his actuality, the agent has attained a non-actuality, a disposition.³³ – To be sure, the substance appears in individuality as pathos, and individuality appears as what brings the substance to life and hence stands above it. However, it is a pathos that is at the same time his character. Ethical individuality is immediately and in itself at one with its universal; it has existence only within it and is incapable of surviving the downfall that this ethical power suffers at the hands of its opposite.

471. However, in this situation ethical individuality has the certainty that the individuality whose pathos is this opposed power suffers no more evil than it has inflicted. The movement of the ethical powers against each other and the individualities which set these powers into life and action have therein reached their true end in that both sides experience the same demise. This is so because neither of the powers has any advantage over the other that would make it into a more essential moment of substance. The equal essentiality and indifferent stable existence which both have in their juxtaposition to each other is their self-less being; in the deed they are as independent beings³⁴ but as diverse, as what contradicts the unity of the self and which constitutes their utter lack of right and their necessary demise. According to its pathos, or its substance, character in part just as much belongs only to one power, and, according to the aspect of knowing, each is just as much estranged into the conscious and into the unconscious; and while each itself calls forth this opposition and is through its own deed its own work of not-knowing, each posits that it itself take on the guilt which devours it. The victory of one power and its character along with the conquest of the other would thus only be one part and would be the imperfect work which inexorably advances towards equilibrium. It is in the equal subjection of both sides that absolute right is first achieved, and ethical substance, as the negative power that devours both sides has emerged. That is, fate, omnipotent and just, has come on the scene.

If both powers are taken according to their determinate content and its individualization, then the picture that arises is that of their conflict as it has crystallized according to its formal aspect, as the antagonism which ethical life and self-consciousness bear towards both unconscious nature and a contingency made available through that nature – the latter, that is, nature, has a right against the former because the former is only true spirit, and it only is in an immediate unity with its substance – and, according to its content, the conflict is pictured as the schism between divine and human law. – Youth leaves the unconscious essence and the spirit of the family, and it becomes the individuality of the polity. However, that youth still belongs to the nature from which it has wrested itself away is demonstrated by youth's contingently emerging in the form of two brothers with equal rights to take possession of the polity. For them, who enter into the ethical essence, the inequality of earlier and later birth has, as a natural difference, no meaning. However, as the simple soul, or as the self of the spirit of the people, the government does not tolerate a dualism of individuality, and by the accident of there being more than one, nature confronts the ethical necessity of this unity. For that reason, these two brothers are at odds with each other, and their equal right to the power of the state shatters both of them, each of whom is just as much in the wrong. Humanly considered, he who has committed the crime is the one who, because he was not in possession of his right, attacked the very polity in which the other stood at the head; in contrast, the one has right on his side who knew how to take the other only as a singular individual cut off from the polity and who, in finding him in this powerlessness, banished him from the polity. He struck at only the singular individual as such and not the polity; he did not strike at the essence of human right. Attacked and defended by empty singular individuality, the polity sustains itself, and it is through each other that the brothers come to their mutual demise, since individuality, which in its being-for-itself is linked to a danger to the whole, has expelled itself from the polity and dissolves itself. However, the polity will honor the one it found to be on its side; in contrast, the government, the re-established simplicity of the self of the polity, will punish the one who had already proclaimed on the walls of the city the devastation he would wreak, and this punishment will be that of denying him final honors. The one who assaulted the highest spirit of consciousness, the religious community,³⁵ must be stripped of the honor due to his fully perfected essence, or the honor due to the isolated spirit.

However much the universal so easily pushes off the pure tip of its pyramid and is victorious over the rebellious principle of singular individuality, or the family, still it has as a result committed itself to a struggle with divine law. This is a struggle between spirit conscious of itself and unconscious spirit, for unconscious spirit is the other essential power and is for that reason not destroyed but only offended by the conscious spirit. Yet confronting the authoritative law lying open to the light of day, unconscious spirit has a bloodless shade to help it put its law actually into effect. Hence, as the law of weakness and of darkness, it is initially subjugated to daylight's law and to its force, for its authority is only valid in the netherworld and not on the earth. However, the actual, which took its honor and power from the inner, has by doing so devoured its essence. The revealed spirit has the roots of its force in the netherworld; the people's self-reassuring certainty has the truth of its oath which binds them all into one only in the mute unconscious substance of all, in the waters of forgetfulness. The achievement of public spirit is thereby transformed into its opposite, and the public spirit experiences that its supreme right is supreme wrong and that its victory is instead its own downfall. For that reason, the dead individual whose right is infringed knows how to find instruments for his vengeance which are as actual and forceful as the power that injured him. These powers are other polities whose altars the dogs or birds defiled with the corpse, which was itself not elevated into unconscious universality by being appropriately returned to the elemental individual, the earth. Instead, it has remained above ground in the realm of actuality, and, as the force of divine law, it has now acquired a self-conscious, actual universality. These powers rise up in hostility and destroy the polity that has dishonored and disrupted its own force, the piety of the family.

In this representation, the movement of human and divine law has its necessity expressed in individuals in whom the universal appears as a pathos, and the movement's activity appears as an individual doing which bestows a semblance of contingency to the necessity of the movement. However, both individuality and doing constitute the principle of singular individuality as such, a principle which in its pure universality was called the inner divine law. As a moment of the polity made public, it does not only have the effectiveness of the netherworld, or an external effectiveness in its existence; it also just as much has a public, actual existence and movement in the actual people. Taken in this form, what was represented as the simple movement of the individualized pathos acquires a different look, and the crime together with the destruction of the polity (a destruction founded in that crime) acquire the real form of their existence. – Thus, in its universal existence, or the polity, human law is in its activity itself the manliness of the polity and is in its actual activity the government, and it moves itself and sustains itself by absorbing into itself the isolation of the Penates, or their self-sufficient individualization into different families over which women preside and which keep them dissolved within the continuity of its fluidity. However, the family is at the same time its elemental unit, and its universal energizing ground is singular consciousness. While the polity gives itself stable existence only by disrupting familial happiness and by dissolving self-consciousness in the universal, it creates an internal enemy for itself in what it suppresses, which is at the same time essential to it, or it creates an enemy in the feminine itself. By intrigue, the feminine – the polity's eternal irony – changes the government's universal purpose into a private purpose, transforms its universal activity into this determinate individual's work, and it inverts the state's universal property into the family's possession and ornament. In this way, the feminine turns to ridicule the solemn wisdom of maturity, which, being dead to singular individuality – dead to pleasure and enjoyment as well as to actual activity – only thinks of and is concerned for the universal. The feminine turns this mature wisdom into an object of ridicule for immature, high-spirited youths and into an object of contempt for those youths' enthusiasm. As such, she elevates the force of youth into the status of what is validly established³⁶ – she elevates the force of the son, born to his mother as her master, and what counts is the force of the brother as one in whom the sister finds a man as an equal with herself, the man through whom the daughter, freed from her own non-self-sufficiency, achieves the enjoyment and the dignity of womanhood. – However, the polity can only sustain itself by suppressing this spirit of individuality, and because that spirit is an essential moment, the polity likewise creates it by its repressive stance towards it as a hostile principle. Nevertheless, since this principle, in separating itself from universal purposes, is only evil and is within itself null, it would be incapable of accomplishing anything if the polity itself were not to recognize the force of youth, or the manhood, which, although immature, still stands within individuality as the force of the whole. For the polity is a people, it is itself individuality, and it is so only essentially for itself in that other individualities are for it and in its excluding these from itself and knowing itself to be independent of them. The negative aspect of the polity, which directs itself inward and suppresses the isolation of the individual but which also directs itself outward and is self-active, has its weapons in individuality. War is the spirit and the form in which the essential moment of ethical substance, the absolute freedom of ethically independent beings³⁷ from all existence, is present in its actuality and in having proved itself. While, on the one hand, war makes the single systems of property and personal self-sufficiency as well as singular personality itself feel the force of the negative, in war this negative essence otherwise brings itself to the forefront as what sustains the whole. The brave youth, in whom the feminine has its pleasure, or the suppressed principle of corruption, comes now into full view and is what counts. Now what will render a decision on the existence of ethical essence and spiritual necessity is natural strength and what appears as the luck of the draw. Because the existence of ethical life thus rests on strength and chance, it has already been decided that it breathes its last. – Just as previously it was only the Penates in the spirit of the people which perished, now it is the living spirits of the people which perish through their individuality, and they collapse into one universal polity whose simple universality is devoid of spirit, is dead, and whose liveliness is the singular individual as singular. The ethical shape of spirit has disappeared, and another shape steps in to take its place.

This demise of ethical substance and its transition into another shape is determined, as a result, by this: That ethical consciousness is immediately directed towards the law, and this determination of immediacy means that nature itself enters into ethical life's action. Its actuality only reveals the contradiction and the germ of corruption which ethical spirit's beautiful unanimity and motionless equilibrium have in this motionlessness and beauty itself, for immediacy bears the contradictory meaning of being the unconscious restfulness of nature and the self-conscious restless restfulness of spirit. – On account of this naturalness, this ethical people per se is an individuality determined by nature and is thus a restricted individuality which finds its sublation in another individuality. However, this determinateness disappears, a determinateness which is posited as existing and which is a restriction, but which is also just as much the negative itself and the self of individuality. While this determinateness disappears, the life of spirit and this substance, which is conscious of itself in the self-consciousness of all, are both lost. In both of them, the substance emerges as a formal universality and no longer dwells in them as a living spirit. Instead, their simple unadulterated individuality has been shattered into a plurality of multiple points.

c. The State of Legality

The universal unity into which the living immediate unity of individuality and substance returns is the spiritless polity, a polity which has ceased to be the un-self-aware substance of individuals, and within which those individuals, according to their singular being-for-itself now each count as independent beings³⁸ and as substance. The universal is splintered into the atoms of absolutely multiple individuals; this spirit, having died, is an equality in which all count for as much as each and where each and all count as persons.³⁹ – What in the ethical world was called the hidden divine law has in fact emerged out of its innerness into actuality. In the former the singular individual was and counted as actual only as the universal blood of the family. As this singular individual, he was the selfless departed⁴⁰spirit, but now he has emerged from out of his non-actuality. Because it is only ethical substance which is true spirit, the singular individual returns into the immediate certainty of himself. He is that substance as the positive universal, but his actuality is to be a negative, universal self. – We saw the powers and shapes of the ethical world immersed into the simple necessity of an empty fate. This power of the ethical world is the substance reflecting itself into its simplicity, but the absolute essence reflecting itself into itself, the very necessity of empty fate, is nothing but the I of self-consciousness.

Henceforth this counts as the essence existing in and for itself. This, its being recognized, is its substantiality. However, this is abstract universality because its content is this aloof self, not the self which has been dissolved in the substance.

Personality has thus here stepped out of the life of ethical substance. It is the actual self-sufficiency of consciousness which counts and is in force. The non-actual thought of such self-sufficiency, which comes to be through the renunciation of actuality is what earlier appeared as stoical self-consciousness. Just as stoical self-consciousness itself emerged out of mastery and servitude as the immediate existence of self-consciousness, personality emerges out of immediate spirit – emerges out of the universally dominating will of all and their servile obedience. What to stoicism was the in-itself only in abstraction is now an actual world. Stoicism is nothing but the consciousness that brings the state of legality, the self-sufficiency devoid of spirit, to its abstract form. Through its flight away from actuality, it only reached the thought of self-sufficiency, and it existed absolutely for itself not through binding its essence to any kind of existence at all. Instead, it has given up on any of those kinds of existence, and it posits that its essence lies solely in the unity of pure thinking. In the same manner, the right of the person is neither bound up with a richer or more powerful existence of the individual itself, nor is it bound up with a universal living spirit. Rather, it is bound up instead with the pure One of its abstract actuality, or to that One as self-consciousness, full stop.

Now just as the abstract self-sufficiency of stoicism exhibited its actualization, so too will this self-sufficiency repeat stoicism's movement. Stoicism passes over into the skeptical disorientation of consciousness, into a kind of blather about the negative, which in shapelessly drifting from one contingency of being and thought to another, certainly brings them to dissolution within its absolute self-sufficiency, but then likewise creates them anew. It is in fact only the contradiction between the self-sufficiency of consciousness and its un-self-sufficiency. – Likewise, the self-sufficiency of the person in lawful right is instead this same universal disorientation and mutual dissolution, for what counts as the absolute essence is self-consciousness taken as the pure empty One of the person. With respect to this empty universality, the substance has the form both of being brought to fulfillment and of the content, and this content is now left free-standing and in a state of disorder, for the spirit which subjugated it and held it together in its unity is no longer present. – Hence, this empty One of the person is in its reality a contingent existence, an essenceless movement and doing that never reaches any kind of stable existence. Just like skepticism, the formalism of legal right is thus through its concept without any distinctive content. It finds a multiply stable existence, that of property, and it impresses on it the very same abstract universality (through which it is now called property) as that of skepticism. But however much actuality determined in that way is what skepticism designates as semblance that has only a negative value, still in legal right it has a positive value. That negative value consists in actuality signifying the self as thinking, the self as the universal in itself. However, the positive value consists in its being mine in the sense of the category, or as a validity that is recognized⁴¹ and actual. Both are the same abstract universal. The actual content, or the determinateness of something's being mine – whether it be an external possession or else that of either inner richness or a poverty of both spirit and character – is not contained in this empty form and does not concern it. The content thus belongs to a power of its own, which is something other than the formal universal, namely, that of contingency and arbitrary choice. – For that reason, in its actual validity, the consciousness of legal right experiences itself instead as the loss of its reality; it experiences its complete inessentiality, and it learns that to designate an individual as a person is an expression of contempt.

The free power of the content determines itself in such a way that the dispersal into the absolute plurality of atoms of personality is through the nature of this determinateness at the same time equally collected into a single and equally spiritless point alien to them, which on the one hand is a purely singular actuality, the same as the aloofness of their personality, but, in opposition to their own empty singular individuality, it refers at the same time to all content and, as a result, signifies for them their real essence. In contrast to the absolute actuality they mean to have, it is in itself the universal power and absolute actuality. In this way, this lord of the world is, to himself, the absolute person, who at the same time embraces all existence within himself and for whose consciousness there is no higher type of spirit. He is a person, but he is the solitary person confronting all the others. All these others constitute the authoritative⁴² universality of the person, for the singular individual as such a singular individual is true only as the universal plurality of singular individuality. Cut off from this plurality, the solitary self is in fact a powerless and non-actual self. – At the same time, the solitary self is the consciousness of the content that confronts that universal personality. However, when freed from its negative power this content is the chaos of the spiritual powers, which are now unchained and which madly and destructively set themselves into motion as elemental essences raging in debauched excesses against each other. Their self-consciousness, lacking any force, is the powerless embrace of their tumult and is its basis. This lord of the world, cognizant of himself as the epitome of all actual powers, is a monstrous self-consciousness who knows himself as an actual god. However, since he is only the formal self who is unable to bring those powers under control, his emotional life⁴³ and his self-indulgence are equally monstrous excesses.

In the destructive violence he exercises upon the selves of his subjects as they confront him, the lord of the world has the actual consciousness of what he is, namely, the universal might of actuality. This is so because his power is not the union of spirit in which persons became cognizant⁴⁴ of their own self-consciousness, but instead, as a person, each is for himself, and he excludes continuity with others through the absolute aloofness of his point-like existence. Those persons are thus in an only negative relationship to each other in the same way that they are in a negative relationship to the lord of the world, who is himself their relation to each other, or their continuity with each other. As this continuity, he is the essence and content of their formalism, but he is a content alien to them, a hostile essence who sublates what counts for them as their essence, namely, their contentless being-for-itself – and as the continuity of their personality, he destroys that very personality itself. While the content alien to personality makes itself felt in it, and it makes itself felt because it is their reality, personality thus experiences instead its substancelessness. In contrast, the destructive groping around in this essenceless arena gives itself a consciousness of its mastery over all others, but this self is merely a laying waste to everything and thus is only external to itself⁴⁵ and instead is the discarding of its own self-consciousness.

This is the way in which the aspect is constituted in which self-consciousness as absolute essence is actual. However, the consciousness which is driven back into itself from out of this actuality thinks through this, its inessentiality. Earlier we saw the stoic self-sufficiency of pure thinking pass through skepticism and find its truth in the unhappy consciousness – the truth which is at stake in its being-in-and-for-itself. However much this knowing appeared at that time only as the one-sided point of view of consciousness as such an unhappy consciousness, still it is here where its actual truth has come into view. What the truth consists in is that this universal validity of self-consciousness is the reality alienated from it. This validity is the universal actuality of the self, but this actuality is immediately just as much an inversion. It is the loss of its essence. – The actuality of the self which was not present in the ethical world has been attained by its return into the person, and what was unified in the ethical world now comes on the scene as both developed and as alienated from itself.

a. Cultural Formation and its Realm of Actuality

The spirit of this world is spiritual essence infused with a self-consciousness that knows itself as this self-consciousness, immediately current and existing for itself, which knows the essence as an actuality over and against itself. However, the existence of this world as well as the actuality of self-consciousness rests on the movement of self-consciousness relinquishing itself of its personality and thereby engendering its world. By doing so it relates to it as something alien so that it henceforth must take possession of it. However, the renunciation of its being-for-itself is itself the engendering of actuality, and therefore in that renunciation self-consciousness immediately takes possession of actuality. – Or, self-consciousness is only something, it only has reality insofar as it alienates itself from itself. By doing this, it posits itself as a universal self-consciousness, and its universality is its validity and its actuality. Hence, this equality of all is not the former equality of legal right, nor that of the immediate recognition⁵³ and validity of self-consciousness for the reason that self-consciousness is. Rather, that it is valid comes about through the alienating mediation which consists in making itself conform to the universal. The spiritless universality of legal right absorbs every natural manner of character and existence into itself and authorizes them. However, the universality that is in force here is the universality which has come to be, and for that reason it is actual.

It is cultural formation through which the individual here has validity and actuality. The individual's true original nature and his substance are the spirit of the alienation of natural being. Hence, this self-relinquishing is as much his purpose as it is the existence of his natural being. It is at the same time the mediating middle, or the transition into actuality of the substance conceived in thought⁵⁴ as well as the transition of determinate individuality into essentiality. This individuality culturally educates itself into what it is in itself and only as a result is it in itself, does it have actual existence. The more it has such cultural education, the more it has actuality and power. Although here the self as this self knows itself to be actual, its actuality still solely consists in the sublation of the natural self. The original determinate nature is thus reduced to an inessential difference of magnitude, to a greater or lesser energy of will. However, the purpose and content of the self belonging solely to the universal substance can only be a universal. The particularity of a nature that becomes purpose and content is something powerless and non-actual. It is a type⁵⁵ that futilely and ridiculously tries to set itself to work; it is the contradiction involved in giving to the particular an actuality which is immediately universal. However much individuality is thus falsely posited as lying in the particularity of nature and character, still in the real world there are no individualities and characters to be found; rather, the individuals have the same existence for each other; the individuality that is supposed to be is only a fancied⁵⁶ existence which has no remaining endurance, where what receives actuality is only what empties itself of itself and is for that reason the universal. – For that reason, what is only meant to be counts for what it is, namely, a type. A type is not quite the same as Espèce, “the most horrible of all nicknames, for it means mediocrity and expresses the highest level of contempt.” To be “a type” and “to be a good one of its type” are German expressions, which add to it an air of honesty, as if it were not uttered with such bad intent; or else it means that in fact consciousness does not yet draw the implications about what in fact is a type, what is cultural formation, and what is actuality.

What in relation to the single individual appears as his cultural formation is the essential moment of the substance itself, namely, the immediate transition of its universality, as having been thought, into actuality, or into the simple soul through which the in-itself is something recognized and is existence. Hence, the movement of individuality culturally educating itself is the coming-to-be of such an individuality as universally objective essence; i.e., it is the coming-to-be of the actual world. This world, although having come to be through individuality, is for self-consciousness immediately alienated and has the form of an unshakeable actuality for it. However, at the same time, self-consciousness, which is certain that this is its substance, sets about to take possession of it. It achieves this power over its substance through cultural formation, which from this aspect has the appearance of self-consciousness making itself conform to reality as much as its original character's energy and talents permit it. What appears here as the authority of the individual under which the substance is subsumed and thereby sublated is the same as the actualization of the substance, for the power of the individual consists in making itself conform to the substance, or the individual empties itself of its own self and thus posits itself as the objectively existing substance. Hence, its cultural formation and its own actuality are the actualization of the substance itself.

To itself, the self is only actual as sublated. Hence, to itself, the self does not constitute the unity of the consciousness of itself and its object; rather, to itself, the object is the negative of itself. – Through the self, as the soul, the substance is thus developed into its moments so that the opposites spiritualize each other, and through its own alienation, each both gives a stable existence to the other and, just as much, receives it from the other. At the same time, each moment has its determinateness as an insurmountable validity and a steadfast actuality with respect to the other. Thinking fixes this difference in the most universal manner through the absolute opposition of good and bad, which, taking flight from each other, cannot in any way become one and the same. However, this fixed being has as its soul the immediate transition into its opposite; instead, existence is the inversion of each determinateness into its opposite, and only this alienation is the essence and the sustaining of the whole. What is now up for examination is this actualizing movement and spiritualizing of the moments. The alienation will alienate itself, and through that alienation, the whole will take itself back into its concept.

First up for examination is the simple substance itself in the immediate organization of its existing but still not spiritualized moments. – Just as nature explicates itself into universal elements, under which fall: air, the enduring purely universal transparent essence; water, the essence that is ever sacrificed; fire, their ensouling unity, which likewise ever dissolves their opposites as their simplicity becomes disunited within it – the earth as both the firm knots of this classification⁵⁷ and the subject of this essence as it is of their processes, that from which they start and to which they return. – In this way, the inner essence, or the simple spirit of self-conscious actuality, explicates itself into just those kinds of universal, though spiritual, social estates⁵⁸ and presents itself as a world – it explicates itself into the first social estate, the universal in itself, the self-equal spiritual essence – and then it explicates itself as being the other, the essence existing for itself which has become unequal within itself, an essence that is self-sacrificing, self-forsaking; after that, it explicates itself into the third social estate, which, as self-consciousness, is subject, and which immediately has in its own self the force of fire. – In the first essence, it is conscious of itself as being-in-itself, but in the second it has the coming-to-be of being-for-itself through the sacrifice of the universal. However, spirit itself is the being-in-and-for-itself of the whole, which estranges itself into substance as lasting and the substance as self-sacrificing and then likewise takes substance back again into its unity and takes back the flame which bursts out and consumes the substance as well as its lasting shape. – We see that this essence corresponds to the polity and the family of the ethical world, but without possessing the indigenous spirit which these latter have. On the contrary, if fate is alien to the latter, then self-consciousness here both is, and knows itself as, the actual power over these spheres.

What is now up for examination are these links, namely, according to how they are initially represented within pure consciousness as thoughts, or as essences existing in themselves, as well as how they are represented in actual consciousness as objective essences. – The first is in that former form of simplicity, as the self-equal essence, or the immediate, and unchanging essence of all consciousness, the good – the independent spiritual power of the in-itself, in which the movement of consciousness existing-for-itself is only incidental. In comparison, the other is the passive spiritual essence, or the universal insofar as it relinquishes itself and permits individuals to come to have their consciousness of their singular individuality in it; it is the null essence, the bad. – This absolute becoming of dissolution is itself lasting. As the first essence is the foundation, starting point, and result of individuals, and these are purely universally within it, so in contrast is the second essence on the one hand a self-sacrificing being-for-others, and on the other hand is for that very reason the individual's constant return to itself as the singular individual and its lasting coming-to-be-for-itself.

493. However, these simple thoughts of the good and the bad are just as immediately alienated from themselves. They are actual and are as objective moments in actual consciousness. That way the first essence is state power and the other is wealth. – State power is like the simple substance as well as the universal work – the absolute crux of the matter in which individuals find their essence expressed and within which their singular individuality is only the very consciousness of their universality. – The crux of the matter is likewise the work and the simple result, and, because it is a result, the fact that it emerges from their own doings itself disappears. The work remains the absolute foundation and stable existence of all of their acts. – This simple ether-like substance of their life is, through this determination of their unchangeable self-equality, being, and for that reason, it is being for others. It is thus in itself the opposite of itself, namely, wealth. Whether wealth is the passive or the null, it is in any case a universal spiritual essence; it is the result which is continuously coming to be, just as it is the work and the doings of all, as it again dissolves within everyone's consumption of it. In consumption, individuality comes to be for itself, or as a singular individual. However, this consumption itself is the result of the universal doing just as it reciprocally engenders both universal work and everyone's consumption, and the actual has the utterly spiritual significance of being immediately universal. In this moment, each singular individual surely thinks he is acting in his own interest, since it is the moment in which he gives himself the consciousness of being for himself, and for that very reason he does not take it to be something spiritual. Yet even viewed only externally, it is evident that each in his own consumption benefits everyone else, and that in his labor each likewise works for everyone else as well as for himself, and in turn everyone else works for him. His being-for-itself is thus in itself universal, and self-interest is only something fancied that cannot even come close to making actual what it intends to do, namely, to do something that would not be to the benefit of all.

In both of these spiritual powers self-consciousness thus takes cognizance⁵⁹ of its substance, its content, and its purpose. It intuits its dual essence within them, seeing in one of them its being-in-itself and seeing in the other its being-for-itself. – At the same time, as spirit it is the negative unity of its stable existence and the separation of individuality from the universal, or of actuality from the self. Mastery and wealth are thus present for the individual as objects, i.e., as the kind of objects which he knows himself to be free from, and, between them and himself, he presumes that he is able to choose neither of them. As this free and pure consciousness, the individual confronts the essence as an essence that is only for him. He then has the essence as essence within himself. – Within this pure consciousness the moments of the substance are to himself neither state power nor wealth, but rather the thoughts of the good and the bad. – However, self-consciousness is furthermore the relation of his pure consciousness to his actual consciousness, or the relation between what has been thought⁶⁰ and the objective essence. Self-consciousness is essentially judgment. – Through the immediate determinations of both aspects of the actual essence, it has already been made clear what is supposed to be good and what is supposed to be bad, namely, that the good is state power, and the bad is wealth. Yet this first judgment cannot be regarded as a spiritual judgment, for within the first judgment the one aspect has been determined as only existing-in-itself, or as the positive, and the other aspect as only existing-for-itself, or as the negative. However, as a spiritual essence, each of them is the permeation of both moments, and thus they are not exhausted in those determinations. In relating itself to itself, self-consciousness is in and for itself, and thus it must relate itself to each of them in a twofold manner with the result that their nature, which is to that of being self-alienated determinations, will draw attention to itself.

To self-consciousness, the object in which it finds itself is now itself good and is in itself, and the object in which it finds its own opposite is bad. The good is the equality of objective reality with self-consciousness, but the bad is their inequality. At the same time, what is good and bad for it is good and bad in itself, for it is precisely that in which both of these moments of being-in-itself and of being-for-it are the same. It is the actual spirit of the objective essences, and its judgment is the proof of its power in them, a power which makes them into what they are in themselves. It is not this, the way in which they immediately are in themselves equal or unequal, i.e., abstract being-in-itself or being-for-itself, that is their criterion and truth. Rather, it is what they are in their relation to spirit, their equality or inequality with spirit. Spirit's relation to these moments, which are initially posited as objects and become in-itself through spirit, becomes at the same time their reflection into themselves through which they receive actual spiritual being, and that which is their spirit steps forward. However, just as their first immediate determination is distinguished from spirit's relation to them, the third moment, so their own proper spirit is also distinguished from the second moment. – Initially their second in-itself, which emerged through spirit's relation to them, must yet turn out differently from the immediate in-itself, since this mediation of spirit instead sets the immediate determinateness into motion and turns it into something else.

Consciousness existing in and for itself thereby undoubtedly now finds in state-power its simple essence and its stable existence per se, but it does not find its individuality as such individuality, finding therein its being-in-itself but not its being-for-itself. Instead, it finds therein doing as a singular doing to be repudiated and subjugated into obedience. Thus, in the face of this power, the individual reflectively takes an inward turn.⁶¹ To himself, it is the oppressive essence and is the bad, for instead of being his equal, it is utterly unequal to individuality. – In contrast, wealth is the good; wealth has to do with universal consumption; it gives itself away and gives to everyone a consciousness of their selves. Wealth is in itself universal beneficence. However much it fails at any given act of beneficence and however much it is not obliging to every need, this is only a contingency which in no way detracts either from its universal, necessary essence of conveying itself to all singular individuals or from its being a thousand-handed benefactor.

Both of these judgments give a content to the thoughts of the good and the bad which is the contrary of what they had for us. – However, self-consciousness had only been related to its objects incompletely, namely, according to the standards of being-for-itself. But consciousness is just as much the essence existing in-itself, and it must likewise make this aspect into the standard through which the spiritual judgment is first perfected. According to this aspect, state-power expresses to consciousness his essence. In part state-power is the motionless law, in part it is the government and command which arranges and orders the singular movements of the universal doing. One is the simple substance itself, the other is its own doing which animates and sustains itself and all individuals. The individual thus therein finds his ground and essence expressed, organized, and activated. – In contrast, in the consumption of wealth the individual does not experience his universal essence but rather receives only a transitory consciousness along with an enjoyment of himself as a singular individuality existing-for-himself, and receives the inequality with his essence. – The concepts of good and bad therefore receive here a content which is the opposite of what they had before.

Both of these modes of judging find each as an equality and an inequality. The first judging consciousness finds state-power to be unequal and finds the consumption of wealth to be equal to himself. In contrast, the second finds the former, state-power, to be equal, and the latter, consumption of wealth, to be unequal. There is a twofold finding-of-equality and a twofold finding-of-inequality, an opposed relation to both of the real essentialities. – We must assess these different acts of judging and apply to them the standard that has been advanced. The relation of consciousness which is a finding-of-equality is thereby the good; that which is a finding-of-inequality is the bad; and both of these kinds of relation must themselves henceforth be regarded as diverse shapes of consciousness. As a result of its conducting itself in diverse ways, consciousness itself comes under the determination of diversity, to be itself good or bad, not for the reason that it would have for its principle either being-for-itself or pure being-in-itself, for both of these are equally essential moments. The two-sided judging we have been considering represented those principles as separated, and thus it contains only abstract modes of judging. Actual consciousness has both principles in it, and the difference falls solely within its essence, namely, in the relation of itself to the real.

The mode of this relation is that of opposition. One of the opposites is a conduct towards state-power and wealth as a relation to an equal, the other as a relation to an unequal: – The consciousness of the relation which is a finding-of-equality is the noble-minded. In public power, it sees its equal, and it thus sees that it has its simple essence and its activity within that power. Its stance towards state-power is that of being in the service of actual obedience to it as well has having inner respect for it. Likewise, in wealth it provides, to itself, the consciousness of its other essential aspect, being-for-itself. Thus, it equally regards wealth as the essence in relation to itself, confers recognition on the benefactor who indulges him, and it holds itself to be under an obligation of gratitude.

The consciousness of the other relation, by comparison, is that of baseness, which clings tenaciously to the inequality between both essentialities. It thus sees the authority of the ruler as a shackle, as the suppression of its being-for-itself, and it thus hates the ruler and only obeys him with concealed malice, standing ever-ready to spring into revolt. – It considers wealth, through which it arrives at the enjoyment of its being-for-itself, just as much to be inequality with its lasting essence. While through wealth it only comes to a consciousness of singular individuality and of transitory consumption, it loves wealth but despises it, and, with the disappearance of that consumption, of what is in itself vanishing, it regards its relationship to the wealthy as having also vanished.

Now these relations initially express the judgment, the determination of what both the essences are as objects for consciousness, not yet as what they are in and for themselves. On the one hand, the reflection represented in the judgment is initially for us that of a positing of one determination as well as the other, and it is thus an equal sublation of both but not yet the reflection of them for consciousness itself. On the other hand, they are initially immediate essences; they neither have come to be these immediate essences, nor in themselves are they self-consciousness. That for which they are does not yet animate them; they are predicates which are not yet themselves subjects. On account of this separation, the whole of the spiritual judging also falls apart into two consciousnesses, each of which is subject to a one-sided determination. – Now, at first as the indifference of both aspects of alienation – one of which is the in-itself of pure consciousness, namely, the determinate thoughts of the good and the bad, and the other is their existence as state-power and wealth – elevated itself into the relation of both, into a judgment, so is this external relation to be elevated to inner unity, or to a relation of thinking to actuality, and the spirit of both shapes of judgment is to come forth. This takes place because judgment becomes inference; it becomes the mediating movement within which the mediating middle and the necessity of both aspects of the judgment come forward.

In the judgment, the noble-minded consciousness is to be found confronting state-power so that this state-power is to be sure not yet a self but is the universal substance. However, the noble-minded consciousness is conscious of it as its essence, as being its purpose and absolute content. Relating itself so positively to this substance, it establishes a negative relationship towards its own purposes, its particular content, and its existence, and it does away with them. It is the heroism of service – the virtue that sacrifices singular being to the universal and thereby brings this universal into existence – the person who by himself abjures possession and consumption and, for the powers that be, acts and is actual.

Through this movement, the universal becomes merged with existence itself just as existing consciousness culturally forms itself into essentiality through this self-relinquishing. That from which this consciousness alienates itself in its service is its own consciousness which is itself sunken into existence; however, self-alienated being is the in-itself. Through this cultural formation, it acquires a respect for itself and a respect from others. – However, state-power, which was initially only the universal in thought,⁶² that is, the in-itself, now becomes through this very movement the existing universal; it becomes actual power. It is this existing universal and actual power only in the actual obedience that it achieves through the judgment of self-consciousness, which judges that this actual power is the essence, and attains the essence through the free sacrifice of this self-consciousness to the actual power. This doing, which merges the essence with the self, engenders the doubled actuality, namely, the self as what has true actuality and state-power as the true that is validly in force.

However, through this alienation, this state-power is not yet a self-consciousness which knows itself to be state-power. It is only state-power's law, or its in-itself, which is valid. State-power still has no particular will, for the self-consciousness which renders service has still not emptied its pure self and thereby spiritualized state-power; it has only spiritualized state-power with its being, or the serving consciousness has only sacrificed its existence to state-power, not its being-in-itself. – This self-consciousness counts as the kind of self-consciousness which conforms to the essence and is recognized on account of its being-in-itself. The others find their essence activated in it but not their being-for-itself – they find their thinking, or, their pure consciousness, brought to fulfillment but not their individuality. It is thus validly in force in their thoughts, and it enjoys honor. It is the self-consciousness of the proud vassal, who actively works for state-power insofar as the latter is not a particular will but rather an essential will, and, to himself, he himself counts for something only within this honor, only in the essential ideas⁶³ of general opinion and not in the grateful opinion on the part of a particular individuality, for he has not helped this latter individuality to achieve its being-for-itself. If he were indeed to relate himself to state-power's own will which itself has not yet come to be, his language would be that of counsel, which he would give for the sake of the general good.⁶⁴

State-power thus still lacks any will to oppose that counsel, and it is indecisive about the different opinions about the common good. It is not yet government and for that reason is not yet in truth actual state-power. – The being-for-itself, the willing which as willing has not yet been sacrificed, is the inner isolated spirit of the estates, a spirit which, with respect to its talk about the common good, reserves to itself its particular common good and is inclined to make all this chatter about the common good into a surrogate for action. The sacrifice of existence which occurs in its service is, to be sure, complete when it has advanced as far as death, but the continual danger of death (when it is survived) leaves behind a determinate existence and, as a result, a particular for-itself which makes the counsel given about the common good into something ambiguous and suspect, something where the counselor in fact reserves for himself his own opinion and his particular individual will in the face of state-authority. The counselor thus relates himself unequally to state-power and, as falling under the determination of the base consciousness, he is always within a stone's throw of rebellion.

This contradiction which being-for-itself has to sublate contains in this form, that of standing in the inequality between being-for-itself vis-à-vis the universality of state-power, at the same time, the form that the former relinquishing of existence which while reaching its culmination in death, is itself an existing relinquishing, not one that returns back into consciousness – This consciousness does not survive the relinquishing; it is not in and for itself. Rather, it only makes a transition into its unreconciled opposite. The true sacrifice of being-for-itself is thus solely that in which it sacrifices itself just as completely, as it does in death, but in which it just as much preserves itself within this self-relinquishing. It thereby becomes actual as what it is in itself, as the identical unity of its own self with what is opposed to it. The isolated inner spirit, the self as such a self, thereby steps forward and alienates itself, and as a result, state-power is at the same time elevated into its own proper self. Without this alienation, all the acts of honor, the actions of the noble consciousness, and the counsels of its insight would remain equivocal; they would have the former departed ambush of particular intention and self-will.

However, this alienation takes place solely in language, which comes on the scene here in its distinctive significance. – In both the ethical world as laws and command and in the world of actuality as counsel, language has the essence for its content and is the form of that essence. However, here it receives as its content the form which it is, and it is as language that it is validly in force. It is the force of speech as that which accomplishes what is to be accomplished, for language is the existence of the pure self as the self. In language, the singular individuality of self-consciousness existing for itself comes into existence⁶⁵ so that it is for others. Otherwise, the I as this pure I is not there.⁶⁶ In every other expression, the I is submerged in an actuality, in a shape from which it can withdraw; it reflects itself into itself from out of its action as well as from out of its physiognomic expression, and it leaves behind an incomplete existence, a soulless existence, in which there is always too much as well as too little. However, language contains the I in its purity; it alone expresses the I itself. This, its existence, is, as existence, an objectivity which has its true nature in language. The I is this I – but is just as much universal. Its appearance is just as much the self-relinquishing and the disappearance of this I, and, as a result, its remaining in its universality. The I that expresses itself is brought to a hearing; it is an infection in which it has immediately made its transition into a unity with those for which it is there,⁶⁷ and it is a universal self-consciousness. – In its being brought to a hearing, its existence has itself immediately become fainter. This, its otherness, is taken back into itself, and its existence is just this: as a self-conscious now, as it is there, it is not there, and through this disappearance, it is there. This disappearing itself is thus immediately its lasting. It is its own knowing of itself, and it is its knowing of itself as a self which has passed over into another self, which itself has been brought to a hearing and is universal.

Spirit contains this actuality here because the extremes whose unity it is just as immediately each have the determination to be for itself its own actuality. Their unity is subverted into aloof aspects, each of which is for the other an actual object excluded from it. The unity thus emerges as a mediating middle which is excluded and distinguished from the departed actuality of the two aspects; thus it itself has an actual objectivity differentiated from its aspects, and it is for them, i.e., it is existent.⁶⁸ The spiritual substance enters into existence,⁶⁹ first while it has gained for its aspects the sort of self-consciousness which knows this pure self to be an actuality which is immediately in force, and therein it just as immediately knows that it is this actuality only through the alienating mediation. Through the former, the moments are refined into the self-knowing category and thereby are refined right up to the point that they are moments of spirit. Through the latter, spirit comes into existence as spirituality.⁷⁰ – In this way, spirit is the mediating middle which presupposes those extremes and is engendered through their existence. – However, it is just as much the spiritual whole welling up between them and which estranges itself into them, and it is only through this contact that, within its principle, it fashions each of them into the whole. – That both extremes are already sublated and subverted in themselves is what brings out their unity, and this unity is the movement which merges both of them together, which exchanges their determinations, namely, merges them together within each extreme. This mediation thereby places⁷¹ the concept of each of the two extremes into the concept's actuality, or it makes what each is in itself into its spirit.

Both extremes, state-power and the noble consciousness, have been subverted through the latter. State-power is subverted into the abstract universal to which an obedient response is given and into the individual will existing-for-itself, but which does not yet itself measure up to the universal. The noble consciousness is subverted into the obedience of sublated existence, or into the being-in-itself of self-respect and honor, and into the pure being-for-itself which is not yet sublated, into the will still lying in ambush. The two moments into which the extremes are purified and are thus moments of language are the abstract universal, which goes by the name of the common good, and the pure self, which in its service repudiated its consciousness which was absorbed within a manifold existence. In the concept, both are the same, for the pure self is just the abstract universal and therefore their unity is posited as their mediating middle. However, the self is only actual in the extreme of consciousness – but the in-itself is only actual in the extreme of state-authority. What is lacking in consciousness is that state-power should actually have passed over into consciousness not only as honor – what is lacking in state-power is that it should be obeyed not only as the so-called common good but also obeyed as the will, in other words, obeyed as the self that makes the decision. The unity of the concept in which state-power still stands and into which consciousness has distilled itself becomes actual in this mediating movement, whose simple existence as the mediating middle is language. – Nonetheless, it does not yet have for its aspects two selves present as selves, for state-power is yet to be spiritualized into a self. This language is hence not yet spirit in the way that spirit completely knows itself and expresses itself.

The noble consciousness, because it is the extreme of the self, appears as the source of the language through which the aspects of the relationships are shaped into ensouled wholes. – The heroism of silent service becomes the heroism of flattery. This expressive reflection of service constitutes the spiritual, self-subverting mediating. It not only reflects its own extreme into itself, it also reflects the extreme of universal authority⁷² back into this self, and it makes that authority, which initially is in itself, into being-for-itself, into the singular individuality of self-consciousness. It thereby becomes the spirit of this authority and becomes an unlimited monarch.⁷³ – Unlimited: The language of flattery elevates this authority into its purified universality; the moment, as language's creation, as existence purified into spirit, is a purified self-equality. – Monarch: The language of flattery just as much elevates singular individuality to its peak; according to this aspect of simple spiritual unity, the noble consciousness empties itself of the pure in-itself of its thinking, its I itself. To put it more determinately: Flattery elevates singular individuality, which otherwise is only fancied,⁷⁴ into its existing purity, into giving the monarch his own name, for it is in the name alone within which the difference of the singular individual from all others is not intended⁷⁵ but is made actual by all. In the name, the singular individual counts as a pure individual singular, no longer only in his own consciousness but in the consciousness of all. Through his name, therefore, the monarch becomes absolutely cut off from everyone; he becomes singled out and solitary. In the name, the monarch is the atom that cannot communicate its essence and which has no equal. – As a result, this name is its reflective turn into itself, or is the actuality which the universal power has in its own self. Through the name, the universal power is the monarch. Conversely, he, this singular individual, thereby knows himself, this singular individual, as the universal power, and he knows that the nobles are not only prepared to enter into the service of state-power but also to group themselves around the throne as his ornaments and to incessantly tell the one who sits on that throne what he is.

In this way, the language of their praise is the spirit which merges together both extremes within state-power itself. This language reflects the abstract power into itself and gives that power the moment of the other extreme, that of the willing and deciding being-for-itself, and it thereby gives it a self-conscious existence.⁷⁶ Or, as a result this singular individual actual self-consciousness comes around to knowing itself with certainty as power. This power is the self sharpened to a point into which the many points of selfhood, through the relinquishing of their inner certainty, are blended together. – However, while this ownmost spirit of state-power itself consists in having its actuality and its nourishment in the sacrifices of the deeds and thoughts of the noble consciousness, it is a self-alienated self-sufficiency. The noble consciousness, the extreme of being-for-itself, relinquished itself of the universality of thinking, and in exchange the noble consciousness itself receives back the extreme of actual universality; the power of the state has been transferred to him. State-authority is initially only truly activated in the noble consciousness; in his being-for-itself, state-power ceases to be the inert essence which, as the extreme of abstract being-in-itself, it appeared to be. – Regarded in-itself, state-power reflected into itself, or state-power as having become spirit, means nothing other than that state-power has come to be a moment of self-consciousness, i.e., it is only as sublated. It is thereby now the essence as such an essence whose spirit consists in being sacrificed and relinquished, or it exists as wealth. – State-power, which according to its concept is always in the process of becoming wealth, nonetheless continues to remain as an actuality in its confrontation with wealth. However, it is an actuality whose concept is this very movement of passing over into its contrary, the self-relinquishing of power, through the service and reverence through which it itself arises. For itself the distinctive self, which is its will, becomes thus a self-relinquishing universality in casting aside the noble consciousness, or it becomes a consummated singular individuality and a contingency at the mercy of any stronger will. All that remains to it of universally recognized and non-mediated self-sufficiency is the empty name.

However much therefore the noble consciousness determines itself as what would relate itself to the universal power in an equal manner, still the truth of that noble consciousness instead lies in its retaining its own being-for-itself in its service to state-power, but in the genuine disavowal of its personality, its truth is the actual sublation and the disruption of the universal substance. Its spirit is a relationship of thoroughgoing inequality, which, on the one hand, comes about in its retaining its own will in its being honored, and, on the other hand, in its giving up its own will in part by itself alienating its own inner and thus becoming the highest pitch of inequality with itself, and in part by subjugating the universal substance to itself so that it makes that substance thoroughly unequal to itself. – It becomes clear that, as a result, its determinateness, which it had in judgments contra to what was called the base consciousness, has thereby also vanished. The base consciousness has achieved its end, that of subordinating universal power to being-for-itself.

Enriched in this way by the universal power, self-consciousness exists as universal beneficence, or universal power is wealth which is again itself an object for consciousness. – This is so because to self-consciousness, wealth is the universal placed into subjection, but which through this first sublation has not yet absolutely returned back into the self. The self does not as yet have itself as self as an object; rather, it has the sublated universal essence as an object. While this object has only just come to be, the immediate relation of consciousness to it has been posited, and consciousness has thus not yet exhibited its inequality with this object. It is the noble consciousness, which, receiving its being-for-itself in the universal that has become inessential, thus gives recognition to the object and is full of gratitude to its benefactor.

Wealth already has in its own self the moment of being-for-itself. It is not the universal of state-power, utterly devoid of a self, nor is it the indigenous inorganic nature of spirit; rather, it is state-power in its own self through its own willing which clings to itself as it confronts a will that wants to seize control of it for its own activities of consumption. However, while wealth only has the form of essence, this one-sided being-for-itself, which is not in itself but instead is the in-itself which has been sublated, is in its consumption the essenceless return of the individual into himself. Wealth thus itself needs to be enlivened, and the movement of its reflection consists in this, that wealth, which only is for itself, is to become being-in-and-for-itself; and wealth, which is the sublated essence, is to become the essence. In that way, it preserves its own spirit in its own self. – Since the form of this movement has been analyzed earlier, here it suffices to determine its content.

The noble consciousness thus relates itself here not to the object as essence. Rather, what is alien, to itself, is here being-for-itself. It finds that its own self as such a self is alienated, and it finds it as an objective, fixed actuality which it has to receive from another fixed being-for-itself. Its object is being-for-itself and thus its own; but as a result of its being an object, it is at the same time immediately an alien actuality which is its own being-for-itself, which has a will of its own, that is to say, the noble consciousness sees his own self under the authority of an alien will, and he is dependent on that alien will to let him have a will of his own.

Self-consciousness can abstract from every singular aspect, and for that reason, it retains its recognition⁷⁷ and validity-in-itself as the essence existing for itself even in an obligation which concerns only one of those aspects. However, here it sees itself from the side of its ownmost pure actuality, or it sees its I as external to itself and as belonging to an other, and it sees its personality as such dependent on the contingent personality of another, dependent on the contingency of a moment, an arbitrary choice, or dependent on some otherwise utterly irrelevant circumstance. – In the state of legality, what is within the authority of the objective essence appears as a contingent content which can be abstracted away from, and the authority does not concern the self as such; rather this self is instead recognized as a self. However, the self here sees its certainty of itself as such a certainty that is the most essenceless, as the pure personality absolutely devoid of personality. The spirit of its gratitude is thus the feeling of how this deepest abjectness is also the deepest indignation. While the pure I itself intuits itself as external to itself and as disrupted, it is in this disruption that everything which has continuity and universality, everything which is called law, good, and right, has come undone and met its downfall. All equality has been dissolved, for what is present is the purest inequality, the absolute inessentiality of the absolutely essential, the being-external-to-itself of being-for-itself. The pure I itself has been absolutely subverted.

However much this consciousness thus gets back from wealth the objectivity of its being-for-itself and sublates that objectivity, still according to its concept, it is not only not perfected in the way in which the preceding reflection was perfected, it is also for its own part unsatisfied. The reflection in which the self receives itself as something objective is the immediate contradiction posited as lying in the pure I itself. But as the self, this consciousness immediately stands above this contradiction; it is the absolute elasticity which again sublates the self's sublation and dismisses the dismissal which would have its being-for-itself become alien to it, and, indignant against this reception of itself, it is in that reception itself for itself.

Therefore, while the circumstances of this consciousness are bound up with this absolute disruption, the difference within its spirit, which is a difference determined as the opposition between the noble consciousness and the base consciousness, itself falls by the wayside, and both are the same. – The spirit of beneficent wealth can be further distinguished from that of the spirit receiving the benefit of the beneficent act and bears special examination. – The spirit was essenceless being-for-itself, the relinquished essence. However, through its communication,⁷⁸ it becomes the in-itself. While it fulfilled its determination-as-destiny,⁷⁹ which was to sacrifice itself, it sublates singular individuality, to be for itself only in consuming things, and as sublated singular individuality, it is universality, or essence. – What it communicates,⁸⁰ what it gives to the other, is being-for-itself. But it does not offer itself up as self-less nature, as the natural, naive self-sacrificing condition of life; rather, it offers itself up as a self-conscious essence, holding onto itself. It is not the inorganic power of the elements, which is known by the receptive consciousness to be transitory in itself; rather, it is the power over the self that knows itself to be independent and arbitrary, and at the same time it knows that what it dispenses is the self of an other. – Wealth thus shares this abjectness with its client, but for wealth, arrogance takes the place of indignation, for according to one aspect, it knows, as its client knows, that its being-for-itself is a contingent thing, but that it itself is this contingency standing under the authority of where legal personality stands. In its arrogance, which fancies that with a meal it has earned an alien I-self and as a result earned the subjection of that other's inmost essence, it overlooks the inner indignation of the other self. It overlooks the fact that all shackles have been completely cast aside; it overlooks this pure disruption, in which, while, to itself, the self-equality of being-for-itself has become utterly unequal, all equality, all stable existence has itself been disrupted; this utter disruption itself does the most to disrupt the opinions and point of view of the beneficent actor. It stands immediately before this most inward abyss, before this bottomless depth, in which all foothold and substance have vanished, and in these depths it sees nothing but a common thing, a play of its vagaries, an accident of its arbitrary choices. Its spirit is just essenceless opinion, a superficiality forsaken by spirit.

Just as self-consciousness had its own language when facing off against state-power, or just as spirit came on the scene as the actual mediating middle between these two extremes, self-consciousness too has a language in facing off against wealth, and even more does its indignation have its own language. That language, which supplies wealth with the consciousness of its essentiality and as a result authorizes itself, is likewise the language of flattery, but of the ignoble kind – for what it expresses as the essence, it knows as the relinquished essence, the essence not existing in itself. However, as already noted, the language of flattery is spirit which is still one-sided. To be sure, its moments are those of a self distilled by the cultural formation of service into a pure existence and the being-in-itself of power. But the pure concept in which the simple self and the in-itself, or the former pure I and this pure essence, or thinking, are the same – this unity of both aspects, where reciprocity comes about in the interstices, does not lie in the consciousness of this language. The object is still, to him, the in-itself in opposition to the self, or, to him, the object is not at the same time its own self as such a self. – However, the language of disruption is the perfected language of this entire world of cultural formation as well as its true existing spirit. This self-consciousness, which corresponds to its own indignation, which repudiates its own abjectness, is immediately the absolute self-equality in absolute disruption, the pure mediation of pure self-consciousness with itself. It is the equality of the identical judgment in which one and the same personality is both the subject as well as the predicate. However, this identical judgment is at the same time the infinite judgment, for this personality is absolutely estranged, and subject and predicate are utterly indifferent entities that have nothing to do with each other and which have no necessary unity, even so that each is the power of its own personality. Being-for-itself has its being-for-itself as its object, as an utterly other and at the same time equally immediately as itself – It has itself as an other, but not as an other which would have another content. Rather, the content is the same self in the form of absolute opposition and its own indifferent existence. – Thus, here the spirit of this actual world of cultural formation is present; it is a spirit conscious of itself in its truth and conscious of its concept.

This spirit is the absolute and universal inversion and alienation of actuality and of thought; it is pure cultural formation. In this world, what is experienced is that it is neither the actual essence of power and wealth, nor their determinate concepts, the good and the bad, or the consciousness of the noble and the base, which are in possession of the truth. Rather, all these moments invert themselves into other moments, and each is the opposite of itself. – While the universal power, which is the substance, arrives at its own spirituality through the principle of individuality, it receives its own self only as a name in itself, and while it is actual power, it is instead the powerless essence which sacrifices itself. – However, this relinquished selfless essence, or the self that has become a thing, is instead the return of the essence into itself. It is being-for-itself existing-for-itself, the existence of spirit. – Just as much, the thoughts of this essence, of the good and the bad, invert themselves in this movement. What is determined as good is bad, and what is determined as bad is good. The consciousness of one of each of these moments, assessed as the noble and the base consciousness, turn out in their truth to be instead just as much the inversion of what these determinations are supposed to be, and the noble consciousness turns out to be just as base and abject as the abjection that transformed itself into the nobility of the most culturally matured freedom of self-consciousness. – Taken formally, everything is, when viewed externally, just as much the inversion of what it is for itself; and, again, what it is for itself is not what it is in truth but is rather something other than it wants to be; its being-for-itself is instead the loss of its own self, and its alienation from itself is instead its self-preservation. – What is now present is the following. All moments execute a universal justice against each other; each in itself alienates itself from itself just as much as it imagines itself to be in its opposite, and in this manner each inverts its opposite. – But the true spirit is this very unity itself of the absolutely separated extremes, and, to be sure, as their mediating middle it just comes into existence through the free-standing actuality of these selfless extremes. Its existence consists in a universal speaking and in this turmoil-ridden judging, for which all those moments, which are supposed to count as the essence and to count as the actual members of the whole, dissolve themselves, and its existence is just as much a game of self-dissolution which it plays with itself. Hence, this judging and speaking are the indomitable truth which overwhelms everything; in this real world, this and this alone is what is truly at work. Each part of this world therein reaches the point where his spirit is expressed, or where what is spoken about him is spoken with wit⁸¹ and what is said of him is just what he is. – The honest consciousness takes each moment to be a lasting essentiality and is the uncultured thoughtlessness which does not know that it is just as much the inverse. However, the disrupted consciousness is the consciousness of inversion, namely, of the absolute inversion. The concept is the ruling power within it. It is that which brings together the thoughts which, to honesty, are separated from each other, and it is that whose language is thus rich in spirit and wit.

The content of spirit's speech about itself and its speech concerning itself thus inverts all concepts and realities. It is thus the universal deception of itself and others, and, for that very reason, the greatest truth is the shamelessness in stating this deceit. This speech is the madness of the musician “who piled up and mixed together some thirty airs, Italian, French, tragic, comic, of all sorts of character; now, with a deep bass, he descended into the depths of hell, then, contracting his throat, with a falsetto he tore apart the vaults of the skies, alternately raging and then being placated, imperious and then derisive.” To the motionless consciousness, which in all honesty posits that the melody of the good and the true lies in the harmony of sound and uniformity of tones, i.e., in one note, this speech appears as a “blather of wisdom and folly, a medley consisting of as much skill as it did of baseness, of as many right as of false ideas, of such a complete inversion of sentiment, of such consummate disgracefulness as well as of such entire candor and truth. It will be unable to refrain from breaking out into all these tones, and from running up and down the entire scale of feeling, of moving from the deepest contempt and depravity to the highest admiration and stirring emotion. A strain of the ridiculous will be blended in with the latter, which denatures them.” The former will find in their candor itself a strain of reconciliation; they will find in their distressing depths the all-powerful move which spirit gives to itself.

If we take the speech of this disorientation, which is so clear to itself, and contrast it with the speech of that simple consciousness of the true and the good, we find that the latter, when confronting the frank and self-aware eloquence of the culturally formed and educated spirit,⁸² can only speak in monosyllables, for it can say nothing to that spirit which the culturally formed and educated spirit does not itself know and say. If it gets beyond speaking in monosyllables, then it says the same thing that the culturally formed and educated spirit expresses, but in doing so, it still commits itself to the foolishness of thinking that it is saying something new and different. Even its own syllables, when it speaks of the disgraceful and the base, are already this foolishness, for the culturally formed and educated consciousness says the same things about itself. However much in its speech this spirit both inverts all that is monotonous, because this self-equal is only an abstraction, in its actuality it is, however, in itself that very inversion, and however much in contrast the unbowed consciousness takes the good and the noble under its protection, i.e., what retains its sameness of meaning in its expression in the only way here possible – which is to say that the good does not lose its value because it is bound up with the bad or mingled with it, for this is supposed to be its condition and necessity, and the wisdom of nature is supposed to lie therein – still this consciousness, while it intends to contradict that speech, has as a result only summed up in a trivial way the content of spirit's speech – which, while having turned the opposite of the noble and the good into the condition for and the necessity of the noble and the good, and while unthinkingly supposing itself to be saying something other than that what is called noble and good, is in its essence the inversion of itself, just as, conversely, the bad is the excellent.

If the simple consciousness substitutes for these spiritless thoughts the actuality of the excellent, while it cites the excellent in examples of a contrived case or a true anecdote and thus shows that it is not an empty name but rather is present, so the universal actuality of the inverted act confronts the entire real world in which that example therefore only amounts to something wholly thinned out, only an Espèce. To present the existence of the good and the noble as a single anecdote, whether fictitious or true, is the most caustic thing that can be said about it. – If finally the simple consciousness requires the dissolution of this entire world of inversion, then it cannot demand of the individual that he withdraw from the world, for even Diogenes in his barrel is conditioned by it. To demand this of the individual is to demand exactly what counts as the bad, namely, to demand that he care for himself as a singular individual. However, if the demand to withdraw is directed at universal individuality, it cannot mean that reason must again give up the spiritually and culturally formed consciousness which it has reached, or that reason should let the vast wealth of its moments fall back down again into the simplicity of the natural heart and regress once more into the backwoods and proximity of the animal consciousness which is called nature (and which is also called innocence). Rather, the demand for this dissolution can be directed only to the spirit of cultural formation itself, namely, that out of its disorientation, it come back round to itself and attain a still higher consciousness.

However, in fact spirit in itself has already accomplished this. Its own disruption of consciousness, conscious of itself and giving expression to itself, is the derisive laughter about existence as much as it is about the disorientation of the whole and about itself. At the same time, it is the fading sound, interrogating itself, of this entire disorientation. – Interrogating itself, this vanity of all actuality and of every determinate concept is the doubled reflection of the real world into itself, at one time in this self of consciousness as this self, and at another time in the pure universality of consciousness, or in thinking. According to the first aspect, in coming round to itself spirit has directed its gaze onto the world of actuality, and it still has that reality for its own purpose and its own immediate content. According to the other aspect, its gaze is in part turned away from the world of actuality and solely into itself; it is in part turned away from the world and towards heaven, where it has its object in the other-worldly beyond of the world of actuality.

From the former aspect of the return into the self, the vanity of all things is its own vanity, or it is itself vain. It is the self existing-for-itself, which does not only know how to evaluate and how to chatter about everything, but which also knows how to convey wittily the fixed essence of actuality as well as the fixed determinations posited by judgment, and it knows how to speak of them in their contradictions. This contradiction is their truth. – From the point of view of form, it knows everything to be alienated from itself. Being-for-itself is separated from being-in-itself; what is meant and what is the purpose are separated from the truth; being for others is separated from both; and what is feigned is separated from what really matters and from the true intention. – It therefore knows how to express correctly each moment's contrast with every other moment; it knows how to correctly express in general the invertedness of all of them; it knows better than each of them what each is, irrespective of how each of them is determined. While it is acquainted with the substantial according to the aspect of discord and conflict which it brings to concord within itself, but not according to the aspect of the concord, it understands very well how to pass judgment on what is substantial, but it has lost the ability to take hold of it. – This vanity thereby needs the vanity of all things in order to give itself the consciousness of the self by way of them. It consequently itself creates this vanity and is the soul that bears it. Power and wealth are the highest ends of its efforts, and it knows that it culturally forms itself into the universal through renunciation and sacrifice, arrives at a possession of the universal, and in this possession has universal validity; and it is power and wealth which are the actual recognized powers. However, its validity is itself vain, and just while it gains mastery over these powers, it knows them to be not independent beings,⁸³ but instead knows that it itself is their power, and it knows them as vanity itself. In its witty speech, it shows that in possessing them, it has itself gone beyond them, and its witty speech is thus its highest interest and the truth of the whole. In witty, spirited speech, this self, as this pure self which belongs neither to the actual determinations nor to the merely conceived determinations, comes to be, to itself, the spiritual, truly universally valid self. It is the nature of all self-disrupting conditions, and it is the conscious disruption of them. However, only as indignant self-consciousness does it know its own disruption, and in this knowing of its disruption, it has immediately elevated itself above it. In that vanity all content becomes negative, and it can no longer be grasped as positive. The positive object is only the pure I itself, and the disrupted consciousness is in itself this pure self-equality of self-consciousness as having come back round to itself.

b. Faith and Pure Insight

The spirit of the alienation of itself has its existence in the world of cultural formation. However, while this whole has become alienated from itself, beyond this whole there lies the non-actual world of pure consciousness, or of thinking. Its content is the purely thought,⁸⁴ and its absolute element is thinking. However, while thinking is initially the element of this world, consciousness only has these thoughts, but it does not as yet think them, or it does not know that they are thoughts. Instead, to itself, they are in the form of representation, for it steps out of actuality and into pure consciousness, but it itself still is within the sphere and the determinateness of actuality. The disrupted consciousness is initially in itself the self-equality of pure consciousness, for us, not for itself. It is thus only the immediate elevation that is not yet accomplished within itself, and it still has within itself the principle opposing it and through which it is conditioned, but without as yet having mastered that principle through the mediating movement. Hence, to itself, the essence of its thought does not count as essence only in the form of the abstract in-itself, but rather as an essence in the form of a common actuality, of an actuality that has only been elevated into another element without having lost the determinateness of an unthought⁸⁵ actuality. – It is essentially to be distinguished from the in-itself which is the essence of stoical consciousness. For stoicism, only the form of thought as such counted, and its thought thereby had some other content alien to itself which was taken from actuality. However, for the former consciousness, what counts is not the form of thought. – It is just as much to be distinguished from the in-itself of the virtuous consciousness, to which the essence does indeed stand in a relation to actuality, to which it is the essence of actuality itself, but only a non-actual essence. – For that consciousness, the essence, although lying beyond actuality, nonetheless still counts as an actuality. By the same token, the right and good that are the in-itself of legislative reason and the universal for the consciousness that tests and examines laws, do not have the determination of actuality. – Consequently, however much in the world of cultural formation even pure thinking, as one aspect of alienation, fell by the wayside, namely, as the standard for judging the abstractly good and the abstractly bad, still pure thinking, by having gone through the movement of the whole, had become enriched in the moment of actuality and as a result also in content. However, this actuality of essence is at the same time only an actuality of pure consciousness, not of actual consciousness. To be sure, elevated into the element of thinking, this actuality does not yet count to this consciousness as a thought, but to this consciousness, it lies instead beyond its own actuality, for the former is the flight from the latter.

527. Just as religion – for it is clear that it is religion that is being spoken of – comes on the scene here as the faith belonging to the world of cultural formation, religion does not yet come on the scene as it is in and for itself. – It has already appeared before us in other types of determinateness, namely, as the unhappy consciousness, as the shape of the substance-less movement of consciousness itself. – In ethical substance it also appeared as a faith in the netherworld, but consciousness of the departed spirit is not really faith, not really the essence posited in the element of a pure consciousness which lies beyond the actual. Rather, faith itself has an immediate present; its element is the family. – However, religion has here in part emerged from the substance and is the pure consciousness of that substance; this pure consciousness, the essence, is in part alienated from its actual existence. Thus, it is indeed no longer the movement of substance-less consciousness, but it still bears the determinateness of opposition to actuality as this actuality itself, and it is the opposition to the actuality of self-consciousness in particular. It is thus essentially only a faith.

This pure consciousness of absolute essence is an alienated consciousness. It requires a closer look to see how its other determines itself, and pure consciousness is only to be taken in combination with this other. At first, this pure consciousness seems to have confronting it only the world of actuality. However, while it is only the flight away from this actuality and is, as a result, the determinateness of opposition, it has in its own self this determinateness of opposition. Thus, pure consciousness is in its own self essentially self-alienated, and faith constitutes only one aspect of it. To us, the other aspect has already emerged. Specifically, pure consciousness is the reflection out of the world of cultural formation so that both its substance and the social estates into which it is structured show themselves to be what they are in themselves, to be spiritual essentialities, absolutely restless movements, or determinations that are immediately sublated in their opposite. Their essence, the simple consciousness, is thus the simplicity of the absolute difference which is immediately no difference at all. It is thereby pure being-for-itself, not as this singular individual, but rather as the self which is universal within itself, as a restless movement which attacks and permeates the motionless essence of the crux of the matter. Thus, within it, the certainty that immediately knows itself to be the truth, to be pure thinking as the absolute concept in the power of its negativity, is present, a certainty which erases all objective essences that are supposed to confront consciousness and which makes those essences into a being of consciousness. – This pure consciousness is at the same time just as much simple because its difference is no difference at all. However, as this form of the simple reflective turn into itself, it is the element of faith within which spirit has the determinateness of positive universality, of being-in-itself in contrast to the being-for-itself of self-consciousness. – Forced back into itself out of this only essenceless, self-dissolving world, spirit is according to its truth in undivided unity as much as it is the absolute movement and negativity of its appearing; it is equally as well their essence as satisfied within itself, and it is their positive motionlessness. However, both of these moments, as being generally subsumed under the determinateness of alienation, come undone from each other and enter into a twofold consciousness. The former is pure insight as the spiritual process integrating itself in self-consciousness; this is a process which has confronting it the consciousness of the positive, or the form of objectivity or of representing, and it directs itself against it. However, its own object is only the pure I. – In contrast, the simple consciousness of the positive or of motionless self-equality has its object in the inner essence as essence. Pure insight itself thus has at first no content in its own self because it is negative being-for-itself, whereas in contrast faith has the content without the insight. However much the former does not step outside of self-consciousness, still the latter does likewise have its content within the element of pure self-consciousness. However, it has it in thinking, not in concepts, in pure consciousness, not in pure self-consciousness. Faith is thereby indeed pure consciousness of the essence, which is to say, of simple inwardness, and is therefore thinking – the chief moment in the nature of faith, which is usually overlooked. The immediacy with which the essence lies within faith has to do with its object being essence, which is to say, pure thinking. However, insofar as thinking enters consciousness, or insofar as pure consciousness enters into self-consciousness, this immediacy comes to have the significance of an objective being that lies beyond consciousness of self. Through this significance, which the immediacy and simplicity of pure thinking thus come to have in consciousness, the essence of faith descends from thought all the way down into representational thought, and it comes to be a supersensible world which is supposed to be essentially an other to self-consciousness. – In contrast, in pure insight the transition of pure thinking into consciousness has the opposite determination. The meaning of objectivity is that it is an only negative content, that it sublates itself and returns into the self, i.e., only the self is to itself genuinely the object, or, the object only has truth insofar as it has the form of the self.

Just as faith and pure insight conjointly belong within the elements of pure consciousness, so too do they conjointly belong to the return out of the actual world of cultural formation. They therefore make themselves available for consideration according to three aspects. According to one of them, each is in and for itself, external to all relationships. According to another, each relates itself to the actual world that is opposed to pure consciousness. According to the third aspect, each relates itself to the other from within pure consciousness.

The aspect of being-in-and-for-itself within the faithful consciousness is its absolute object, or the object whose content and determination have according to the concept of faith already resulted. This is so because the object is itself nothing but the real world elevated into the universality of pure consciousness. The articulation of the latter, the real world, thus constitutes the organization of the world of faith, except that within the latter essence, the parts do not alienate themselves within their spiritualization.⁸⁶ Rather, they are essences existing in and for themselves, enduring spirits, and have returned into themselves and are at one with themselves in their own sphere.⁸⁷ – It is thus only for us that the movement of their transition is an alienation of the determinateness in which they are in their differences, and it is only for us that it is a necessary series. However, for faith, their difference is a motionless diversity, and their movement is an event.

We can briefly label them according to the external determination of their form. Just as in the world of cultural formation, state-power or the good came first, here too what comes first is the absolute essence, which is spirit existing in and for itself insofar as spirit is the simple eternal substance. However, in the realization of its concept, which is to be spirit, substance passes over into being for others. Its self-equality becomes actual self-sacrificing absolute essence. It becomes a self, but a transitory self at that. Hence, the third point is the return of this alienated self and the humbled substance into their first simplicity. It is only in this manner that substance is represented as spirit. –

These differentiated essences, brought by thinking from out of the flux of the actual world back into themselves, are changeless eternal spirits, whose being is to think the unity that constitutes them. However much self-consciousness is lost in reverie, these essences all the same intervene in it; for if, in the form of the first simple substance, the essence were to be unmoved, it would remain alien to self-consciousness. However, the relinquishing of this substance and then of its spirit has the moment of actuality in it and thereby makes itself privy to the faithful self-consciousness, or, the faithful consciousness belongs to the real world.

533. According to this second relationship, the faithful consciousness in part has its actuality in the real world of cultural formation, and it constitutes what has already been considered, that world's spirit and existence. However, in part faith confronts its own actuality as being that of vanity itself, and it is the movement of sublating that actuality. This movement does not consist in its supposedly having a spirited, witty consciousness about its own invertedness, for it is the simple consciousness that reckons wit to be vanity because wit still has the real world for its purpose. Rather, confronting the motionless realm of its thinking is actuality as a spiritless existence, which consequently is to be overcome in an external manner. Through the sublation of both doing and sensuous knowing, this obedience of service and praise brings forth the consciousness of unity with the essence existing in and for itself, although not as an intuited, actual unity. Rather, this service is only that incessant engendering [of the unity], a doing which never completely reaches its goal in the present. To be sure, the religious community⁸⁸ arrives at that, for that community is universal self-consciousness. However, for singular self-consciousness, the realm of pure thinking necessarily remains an other-worldly beyond of its actuality; or, while, through the self-relinquishing of the eternal essence, this other-worldly beyond has become actual, the religious community is a sensuous, unconceptualized actuality. However, one sensuous actuality remains indifferent to another sensuous actuality, and the other-worldly beyond thus has only received the determination of remoteness in space and time. – However, the concept, the current actuality of spirit to itself, remains for the faithful consciousness the inner, which is both all that is and which is efficacious, but which never itself comes to light.

However, in pure insight the concept alone is the actual, and this third aspect of faith, that of being an object for pure insight, is the genuine relation in which faith comes on the scene here. – Likewise, pure insight itself is in part in and for itself and in part in its relationship to the actual world insofar as the actual world is still positively present, namely, as vain consciousness, and finally, it is in part to be examined in that relationship to faith.

We have seen what pure insight is in and for itself. As faith is the pure motionless consciousness of spirit as the essence, pure insight is the self-consciousness of the same thing. Hence, it knows the essence not as essence but as the absolute self. It thus proceeds to sublate all self-sufficiency that is other to self-consciousness, whether it is the self-sufficiency of the actual or whether it is what is existing-in-itself, and it proceeds to make them into concepts. Pure insight is not only the certainty of self-conscious reason that it is all truth; rather, it knows that it is all truth.

However, as the concept of pure insight comes on the scene, it is not yet realized. Its consciousness of the concept accordingly appears as something still contingent and singularly individual, and what to it is the essence appears as a purpose which it is to realize. This consciousness first of all has the intention of making pure insight universal, which is to say, of making everything that is actual both into concepts and into one concept within every self-consciousness. The intention is pure, for its content is pure insight, and this insight is likewise pure, for its content is just the absolute concept which neither has opposition in an object nor is bounded in its own self. Both aspects are immediately situated within the unlimited concept, namely, that everything objective is only supposed to mean being-for-itself, self-consciousness; and that this is supposed to signify a universal, or that pure insight is supposed to be the possession of all self-consciousnesses. In this respect, this second aspect of the intention is a result of cultural formation inasmuch as in such cultural formation, the differences of objective⁸⁹ spirit, the parts and judgmental determinations of its world, as well as those differences which appeared as original determinate natures, have all come to ruin. Genius, talent, the particular abilities in general, belong to the world of actuality, inasmuch as this world still contains in it the aspect of the spiritual kingdom of animals, where in mutual forcibleness and confusion they fight and deceive each other over the essence of the real world. – The differences, to be sure, have no place in this world as honest Espèces. Individuality is neither content with the non-actual crux of the matter, nor does it have any particular content and purposes of its own. Rather, it counts only as something universally accepted, namely, as cultured;⁹⁰ and the difference reduces itself into a matter of more or less energy – a difference of magnitude, which is to say, a non-essential difference. However, this last diversification came to ruin through the difference having been transformed from a difference within the complete disruption of consciousness into an absolutely qualitative difference. What is therein the other to the I is only the I itself. In this infinite judgment, all one-sidedness and idiosyncrasy of the original being-for-itself is erased. As the pure self, the self knows itself as its own object; and this absolute equality of both sides is the element of pure insight. – Pure insight is thus the simple essence with no difference within itself, and is just as much the universal work and universal possession. In this simple spiritual substance, self-consciousness gives itself and sustains for itself the consciousness of its own singular individuality just as much in every object, or the consciousness of its own doing, just as, conversely, the individuality of self-consciousness is therein equal to itself and is universal. – This pure insight is thus the spirit that calls out to every consciousness: Be for yourselves what you all are in yourselves – rational.

a. The Struggle of the Enlightenment with Superstition

The various modes of the negative conduct of consciousness, which are in part those of skepticism and in part those of theoretical and practical idealism, are subordinate shapes with respect to those of pure insight and of its diffusion, the Enlightenment. This is so because pure insight is born from the substance, and it both knows the pure self of consciousness as absolute, and it incorporates that self into the pure consciousness of the absolute essence of all actuality. – While faith and insight are the same pure consciousness but are opposed according to their form, the essence for faith is thought but not thought as concept, and thus something utterly opposed to self-consciousness. However, for pure insight the essence is the self, and so for each other, each is the utter negative of the other. – As they come on the scene confronting each other, all content corresponds to faith, for in its element of motionless thinking, every moment gains stable existence. – However, pure insight is at first without content; instead, it is the pure disappearance of content, but by its negative movement towards what is negative to it, it will realize itself and give itself a content.

It knows faith to be opposed to itself and thus opposed to reason and truth. Just as, to the Enlightenment, faith is on the whole a tissue of superstitions, prejudices, and errors, the consciousness of this content is, to the Enlightenment, further organized into a realm of errors in which false insight, as the universal social estate of consciousness, is immediate, naive, and completely lacking in any reflective turn into itself.⁹¹ However, the Enlightenment also has in it the moment of a reflective turn into itself,⁹² or, also in it, of self-consciousness separated from naiveté, as an insight remaining for itself in the background, and an evil intention by which the naive consciousness is tricked. That social estate is the victim of deception by a priesthood, which remains entrenched in its envious conceit that it and it alone remains in possession of insight and which puts into practice its various and sundry forms of self-interest. At the same time, this priesthood conspires with despotism, which, as the synthetic, conceptless unity of the real and of this ideal realm – an oddly inconsistent essence – stands above the bad insight of the multitude and the bad intention of the priests and unites both of these within itself. Drawing on the stupidity and disorientation brought about among the people by the deceitful priesthood, despotism, which despises both, draws on both of them to gain the advantage of its own undisturbed control and of the fulfillment of its own pleasures and its whims, while it is at the same time this very same dullness of insight, this very same superstition and error.

The Enlightenment does not engage with these three aspects of the enemy indiscriminately, for while its essence is pure insight which is in and for itself universal, its true relation to the other extreme is that which has to do with what is common to and is the equal of both. The aspect of singular individuality, which isolates itself from the universal naive consciousness, is its opposite and it cannot immediately come into contact with it. The will of the deceiving priesthood and the oppressive despot is thus not the immediate object of its doing, but rather, its object is insight without a will, the insight which is not thinning itself out into being-for-itself, or the concept of rational self-consciousness which has its existence in the social estates but which is not yet present within them as the concept. However, while pure insight rescues this honest insight and its naive essence from prejudices and errors, it wrests from the hands of bad intentions the reality and its power of its deceit, whose realm has its basis and material in the conceptless consciousness of the universal social estates – the being-for-itself [of the universal social estate] has its substance in simple consciousness, full stop.

The relation of pure insight to the naive consciousness of absolute essence now has two sides. On the one hand, pure insight is in itself one and the same as the naive consciousness, but on the other hand, this naive consciousness within the simple element of its thought lets the absolute essence, as well as its parts, go their own way. It allows them to give themselves stable existence, and for that reason, it allows them to count only as its in-itself and to be in an objective mode, but it repudiates its being-for-itself within this in-itself. – To the extent that for pure insight this faith is, according to the first aspect, in itself pure self-consciousness and is supposed to become this only for itself, pure insight has in this concept of faith the element in which, in place of false insight, it realizes itself.

From this aspect, that both are essentially the same, the relation of pure insight happens in and through the same element. The communication between them is immediate, and their giving and receiving is an undisturbed flow of the one into the other. Whatever other pegs may be driven into consciousness, it is in itself this simplicity in which everything is dissolved, forgotten, and unencumbered, and which is thus utterly receptive to the concept. For that reason, the communication of pure insight is comparable to a peaceful diffusion of something like a scent in a compliant atmosphere. It is a pervading infection and is not noticeable beforehand as being opposed to the indifferent element into which it insinuates itself; it thus cannot be warded off. It is only when the infection has become widespread that it is for consciousness, which had carefreely yielded itself to it, for what this consciousness received into itself was precisely the simple essence, which was equal to itself and to consciousness but which was at the same time the simplicity of negativity taking a reflective turn into itself.⁹³ This latter inward turn, according to its nature, also subsequently unfolds itself into an opposition, and it thereby reminds consciousness of its previous mode. It is the concept which is the simple knowing that at the same time knows itself and its opposite, but which knows this opposite to be sublated within it. As soon as pure insight thus is for consciousness, this insight has already made itself widespread, and the struggle against it betrays the fact that the infection has already taken hold. The struggle is too late, and all the remedies taken only make the disease worse, for the disease has seized the very marrow of spiritual life, namely, consciousness in its concept, or its pure essence itself. For that reason, there is no force within it that could prevail over the disease. Because it is in the essence itself, its still isolated expressions are repressed, and its superficial symptoms are muffled. This is immensely to its advantage, for in that case it neither uselessly squanders its force nor does it show itself to be unworthy of its essence, something which is the case when it breaks out into symptoms and when there are singular outbreaks contrary both to the content of faith and to the way its external actuality coheres. Rather, now that it is an invisible and undetected spirit, it winds its way all through the nobler parts, and it has soon taken complete hold over all the fibers and members of the unaware idol. At that point, “some fine morning it gives its comrade a shove with the elbow, and, thump! kadump! the idol is lying on the floor”⁹⁴ – on some fine morning, where the noontime is bloodless and when the infection has permeated every organ of spiritual life. Only then does memory alone still preserve the dead mode of spirit's previous shape as a vanished history (although exactly how it does this nobody knows), and the new serpent of wisdom, which is elevated for adoration, has in this way painlessly only shed its withered skin.

However, this mute weaving of spirit in the simple inwardness of its substance conceals to itself what it is doing and is only one side of the realization of pure insight. Its diffusion does not only consist in “like coming together with like,” and its actualization is not only extension without opposition. Rather, the doing on the part of negative essence is just as essentially a developed self-differentiating movement, which, as a conscious doing, must set up its moments within a determinately manifested existence and which must as such be present as a noisy ruckus and a violent struggle with its opposite.

It thus remains to be seen how pure insight and intention conduct themselves negatively with respect to the other which they find confronting them. – Since their concept is all essentiality and there is nothing external to them, pure insight and intention, which conduct themselves negatively, can only be the negative of themselves. Therefore, as insight it becomes the negative of pure insight; it becomes untruth and unreason, and as intention it becomes the negative of pure intention and grows into lies and a dishonesty about its purpose.

It is thereby entangled in this contradiction as a result of having both let itself get into this quarrel and as a result of thinking of itself as doing battle with something other. – This is what it means to do, for its essence as absolute negativity is just its having otherness in its own self. The absolute concept is the category; it is knowing and the object of knowing being one and the same. What pure insight thereby expresses as its other, what it expresses as an error or a lie, can be nothing but it itself; it can only condemn what it is. What is not rational has no truth, or what is not conceptually comprehended is not; while reason thus speaks of an other, it really speaks only of itself; in doing so, it does not manage to get outside of itself. – For that reason, this struggle with the opposite unifies within itself the meaning that it is insight's own actualization. This consists in the very movement of developing the moments and taking them back into itself. One part of this movement is the difference in which comprehending insight confronts itself as object to itself, and as long as it lingers in this moment, it is alienated from itself. As pure insight, it is without any content; the movement of its realization consists in it itself becoming, to itself, the content, for an other cannot become, to it, the content because it is the self-consciousness of the category. However, while insight at first knows the content in its opposite only as content, and does not as yet know it as itself, pure insight fails to see itself in it. Hence, the sense of its culmination is that it cognizes the content, which, to itself is initially objective, as its own. However, its result will thereby neither be the re-establishment of the errors against which it fights, nor will it only be its first concept, but rather it will be an insight which knows the absolute negation of itself as its own actuality, which cognizes itself, or cognizes its own self-cognizing concept. – This nature of the Enlightenment's struggle with errors is that in struggling with them it is struggling with itself, and that it is condemning in them what it asserts, is for us, or what it and its struggle in itself are. However, the first aspect of this struggle is the pollution of the Enlightenment through its incorporation of negative conduct into its self-equal purity, the way in which it is an object for faith. That is, it lies in the way faith therefore experiences it as lies, unreason, and malicious intent, just as for the Enlightenment, faith is itself experienced as error and prejudice. – As regards its content, it is in the first place empty insight whose content appears to it as an other. Hence, in faith it comes across this content in this shape which is not yet its own, as an existence totally independent of it.

The Enlightenment therefore grasps its object universally in such a way that it at first takes it to be pure insight, and so that, while not cognizing itself, it declares it to be error. In insight as such insight, consciousness grasps an object so that the object becomes, to consciousness, the essence of consciousness, or becomes an object which consciousness permeates and within which consciousness sustains itself, remains at one with itself,⁹⁵ and remains currently present to itself, and, while it is thereby the object's movement, engenders the object itself. This is what the Enlightenment correctly expresses as faith, as when it says that what faith takes to be the absolute essence is a being of faith's own consciousness, is its own thought, is something brought out by consciousness. The Enlightenment thereby declares faith to be in error and to be a fiction about the same thing that the Enlightenment itself is about. – The Enlightenment, which wishes to teach faith this new wisdom, does not tell it anything new when it does so, for the object of faith is to faith also only this, namely, the pure essence of faith's own consciousness such that this consciousness does not posit itself as lost and negated in the object but instead places its trust in it, which just means that as this consciousness precisely within that object, it comes across itself, or comes across itself as self-consciousness. The certainty of self whom I trust, is, to me, my own certainty of itself. I cognize my being-for-myself in that certainty of itself, I know that my being-for-myself bestows recognition on it, and I know it is purpose and essence. However, faith is trust because the faithful consciousness relates itself immediately to its object and thus intuits that it is at one with the object, that it is in the object. – Furthermore, while what is the object for me is that within which I cognize myself, at the same time, to myself, I am therein as an other self-consciousness, which means that I am as the kind of self-consciousness which has become alienated therein from his own particular singularity, namely, from his naturalness and contingency, but which remains therein in part self-consciousness and in part essential consciousness, like pure insight. – It lies not only in the concept of insight that consciousness recognizes⁹⁶ itself in the object into which its insight goes and that has itself immediately in that object, and that not only does it do this without abandoning what has been thought⁹⁷ and then returning into itself from out of that abandonment. It also lies in the concept of insight that it is conscious of itself as the mediating movement, or it is aware of itself as doing, as engendering. As a result, its unity is for it in thought as the unity of the self and the object. – It is precisely this very consciousness which is also that of faith. Obedience and doing are a necessary moment through which the certainty of existence within the absolute essence comes about. To be sure, this doing by faith does not indeed appear in such a way so that the absolute essence is itself generated as a result. However, the absolute essence of faith is essentially not the abstract essence which is supposed to lie in an other-worldly beyond of that of the faithful consciousness; rather, it is the spirit of the religious community, the unity of that abstract essence and self-consciousness. For it to be the spirit of the religious community, an essential moment is the doing of the community itself. It is only by being engendered by consciousness – or, instead, it is not without being engendered by consciousness, for as essential as this engendering is, it is equally essentially not the only ground of the essence, but is only a moment of it. At the same time, the essence is in and for itself.

On the other side, the concept of pure insight is, to itself, an other than its object, for it is just this negative determination which constitutes the object. So, from that other aspect, it also expresses the essence of faith to be alien to self-consciousness, not the essence of self-consciousness but rather a changeling⁹⁸ covertly foisted on it. However, here the Enlightenment is being completely fatuous, and faith experiences the Enlightenment as a way of talking that neither knows what it is saying, nor understands what is at stake when it talks about clerical fraud and the deception of the people. It speaks about this as if through some kind of hocus-pocus, priestly conjurers foisted on consciousness something absolutely alien and other to it as its essence, and at the same time it says that this is the essence of consciousness, that consciousness believes in it, trusts in it, and seeks to make it favorably disposed towards itself – which is to say that consciousness intuits its pure essence likewise to be its singular and universal individuality in that essence, and, through its own doing, it engenders this unity of itself with its essence. It immediately declares that what it pronounces to be alien to consciousness is what is ownmost to consciousness – How, then, can it possibly speak about deception and mystification? While what it immediately says about faith is the opposite of what it asserts about faith, to faith itself it appears instead to be a conscious lie. How are deception and mystification to come about at the very point where consciousness immediately has in its truth the certainty of itself, at the very point where it possesses itself in its object, while it is to be found in the object equally as much as it engenders itself in it? In the words being used, the difference is no longer present. – However much the general question was once raised, “whether it is permissible to deceive a people?”, still the answer in fact should have been that the question itself is ill-posed because it is impossible to deceive a people about this matter. Putting brass in place of gold and offering counterfeit instead of genuine coins may well have swindled individuals many a time; many people have been led to believe that a battle lost was a battle won; and lies of all sorts about empirical things and particular events have been made plausible for a while. However, within the knowing of that essence in which consciousness has immediate certainty of itself, the notion that it is sheer delusion is entirely out of the question.

551. Let us further see how faith experiences the Enlightenment in the differentiated moments of its consciousness. From the point of view just noted, this was only gestured at in a very general way. However, these moments are as follows: pure thinking, or the absolute essence, as object, in and for itself; next, as knowing, faith's relation to the ground of its faith; and, finally, faith's relation to it in its doings, or in its religious service. Just as pure insight both mistook itself and completely denied itself in faith, so too we shall find it behaving in these moments in just as inverted a manner.

Pure insight conducts itself negatively to the absolute essence of the faithful consciousness. This essence is pure thinking posited within itself as object, or as the essence. In the consciousness of faith, this in-itself of thinking at the same time acquires the form of objectivity for the consciousness existing in and for itself, but what it acquires is only the empty form. Its determination is thus that of something represented.⁹⁹ However, while pure insight is pure consciousness according to the aspect of the self existing for itself, this other appears to pure insight as the negative of self-consciousness. This could still be taken either as the pure in-itself of thinking, or else as the being of sensuous-certainty. However, while at the same time it is actual consciousness for the self, and this self as the self that has an object, so is insight's distinctive object as such an ordinary existing thing of sensuous-certainty. Its object appears to it in faith's representation of it. Pure insight condemns this, and in doing so, it condemns its own object. It already, however, does wrong to faith when it grasps the object of faith as if faith's object were insight's own object. Accordingly, it says of faith that its absolute essence is a piece of stone, a block of wood with eyes that do not see, or else that it is something made of bread-dough obtained from the field, which, when transformed by men, is then returned there. Or when it says in whatever other ways that faith anthropomorphizes the essence and makes it objective and presentable.¹⁰⁰

In passing itself off for what is pure, the Enlightenment here turns into a transitory thing just what to spirit is eternal life and the holy spirit, and it besmirches it with the point of view of sensuous-certainty, which is in-itself negative – with a point of view which is simply not present to faith in its acts of worship, so that the Enlightenment is simply lying to faith about it. What faith reveres is, to faith, without question neither stone nor wood, nor bread-dough, nor any other sort of temporal, sensuous thing. However much it occurs to the Enlightenment to say that its object is nevertheless also this, or even that this is what it is in itself and in truth, still faith is in part just as well acquainted with that “also,” but, to itself, that “also” lies outside of its worship. However, to faith, things such as a stone, etc., are not the in itself, but rather, to faith, what is in itself is solely the essence of pure thinking.

The second moment is the relation of faith as knowing consciousness to this essence. As pure, thinking consciousness, this essence is immediate to faith. However, pure consciousness is just as much a mediated relation of certainty to truth, which is a relation that constitutes the ground of faith. For the Enlightenment, this ground just as much becomes a contingent knowing of contingent occurrences. However, the ground of knowing is the knowing universal, and in its truth it is absolute spirit, which, in abstract pure consciousness, or in thinking as such, is only absolute essence, but which as self-consciousness is self-knowing. Likewise, pure insight posits this knowing universal, the simple self-knowing spirit, as the negative of self-consciousness. This pure insight is indeed itself pure mediated thinking, or thinking mediating itself with itself. It is pure knowing, but while it is pure insight, or pure knowing which does not yet know itself, i.e., it is what, to itself, is not yet this pure, mediating movement, this movement appears to pure insight, as does everything which it is itself, as an other. Thus comprehended¹⁰¹ in its actualization, it develops this moment which is essential to it, but the moment appears to it as belonging to faith, and in its determinateness as something external to pure insight, it appears to be a contingent knowing of exactly those rather ordinary and matter of fact¹⁰² stories. Here it therefore charges religious faith with basing its certainty on a collection of singular historical testimonies, which, considered as historical testimony, would not even warrant that degree of certainty that we get with respect to any event mentioned in the newspapers; it charges further that faith's certainty rests on the accident that all this testimony happens to have been preserved – that it rests in part on the preservation of this testimony on a piece of paper, and in part through the skill and honesty in transferring what is written on one piece of paper onto another piece of paper – and, finally, that its certainty rests on the accurate grasp of the sense of those dead words and letters. But in fact it never even occurs to faith to link its certainty to that kind of testimony and those kinds of contingencies. In its certainty, faith stands in an unencumbered relation to its absolute object. It is a pure knowing of that object, and it never lets letters, paper, or copyists interfere with its consciousness of the absolute essence; it does not mediate itself with the absolute essence by those kinds of things. Rather, this consciousness is the self-mediating ground of its knowing. It is spirit itself which is its own testimony, just as much in the inner of singular consciousness as it is through the universal presence of the faith of everyone in it. However much faith wishes to substantiate itself, or if it wishes at the very least to confirm for itself the topics about which the Enlightenment speaks, and if it wishes to do this by drawing on what is historical, and if furthermore it seriously thinks and acts as if something really depended on its doing so, then so has it already let itself be seduced by the Enlightenment. Its efforts to ground itself or to bolster itself in this way only amounts to testimony that attests to its infection by the Enlightenment.

There is still the third aspect to all this, the relation, as a doing, of consciousness to absolute essence. This doing is that of sublating the particularity of the individual, or sublating the natural mode of its being-for-itself. Out of this sublating, there emerges, to it, the certainty that it is pure self-consciousness through its own doing, i.e., that it is certain of being at one with the essence as a singular individual consciousness existing-for-itself. – While in this doing purposiveness and purpose are distinguished, and while pure insight likewise conducts itself negatively in relation to this doing and thus denies itself in the same way that it did in the other moments, it must, with regard to purposiveness, exhibit itself as a complete folly, as insight combined with intention, the correspondence of ends with means, appears to it as an other, as being instead insight's opposite. – However, with regard to the purpose, it makes badness, consumption of goods, and possession its purpose, thus proving itself to be the most impure intention, while pure intention, as an other, is equally impure intention.

Accordingly we see that with regard to purposiveness, the Enlightenment finds it simply fatuous when the believing individual seeks to give himself the higher consciousness of not being fettered to natural consumption and gratification by actually denying himself natural consumption and gratification, and by proving through his deed that in his contempt for those things, he is not lying but that his contempt for them is true. – Likewise, the Enlightenment finds it fatuous for the individual to absolve himself of his determinateness (of his being absolutely singular, of his excluding all others, and of his possessing property) by giving up his property. What he shows in truth is that he is not really serious about thinning himself out. Instead, he shows that he is so lofty that he rises above the natural necessity of thinning himself and in this absolutely thinned out being-for-itself, he shows that he denies that the others are the same as himself. – Pure insight finds both of these things to be purposeless¹⁰³ as well as wrong – that is, it is purposeless to deny oneself pleasures and give away a possession in order to prove that one is free from pleasure and possession of property. On the contrary, insight will therefore declare him to be a fool, who in order to eat employs the means for actually eating. Insight also thinks it is wrong to deny oneself a meal and to give away butter and eggs not for money, or even to give away money for butter and eggs; what is wrong is just to give them away and get nothing in return at all. It declares a meal, or the possession of things of that sort, to be an end in itself; as a result, it in fact declares itself to be a very impure intention since what essentially matters to it are such possessions and acts of consumption. As pure intention, it again asserts the necessity of rising above natural existence and rising above any covetousness over the means for such existence. It only finds it both foolish and wrong that this elevation should be demonstrated through the deed, or that this pure intention is in truth a deception which both pretends and demands to be an inner elevation but which takes on the affectation that it is gratuitous, foolish, and even wrong to be serious about actually putting this into practice and demonstrating its truth. – Pure insight thus disowns itself as pure insight, for it disowns the immediately purposive doing as pure intention; and it disowns itself as pure intention, for it disowns the intention to prove itself to be liberated from the purposes of singular individuality.

So does the Enlightenment make itself known to faith.¹⁰⁴ It comes on the scene in such a bad light precisely because through the relationship to an other, it gives itself a negative reality, or it exhibits itself as the opposite of itself. However, pure insight and pure intention must give this relationship to themselves, for this relationship is their actualization. – This actualization at first appeared as negative reality. But perhaps its positive reality is better constituted, so let us see how it fares. – However much all prejudice and superstition have been banished, still the question arises: What next? What is the truth that the Enlightenment has disseminated in their place? – It has already declared that its positive content lies in its eradication of error, for that alienation of itself is equally its positive reality. – In what was for faith absolute spirit, the Enlightenment grasps whatever sort of determination it discovers there only to be wood, stone, and so forth, or to be singular, actual things. While in general it comprehends all determinateness in this way, which is to say, it conceives of every content and every fulfillment of content as finite, or as a human essence and as representational thought, absolute essence turns out, to itself, to be a vacuum to which no determinations and no predicates can be married.¹⁰⁵ Such a marital consummation would be in itself a punishable offence, and it is precisely that kind of thing which has produced the monstrosities of superstition. Reason, pure insight, is itself, of course, not empty, as the negative of itself is for it and is its content. On the contrary, it is rich but only in singularity and limitations. To allow nothing of that sort either to be attributed to absolute essence or to be made to accord with the absolute essence is its own insightful way of life, which knows so well how to put itself and its wealth of finitude in their proper places and how to deal with the absolute in a dignified manner.

Confronting this empty essence as a second moment of the positive truth of the Enlightenment stands the singular individuality per se, that of consciousness and all being, as absolute being-in-and-for-itself that is excluded from an absolute essence. Consciousness, which in its very earliest actuality is sensuous-certainty and opinionating,¹⁰⁶ returns from the whole course of its experience back to this point and is again a knowing of the pure negative of itself, or of the sensuous things, i.e., existing things which indifferently confront its being-for-itself. However, here is no immediate natural consciousness; rather, to itself, it has become such a consciousness. At first abandoned to every entanglement into which it was plunged in the course of its unfolding, it is now led back to its first shape by pure insight, and it has learned from experience that this first shape is a result of its unfolding. Grounded on the insight into the nullity of all other shapes of consciousness (and thus into the nothingness of everything beyond sensuous-certainty), this sensuous-certainty is no longer only a view¹⁰⁷ but is instead the absolute truth. This nothingness of everything that goes beyond sense certainty is, to be sure, only a negative proof of this truth. However, it is not capable of producing any other proof, for the positive truth of sensuous-certainty in its own self is precisely the unmediated being-for-itself of the concept itself as the object, indeed, as the object in the form of otherness – that it is utterly certain to every consciousness that it is and that there are other actual things external to it and that in its natural existence it, as well as these things, is in and for itself, or is absolutely.

The third moment of the truth of the Enlightenment is finally the relationship which the singular essence bears to the absolute essence, which is the relation of the first two moments. Insight, as the pure insight of the equal, or, the unrestricted, also goes beyond the unequal, namely, finite actuality, or goes beyond itself as mere otherness. For the other-worldly beyond of this otherness, it has the void to which it therefore relates sensuous actuality. Both aspects of the matter do not enter into the determination of these relationships as content, for the one is the void, and therefore a content is present only through the other, sensuous actuality. However, the form of the relation, in the determination of which the aspect of the in-itself lends a hand, can be construed arbitrarily, for the form is the negative in itself and for that reason is what is self-opposed. It is being as well as nothing, is the in-itself as well as the opposite, or, what comes down to the same thing, the relation of actuality to an in-itself as an other-worldly beyond is just as much a negating as it is a positing of that actuality. Finite actuality can thus in effect be taken precisely as one needs to take it. The sensuous is thus now positively related to the absolute as the in-itself, and sensuous actuality itself is in itself. The absolute makes it, takes care of it, and looks after it. In turn, actuality is also related to it as it is related to the opposite, to its non-being. According to this relation, sensuous actuality is not in itself but rather only for an other. However much in the preceding shape of consciousness the concepts of the opposition were determined as the good and the bad, still in pure insight they will become the even purer abstractions of being-in-itself and being-for-an-other.

However, both approaches, the positive as well as the negative relation of the finite to the in-itself, are in fact equally necessary, and everything is therefore just as much in itself as it is for an other, or everything is useful. – Everything hands itself over to others, now lets itself be used by others, and is for them; and now, so to speak, everything puts up a good fight, is unaccommodating to others, is for itself, and, for its own part, uses the other. – For people, as the things that are conscious of this relation, it turns out that this is their essence and their stance. As he immediately is, as natural consciousness in itself, the person is good; as a singular individual, he is absolute; and what is other is for him; indeed, since, for him as a self-aware animal, the moments have the meaning of universality, everything is for his enjoyment and his delight, and, as he comes out of the hand of God, he walks the earth as if he were in a garden planted for him. – He must have also plucked the fruit of the tree of knowing of good and evil. In that he possesses a utility that distinguishes him from every other being, for, quite contingently, his good nature in itself is also constituted so that the excess of delight does him harm, or, instead, his singular individuality also has its other-worldly beyond in it, and it can go beyond itself and destroy itself. To prevent this, reason is for him a useful means for properly restricting this going-beyond, or rather, for preserving himself when he does in fact go beyond the determinate, for this is the power of consciousness. The enjoyment on the part of the conscious, in itself universal essence must not itself be, according to variety and duration, a determinate but rather a universal enjoyment. The measure thus signifies this determination, namely, that it is to prevent pleasure in its variety and duration from being cut short, which is to say, such a measure is determined as immoderation. – As everything is useful for man, man is likewise useful, and his determination consists in making himself a universally usable member of the troop and being of use for the common interest. As much as he looks out for himself is just as much as he must also give away to others, and as much as he gives to others is just as much as he is to look out for himself; or, “Scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.” But wherever he ends up, he is in the right place; he makes use of others and is himself made use of.

Different things are useful to each other in different ways, but all things have this useful reciprocity through their essence, namely, that they are related to the absolute in a twofold manner – the positive way, as a result of which they are in and for themselves, and the negative way, as a result of which they are for others. The relation to the absolute essence, or to religion, is thus among all utilities the most useful, for it is pure utility itself. It is the stable existence of all things, or their being-in-and-for-itself, and the pitfall of all things, or their being for others.

Of course, this positive result of the Enlightenment is for faith as much a horror as is the Enlightenment's negative conduct towards faith. This insight into the absolute essence that sees nothing in it but the absolute essence itself, the être suprême, or the void – this intention that everything in its immediate existence is in itself, or, is good, that finally the relation of the singular conscious being to the absolute essence, religion, is to be exhaustively expressed in the concept of utility is, to faith, something utterly abhorrent. This, the Enlightenment's own wisdom, necessarily appears to faith at the same time as shallowness itself and as the very confession of shallowness because it consists in knowing nothing of absolute essence, or, what amounts to the same thing, in knowing only this entirely banal truth about it, that it is only the absolute essence. Quite the contrary, to faith, what the Enlightenment knows as the highest is nothing but finitude, indeed, it knows this finitude and the knowing of such finitude as the true.

Faith has the divine right of absolute self-equality, or of pure thinking, against the Enlightenment, and it suffers quite a wrong from the Enlightenment, for the Enlightenment distorts faith in all its moments and makes those moments into something quite different from what they are within faith. However, the Enlightenment has only a human right against faith and for its own truth, for the wrong it commits is the right of inequality, and it consists in inverting and altering a right that belongs to the nature of self-consciousness in regard to the simple essence, or to thinking. However, while the Enlightenment's right is the right of self-consciousness, it will not only also retain its own right, so that two equal rights of spirit would be left facing off against each other with neither of them satisfying the claims of the other, but rather it will also assert absolute right because self-consciousness is the negativity of the concept, which is not only for itself but also overlaps with its opposite, and faith itself, because it is consciousness, will not be able to deny the Enlightenment its right.

For the Enlightenment does not conduct itself with regard to the faithful consciousness in terms of any distinctive principles of its own, but rather does so with the principles which faith has in itself. The Enlightenment only brings together faith's own thoughts, which, to the faithful consciousness, come undone without its being aware of it. The Enlightenment only reminds faith that in one of its thoughts, there are others that it also has, but that it is always forgetting one of those thoughts when it has the other one. Contra faith, the Enlightenment proves precisely as a result that as pure insight, the Enlightenment sees the whole in one determinate moment, and it thus brings the self-relating opposition to that moment; in inverting one moment into the other, the Enlightenment then brings out the negative essence of both thoughts, namely, the concept. For that reason, it appears to faith as distortion and lies because it points out the otherness of faith's moments. For this reason, to faith, the Enlightenment immediately seems to make of those moments something other than they are in their singularity. However, this other is just as essential, and it is in truth present in the faithful consciousness itself, but only in that faith does not think about it but has the other somewhere else. Hence, that other is neither alien to faith nor can it be denied by faith.

However, the Enlightenment itself, which reminds faith of the opposition within each of its various isolated moments, is no more enlightened about itself. It conducts itself purely negatively towards faith insofar as it excludes its own content from its own purity, and it takes that content to be the negative of itself. Hence, it cognizes itself neither in this negative, nor in the content of faith, nor on these grounds does it bring the two thoughts into contact with each other, the thought which it brings along and the thought that it brings along in opposition to the first one. Since it does not cognize that what it condemns in faith are immediately its own thoughts, it itself is in the opposition of both moments, one of which, namely, the one that is in every case opposed to faith, only bestows recognition on it, separating itself, however, from the other exactly in the way that faith does. The Enlightenment thus does not bring out the unity of both as the unity of both, i.e., the concept, but, to it, the concept emerges for itself, or, the Enlightenment encounters it only as present, for in itself this is just the very realization of pure insight. The pure insight whose essence is the concept initially comes to be, to itself, as an absolute other, and it denies itself, for the opposite of the concept is the absolute opposite. It then comes back round to itself, to its concept, from out of this otherness. – However, the Enlightenment is only this movement; it is the still unconscious activity of the pure concept which, to be sure, comes back round to itself as object but which takes this object for an other and which is also not even aware of the nature of the concept, namely, that the concept is non-differentiated which absolutely separates itself. – Thus, as against faith, insight is the power of the concept insofar as insight is both the movement and the relating of the moments which lie apart in faith's consciousness; it is an [act of] relating in which the contradiction in those moments comes to light. Therein lies the absolute right of the authority¹⁰⁸ which insight exercises over faith, but the actuality on which it brings this authority to bear lies precisely in this, that the faithful consciousness is itself the concept, and that it thus itself recognizes and accepts the opposition that insight brings to it. For that reason, insight keeps its right against faith because what it affirms in faith is what is necessary to faith itself and what faith has in its own self.

At first the Enlightenment asserts the moment of the concept to be a doing of consciousness. What it asserts against faith is just this – that faith's absolute essence is an essence of faith's consciousness as a self, or that this absolute essence is supposed to be brought out through consciousness. Its absolute essence is, to the faithful consciousness, precisely as it is as faith's in-itself, at the same time not like some alien thing which would just be there in it, some kind of “who knows where it came from and how it got there,” but rather, faith's confidence consists only in finding itself as this personal consciousness within its absolute essence, and its obedience and service consist in engendering that essence as its absolute essence through faith's own doing. In effect the Enlightenment only reminds faith of this when faith starkly declares that the in-itself of the absolute essence is the other-worldly beyond of the doing of consciousness. – However, while, to be sure, the Enlightenment brings up faith's one-sidedness concerning the opposing moment of faith's own doing in contrast to what is,¹⁰⁹ which is all that faith thinks about here, and does not bring together its own opposing thoughts, the Enlightenment isolates the pure moment of doing and declares faith's in-itself to be only something brought out by consciousness. However, the isolated doing opposed to the in-itself is a contingent doing, and, as what representational thought does, it is an engendering of fictions – representations which are not in itself, and so this is the way in which the Enlightenment regards the content of faith. – But, conversely, pure insight states the very opposite. While insight affirms the moment of otherness which the concept has in it, it expresses the essence of faith as that which does not concern consciousness, which is an other-worldly beyond to consciousness, something alien and unknown to it. To faith, the essence, on the one hand, is exactly what it places its trust in and in which it has certainty of itself, whereas, on the other hand, the essence is inscrutable in its ways and unattainable in its being.

Furthermore, the Enlightenment asserts a right contra the faithful consciousness that faith itself concedes when the Enlightenment takes the object of the faith's veneration to be stone and wood, or otherwise regards it as a finite, anthropomorphic determinateness. For since it is this estranged consciousness in that it has an other-worldly realm beyond actuality together with a pure this-worldliness to that other-worldly beyond, so is this point of view on sensuous things in fact also present in it, according to which sensuous things count in and for themselves. However, faith does not bring together these two thoughts of what-is-existing-in-and-for-itself, what to it at one time is the pure essence and at another time an ordinary thing of sense. – Even its pure consciousness is affected by this last point of view, for the differences in its supersensible realm, because it lacks the concept, are a series of self-sufficient shapes, and their movement is an event, which is to say that those shapes only are in representational thought and bear in themselves the mode of sensuous being. – For its part, the Enlightenment isolates as well actuality as an essence forsaken by spirit, the determinateness as an unmoved finitude which would neither be a moment in the spiritual movement of the essence itself, nor would it be not nothing, nor would it also be something existing in and for itself. Rather, it would be a vanishing.

It is clear that the same is the case with regard to the ground of knowing. The faithful spirit itself bestows recognition on a contingent knowing, for it has a relation to contingencies, and the absolute essence itself is for it in the form of a represented, ordinary actuality. Thus, the faithful consciousness is also a certainty which does not have the truth in its own self, and it avows itself to be an inessential consciousness of this kind, or to be on the this-worldly side of the self-assuring and self-authenticating spirit. – However, in its spiritually immediate knowing of the absolute essence, the faithful consciousness forgets this moment. – But the Enlightenment, which reminds faith of this, again only thinks of contingent knowing, and it forgets the other – it only thinks of the mediation that comes about through an alien third term, and it does not think of that within which the immediate is, to itself, itself the third term through which it mediates itself with the other, namely, with itself.

Finally, in its view of what faith does, the Enlightenment finds that faith's dismissal of possessions and consumption is something both wrong and without purpose.¹¹⁰ – As far as that wrong is concerned, the Enlightenment is on this point in accord with the faithful consciousness itself. The faithful consciousness recognizes the actuality of possessing property and of keeping hold of it and consuming it. In claiming its property, it behaves in an even more isolated and stubborn manner, just as it has even more crudely thrown itself into its consumption, since its religious doing – that of giving up possessions and the consumption of them – falls into the other-worldly side of this actuality, and it purchases freedom for itself on that side. In fact, through this opposition, this service of sacrifice of both natural drives and consumption has no truth; both the retention and the sacrifice occur together side by side. The sacrifice is only a sign that the actual sacrifice has been accomplished in only a small degree and consequently that it in fact only represents it.

With regard to purposiveness, the Enlightenment finds it simply inept either to discard a possession in order both to know and to prove that one is liberated from possession per se or to renounce an enjoyment in order both to know and prove that one is liberated from enjoyment. The faithful consciousness itself takes the absolute doing to be a universal doing; to itself, not only is the doing of its absolute essence, as its object, a universal doing; the singular consciousness is also supposed to prove itself to be entirely and universally liberated from its sensuous essence. However, casting off a single possession or renouncing a single enjoyment is not this universal action; and while in the action the purpose, which is a universal purpose, and the execution of the purpose, which is singular, would essentially have to be present to consciousness in their inadequacy to each other, that action proves itself to be the sort of action in which consciousness has no share, and this action thereby in effect proves to be too naive even to be an action at all. It is simply too naive to fast in order to prove oneself freed from the pleasures of the table, and it is too naive to remove the body of some other pleasure, as Origen did, in order to show that one has dismissed pleasure. The action itself proves to be an external and singular doing. However, desire is inwardly rooted and is universal; its pleasure neither disappears when the instrument for obtaining pleasure disappears, nor does it disappear through individual abstention.

However, for its part the Enlightenment here isolates the inner, the non-actual with regard to actuality just as with regard to faith's contemplation and devotion it had tenaciously clung to the externality of thinghood in contrast to the inwardness of faith. The Enlightenment puts all essentiality into the intention, into thoughts, and as a result it spares itself from actually accomplishing the liberation from natural purposes. On the contrary, this inwardness is itself what is formal, and it has its fulfillment in the natural drives, which as a result are justified precisely in that they indeed are inward, that they belong to the universal being, nature.

The Enlightenment therefore has an irresistible authority over faith for the reason that faith itself finds within its own consciousness the moments which the Enlightenment itself has validated. If the effect of this force is examined more closely, then its comportment with respect to faith seems to disrupt the beautiful unity of trust and faith's immediate certainty; it seems to pollute its spiritual consciousness with the lower thoughts of sensuous actuality and through the vanity of the intellect, of self-will, and of self-fulfillment, to destroy faith's heart, which is motionless and secure in its submission. However, in fact the Enlightenment marks instead the beginning of the sublation of the unthinking separation, or instead the separation which is itself devoid of the concept, which is present in faith. The faithful consciousness weighs and measures by a double standard. It has two sorts of eyes and ears, two tongues and languages, and it doubles all its representational thoughts without ever comparing these ambiguities. Or, faith lives within two sorts of perception, one of which is that of the slumbering, utterly conceptless consciousness, and the other that of the waking consciousness, which lives purely in sensuous actuality. Moreover, it keeps a separate set of account books in each of them. – The Enlightenment illuminates that heavenly world with representations drawn from the sensuous world, and it points out to faith this finitude which faith cannot deny because faith is self-consciousness, and because faith is the unity to which both kinds of representations belong and within which they do not come undone from one another, for both kind belong to the same indivisible simple self into which faith has passed over.

Faith has thereby lost the content that fulfilled its element, and it descends into weaving a kind of dull stupefaction within spirit itself. Faith has been banished from its own realm, or rather this realm has been sacked and plundered, while the waking consciousness in itself ripped up all the differentiation and dispersal within that realm, claimed those parts as the earth's property, and returned them to the earth that owns them. However, faith is not for that reason satisfied, for through this illumination, what has sprouted everywhere is only a singular essence, such that what speaks to spirit is only an essenceless actuality and a finitude forsaken by spirit. – While faith is without content and cannot remain in this emptiness, or while it goes beyond the finite, which is the sole content, and finds only emptiness, it is a pure longing. Its truth is an empty other-worldly beyond for which there is no longer any adequate content to be found since everything now stands in a different relation. – With that, faith has in fact become the same as the Enlightenment, namely, the consciousness of the relation between the finite existing in itself and a predicate-less, unknown and unknowable absolute. The only difference is that the Enlightenment is satisfied Enlightenment, whereas faith is the unsatisfied Enlightenment. Nonetheless, it is still to be seen whether the Enlightenment can remain in its satisfaction. The longing on the part of the former tarnished spirit which mourns the loss of its spiritual world lurks in the background. The Enlightenment itself has this stain of unsatisfied longing in it – as the pure object in its empty absolute essence – as doing and movement in its going beyond its individual essence to an unfulfilled other-worldly beyond – and as an object brought to fulfillment in the selflessness of utility. The Enlightenment will sublate this stain. In the closer examination of the positive result, which, to the Enlightenment, is the truth, it will turn out that the stain is in itself already sublated.

b. The Truth of the Enlightenment

The stupefied weaving by spirit that no longer has any differences within itself, has thus moved into a realm beyond consciousness, which in contrast has now become clear to itself. – The first moment of this clarity, in its necessity and condition, is as a result determined, so that the pure insight, or the insight which is in itself the concept, actualizes itself. It does this as it posits otherness, or the determinateness, in it. In this manner, it is negative pure insight, i.e., negation of the concept. This negation is just as pure, and it has thereby become the pure thing, the absolute essence, which otherwise has no further determination. If it is more closely determined, then insight is the absolute concept, the differentiating of differences that are no longer differences, of abstractions or pure concepts which no longer support themselves but which have a firm hold and a difference only through the movement as a whole. This distinguishing of what is not distinguished thereby consists exactly in the absolute concept's making itself its own object, and, over and against that movement, in its positing itself as the essence. The essence thereby dispenses with that aspect of the matter in which abstractions or differences are kept apart from each other, and hence it becomes pure thinking as a pure thing. – This is therefore just that former dull, unconscious weaving of a cloud of stupefaction in spirit itself, the same one into which faith sank when it lost all differentiated content. – This is at the same time the former movement of pure self-consciousness which was supposed to be the absolute, alien, other-worldly beyond. Because this pure self-consciousness is a movement within pure concepts, within differences that are no differences, pure self-consciousness actually collapses into that unconscious weaving of its own stupefaction, i.e., into pure feeling or pure thinghood. – It is the concept alienated from itself – for the concept still remains here at the stage of this alienation – but it does not cognize this same essence of both aspects, of the movement of self-consciousness and its absolute essence – it does cognize the same essence of both, which is in fact their substance and stable existence. While it does not cognize this unity, so does the essence count for the concept only in the form of an objective other-worldly beyond, whereas the differentiating consciousness, which in this way has the in-itself external to itself, counts as a finite consciousness.

The Enlightenment itself falls into conflict with itself over that absolute essence just as it had previously done with faith, and it now divides itself into two factions. One faction proves itself to be victorious as a result of breaking up into two factions, for in that breakup it points to the very principle it combats, and it thus shows both that it has that principle in its own self and that it thereby has sublated the one-sidedness within in which it formerly appeared. The interest that it shared with the other now falls entirely within itself, and it forgets the other because that interest finds within itself the opposition with which it engages. However, at the same time, the opposition has been elevated into the higher, victorious element in which it manifests itself in a clarified form. Thus, the discord which arises in one faction, and which seems to be a misfortune, proves to be its good fortune after all.

576. The pure essence itself has no difference in it. It comes to such a difference in this way: What become prominent are two such pure essences for consciousness, or a twofold consciousness of the pure essence. – The pure absolute essence is only in pure thinking, or rather it is pure thinking itself, and it is thus utterly the other-worldly beyond of the finite, or of self-consciousness, and is only the negative essence. However, in this manner it is just being, the negative of self-consciousness. As the negative of self-consciousness, it is also related to self-consciousness. It is external being, which in its relation to self-consciousness, within which the distinctions and determinations fall, receives in it the differences among being tasted, being seen, and so on. The relationship is thus that of sensuous-certainty and perception.

If one starts with this sensuous being into which that former negative other-worldly beyond necessarily passes, and one then abstracts from those determinate modes of the relation of consciousness, what remains is pure matter as both the dull weaving together of its own stupefaction and motion within itself. It is thereby essential to think about whether pure matter is only what is left over when we abstract from seeing, feeling, tasting, and so forth, which is to say, matter is not what is seen, tasted, felt, and so on. It is not matter that is seen, felt, or tasted, but the color, a stone, salt, and so on. Matter is instead pure abstraction, and, as a result, what is present is the pure essence of thinking, or pure thinking, or pure thinking itself as the absolute lacking all predicates, undetermined and without differences within itself.

One Enlightenment dubs the absolute essence the former predicate-less absolute which is in thinking as the other-worldly beyond of the actual consciousness which was its starting point. – The other Enlightenment calls the other matter. If they were to be differentiated as nature and spirit, or as God, the unconscious weaving together of its own stupefaction within itself would still lack the wealth of developed life which is required for there to be nature, and spirit or God, and it would lack the consciousness distinguishing itself within itself. As we saw, both are quite plainly the same concept. The difference lies not in the thing at issue but simply in the various points of departure for both formations,¹¹¹ and it lies in each sticking to its own point in the movement of thinking. If they were to set those points aside, their thoughts would meet up with each other, and they would recognize¹¹² that what one of them professes to be a horror and the other professes to be a folly are really one and the same thing. For one of them, the absolute essence is in its pure thinking, or it is immediately for pure consciousness, and it is external to finite consciousness; it is the negative other-worldly beyond of finite consciousness. If it were to reflect on the matter, namely, that in part that former simple immediacy of thinking is nothing but pure being, and that in part, what is negative for consciousness is at the same time related to consciousness, or that in the negative judgment, the “is” (the copula) by the same token holds together two separate items – then the result would be that this other-worldly beyond would have the determination of an external existent in relation to consciousness, and it would thereby be the same as what is called pure matter. The absent moment of the present would thereby be gained. – The other Enlightenment starts from sensuous being and then abstracts from the sensuous relation of tasting, seeing, and so forth; it then turns sensuous being into the pure in-itself, into absolute matter, into something neither felt nor tasted; in this way, this being has become the predicate-less simple, the essence of pure consciousness. It is the pure concept existing in itself, or pure thinking inwardly turned into itself.¹¹³ In its consciousness, this insight does not take the reverse step from what is existing, which is a pure existent, to what has been only thought,¹¹⁴ which is the same as the purely-existing,¹¹⁵ or, it does not go from the purely positive to the purely negative; yet while the positive is purely, utterly through negation, the purely negative, as pure, is to itself in itself self-equal,¹¹⁶ and, as a result, it is positive. – Or, it is that these two have not gone as far as the concept of Cartesian metaphysics, namely, that being and thinking are in themselves the same, and they have not arrived at the thought that being, pure being, is not a concrete actuality, but is rather pure abstraction. Conversely, pure thinking, self-equality, or essence, is in part the negative of self-consciousness and is thereby being, and as immediate simplicity, it is in part likewise nothing but being. Thinking is thinghood, or thinghood is thinking.

The essence here has estrangement in itself in such a way that there are two ways of considering it. In part, the essence must have the difference in its own self, and in part, precisely by having the difference in its own self, both ways of considering it merge into one way, since the abstract moments of pure being and of the negative, within which they are differentiated, are united in the object of these two approaches. – The universal common to both is the abstraction of the pure trembling within itself, or pure thought-thinking-itself. This simple motion rotating on its own axis has to pull itself apart into separate moments because it is only by distinguishing its moments that it is itself motion. This difference of the moments leaves the unmoved behind as the empty husk of pure being which is no longer actual thinking and which no longer has life within itself, for, as difference, it is all content. However, the movement, which posits itself as external to that unity, is thereby the flux of the moments which do not return back into themselves, those of being-in-itself, of being-for-an-other, and of being-for-itself – actuality in the way in which it is the object for the actual consciousness of pure insight – utility.

As bad as utility may look to faith or to sentimentality, or even to that abstraction which calls itself speculation and which fixes on the in-itself, it is nonetheless in utility that pure insight finalizes its realization and is, to itself, its object, an object which insight now no longer disavows and which for insight is no longer valued as the void, or as the pure other-worldly beyond. This is so because pure insight is, as we saw, the existing concept itself, or the pure self-equal personality which is distinguishing itself within itself in such a way that each of the differences is itself the pure concept, which is to say, is immediately not distinct. It is simple pure self-consciousness which is just as well in an immediate unity for itself as it is in an immediate unity in itself. Its being-in-itself is thus not a lasting being, but, within its differences, it immediately ceases to be “something.” However, such a being which has no support is not immediately in itself but is essentially for an other which is the power that absorbs it. But this second moment, which is opposed to that first one, or to the being-in-itself, disappears just as immediately as does the first. That is to say, as being only for others, it is instead disappearance itself, and it is being-returned-into-itself, or being-for-itself which is posited. But as self-equality, this simple being-for-itself is instead a being, or it is thereby for an other. – The nature of pure insight in the unfolding of its moments, or as object, expresses itself as utility. Utility is something stably existing in itself, or a thing. This being-in-itself is at the same time only a pure moment; it is thereby absolutely for an other, but it is just as much only for an other as it is in itself, and these opposing moments have thus returned back into the inseparable unity of being-for-itself. However much utility is indeed the expression of the concept of pure insight, still it is not the concept of pure insight as such but of pure insight as representational thought, or as insight's object. Utility is only the restless flux of those moments, one of which is indeed that of being-returned-into-itself, although only as being-for-itself, i.e., as an abstract moment standing off to one side with regard to the others. Utility itself is not the negative essence, these moments in their opposition and at the same time undivided in one and the same respect, or, to have them as thinking, in the way they are as pure insight. The moment of being-for-itself is indeed in utility, but not in the sense that it extends over¹¹⁷ the other moments, being-in-itself and being-for-an-other, and thereby would be the self. In utility, pure insight thus has as its object its own distinctive concept in its pure moments, and it is the consciousness of this metaphysics although not yet its comprehension. It has not yet itself arrived at the unity of being and concept. Because utility still has the form of an object for insight, insight has a world. To be sure, it has a world no longer existing in and for itself, but nonetheless it is still a world which it distinguishes from itself. However, while at the pinnacle of the concept, the oppositions have themselves begun to come out, the next stage will be for them to totally collapse, and the Enlightenment shall then experience the fruits of its deeds.

If the attained object is viewed in relation to this entire sphere, then the actual world of cultural formation thus summed itself up in the vanity of self-consciousness – in being-for-itself, which still has its content in its fogginess, and which is still the singular concept and not yet the concept which is for itself universal. However, when that concept has returned into itself, it is pure insight – that is, it is pure consciousness as the pure self, or negativity, just as faith is the same pure consciousness as pure thinking, or positivity. In that self, faith has the moment which completes it – but, foundering through this supplementation, it is now in pure insight that we see both moments, as the absolute essence, which is purely thought, or the negative – and then as matter, which is the positive existent. – This culmination still lacks the actuality of self-consciousness, which belongs to the vain consciousness – the world from out of which thinking raised itself up to itself. What was lacking is attained in utility insofar as pure insight attains positive objectivity in utility. As a result, pure insight is an actual consciousness satisfied within itself. This objectivity now constitutes its world, and it has become the truth of the entire previous world, of the ideal as well as of the real world. The first world of spirit is the unfolded realm of spirit's self-dispersing existence and of the thinned-out certainty of itself just as nature disperses its life into an infinite diversity of shapes without the genus of all the shapes being present. The second world contains the genus and is the realm of being-in-itself, or the truth opposed to that certainty. However, the third world, which is that of utility, is the truth which is just as much the certainty of itself. The realm of the truth of faith lacks the principle of actuality, or it lacks the certainty of itself as being this singular individual. However, actuality, or the certainty of itself as this singular individual, lacks the in-itself. In the object of pure insight, both worlds are united. Utility is the object insofar as self-consciousness sees through it and has the singular certainty of itself, its enjoyment (its being-for-itself) within it. In this way, self-consciousness insightfully looks into it,¹¹⁸ and this insight contains the true essence of the object (something which is seen through, or is for an other). This insight is thus itself true knowing, and self-consciousness just as immediately has the universal certainty of itself, or has its pure consciousness in this relationship in which truth as well as presence and actuality are therefore united. Both worlds are reconciled, and heaven is transplanted to the earth below.

a. The Moral Worldview

Self-consciousness knows duty as the absolute essence. It is bound only by duty, and this substance is its own pure consciousness. For self-consciousness, duty cannot assume the form of something alien. However, moral self-consciousness, when resolved in that way within itself, is not yet posited and regarded as consciousness. The object is immediate knowing, and, as so purely permeated by the self, it is not an object. However, because it is essentially mediation and negativity, self-consciousness has in its concept the relation to an otherness and is thus consciousness. On the one hand, because duty constitutes its sole essential purpose and is the object of self-consciousness, this otherness is a completely meaningless actuality for it. Because this consciousness is so entirely resolved within itself, it relates itself freely and indifferently to this otherness, and existence, on the other hand, is completely free-standing vis-à-vis self-consciousness, only relating itself to itself. The more free-standing self-consciousness becomes, the more free-standing is the negative object of its consciousness. The object is thereby a world perfected within itself with an individuality all its own; it is a self-sufficient whole of laws peculiar to itself as well as a self-sufficient operation of these laws and their free realization – a nature as such, whose laws and activities belong to itself, a nature which, as an essence, is as unconcerned with moral self-consciousness as moral self-consciousness is unconcerned with it.

Out of this determination, there is a moral worldview which develops and gives shape to itself. This moral worldview consists in the relation between moral being-in-and-for-itself and natural being-in-and-for-itself. Lying at the basis of this relation is the complete indifference and the self-sufficiency of both nature and of moral purposes and activities with respect to each other, and, on the other side of the coin, there is the consciousness of the sole essentiality of duty and of the complete non-self-sufficiency and inessentiality of nature. The moral worldview contains the development of the moments which are contained in this relation between such entirely conflicting presuppositions.

At first, it is moral consciousness as such which is presupposed. Duty counts, to itself, as the essence, and, to itself, the essence is actual and active; in its actuality and in its deed, the essence fulfills duty. However, at the same time for this moral consciousness the free-standingness¹³¹ of nature is presupposed, or moral consciousness experiences nature as unconcerned with giving moral consciousness the consciousness of the unity of its actuality with that of nature itself, and it thus learns from experience that nature might allow it to be happy but then again it might not. By comparison, the non-moral consciousness finds, perhaps by chance, its actualization in places where the moral consciousness sees only an occasion for acting but does not see itself thereby obtaining happiness either in the execution of the action or in the enjoyment of its achievement. Hence, the moral consciousness finds all the more reason for both bewailing such a state of affairs where there is no fit between itself and existence and for lamenting the injustice which both limits it to having its object only as pure duty and which fails to let it see this object and itself actualized.

Moral consciousness cannot renounce happiness and leave this moment out of its absolute purpose. The purpose, which is expressed as pure duty, essentially contains in it this singular self-consciousness. Both the individual conviction and the knowing of this conviction constituted an absolute moment of morality. This moment in the purpose which has objectively come to be, or in the duty fulfilled, is the singular consciousness intuiting itself as actualized, or it is the gratification which does not thereby immediately lie in the concept of morality regarded as disposition¹³² but which does lie in the concept of the actualization of morality. However, gratification also thereby lies in morality as a disposition, for the disposition does not aim at remaining a disposition in contrast to action; it aims at action, or at actualizing itself. The purpose, expressed as both the whole and the consciousness of its moments, therefore amounts to the following. Duty fulfilled is supposed to be just as much a purely moral action as it is a realized individuality, and nature, as the aspect of singularity in contrast with abstract purpose, is supposed to be at one with this purpose. – As necessary as the experience of the disharmony between the two aspects is, it is because nature is free-standing that duty alone is the essential, and nature, in contrast to duty, is devoid of a self.¹³³ That former purpose, which is constituted in its entirety by the harmony, contains within itself actuality itself. It is at the same time the thought of actuality. The harmony of morality and nature, or – as nature would come into view only insofar as consciousness experiences its unity with it – the harmony of morality and happiness is conceived¹³⁴ as necessarily existing, or it is postulated. For making that demand expresses that something is thought of as existing which is not yet actual, or a necessity not of the concept as concept but of being. However, the necessity is at the same time essentially a relation by way of the concept. The demanded being therefore does not belong to the representational thinking of a contingent consciousness; rather, it lies in the concept of morality itself, whose true content is the unity of pure and singular consciousness. It pertains to the latter, to singular consciousness, that this unity is supposed to be for it an actuality, that what is happiness in the content of the purpose is in its form existence as such. – For that reason this demanded existence, or the unity of both, is neither a wish, nor, when it is taken as purpose, is it something whose attainment would still be uncertain. Rather, the purpose is a demand of reason, or an immediate certainty and presupposition of reason.

It is not that this first experience and this postulate are the only ones, but rather a whole sphere of postulates is opened up. Nature, namely, is not only this wholly free-standing external mode in which consciousness, as a pure object, would have to realize its purpose. Consciousness is in its own self essentially that for which this other free-standing actuality is, i.e., it is itself contingent and natural. This nature which to consciousness is properly its own is that of sensibility, which, in the shape of willing as impulses and inclinations has its own determinate essentiality for itself, or it has individual purposes, and it is thus opposed to the pure will and its pure purposes. But in contrast to this opposition, the relation of sensibility to pure consciousness, or its absolute unity with it, is to pure consciousness instead the essence. Both of these, pure thinking and the sensibility of consciousness, are in themselves One consciousness, and pure thinking is precisely that for which and within which this pure unity is. However, for it as consciousness, the opposition is between itself and its impulses. In this conflict between reason and sensibility, the essence for reason consists in the dissolution of the conflict, and as a result the unity of both emerges, a unity which is not the original unity, or the unity that consists in both existing in one individual. The unity which emerges is that which arises out of the known opposition of both of them. Such a unity is initially actual morality, for contained within it is the opposition through which the self is consciousness, or through which the self is first actual, or is in fact the self and at the same time the universal. Or, it is the sort of mediation which, as we see, is essentially morality. – While of the two moments in the opposition, sensibility is purely and simply otherness, or the negative, whereas the pure thinking of duty is the essence from which nothing can be given up, then it seems that the unity which is engendered can only be brought about by the sublation of sensibility. However, since sensibility is itself a moment of this coming-to-be, or it is the moment of actuality, then for the expression of the unity, one will initially have to content oneself with a turn of phrase, more or less to the effect that sensibility is supposed to conform to morality. – This unity is equally a postulated being; it is not there¹³⁵ because what is there is consciousness, or the opposition of sensibility and pure consciousness. However, the unity is at the same time not an in-itself like the first postulate, in which free-standing nature constitutes one aspect. Hence, the harmony of nature with moral consciousness belongs to the sphere outside of the latter. Here it is nature which is in its own self, and the issue here has to do with morality as such, with a harmony which is the acting self's very own harmony. Thus, consciousness itself both has to bring about this harmony and to be making constant progress in morality. However, the culmination of this progress has to be put off to infinity, since if that culmination were actually to arrive, moral consciousness would be sublated. This is so because morality is only moral consciousness as the negative essence for which sensibility is only of negative significance, is only not in accordance with pure duty. But in that harmony, morality as consciousness vanishes, or its actuality vanishes in the way that in moral consciousness, or in actuality, its harmony vanishes. For that reason, the culmination is not actually to be reached, but rather, it is only to be thought of as an absolute task, which is to say, a task which remains purely and simply a task. Nonetheless, at the same time its content is to be thought as what purely and simply must be, and it must not remain a task. Now, in this aim, one is to represent consciousness as sublated, or, for that matter, not sublated. In the dark remoteness of the infinity to which the attainment of the aim consequently has to be postponed, there is no clear distinction to be made as to which of these views is to be held. Strictly speaking, the determinate representation of this progress should be of no interest and ought not to be sought because it leads to contradictions – contradictions lying in a task which is both to remain a task and which is yet to be fulfilled, and in a morality which is no longer supposed to be consciousness and no longer supposed to be actual. However, the thought that a perfected morality would contain a contradiction would harm the holiness of moral essentiality, and absolute duty would then appear as something non-actual.

The first postulate was the harmony of morality and objective nature, the final purpose of the world; the other was the harmony of morality and the sensuous will, the final purpose of self-consciousness as such. The former is thus the harmony in the form of being-in-itself, and the latter is the harmony in the form of being-for-itself. However, the mediating middle that combines these two extreme final ends, as they have been conceived, is the movement of actual acting itself. They are harmonies whose moments have not yet become objects in their abstract differentiatedness from each other. This occurs in actuality, in which the aspects appear in real consciousness, where each comes on the scene as the other of the other. The postulates thereby arising contain, as before, only the separated harmonies in themselves and existing for themselves, which are now harmonies existing in and for themselves.

As the simple knowing and willing of pure duty in acting, moral consciousness is related to an object opposed to its simplicity – related to the actuality of the diverse cases, and as a result it has a diverse moral relationship to that actuality. According to the content, what emerges here is the plurality of laws, and according to the form, what emerges are the contradictory powers of knowing consciousness and of the unconscious. – At the outset, with regard to the plurality of duties, what counts for the moral consciousness is only the pure duty within them. The many duties, as many, are determinate and as such are thus nothing holy for moral consciousness. However, at the same time and necessarily through the concept of acting, which itself encompasses a diverse actuality and thus a diverse moral relation, those many duties must be regarded as existing in and for themselves. Furthermore, since they can only be within a moral consciousness, they are at the same time within a consciousness other than that for which there is only pure duty as that which is holy and which is in and for itself.

It is thus postulated that there is to be another consciousness which sanctifies those duties or which knows them and wills them as duties. The first consciousness supports pure duty indifferently with respect to all determinate content, and duty is only this indifference with respect to content. But the other consciousness contains the equally essential relation to acting and the necessity of determinate content. While duties count, to itself, as determinate duties, the content as such is, to itself, just as essential as the form through which the content is a duty. This consciousness is thereby the kind in which the universal and the particular are utterly at one, and its concept is thus the same as the concept of the harmony of morality and happiness. This is so because this opposition equally well expresses the separation of the self-equal moral consciousness from that actuality which, as multiple being, militates against the simple essence of duty. However much the first postulate expresses only the existing harmony between morality and nature because nature is therein this negative of self-consciousness, the moment of being, still this in-itself is in contrast now posited essentially as consciousness. For what exists now has the form of the content of duty, or is the determinateness in the determinate duty. The in-itself is thus the unity of the sort of items which are as simple essentialities, as essentialities of thinking, and which thus only are within a consciousness. This latter consciousness is thus now a lord and ruler of the world who generates the harmony of morality and happiness and at the same time sanctifies duties as a plurality of duties. In turn, that means this much: For the consciousness of pure duty, the determinate duty cannot be immediately sanctified. Because the determinate duty, in the service of actual action which is a determinate action, is likewise necessary, so does its necessity fall outside of that consciousness into another consciousness, which is thereby what mediates the determinate and the pure duty and is the reason why that specific duty also counts as valid.

However, in actual action, consciousness conducts itself as this self, as a completely singular individual. It is directed towards actuality as such and has this actuality for its purpose, for it wants to accomplish something. Duty as such thus falls outside of itself into another essence, the consciousness and the holy lawgiver of pure duty. To the acting consciousness, precisely because it is acting consciousness, the other of pure duty is immediately valid. This pure duty is thus the content of another consciousness, and this pure duty is only mediately holy for the acting consciousness, namely, within that other consciousness.

Because it is hereby posited that the validity of duty as the holy in and for itself falls outside of actual consciousness, this consciousness as such thereby stands off to one side as incomplete moral consciousness. According to its knowing, it therefore knows itself to be the sort whose knowing and conviction is incomplete and contingent. Just as much according to its willing, it knows itself to be the sort whose purposes are affected by sensibility. According to its unworthiness, it thus cannot look on happiness as necessary but rather as something contingent, and it can only expect happiness to issue from grace.

However, even though its actuality is incomplete, duty nonetheless counts as the essence for its pure willing and knowing. In the concept, inasmuch as the concept is opposed to reality (or is the concept in thinking), consciousness is thus completed. However, the absolute essence is just something thought,¹³⁶ what is postulated as an other-worldly realm beyond actuality. It is therefore the thought within which morally imperfect knowing and willing count as perfected, and as taking this imperfection to have full weight, it thereby also apportions happiness according to worthiness, namely, according to the desert ascribed to the imperfect consciousness.

With that, the moral worldview is completed, for in the concept of moral self-consciousness, the two aspects, those of pure duty and actuality, are posited as being in a single unity, and as a result both the one as well as the other are each posited not as existing in and for themselves but as a moment, or as sublated. In the last part of the moral worldview, it is for consciousness that this comes to be. That is to say, consciousness posits pure duty as lying in another essence than itself, i.e., it posits pure duty as something which it partly has as something represented and which it partly has as something which is not valid in and for itself, but it is the non-moral consciousness which instead counts as completed. It likewise posits itself as having an actuality which is unsuited to duty, which is sublated, and which, as sublated, or as lying in the representation of the absolute essence, no longer contradicts morality.

However, for the moral consciousness itself, its moral worldview does not mean that moral consciousness develops its own concept within that worldview and makes that concept its object to itself. It neither has a consciousness concerning this opposition of form nor a consciousness concerning this opposition, whose parts, according to their content, it neither relates nor compares with each other. Rather, it rolls onward in its development without being the concept holding those moments together. This is so because it only knows the pure essence, or the object insofar as the object is duty and insofar as it is the abstract object of its pure consciousness, as pure knowing or as itself. It therefore conducts itself only thinkingly, not comprehensively.¹³⁷ Hence, the object of its actual consciousness is, to itself, not yet transparent; it is not the absolute concept, which alone grasps otherness as such, or which grasps its absolute opposite as itself. To be sure, its own actuality as well as that of all objective actuality counts, to itself, as the inessential, but its freedom is the freedom of pure thinking, which for that reason has at the same time emerged as confronting nature as something which is itself just as free-standing. Because both are in the same way within it, the free-standing character of being and the inclusion of this being within consciousness, its object comes to be an existing object which at the same time is only [an object of] thought. In the last part of its intuition, the content is essentially posited in such a way that its being is something represented, and this combination of being and thinking, expressed as what it in fact is, is representing.

When we regard the moral worldview in such a way that this objective mode is nothing but the concept of moral self-consciousness itself which it makes objective to itself, what results from and through this consciousness about the form of its origin is another shape of its exposition. – The first, which is the starting-point, is actual moral self-consciousness, or that there is such a self-consciousness at all. This is so because the concept posits moral self-consciousness as subsumed under the following determination, that, to the concept, all actuality, full stop, has an essence only insofar as such actuality conforms to duty, and that the concept posits this essence as knowing, i.e., as being in immediate unity with the actual self. This unity is thus itself actual; it is an actual moral consciousness. – The latter now, as consciousness, represents its content to itself as an object, namely, as the final purpose of the world, as the harmony of morality with all actuality. However, while representing this unity as object and not yet the concept which has power over the object as such an object, this unity is, to itself, a negative of self-consciousness, or the unity falls outside of self-consciousness. It does this as an other-worldly beyond to its actuality, but at the same time as the sort of unity that is also existent even though only as it is thought.

To self-consciousness, which as self-consciousness is something other than the object, what remains is the non-harmony between the consciousness of duty and actuality, in fact its own actuality. The proposition thus now goes in this way: There is no morally perfected actual self-consciousness – and, since the moral per se only is insofar as it is completed, for duty is the pure unmixed in-itself, and since morality consists only in an adequacy to this purity, the second proposition itself goes like this: There is no moral actuality.

But, third of all, while it is one self, it is in itself the unity of duty and actuality; this unity thus becomes, to itself, the object as perfected morality – however, as an other-worldly beyond of its actuality – but an other-worldly beyond that nonetheless ought to be actual.

In this goal of the synthetic unity of the first two propositions, self-conscious actuality as well as duty is only posited as a sublated moment. This is so because neither of them is singular; rather, each of them, in their essential determination as free-standing from the other, are, as they are in the unity, thereby no longer free-standing from the other, and are thus sublated. Thus, according to the content, each of them becomes the object which counts as object for the other, and, according to the form, this reciprocal exchange is at the same time only representationally thought.¹³⁸ – Or, the actually non-moral, because it is just as much pure thinking and sublimely stands above its actuality, is within representational thought nonetheless moral and is taken to be entirely valid. In this way, the first proposition, namely, that there is a moral self-consciousness, is produced, but it is combined with the second, namely, that there is none, that is, there is a moral self-consciousness but only in representational thought; or there is indeed no moral self-consciousness, but it is accepted as one by another self-consciousness.

b. Dissemblance

In the moral worldview, we see on the one hand consciousness itself consciously create its object; we see that the object is neither something we come upon as alien, nor do we see the object coming to be for consciousness in any kind of unconscious way. Rather, throughout all of this, consciousness conducts itself according to a reason, on the basis of which it posits the objective essence. It thus knows this objective essence as itself, for it knows itself as active consciousness, which creates the essence. It thereby seems to achieve its repose and its satisfaction, for these can only be found where it no longer needs to go above and beyond its object because this object no longer goes above and beyond it. However, on the other side of the coin, it itself instead posits the object as external to itself, as its other-worldly beyond. But this existent-in-and-for-itself is at the same time equally posited as the sort of entity which is not free-standing with regard to self-consciousness but which is supposed to be for the purpose of and to be through self-consciousness.

The moral worldview is thus in fact nothing but the elaboration of this fundamental contradiction according to its various aspects. It is, to use a most appropriately Kantian phrase here, a whole nest of thoughtless contradictions. Consciousness conducts itself in this development in such a way that it fixes one moment, and from there immediately passes over to an other, and then sublates the first. However, as soon as it has now put forth this second moment, it also again dissembles about this moment and instead makes the opposite into the essence. At the same time, it is also conscious both of its contradiction and of its dissembling, for it passes over from one moment immediately in relation to itself into the opposite. Because a moment has no reality at all for it, it posits that very moment as real, or, what amounts to the same thing, in order to affirm one moment as existing in itself, it affirms the opposite as what is existing in itself. It thereby confesses that it is in fact serious about neither of them. This calls for closer examination of the various moments of this vertigo-inducing movement.

First, let us just put off to one side the presupposition that there is an actual moral consciousness for the reason that the presupposition is immediately made without any reference to what came before. Let us turn to the harmony of morality and nature, the first postulate. It is supposed to be in itself, not for actual consciousness and not currently. Rather, the present is instead only the contradiction between the two. In the present, morality is accepted as extant,¹³⁹ and actuality is so positioned that it is not supposed to be in harmony with morality. However, actual moral consciousness is an acting consciousness, and just therein consists the actuality of its morality. However, in acting itself, that stance is immediately made into a matter of dissemblance, for acting is nothing but the actualization of the inner moral purpose, nothing but the bringing forth of an actuality determined through the purpose, or of the harmony of moral purpose and actuality itself. At the same time, the completion of the action is for consciousness; it is the present of this unity of actuality and purpose. And because in the completed action consciousness actualizes itself as this singular individual, or intuits existence returned into it, so at the same time is also contained in it that form of the actuality which is called gratification and happiness. – Acting therefore in fact immediately fulfills what had been put forward as not taking place at all, or what was only supposed to be a postulate, only an other-worldly beyond. Consciousness therefore expresses through its deed that it is not serious about its own postulating, because what the action means is instead that it brings into the present what is not supposed to be in the present. And as the harmony is postulated for the sake of the action – which is to say, that what is supposed to become actual through action must be that way in itself, for otherwise the actuality would not be possible – the connection between acting and the postulate is so constituted that, for the sake of acting, i.e., for the sake of the actual harmony of purpose and actuality, this harmony is posited as not actual, as an other-worldly beyond.

While acting does take place, the inadequacy of the purpose and of actuality [to each other] is therefore not taken seriously at all; but in contrast, it does seem that acting itself is taken seriously. However, the actual action is in fact only the action of a singular consciousness; therefore it is only itself something singular, and the work is only something contingent. However, the purpose of reason as the all-comprehensive universal purpose, is nothing less than the whole world itself, a final end which goes far beyond the content of this individual action and thus is to be placed altogether beyond all actual acting. Because the universally best ought to be put into practice, nothing good is done. However, in fact the nothingness of actual acting and the reality only of the whole end, which are now put forward, are according to all the aspects again a matter of dissemblance. Moral action is not something contingent and restricted, for it has pure duty for its essence; this pure duty constitutes the single entire end; and the action, as the actualization of that end, is the accomplishment of the entire absolute end, whatever other restrictions there may be on the content. Or, if actuality is again taken to be nature, which has its own laws and which is opposed to pure duty so that duty cannot realize its law within nature, then while duty as such is the essence, this in fact has nothing to do with the accomplishment of pure duty, which is the entire end, for that accomplishment would instead have as its end not pure duty but instead what is opposed to it, actuality. However, that it is not supposed to have anything to do with actuality is again a matter of dissemblance, for according to the concept of moral action, pure duty is essentially an active consciousness. By all means, action should be taken; the absolute duty ought to be expressed in the entirety of nature; and the moral law should become the natural law.

If we allow this highest good to count as the essence, then consciousness is not at all serious about morality. This is so because in the highest good, nature does not have a different law from that of morality. Moral acting itself thus breaks down, for there is action only under the presupposition of a negative which is to be sublated through the action. However, if nature is in accordance with ethical laws, then these ethical laws would be violated by action, or by the sublation of what exists. – In that assumption about the essential condition, there is the admission that there is a condition in which moral action is superfluous and does not take place at all. Seen from this aspect, the postulate of the harmony between morality and actuality – of a harmony posited by the concept of moral action which is to bring the two into agreement – is expressed in the following way: Because moral acting is the absolute purpose, then the absolute purpose is that moral acting would not at all be said to be present.

If we collect these moments together in which consciousness has rolled forward in its morally representational thinking,¹⁴⁰ it becomes clear that it again sublates each of those representational thinkings into its opposite. It starts from the position that for it morality and actuality do not harmonize, but, to itself, it is not serious about it, for in the action this harmony is for it in the present. However, to itself, it is also not serious about this action, for it is something singular, for it has such a lofty purpose, the highest good. But this is again only a dissemblance about what is really at issue, for in that dissemblance all action and all morality would fall by the wayside. Or, it is that, to itself, it is not genuinely serious about moral action, but rather it holds that what is most desirable, the absolute, is that the highest good be put into practice and that moral action be superfluous.

On the basis of this result, consciousness must advance further in its contradictory movement, and again it necessarily dissembles about the sublating of moral action. Morality is the in-itself; for morality to come about, the final end of the world cannot be realized, but rather, moral consciousness must be for itself, and it must find that it confronts a nature which is opposed to it. However, in its own self it must be completed, and this leads to the second postulate of the harmony of itself and the nature which is immediately in it, namely, sensibility. Moral self-consciousness puts forward the view that its purpose is pure purpose, independent of inclinations and impulses so that the pure purpose has eliminated within itself sensibility's purposes. – Yet this proposed sublation of the sensuous essence is again made into a matter of dissemblance. Moral consciousness acts, brings its purpose into actuality and self-conscious sensibility, which ought to be sublated, is precisely the mediating middle between pure consciousness and actuality. – It is the former's instrument, or organ, for its realization, and it is what is called impulse, inclination; hence, it is not really serious about sublating inclinations and impulses, for it is just these which are the self-actualizing self-consciousness. However, they should also not be suppressed, but rather, only to be in accordance with reason. They are also in accordance with reason, for moral action is nothing but self-realizing consciousness giving itself the shape of an impulse, which is to say, it is immediately the current harmony of impulse and morality. However, impulse is in fact not only this empty shape which might have within itself a spring of action other than itself and by which it could then be impelled. This is so because sensibility is a nature which contains in its own self its own laws and springs of action, and thus morality cannot be serious about the driving force for the drives or the angle of inclination for inclinations. For, while these latter have their own fixed determinateness and distinctive content, the consciousness with which they were to conform would instead be in accordance with them, and this is a conformity which moral self-consciousness refuses to tolerate. The harmony between the two thus is only in itself and is postulated. – In moral action, the current harmony of morality and sensibility had been put forth as a view, but now even this is a matter of dissemblance. The harmony is an other-worldly beyond of consciousness, lying somewhere off in a foggy distance in which there is no longer anything which can be accurately differentiated or comprehended, since the comprehension of this unity, which we just attempted to provide, itself failed. – However, within this in-itself, consciousness gives itself up altogether. This in-itself is its moral completion within which the struggle of morality and sensibility has ceased, and the latter is in accordance with the former in a way which cannot be grasped. – For that reason, this completion is again only a dissemblance about what is really at issue, for in that completion morality would instead be abandoned, since morality is only consciousness of the absolute purpose as pure purpose, and therefore as opposing all other purposes. Morality is just as aware of the activity of this pure purpose as it is aware of its elevation above sensibility, aware of the intrusion of sensibility, and aware of the opposition and struggle with sensibility. – Consciousness itself immediately expresses that it does not take this moral completion seriously by its dissemblance about the way this culmination is put off into infinity, which is to say, by asserting that this completion is never completed.

What is valid is thus instead only the in-between state of incompletion, a state that nonetheless is supposed to be at least progress towards completion. Yet it also cannot be this progress, for progress in morality would really be progress towards its own downfall. The aim would be the nothingness mentioned above, or the sublation of morality and of consciousness itself; however, to get ever nearer and nearer to nothing is to decrease. Besides, to make progress as such (as well as to decrease as such) would equally make the assumption that there are differences of quantity within morality, yet there can be no such kind of talk in morality. In morality, as the consciousness which takes ethical purpose to be pure duty, there cannot be any thinking at all of diversity, least of all of the superficial difference of quantity. There is only one virtue, only one pure duty, only one morality.

While it is therefore not serious about moral completion but rather about the intermediate state, i.e., as was just discussed in the case of non-morality, we return to the content of the first postulate by way of another route. That is to say, one cannot see how for this moral consciousness happiness is going to be demanded on the basis of its worthiness. It is well aware that it is not perfect and that it thus cannot in fact demand happiness as a matter of desert, as something of which it is worthy. Rather, it can only require that happiness be given as freely bestowed grace, which is to say, it can only demand happiness in and for itself as that kind of happiness. It can hope for such happiness, not on the basis of that absolute ground but only in accordance with a fortuitousness and a kind of arbitrary free choice. – Non-morality expresses therein just what it is – namely, that it is concerned not about morality but about happiness in and for itself without reference to morality.

On the basis of this second aspect of the moral worldview, the other assertion is also sublated, namely, the one about the first aspect in which the disharmony between morality and happiness is presupposed. – It wants indeed to have learned from experience that in this present state of affairs the moral person often fares badly, whereas in contrast the immoral person is often happy. Yet the intermediate state of incomplete morality, which has turned out to be essential, clearly shows that this perception, this supposed experience, is only a matter of dissemblance about what is really at issue. For since morality is not completed, which is to say, since morality in fact is not, just what exactly is there in the learning experience to the effect that the moral person fares badly? – While it has come to light at the same time that what is at issue is happiness in and for itself, it turns out that the appraisal which asserts that “things go well for the non-moral person” did not intend to imply that anything wrong took place. When morality as such is incomplete, the designation of an individual as immoral in itself falls by the wayside and has therefore only an arbitrary ground. As a result, the sense and content of the judgment of experience is only that happiness in and for itself should not have been granted to some people, which is to say, the judgment is envy which helps itself to the cloak of morality. The reason, however, why so-called good fortune should be apportioned to others is that of good friendship, which does not begrudge it and which wishes that this grace, this accident of good fortune, be given both to them and to itself.

Morality is therefore not completed in moral consciousness. This is what is now being proposed, but the essence of moral consciousness is just to be completed purity, and incomplete morality is thus impure, or is immorality. Morality itself thus is in another essence than in that of actual consciousness, and this other is a holy moral legislator. – The morality which is not completed in consciousness, the very morality which is the basis for this postulating, initially signifies the morality which, as it is posited within consciousness as actual, stands in relation to an other, or to an existence, and thus acquires in it otherness, or difference, within which a variegated plurality of moral commands arises. However, at the same time, moral self-consciousness holds these many duties to be inessential, for it is concerned only with the one pure duty, and for self-consciousness, this plurality of duties, insofar as they are determinate duties, has no truth. They thus can have their truth only in an other, and although they are not holy for self-consciousness, they are made holy through a holy law-giver. – Yet this is itself again only dissemblance about what is at issue. This is so because, to itself, moral self-consciousness is absolute, and duty purely and simply is only that which self-consciousness knows to be duty. However, it knows only pure duty as duty; what, to itself, is not holy is not holy in itself, and what is not holy in itself cannot be made holy by the holy being.¹⁴¹ Moral consciousness is also not really serious about permitting something to be made holy by another consciousness than itself, since, to itself, the utterly holy is only that which is made holy through itself and is holy in moral consciousness. – It is thus not any more serious about the claim that this other being is a holy being, for in that holy being¹⁴² something should have arrived at essentiality, which, for moral consciousness, i.e., in itself, has no such essentiality.

However much the holy essence had been postulated so that duty would have its validity within it, not as pure duty but as a plurality of determinate duties, still this must again be a matter of dissemblance, and the other being¹⁴³ alone would have to be holy only insofar as it is only the pure duty in it which has validity. In fact, pure duty too has validity only in another being¹⁴⁴ and not in moral consciousness. Although in the latter, it is pure morality alone which seems to be valid, still this moral consciousness must be taken in another way, for it is at the same time a natural consciousness. Within natural consciousness, morality is affected and conditioned by sensibility and thus is not in and for itself. Rather, it is a contingency of free willing, but as pure willing within natural consciousness, it is a contingency of knowing. Hence morality is in and for itself in another being.¹⁴⁵

This being¹⁴⁶ is therefore here the purely completed morality for the reason that within it morality does not stand in any relation to nature and to sensibility. Yet the reality of pure duty is its actualization in nature and sensibility. Moral consciousness posits that its incompletion lies in the following, namely, that within it morality has a positive relation both to nature and to sensibility, since, to itself, what counts as an essential moment of morality is that morality purely and simply should only have a negative relation both to nature and sensibility. On the other hand, the purely moral being,¹⁴⁷ because it stands sublimely above the struggle with nature and sensibility, does not stand in a negative relation to either of them. In fact, to itself, what thus remains is only the positive relation to them, i.e., what remains is precisely what had counted as incomplete, as immoral. However, as entirely separated from actuality in such a way that it would lack any positive relation to actuality, pure morality would be an unconscious, non-actual abstraction in which the concept of morality and the thinking of pure duty together with both willing it and then acting on that duty, would all be utterly sublated. This purely moral being¹⁴⁸ is thus again dissembling about what is really at issue, and it too is to be given up.

However, in this purely moral being,¹⁴⁹ the moments of the contradiction, within which this synthetic representational thinking has roamed about, now draw closer together to each other, as do the opposing alsos succeed each other, one after the other, without its bringing these thoughts together. One opposite is always letting itself be displaced by the other to such a degree that consciousness here has to give up its moral worldview and retreat back into itself.

For that reason, consciousness recognizes¹⁵⁰ that its morality is incomplete. It does this because it is affected by a sensibility and a nature opposed to itself which in part itself obfuscates morality as such and in part gives rise to a whole host of duties through which consciousness falls into dilemmas in concrete cases of actual action. Each case is the concretion of a plurality of moral relations in the way that an object of perception per se is a thing of many qualities. While the determinate duty is the purpose, it has a content, and its content is a part of the purpose, and hence morality is not pure. – Morality therefore has its reality in another being.¹⁵¹ However, this reality amounts to nothing but the following. Morality is here supposed to be in and for itself – for itself, i.e., it is supposed to be the morality of a consciousness; and in itself, which is to say, it is supposed to have existence and actuality. – In the former, initially incomplete consciousness, morality was not put into practice; in such a case, morality is the in-itself in the sense that it is a thought-thing,¹⁵² for it is associated¹⁵³ with nature and sensibility, and with the actuality of being and of consciousness. That actuality constitutes its content, and the morally null is nature and sensibility. – In the second case, morality is present as completed and not as a thought-thing which has not been put into practice. However, this completion precisely consists in morality's having actuality as well as free-standing actuality in a consciousness, in having existence per se, in its not being empty but rather in having a fulfilled content. – Which is to say, the completion of morality is posited in the following way. What was just now determined as morally null is now in morality's own interior and is present in morality itself. It is at one time supposed to be what has validity purely and simply as a non-actual thought-thing of pure abstraction, but it is equally as much supposed to have no validity at all in this mode. Its truth is supposed to consist in its being opposed to actuality, to be wholly free-standing from it, to be empty, and therein again to be actuality itself.

The syncretism of these contradictions, which lie side by side in the moral worldview, collapses into themselves as the difference on which such syncretism rests, namely, that between what would be necessarily thought and posited, and what at the same time would also be inessential, becomes itself a difference that no longer even resides in the words themselves. In the end, what is posited as diverse, or is posited as being both a nullity and as real, is one and the same, namely, existence and actuality. And what is absolutely supposed to be only as the other-worldly beyond of actual being and of actual consciousness, and is equally supposed to be in consciousness and, as an other-worldly beyond, the utterly null, is pure duty and the knowing of it as that of essence. The consciousness which makes this distinction which is no distinction, the consciousness which at the same time states that actuality is both nullity itself and the real, which also states that pure morality is both the true essence and is utterly essence-less, now declares that the thoughts which it had previously separated are linked together, and it declares its own lack of seriousness about this determination and expression of the moments of the self and the in-itself. Instead, what it declares to be absolutely outside of consciousness is what it keeps enclosed within the self of self-consciousness, and, it states that the absolutely thought,¹⁵⁴ or, the absolute in-itself, is for that very reason what has no truth at all. – It becomes clear to consciousness that when it assembles all these moments so that they are separate from each other, it is really dissembling, and that if it were to keep on doing this, it would be hypocrisy. However, as pure moral self-consciousness, it flees from this inequality between its representational thinking and its essence, flees from this untruth which declares that what counts to it as untrue is in fact true, and with abhorrence, it flees back into itself. It is a pure conscience that spurns such a moral worldview. It is, as turned inwardly into itself, the simple self-certain spirit which, without the mediation of those representations, immediately and conscientiously acts and has its truth in this immediacy. – However much this world of dissemblance is nothing but the development of moral self-consciousness in its moments, and however much it is thus the reality of that moral self-consciousness, still through its retreat inward into itself, moral self-consciousness will, according to its essence, not become anything else. This inward return into itself is instead only the consciousness that has arrived at this, that its truth is a feigned truth. It would always have to pretend that this feigned truth is its truth, for it would have to express itself and exhibit itself as an objective representation, but it would know that this is only dissemblance. It would thus in fact be hypocrisy, and that disdain for such dissemblance would itself already be the first expression of hypocrisy.

c. Conscience; the Beautiful Soul, Evil, and its Forgiveness

The antinomy of the moral worldview, that there is a moral consciousness and that there is none – or that the validity of duty is an other-worldly beyond of consciousness, and conversely that this validity only comes about in consciousness – was summarized in the representation of non-moral consciousness counting as moral, its contingent knowing and willing being accepted as sufficiently important, and in the idea of happiness being granted to it as a matter of grace. Moral self-consciousness did not put this self-contradictory representation onto itself; rather, it shifted it off into a being¹⁵⁵ which, to itself, is other than itself. However, taking what it must think to be necessary and then positing it outside of itself is just as much a contradiction according to the form as the former was a contradiction according to the content. However, because in itself it is what appears to be contradictory and within whose separation and its ever reoccurring dissolution the moral worldview meanders around, it is in itself the same pure duty as pure knowing. It is nothing but the self of consciousness, and the self of consciousness is being and actuality – likewise, what is supposed to be the other-worldly beyond of actual consciousness is nothing but pure thinking and therefore is in fact the self, so self-consciousness for us, or in itself, returns back into itself, and it knows that being¹⁵⁶ to be itself and to be that in which the actual is at the same time pure knowing and pure duty. It itself is to itself what is fully valid in its contingency and which knows its immediate singular individuality as pure knowing and action, as true actuality and harmony.

This self of conscience, spirit immediately certain of itself as absolute truth and being, is the third self which has developed out of the third world of spirit and which in short order may be compared with those that preceded it. The totality or actuality which showed itself to be the truth of the ethical world is that of the self of the person; its existence consists in its being recognized. As the person is the substance-less self, so is the substance-less self's existence likewise abstract actuality; the person counts as valid in fact immediately. The self is the immediately motionless point in the element of its being; that point is not detached from its universality, and the two are therefore not in movement and in relation to each other. Within that point, the universal is without any differentiation, and neither the content of the self nor the fulfillment of the self comes about in and through the self. – The second self is the world of cultural formation which has achieved its truth, or it is the spirit of estrangement which has given itself back to itself – absolute freedom. In this self, the former initial immediate unity of singular individuality and universality come undone from each other. The universal, which remains equally a pure spiritual essence, a being recognized, or universal will and knowing, is the object and content of the self and its universal actuality. However, it does not have the form of free-standing existence apart from the self; within this self, it thus is not brought to fulfillment, and it reaches no positive content, no world at all. Moral self-consciousness, to be sure, lets its universality go and be free-standing so that this universality becomes a nature of its own and moral self-consciousness equally holds fast to the universality's being sublated within moral self-consciousness. However, it is only the dissembling game of shifting back and forth between these two determinations. As conscience, it has within its certainty of itself the content for the formerly empty duty as well as for the empty law¹⁵⁷ and the empty universal will. Because this self-certainty is equally the immediate, moral self-consciousness has existence itself.

Having arrived at this, its truth, moral self-consciousness therefore forsakes, or rather sublates instead the separation within itself out of which the dissemblance arose, the separation of the in-itself from the self, of pure duty as pure purpose from actuality as a nature and as a sensibility opposed to pure purpose. Having thus returned into itself, it is concrete moral spirit, which in the consciousness of pure duty does not give itself an empty standard which would be opposed to actual consciousness. Rather, pure duty, as well as the nature opposed to it, are both sublated moments. In its immediate unity, spirit is a moral essence actualizing itself, and its action is immediately a concrete moral shape.

A case calling for action is present, and it is an objective actuality for the knowing consciousness. As conscience, it knows the case in an immediately concrete manner, and at the same time the case is only as conscience knows it. Knowing is contingent insofar as it is something other than its object, but spirit certain of itself is no longer either such a contingent knowing or such a creation within itself of thoughts which themselves might differ from actuality. Rather, while the separation between the in-itself and the self has been sublated, the case is immediately within the sensuous-certainty of knowing as the case is in itself, and the case only is in itself in the way it is in this knowing. – Acting as actualization is thereby the pure form of willing. It is the mere reversal of actuality as a case which exists into an actuality which has been done, the conversion of the mere mode of objective knowing into the mode of knowing about actuality as something brought forth by consciousness. Just as sensuous-certainty is immediately incorporated, or rather is reversed, into the in-itself of spirit, this other reversal is also simple and unmediated; it is a transition through the pure concept without there being any alteration of content which would be determined by way of the interest of the consciousness which knows it. – Furthermore, conscience does not break up the circumstances of the case into a variety of duties. It does not conduct itself as the positive universal medium within which the many duties, each for itself, would acquire undisplaceable substantiality so that either no action could take place at all, because every concrete case contains opposition per se (and moral cases contain oppositions among duties), such that there would thus always be one aspect, one duty which would be violated in the determination of action – or, if action does take place, one of the conflicting duties would actually be violated. Conscience is instead the negative One, that is, the absolute self which erases all these diverse moral substances. It is simple action in accordance with duty, an action which does not fulfill just this or that duty but rather knows and does what is concretely right. Hence, in the first place conscience is moral acting as acting, into which the previous consciousness of morality, itself devoid of any deeds, has made its transition. – The concrete shape of the deed may be analyzed by different consciousnesses into a variety of properties, i.e., in this instance into a variety of moral relations, and these may be each expressed either as absolutely valid, as each must be if it is supposed to be a duty, or else as a matter up for comparison and testing. In simple moral action on the part of conscience, duties are buried so that all these individual essences are immediately aborted, and the kind of justificatory jiggling which undermines duty simply does not occur in the unwavering certainty of conscience.

In conscience there is just as little of the former uncertainty of consciousness, flittering here and there, which at one time posits so-called pure morality as external to itself and as residing in some other, holy being, and it then posits itself as the unholy being.¹⁵⁸ At another point, it then again posits moral purity as residing within itself, and it then posits that the linkage of the sensuous to the moral resides in the other being.¹⁵⁹

It disavows all the moral worldview's stances and dissemblances in that it disavows the consciousness which takes duty and actuality to be contradictory. According to this latter stance, I act morally while I am conscious to myself of accomplishing only the pure duty and of nothing else, and this means, in effect, while I do not act. But while I actually do act, I am conscious to myself of an other, of an actuality, which is there before me and of an actuality which I want to bring about, so I have a determinate end, and I fulfill a determinate duty; there is something other therein than the pure duty which was alone supposed to be kept in view. – On the other hand, conscience is the consciousness about what is going on when the moral consciousness expresses pure duty as the essence of its action [and] this pure purpose is dissemblance about the crux of the matter. This is so because the crux of the matter is this, that pure duty consists in the empty abstraction of pure thinking and that it has its reality and content only in a determinate actuality, the actuality of consciousness itself, not in the sense that is a thought-thing but rather in the sense that it is a singular individual. Conscience has its truth for itself in the immediate certainty of itself. This immediate concrete certainty of itself is the essence. If that self-certainty is considered according to the opposition of consciousness, then its own immediate singular individuality is the content of moral action, and the form of moral doing is this very self as pure movement, namely, as knowing, or as one's own conviction.

If this knowing is given a closer look according to its unity and the meaning of its moments, then we see that moral consciousness took itself only to be the in-itself, or to be essence, but as conscience, it now grasps its being-for-itself, or its own self. – The contradiction of the moral worldview dissolves itself, i.e., the difference which lay at its basis shows itself to be no difference, and it converges into pure negativity. However, this is precisely the self, that is to say, a simple self which is as much pure knowing as it is knowing of itself as this singularly individual consciousness. This self thus constitutes the content of what was formerly the empty essence, for it is the actual, which no longer has the significance of being, within its own laws, a self-sufficient nature alien to the essence. As the negative, it is the difference of the pure essence, a content, indeed, the kind of content which is valid in and for itself.

Furthermore, as self-equal pure knowing, this self is the universal pure and simple, such that it is just this knowing as its own knowing, as conviction, which is duty. Duty is no longer the universal confronting the self. Rather, duty is known to have no validity when it is separated in that way. The law now exists for the sake of the self and not the other way around, not the self existing for the sake of the law. But for that reason law and duty do not signify being-for-itself alone. Rather, they also signify being-in-itself, for on account of its self-equality, this knowing is just the in-itself. In consciousness this in-itself separates itself from that former immediate unity with being-for-itself; facing off in that way, this in-itself is being, being for others. – Duty, as duty deserted by the self, is now known to be only a moment. It has sunken from meaning the absolute essence, to meaning only “being,” which is not the self, which is not for itself, and is thus a being for others. However, for that very reason, this being for others remains an essential moment because the self, as consciousness, constitutes the opposition between being-for-itself and being for an other, and now duty, in its immediate actuality, is no longer merely abstract pure consciousness.

640. This being for others is thus the substance existing-in-itself, differentiated from the self. Conscience has not abandoned pure duty, or the abstract in-itself; rather, pure duty is the essential moment in its conducting itself as universality towards others. Conscience is the common element of self-consciousnesses, and self-consciousness is the substance in which the deed has stable existence and actuality, the moment of coming-to-be-recognized by others. Moral self-consciousness does not have this moment of being recognized,¹⁶⁰ of pure consciousness which is there,¹⁶¹ and as a result it is not acting self-consciousness, not actualizing self-consciousness. Its in-itself is, to itself, either the abstract non-actual essence, or it is being as an actuality which is not spiritual. However, the existing actuality of conscience is the kind of actuality that is a self, i.e., an existence conscious of itself, the spiritual element of coming-to-be-recognized. Hence, the doing is only the translation of its singular content into the objective element within which it is universal and is recognized, and it is just this, that the content is recognized, which makes the deed into an actuality. The action is recognized and thereby actual, because the existing actuality is immediately linked with conviction, or knowing, or because the knowing of its purpose is immediately the element of existence, universal recognition. This is so because the essence of the action, duty, consists in the conviction which conscience has about that duty; this conviction is precisely what is the in-itself; it is universal self-consciousness in itself, or being-recognized,¹⁶² and is thereby actuality. What is done out of the conviction of duty is therefore immediately the kind of deed which has stability and existence.¹⁶³ Thus, there is no longer any idle chatter about good intentions not coming to pass, or about things going badly for the good man. Rather, what is known as duty is carried out completely and becomes actual precisely because what is dutiful is what is universal for all self-consciousnesses, is what is recognized and what is thus existent. But taken separately and alone, without the content of the self, this duty is being for others, is transparent and its meaning is only that of a vacuous essentiality as such.

If we look back to the sphere where spiritual reality first emerged, we see that its concept was there the expression of individuality as what was supposed to be the in-and-for-itself. However, the shape which immediately expressed this concept was the honest consciousness which set itself in pursuit of the abstract crux of the matter. This crux of the matter was there a predicate, but in conscience it is for the first time the subject which has posited all the moments of consciousness as residing in it and for which all of these moments, namely, substantiality as such, external existence, and the essence of thinking, are contained in this certainty of itself. The crux of the matter has substantiality per se in ethical life, it has external existence in cultural formation, it has the self-knowing essentiality of thinking in morality, and in conscience it is the subject which in its own self knows these moments. However much the honest consciousness only grasps the vacuous crux of the matter, still conscience, in contrast, attains it in its fullness, something which conscience gives it by way of itself. Conscience is this power as a result of its knowing the moments of consciousness to be moments, and as their negative essence, it rules over them.

If conscience is regarded in relation to the singular determinations of the opposition which appears in acting and in relation to its consciousness about the nature of those determinations, then it conducts itself foremost as a knower vis-à-vis the actuality of the case in which action is to take place. Insofar as the moment of universality exists in this knowing, it is part and parcel of the knowing of conscientious action that it comprehensively grasp the actuality before it in an unrestricted manner and that it thus accurately knows the circumstances of the case and takes everything into consideration. However, since it is acquainted with universality as a moment, this knowing of these circumstances is thus the kind of knowing which is fully aware that it does not comprehensively grasp them, or it is aware that it is not therein conscientious. The genuinely universal and pure relation of knowing would be a relation to something non-oppositional, to itself. However, through the opposition which essentially lies within itself, acting relates itself to a negative of consciousness, to an actuality existing in itself. Vis-à-vis the simplicity of pure consciousness, the absolute other, or the multiplicity in itself, this actuality is an absolute plurality of circumstances which infinitely divides itself and spreads out backwards into its conditions, sideways into its juxtapositions, and forwards into its consequences. – The conscientious consciousness is fully aware of this nature of the crux of the matter and of its relation to it. It knows that it is not acquainted with the case in which it acts according to the terms of the universality demanded of it, and it knows that its pretense of conscientiously weighing all the circumstances is an empty matter. However, this acquaintance with and weighing of all the circumstances is not entirely absent; yet it is present only as a moment, as something which is only for others, and its incomplete knowing, because it is its own knowing, counts for it as sufficiently complete knowing.

It conducts itself in the same way with the universality of the essence, or with the determination of the content through pure consciousness – Conscience, striding forth into action, relates itself to the various aspects of the case. The case breaks up into separate elements, just as does the relation of pure consciousness to it, whereby the multiplicity of the case is a multiplicity of duties – Conscience knows that it has to choose among them and to decide, for none of them are absolute in their determinateness or in their content. Rather, only pure duty is absolute. However, in its reality, this abstractum has arrived at the point of signifying the self-conscious I. As conscience, spirit certain of itself is motionless within itself, and its real universality, or its duty, lies in its pure conviction of duty. This pure conviction as such is just as empty as pure duty; it is pure in the sense that there is nothing in it, that no determinate content is a duty. But action is supposed to occur, and it must be determined by the individual. Moreover, spirit certain of itself, in which the in-itself has arrived at the significance of the self-conscious I, knows that it has this determination, this content, in the immediate certainty of its own self. As determination and content, this certainty is natural consciousness, i.e., the impulses and inclinations. – Conscience cognizes no content as absolute for it because conscience is the absolute negativity of everything determinate. It makes its determination from itself alone, but the circle of the self into which determinateness as such falls is that of so-called sensibility, and in order to have a content provided by its immediate certainty of itself, it finds nothing else present but sensibility itself. – Everything which in previous shapes had exhibited itself as good or bad, or as law and right, is an other than the immediate certainty of itself. It is a universal which is now a being for an other, or, looked at otherwise, it is an object which, mediating consciousness with itself, comes between consciousness and its own truth and dissociates consciousness from itself instead of it, the object, being the immediacy of consciousness – However, to conscience, the certainty of itself is the pure immediate truth, and this truth is thus its immediate certainty of itself represented as content, i.e., the arbitrary free choice of the singular individual and the contingency of his unconscious natural being.

At the same time this content counts as moral essentiality, or as duty because, as was already shown in the testing of laws, pure duty is utterly indifferent to every content and is compatible with any content. Here moral essentiality has at the same time the essential form of being-for-itself, and this form of individual conviction is nothing but the consciousness of the emptiness of pure duty. The consciousness that this is only a moment, or that its substantiality is a predicate which finds its subject in the individual whose arbitrary free choice gives pure duty content, can tie every content to this form and can attach its conscientiousness to any content. – An individual increases his property in a certain way. It is a duty that each should see to the maintenance of himself and his family, and it is no less a duty that he see to the possibility of his becoming useful to his neighbors and of doing good to all those who stand in need. The individual is aware that this is a duty, for this content is immediately contained in his certainty of himself; furthermore, he clearly sees that he has fulfilled his duty in this case. Others may hold that this particular way of fulfilling one's duty is deceitful; they hold tight to a different aspect of the concrete case, but he holds tight to this aspect of the case as a result of his awareness that the increase of property is a pure and absolute duty. – In that way, what others call outrageous behavior and wrong-doing is here just fulfilling the duty of affirming one's self-sufficiency with respect to others; what they call cowardice is here the duty of preserving one's life and the possibility of being useful to one's neighbors; what those others call courage instead violates both duties. However, cowardice need not be so inept as not to know that the maintenance of life and the possibility of being useful to others are duties – it need not be so inept as not to have the conviction of the dutifulness of its action and not to know that dutifulness consists in knowing; otherwise, it would be committing the clumsy mistake of being immoral. Because morality lies in the consciousness of having fulfilled one's duty, this consciousness will not be lacking when the acting is called “cowardice” any more than when the acting is called “courage.” The abstractum called “duty” is capable of each and every content – it thus knows what it does as duty, and while it knows this, and knows that the conviction of duty is dutifulness itself, it is thus recognized by others. As a result, the action counts as valid and has actual existence.

Against this freedom, which inserts any kind of arbitrary content into the universal passive medium of pure duty and pure knowing, it is of no help to assert that another content ought instead to have been introduced at that point. This is so because whatever the content may be, each content bears the flaw of determinateness in itself, a flaw from which pure knowing is free; pure knowing can disdainfully scorn this determinateness as easily as it can incorporate each and every determinateness. Every content in this respect, being determinate, stands on the same footing with every other, even if it seems to have exactly the character of having sublated the particular within itself. It might seem that while in actual cases, duty per se estranges itself into opposition and, as a result, into the opposition of individuality and universality, the duty whose content is the universal itself immediately has, as a result, in its own self the nature of pure duty, and that therefore form and content are here completely adequate to each other such that, e.g., acting for the common good¹⁶⁴ is thus preferable to acting for the individual's good. Yet this universal duty, as the substance existing in and for itself, is that which is present as law and right and which is valid independently of the singular individual's knowing and conviction as well as his own immediate interest. It is thus that against whose form morality per se directs itself. However, as to what concerns its content, this too is something determinate to the extent that the common good is opposed to the singular individual. Thus, its law is one from which conscience knows itself to be utterly free, and it bestows on itself the absolute privilege to add, pare, and neglect, as well as to fulfill – Furthermore, according to the nature of the opposition itself, the former difference between duty versus the singular individual and duty versus the universal is thus not something fixed and final. Instead what the singular individual does for himself benefits the universal as well. The more he looks after himself, the more there is not only the greater possibility that he can be useful to others but rather his actuality itself consists only in his living and existing in interrelation with others. His individual gratification essentially signifies that he puts what is his own at the disposal of others and that he helps them to secure their own gratification. In the fulfillment of his duty to singular individuals and thus in the fulfillment of his duty to himself, the duty to the universal is also fulfilled. – Balancing and comparing duties, which would here make an entrance, would lead into calculating the advantage which would accrue to the universal from an action. However, morality would thereby in part fall prey to the necessary contingency of insight. In part, though, it is precisely the essence of conscience to cut itself off from this calculating and balancing of duties and to come to a decision solely on its own without relying on any reasons of that sort.

In this way conscience acts and sustains itself in the unity of its being-in-itself and its being-for-itself, in the unity of pure thinking and individuality, and it is spirit which is certain of itself which has its truth in its own self, inside its own self, within its knowing, and therein has its knowing of duty. As a result, it sustains itself therein, so that what is positive in the action, that is, which is the content as well as the form of duty and is the knowing of duty, is that which belongs to the self in the self's certainty of itself. However, whatever with its own in-itself wishes to face off against the self is what counts only as untrue, only as sublated, only as a moment. Hence, what counts is not universal knowing but rather conscience's acquaintance with the circumstances. It inserts into duty as universal being-in-itself the content that it takes out of its natural individuality, for the content is what is in its own self present. Through the universal medium in which it is, this content becomes the duty that it carries out, and the empty pure duty is precisely thereby posited as sublated, or posited as a moment. This content is its sublated emptiness, or the fulfillment. – But conscience is likewise free from every content; it absolves itself from every determinate duty which is supposed to be a law, and in the force of its certainty of itself, it has the majesty of absolute autarky, to bind and to undo. – This self-determination is immediately for that reason sheer dutifulness. Duty is knowing itself, but this simple selfhood is the in-itself, for this in-itself is pure self-equality, and this pure self-equality is within this consciousness.

This pure knowing is immediately being for others, for as pure self-equality, it is immediacy, or being. However, this being is at the same time the pure universal, the selfhood of All; or acting is recognized and hence is actual. This being is the element as a result of which conscience immediately stands in the relation of equality to every self-consciousness, and the meaning of this relation is not the selfless law, but that of the self of conscience.

That this right, what conscience does, is at the same time a being for others means that an inequality seems to have been introduced into conscience. The duty which it fulfills is a determinate content, and that content is indeed the self of consciousness, and in that respect, that content is its knowing of itself, its equality with itself. But when it is fulfilled, when it is placed into the universal medium of being, this equality is no longer knowing, is no longer this differentiating which just as immediately sublates its own differences. Rather, in being placed into [the sphere of] being, the difference is posited as stably existing, and the action is a determinate action, unequal to the element of everyone's self-consciousness and thus is not necessarily recognized. Both sides, the acting conscience and the universal conscience, which is the consciousness that bestows recognition¹⁶⁵ on this action as its duty, are equally free from the determinateness of this doing. On account of this freedom, the relation between the two within the common medium of their interrelation is instead a relationship of complete inequality through which consciousness, for which the action is, finds itself in complete uncertainty about the self-certain spirit which acts. This spirit acts, it posits a determinateness as existent. Others stick to this being as sticking to its truth, and in sticking to it, they are therein certain of this spirit. In that respect, this spirit has expressed what counts, to itself, as its duty. Yet it is free from any determinate duty; it is beyond the point where the others think it is actually supposed to be, and this medium of being itself¹⁶⁶ and of duty as existing in itself counts to it only as a moment. What this spirit has thus placed before them, it has again also dissembled about, or, instead, what it has done is to immediately dissemble, for its actuality is, to itself, not this duty and this proposed determination. Rather, actuality is what it has within its absolute self-certainty.

The others thus do not know whether this conscience is morally good or evil; or instead, not only can they not know this, they must also take it to be evil, for just as it is free from the determinateness of duty and from duty as existing in itself, likewise so are they. What it proposes to them, they know themselves to dissemble about it. It is the kind of thing through which only the self of an other is expressed, not their own self. Not only do they know themselves to be free from it, they must dissolve it in their own consciousness, and, for the sake of sustaining their own selves, they must nullify it through judging and explaining.

Yet conscience's action is not only this determination of being which is abandoned by the pure self. What is supposed to count and be recognized as duty is what it is solely through the knowing and conviction that it is duty, through the self's knowing itself in the deed. If the deed ceases to have this self in it itself, it ceases to be what alone is its essence. Abandoned by this consciousness, its existence would be an ordinary, common actuality, and the action would appear to us as a way of achieving one's pleasure and desire. What ought to be there¹⁶⁷ is here essentiality alone as a result of its being known as individuality's giving voice to itself. This being-known is what is recognized and is what as such that is recognized is supposed to have existence.

The self enters into existence as a self. The spirit certain of itself exists as such for others. It is not immediate action which is valid and actual; what is recognized is not the determinate, not the existent-in-itself; rather, it is solely the self knowing itself as such a self. The element of stable existence is universal self-consciousness. What enters into this element cannot be the effect of the action; the effect does not endure there and acquires no lastingness. Rather, it is only self-consciousness that is what is recognized and which achieves actuality.

Here again we see language as the existence of spirit. Language is self-consciousness existing for others. It is self-consciousness which as such is immediately present,¹⁶⁸ and as this self-consciousness, it is universal. Language is the self severing itself from itself, the self which, as the I = I, becomes objective to itself, in this objectivity likewise sustaining itself as this self, coalescing with others, and which is their self-consciousness. The self interrogates itself just as it is interrogated by others, and this interrogation is just existence which has become a self.

The content that language has acquired here is no longer the inverted and inverting, disrupted self of the world of cultural formation. Rather, it is spirit which has returned into itself, is certain of itself, certain within itself of its truth, or certain of its recognition and certain as the spirit which is recognized as this knowing. The language of ethical spirit is the law, the simple commandment, and it is the lament, which is more that of shedding a tear over necessity. Moral consciousness conversely is still mute, remains shut off and at odds with itself within its own interiority,¹⁶⁹ for as yet the self does not have any existence within that interiority. Rather, existence and the self initially stand in an external relation to each other. However, language emerges as the mediating middle between self-sufficient and recognized self-consciousnesses, and the existing self is immediately universal, multifaceted, and, within this multifacetedness, it is simple recognition.¹⁷⁰ The content of conscience's language is the self knowing itself as essence. This alone is that to which it gives voice, and this giving voice is the true actuality of the doing, is the validity of the action. Consciousness gives voice to its conviction, and this conviction is that solely within which the action is a duty. It also solely counts as duty as a result of its having given voice to the conviction, for universal self-consciousness is free from action that is only existent determinate action. To itself, the action as existence counts for nothing. Rather, what counts is the conviction that the action is a duty, and this is actual in language. –To realize the action does not mean here that one translates its content from the form of a purpose, or from being-for-itself, into the form of abstract actuality. What it means is that one translates it from the form of immediate certainty of itself which knows its own knowing, or its being-for-itself, as the essence, into the form of an assurance that consciousness has a conviction about its duty, and that as conscience, duty knows from its own self¹⁷¹ what duty is. This assurance thus assures that consciousness is convinced that its conviction is the essence.

Whether the assurance that it acts from conviction of duty is true, or whether it actually is duty that is done – these questions or doubts have no meaning when they are directed against conscience. – To ask whether the assurance is true would presuppose that the inner intention could be different from the one put forward, i.e., that the willing of the singular self could be separated from the duty, from the willing of the universal and pure consciousness. The latter could be put into words, but it is the former which would be the true motive of the action. But this difference between universal consciousness and the singular self is just what has been sublated, and whose sublation just is conscience. The immediate knowing of the self which is certain of itself is law and duty; its intention, as a result of being its own intention, is what is right, and the only requirement is that it should both know this and state its conviction that its knowing and willing are right. Giving voice to this assurance sublates the form of its particularity, and it therein recognizes the necessary universality of the self. While it calls itself conscience, it calls itself pure self-knowing and pure abstract will, i.e., it calls itself the universal knowing and willing which bestows recognition on others and which is equal to them, for they too are just this pure self-knowing and willing and for that reason, it is also recognized by them. In the willing of the self certain of itself, in this knowing that the self is the essence, lies the essence of the right. – Whoever therefore says that he is acting from conscience is speaking the truth, for his conscience is the knowing and willing self. However, it is essential that he should say this, for this self must at the same time be a universal self. It is not universal in the content of the action, for this content is on account of its determinateness in itself indifferent. Rather, the universality lies in the form of the action, and it is this form which is to be posited as actual. It is the self which as such a self is actual in language, which testifies to itself being the true, and which just in doing so recognizes all other selves and is recognized by them.

Therefore, conscience, in the majesty of its sublimity rising above determinate law and every content of duty, puts any content it likes into its knowing and willing. Conscience is the moral genius who knows the inner voice of his immediate knowing to be the divine voice, and as he is in this knowing, he just as immediately knows existence, he is the divine creative power who has the vitality of life within its concept. He equally conducts a worship service within himself, for his action is the intuiting of his own divinity.

This solitary worship service is at the same time essentially the worship service of a religious community, and pure inward self-knowing and pure inward self-interrogation advance into becoming moments of consciousness. The intuition of itself is its objective existence, and this objective element is the declaring of its knowing and willing as a universal. Through this declaring, the self becomes what is established and valid, and the action becomes the executive deed. The actuality and stable existence of its doing is universal self-consciousness, but the declaration of conscience posits the certainty of itself as the pure self and, as a result, as the universal self. Others allow the action to count as valid on account of this speech within which the self is expressed and is recognized as the essence. The spirit and the substance of their bond is thus the reciprocal assurance of both their mutual conscientiousness and their good intentions; it is the rejoicing over this reciprocal purity, the refreshment received from the glory of knowing, declaring, fostering, and cherishing such excellence. – Insofar as this conscience still differentiates its abstract consciousness from its self-consciousness, it has only a hidden life in God. God is, to be sure, immediately current to its spirit and its heart, to its own self, but what is revealed, namely, its actual consciousness and the mediating movement of this consciousness, is, to itself, something other than the hidden inwardness and the immediacy of the essence which is at the current moment. Yet in the consummation of conscience the difference between its abstract consciousness and its self-consciousness sublates itself. It knows that abstract consciousness is just this self, this its being-for-itself certain of itself, that in the immediacy of the relation of the self to the in-itself, which, posited as external to the self, is the abstract essence and is hidden from the self, the diversity [of this] is sublated. This is so because that relation is a mediating relation in which the items which are related are not one and the same, but rather, each is an other for each other, and it is only within some third [term] that each is at one with the other. However, the immediate relation in fact means nothing other than the unity. Consciousness, risen above the unthinking mode that holds these differences which are themselves no differences at all nonetheless to be differences, knows the immediacy of the presence of the essence within itself to be the unity of the essence and its own self; it knows its own self therefore to be the living in-itself; and it knows this, its knowing, to be the religion that, as intuited or existent knowing, is the speaking of the religious community about its spirit.

With that, we see self-consciousness returned back into what is innermost to itself, for which all externality as such has vanished – it has returned into the intuition of the “I = I,” within which this I is all essentiality and existence. It is immersed within this conception of itself, for it has been driven to the apex of its extremes, indeed in such a way that the differentiated moments through which it is real, or is still consciousness, are not only for us as these pure extremes but rather are what it is for itself, and what is in itself to itself, and what is existence to itself, all of which have evaporated into abstractions that no longer either have any hold on this consciousness itself nor any substance for it. Everything which hitherto had been the essence for consciousness has receded into these abstractions. – Refined into this purity, consciousness is in its poorest shape, and this poverty, which constitutes its sole possession, is in itself a disappearing. This absolute certainty in which substance has been dissolved is the absolute untruth which collapses into itself. It is absolute self-consciousness within which consciousness is swallowed up.

Taken as this submersion of consciousness inside of itself, the substance existing-in-itself is, for consciousness, knowing as its knowing. As consciousness, it is separated into the opposition between itself and the object, an opposition which, to itself, is the essence. But this object is precisely what is completely transparent, it is its own self, and its consciousness is only the knowing of itself. All life and all spiritual essentiality have receded into this self and have lost their diversity from the I-self. The moments of consciousness are therefore these extreme abstractions, neither of which holds its ground but each of which loses itself in the other and generates the other. It is the flux of the unhappy consciousness with itself, but which takes place this time inside itself, so that this time it is conscious of being the concept of reason, something which the unhappy consciousness was only in itself. Thus, as consciousness, absolute certainty of itself is immediately turned around into a fading tone, into the objectivity of its being-for-itself, but this created world is its speech, which it has just as immediately heard and whose echo is all that returns to it. That the echo returns to it does not thus mean that consciousness is therein in and for itself, for the essence is, to itself, no in-itself but rather just itself. Nor does it have existence, for what is objective does not arrive at being a negative of the actual self, just as this self does not arrive at actuality. It lacks the force to relinquish itself,¹⁷² lacks the force to make itself into a thing and to sustain being. It lives with the anxiety that it will stain the splendor of its innerness through action and existence. Thus, to preserve the purity of its heart, it flees from contact with actuality, and it steadfastly perseveres in its obstinate powerlessness to renounce its own self, a self which has been tapered to the final point of abstraction. It stably exists in its powerlessness to give itself substantiality, or to transform its thinking into being and to entrust itself to absolute difference. The hollow object which it generates to itself it thus now fills only with the consciousness of emptiness. It is a yearning which only loses itself as it becomes an essenceless object, and as it goes beyond this loss and then falls back on itself, it only finds itself as lost. – In this transparent purity of its moments it becomes an unhappy, so-called beautiful soul, and its burning embers gradually die out, and, as they do, the beautiful soul vanishes like a shapeless vapor dissolving into thin air.

This silent coalescence of the feeble essentialities of evaporated life is, however, still to be taken in the other meaning of the actuality of conscience and in the appearance of its movement, and conscience is to be examined as acting. – In the preceding, the objective moment in this consciousness determined itself as universal consciousness, and the knowing which knows itself as this self was differentiated from other selves. The language in which all of them mutually recognize each other as acting conscientiously, this universal equality, falls apart into the inequality of singular being-for-itself, and each consciousness is equally reflected out of its universality and utterly into itself. Through this, the opposition of singular individuality vis-à-vis other individuals and vis-à-vis the universal necessarily makes its entrance, and it is this relationship and its movement which is now to be examined. – Or this universality and duty has the utterly opposed meaning of determinate singular individuality exempting itself from the universal, for which pure duty is only the universality which has made its appearance on the surface and which has turned back outwards. Duty is only a matter of words and counts as a being for others. Conscience, initially directed only negatively towards duty as this determinate, present duty, knows itself to be free from it, but while conscience fills empty duty with a determinate content taken from its own self, it has the positive consciousness that it, as this self, makes itself its own content. As empty knowing, its pure self is without content and without determination. The content which it gives to its self is taken from its own self as this determinate self, or from itself as a natural individuality, and in speaking of the conscientiousness of its action, it is indeed conscious of its pure self, but in the purpose of its action as actual content of the action, it is conscious of itself as this singular individual and of the opposition between that which it is for itself and what it is for others, conscious of the opposition between universality, or duty, and consciousness of its being reflected from out of universality.

However much the opposition into which conscience enters when it acts, expressing it within its innerness, still it is also at the same time the inequality directed outwards in the element of its existence, the inequality of its particular singularity vis-à-vis other singular individuals. – Its particularity consists therein, that both moments constituting its consciousness, the self and the in-itself, each count as having unequal value; that certainty of itself is the essence vis-à-vis the in-itself or vis-à-vis the universal, which only counts as a moment. Confronting this inward determination is thus the element of existence or the universal consciousness, to which universality, duty, is instead the essence; in contrast, singular individuality, which is for itself vis-à-vis the universal, only counts as a sublated moment. To this adherence to duty [the universal consciousness], the first consciousness counts as evil because it is the inequality between its inwardly-turned-being and the universal, and while the latter at the same time also pronounces its doing as equality with itself, as duty and conscientiousness, to the universal consciousness it counts as hypocrisy.

The movement of this latter opposition is initially the formal establishment of equality between what evil is within itself and what it pronounces; it must come to light that it is evil and thus that its existence is equal to its essence. The hypocrisy must be unmasked. – This return of inequality, which is present within hypocrisy, into equality is not something which has already taken place, so that hypocrisy, as people commonly say, as a result demonstrates its respect for both duty and virtue by seeming to be both of them and then using that semblance as a mask to hide itself from its own consciousness no less than from the consciousness of others, and in which recognition of the opposition would in itself contain the equality and agreement of the two. – Yet at the same time, hypocrisy is just as much beyond this verbal recognition and is reflected into itself; and in using the existent-in-itself only as a being for others, hypocrisy's own contempt for what exists-in-itself and the exhibition of its total lack of essence¹⁷³ is there for all to see. For what lets itself be used as an external instrument shows itself as a thing which has within itself no proper weight of its own.

This equality is also brought about neither by the evil consciousness in its one-sided insistence on itself nor by the judgment of the universal. – However much the former denies itself vis-à-vis the consciousness of duty, and however much it asserts that what the latter pronounces to be wickedness, absolute inequality with the universal, is instead as an action according to inner law and conscience, still there remains in this one-sided assurance of equality its inequality with the other, for this other neither believes his assurance nor does it give it any recognition. Or, since the one-sided insistence on one extreme dissolves itself, evil would as a result confess to being evil, but in so doing would immediately sublate itself and thus would not be hypocrisy, nor would it have unmasked itself as such hypocrisy. It in fact confesses to being evil through its assertion that it acts according to its own inner law and conscience in opposition to what is recognized as universal. If this law and conscience were not the law of its singular individuality and its own arbitrary free choice, then it would not be something inward, not be something its own, but instead be what is universally recognized. Whoever for that reason says that he acts with regard to others according to his own law and his own conscience is saying in fact that he is mistreating them. However, actual conscience is not this insistence on knowing and willing which opposes itself to the universal; rather, the universal is the element of its existence, and its language pronounces its doing as a recognized duty.

The insistence on the part of the universal consciousness that it make its own judgment is even less so the unmasking and dissolution of hypocrisy. – While universal consciousness proclaims hypocrisy to be bad, vile, etc., in making such a judgment, it appeals to its own law just as the evil consciousness appealed to its own law. This is so because the former law comes on the scene in opposition to the latter, and as a result it comes on the scene as a particular law. It therefore has no advantage over the other law; on the contrary, it legitimizes this other law, and in its zeal, it does exactly the opposite of what it intends to do – which is to say that it shows that what it called true duty and which is supposed to be universally recognized, is what is not universally recognized, and thereby it concedes to the other an equal right of being-for-itself.

However, this judging has at the same time another aspect to it by which it becomes the introduction to the dissolution of the present opposition. – Consciousness of the universal does not conduct itself as actual and as acting with regard to the first consciousness – for this latter is instead the actual – but rather it conducts itself in opposition to the first consciousness, as what is not caught in the opposition of individuality and universality. It remains within the universality of thinking, conducts itself as interpreting,¹⁷⁴ and its first action is only that of judgment. Through this judgment, it now places itself, as was just noted, alongside the first consciousness, and through this equality, the latter comes to an intuition of itself in this other consciousness. This is so because the consciousness of duty conducts itself as apprehending, passive consciousness, and it is thereby in contradiction with itself as the absolute willing of duty, and in contradiction with itself as that which determines itself quite simply by its own self. It preserves itself well in its purity, for it does not act; it is the hypocrisy which wants to know that its judging is to be taken as the actual deed and which, instead of proving its uprightness in action, proves it by means of speaking about its splendid dispositions. It is thus constituted in entirely the same way as is the one that is reproached for taking its duty to consist in its talking about its duty. In both of them, the aspect of actuality is equally distinguished from that of speech; in one, through the self-interested ends of action, and in the other, through the lack of action at all, action of which the necessity lies in talking about duty itself, for duty without deeds has no meaning at all.

However, judging is also to be regarded as a positive action on the part of thought, and it has a positive content, and through this aspect, the contradiction which is present in the apprehending consciousness and its equality with the first consciousness become even more complete. – The acting consciousness pronounces its determinate doing to be duty, and the judgmental consciousness cannot deny it this, for duty itself is the form capable of all content, contentless form – or, it is concrete action which is in its own self diverse in its many-sidedness. It has both the universal aspect, which is the aspect taken as duty, and just as much in it as the particular aspect, which constitutes the individual's share and interest. Now, the judging consciousness stops short neither at the former aspect of duty nor the agent's knowing that this is his duty, the relationship and the standing of his actuality. Rather, it holds on to the other aspect, spins the action off into the inward realm, and explains the action according to an intention and a self-serving motive which is different from the action itself. As every action is capable of being considered from the point of view of dutifulness, equally so can every action be considered from the point of view of particularity, for as an action it is the actuality of an individual. – This assessment thus puts the action outside of its existence and reflects it into the inner, or into the form of its own particularity. If the action is accompanied by fame, then it knows this inwardness to be a craving for fame. – If the action is wholly in conformity with the social estate of the individual, if it does not go beyond that status, and if this individuality's social estate is not an external determination tacked onto him but is the very conduit by which this universality fills itself out, and if as a result the individuality shows himself to be fitting for an even higher social estate, then the judgment knows his inwardness as ambition for honor, and so forth. While in the action itself, the agent achieves an intuition of himself in [the realm of] objectivity, or he arrives at a feeling for his own self in his existence and thus obtains gratification, the judgment knows his inwardness to be a drive towards his own happiness, even if this happiness were to consist only in inner moral vanity, in the enjoyment of a consciousness of his own excellence, and in the foretaste of a hope for a future happiness. – No action can escape being judged in such a way, for duty for duty's sake, this pure purpose, is the non-actual. It has its actuality in what individuality does, and as a result, the action has the aspect of particularity in itself. – No man is a hero to his valet, but not because that man is not a hero, but rather because the latter is – a valet, a person with whom the hero deals not as a hero but as someone who eats, drinks, gets dressed, in general in the singularity of the hero's needs and ideas.¹⁷⁵ For that kind of judgmental assessment, there is no action for which such judgmental assessment cannot oppose the aspect of the singularity of individuality to the action's universal aspect, and there is no action in which it cannot play the part of the moral valet towards the actor.

The judging consciousness is itself thereby base because it divides up the action, and it both brings out and holds onto the action's inequality with itself. Furthermore, it is hypocrisy because he pretends that such judgment is not only another manner of being evil but is rather itself the rightful consciousness of action. In his non-actuality and in the vanity he has in being such a faultfinder,¹⁷⁶ he places himself far above the deeds it excoriates, and he wants to know that his speech, which is utterly devoid of any deeds, is to be taken as a superior actuality. – In thereby making himself equal to the agent about whom it is so judgmental, the judging consciousness is thus known¹⁷⁷ by that consciousness to be the same as himself. The latter consciousness not only finds himself to have been taken by the former, the judging consciousness, as somebody alien and unequal to him, but rather instead finds that the judging consciousness, according to his own constitution, is equal to himself. Intuiting this equality and giving voice to it, he confesses this to the other, and he equally expects that the other, just as he has in fact placed himself on an equal plane to him, will reciprocate his speech and in that speech will pronounce their equality so that recognitional existence¹⁷⁸ will make its appearance. His confession is not an abasement, nor a humiliation, nor is it a matter of his casting himself aside in his relationship with the other, for this declaration is not something one-sided through which he would posit his inequality with the other, but rather it is solely on account of the intuition of his equality with the other that he gives voice to himself, that in his confessions he gives voice on his own part to their equality, and he does this because language is the existence of spirit as the immediate self. He thus expects that the other will contribute his own part to this existence.

But following on the admission of the one who is evil – I am he – there is no reciprocation of an equal confession. This was not what was meant by the judgment, no, quite the contrary! The judging consciousness repels this community from itself and is the hard heart which is for itself and which rejects any continuity with the other. – The scene is hereby reversed. The one who confessed sees himself repulsed and sees the other as in the wrong, sees the other as somebody who refuses his own inwardness making the step into the existence of speech and as somebody who contrasts the beauty of his own soul to the soul of the one who is evil. He sees the judging consciousness as somebody who sets his own stiff-necked self-consistent character in opposition to the confessing consciousness, and he sees the utter silence of someone who keeps himself locked up within himself, who refuses to be cast aside vis-à-vis an other. What is posited here is the highest indignation of the spirit certain of itself, for, as this simple knowing of the self, this spirit intuits itself in others, namely, it does so in such a way that the external shape of this other is not, as it was in material wealth, the essenceless itself, not a thing. On the contrary, it is thought, knowing itself which is contrasted with that spirit; it is this absolutely fluid continuity of pure knowing which refuses to put itself into communication with him – with him, who in his confession had already renounced his separate being-for-itself and had posited himself as sublated particularity and thereby posited himself in continuity with the other, posited himself as the universal. But the other retains in its own self its non-communicative being-for-itself; in the one confessing, it retains just the same non-communicative being-for-itself, which the latter has already cast off. In that way, the hard heart shows itself to be the consciousness forsaken by spirit, the consciousness denying spirit, for it does not recognize¹⁷⁹ that in its absolute certainty of itself, spirit has a mastery over every deed and over all actuality, and that spirit can discard them and make them into something that never happened. At the same time, the hard heart does not recognize¹⁸⁰ the contradiction it commits when it does not let the discarding that took place in speech be the true discarding, whereas it itself has the certainty of its spirit not in an actual action but in its innerness and has its existence in the speech in which its judgment is phrased. It is therefore just the hard heart itself which is putting obstacles in the way of the other's return from the deed into the spiritual existence of speech and into the equality of spirit, and through its hardness of heart, it engenders the inequality which is still present.

Inasmuch as the self-certain spirit as a beautiful soul does not now possess the force to relinquish¹⁸¹ itself of the self-knowing holding onto itself, it cannot arrive at an equality with the consciousness it has repulsed, and thus it cannot arrive at the intuited unity of itself in an other, and it cannot arrive at existence. Hence, the equality comes about only negatively, as a spirit-less being. The beautiful soul, lacking all actuality, caught in the contradiction between its pure self and its necessity to empty itself into being and to turn itself around into actuality, in the immediacy of this opposition to which it adheres – in an immediacy which is alone the mediating middle and the reconciliation of an opposition which has been intensively raised to the point of its pure abstraction, and which is itself pure being or empty nothingness – is thus, as the consciousness of this contradiction in its unreconciled immediacy, shattered into madness and melts into a yearning, tubercular consumption. It thereby in fact gives up its severe adherence to its being-for-itself but engenders only the spiritless unity of being.

The true, namely, the self-conscious and existing conciliation,¹⁸² is according to its necessity already contained in the preceding. The breaking of the hard heart and its elevation to universality is the same movement which was expressed in the consciousness that confessed. The wounds of the spirit heal and leave no scars behind; it is not the deed which is imperishable, but rather the deed is repossessed by spirit into itself; the aspect of singular individuality, whether present in the deed as intention or as existing negativity and limitation to the deed is what immediately vanishes. The actualizing self, the form of its action, is only a moment of the whole, and is equally the knowing which through judgment determines and assigns the difference between the singular and the universal aspects of action. The former evil consciousness posits this relinquishing of itself, or posits itself as a moment enticed into a confessional existence through the intuition of itself in an other. However, to this other, the latter consciousness, its one-sided, unrecognized judgment must break, just as to the former, its one-sided, unrecognized existence of particular being-for-itself has to break. As the former exhibits the power of spirit over its actuality, the latter exhibits the power of spirit over its determinate concept.

However, the latter renounces the divisive thought and the rigidity of its being-for-itself holding fast to itself for the reason that it in fact intuits itself in the first agent. This first subject, which casts its actuality aside, makes itself into a sublated This,¹⁸³ and as a result exhibits itself in fact as universal. It turns out of its external actuality back into itself as essence, and the universal consciousness thus cognizes itself therein. – The forgiveness it extends to the first is the renunciation of itself, of its non-actual essence, an essence which it equates with this other consciousness which was actual action, and it bestows recognition as good on what thought had determined acting to be, namely, evil; or, instead, it lets go of this difference between determinate thought and its determining judgment existing-for-itself, just as the other lets go of its own, existing-for-itself, determining of action. – The word of reconciliation is the existing spirit which immediately intuits in its opposite the pure knowing of itself as the universal essence, intuits it in the pure knowing of itself as singular individuality existing absolutely inwardly¹⁸⁴ – a reciprocal recognition which is absolute spirit.

Absolute spirit comes into existence only at the point where its pure knowing of itself is the opposition and flux of itself with itself. Knowing that its pure knowing is the abstract essence, it is this duty knowingly¹⁸⁵ in absolute opposition to the knowing that knows itself, as the absolute singular individuality of the self, as the essence. The former is the pure continuity of the universal which knows singular individuality knowing itself as the essence as nullity in itself, as evil. However, the latter is the absolute discretion which knows itself absolutely in its pure oneness, and it knows the universal as the non-actual and as what is only for others. Both aspects are refined into this purity within which, in the aspects themselves, there is no longer existence devoid of self, no longer the negative of consciousness, but rather within which that former duty is the self-consistent character of its knowing-of-itself. This evil has its purpose just as much in its inwardly-turned-being¹⁸⁶ and its actuality in its speech. The content of this speech is the substance of its stable existence; the speech is the assurance of spirit's certainty in its inward turn. – Each of these self-certain spirits has no other end than its pure self and has no other reality and existence other than just this pure self. However, they are still different, and the difference is absolute because it is posited as lying in this element of the pure concept. The difference is also absolute not only for us but also for the concepts themselves which stand in this opposition. For these concepts are indeed determinate against each other, but at the same time they are in themselves universal such that they fill out the whole range of the self, and this self has no other content than this, its own determinateness, a determinateness which neither goes beyond the self nor is more restricted than it, for one of them, namely, the absolutely universal, is just as much pure self-knowing as is the other, the absolute discretion of singular individuality, and both are only this pure self-knowing. Both determinatenesses are thus the pure, knowing¹⁸⁷ concepts whose determinateness itself is immediately knowing, or whose relationship and opposition is the I. For-each-other, they are thereby these utter opposites. It is the completely inner which has entered into confrontation with itself and has entered into existence. They constitute pure knowing, which, through this opposition, is posited as consciousness. But it is still not yet self-consciousness. It has its actualization in this opposition's movement, for this opposition is instead itself the indiscrete continuity and equality of the “I = I.” Each of the I's, for itself just through the contradiction of its pure universality which at the same time strives against its equality with the other and separates itself from it, sublates itself in its own self. Through this relinquishing,¹⁸⁸ this knowing, which is estranged in its own existence, returns back into the unity of the self. It is the actual I, the universal self-knowing in its absolute opposite, in the existing knowing that has taken the inward turn, which, according to the purity of its separated inwardly-turned-being, is itself the completed universal. The reconciling yes, in which both I's let go of their opposed existence, is the existence of the I extended into two-ness, which therein remains the same as itself¹⁸⁹ and which has the certainty of itself in its complete self-relinquishing and in its opposite. – It is the God that appears¹⁹⁰ in the midst of those who know themselves as pure knowing.