have validity as essential realities of consciousness, and the process of testing likewise does not hold good as an activity inside consciousness. Rather, these moments, when they appear directly as a reahty each by itself, express in the one case the illegitimate estabhshment and mere de facto existence of actual laws, and in the other an equally illegitimate independence and detachment from them. The law as determinate has an accidental content: this means here that it is a law made by a particular individual conscious of an arbitrary content. To legislate immediately in that way is thus tyrannical insolence and wickedness, which makes caprice into a law, and morality into obedience to such caprice — obedience to laws which are merely laws and not at the same time commands. So, too, the second process, testing the laws, so far as it is taken by itself, means moving the immovable, and the insolence of know- ledge, which treats absolute laws in a spirit of intel- lectual detachment, and takes them for a caprice that is alien and external to it.
In both forms these moments are negative in rela- tion to the substance of the moral hfe, to the real spiritual nature. In other words, the substance does not find in them its reality: but instead conscious- ness contains the substance still in the form of its own immediacy; and the substance is, as yet, only a process of willing and knowing on the part of a given particular individual, i.e. the " ought " of an un- real command and a knowledge of formal universality. But since these modes were cancelled, consciousness has passed back into the universal and those opposi- tions have vanished. The spiritual reality is actual sub- stance precisely through these modes not holding good 424 Phenomenology of Mind individually, but merely as cancelled and transcended; and the unity where they are merely moments is the self of consciousness which is henceforth affirmed and estabhshed within the spiritual reality, and makes that spirit concrete, actual, and self-conscious.
Spiritual reality {das geistige Wesen) is thus, in the first place, for self-consciousness in the shape of a law implicitly existuig. The universahty present in the process of testing, which was of a formal kind and not inherently existent, is transcended. The law is, too, an eternal law, which does not have its ground in the will of a given individual, but has a being all its own {an und fiir sich), the pure and absolute will of all which takes the form of immediate existence. This will is, again, not a conunand which merely ought to be; it is and has validity; it is the universal ego of the categorj^, ego which is immediately reaUty, and the world is only this reality. Since, however, this exist- ing law is absolutely vahd, the obedience given by self-consciousness is not service rendered to a master, whose orders might be mere caprice and in which it might not recognise its own nature. On the con- trary, the laws are thoughts of its own absolute con- sciousness, thoughts which are its own immediate posses- sion. Moreover, it does not believe in them, for beUef, while it no doubt sees the essential nature, still gazes at an alien essence — not its own. The ethical self-consciousness is directly at one with the essential reality, in virtue of the universality of its own self. Belief, on the other hand, begins with a particular consciousness; it is a process in which this consciousness is always approaching this imity, without ever being able to find itself at home with its real Reason as Testing Laws 425 nature, its true essence. The above consciousness, on the other hand, has transcended itself as particular, this mediating process is completed, and only because of this, is it immediate self-consciousness of ethical substance.
The distinction, then, of self-consciousness from the essential nature (Wese^i) is completely transparent. Because of this the distinctions found within that nature itself are not accidental characteristics. On the contrary, because of the unity of the essence with self- consciousness (from which alone discordance, incon- gruity, might have come), they are articulated groups (Massen) of the unity permeated by its own life, unsundered spirits transparent to each other, stainless forms and shapes of heaven, that preserve amidst their differences the untarnished innocence and concord of their essential nature.
Self-consciousness, again, stands likewise in a simple and clear relation to those different laws. They are and nothing more — this is what constitutes the con- sciousness of its relation to them. Thus, Antigone takes them for the unwritten and unerring law of the gods — " Not now, indeed, nor yesterday, but for aye It lives, and no man knows what time it came." * They are. When I ask for their origin, and confine them to the point whence they arose, that puts me beyond them, for it is I who am now the universal, while they are the conditioned and hmited. If they are to get the approval and sanction of my insight, I have already shaken their immovable nature, their inherent constancy, and regarded them as something 426 Phenomenology of Mind which is perhaps true, but possibly may also be not true, so far as I am concerned. True ethical senti- ment consists just in holding fast and unshaken by what is right, and abstaining altogether from what would move or shake it or derive it. Suppose a deposit has been made over to me on trust, it is the property of another, and I recognise it because it is so, and remain inunovable in this relation towards it. But if I keep the deposit for myself, then, according to the principle I use in testing laws — tautology — I un- doubtedly do not commit a contradiction; for in that case I do not regard it any longer as the property of another. To keep anj^thing which I do not look on as the property of some one else is perfectly consistent. Changing the point of view is not contradiction; for what we have to do with is not the point of view, but the object and content, which is not to contradict itself. Just as I can — as I do, when I give something away in a present — alter the view that something is mine into the view that it is the property of another, with- out being thereby guilty of a contradiction, so too I can proceed the other way about. It is not, then, because I find something not contradicting itself that it is right; but it is right because it is the right. That something is the property of another, this Ues at the basis of what I do. I have not to " reason why," nor to seek out or hit upon thoughts of all kinds, con- nections, aspects; I have to think neither of giving laws nor of testing them. By all such thought- processes on my part I should stultify that relation, since in point of fact I could, if I hked, make the oppo- site suit my indeterminate tautological knowledge just as well, and make that the law. But whether this or Reason as Testing Laws 427 the opposite determination is the right, that is settled just as it stands {an und fiir sich). I might, for my own part, have made the law whichever I wanted, and neither of them just as well, and am, by my be- ginning to test them, thereby already on an immoral track. That the right is there for me just as it stands — this places me within the substance of ethical reality: and in this way that substance is the essence of self- consciousness. But self-consciousness, again, is its actualisation and its existence, its self and its will.
PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND (BB) SPIRIT * [In the preceding section there is analysed the attempt on the part of individuality to operate as its own legislator and judge of laws holding for individuals. Individuality may claim the privilege of enunciating laws universal in character but having their source and inspiration solely in the single individual. Such laws can at best only be regulative and cannot be constitutive of the substance of individuality; for the sub- stance of individuality necessarily involves other individuals within it. In short individuality is itself only realised as a part of a concrete whole of individuals: its life is drawn from common life in and with others. To attempt to enunciate laws from itself as if it could create the conditions of its own inherent universality can only issue in one result: laws are furnished without the content which gives those laws any meaning, or else the laws and the content remain from first to last external to one another. But if laws are purely formal, they cease to be "laws," i.e. constitutive conditions of individuality. Hence the attempt above described is sure to break down by its own futility. What is wanted to give the laws meaning is the concrete substance of social life: and when this concrete substance is provided ipso facto the attempt of individuality to create laws disappears, for these laws are already found in operation in social life. Only such laws have reality. But this involves the further step that in- dividuality is only realised, only finds its true universal content, in and with the order of a society. Here alone is individuality what it is in truth, at once a particular focus of self-consciousness, and a realisation of universal mind. This condition where individuality is conscious of itself only in and with others, and conscious of the common life as its own, is the stage of spiritual existence. Spiritual existence and social life thus go together. The following section begins the analysis of this phase of experience, which extends from the simplest form of sociality — the Family — up to the highest experience of universal mind — Keligioii.
The immediately succeeding section may be taken as the keystone of t" e whole arch of experience traversed in the Phenomenology. Here it is pointed out that all the preceding phases of experience have not merely been preparing the way for what is to follow, but that the various aspects, hitherto treated as separate moments of experience, are in reality abstrac- tions from the life of concrete spirit now to be discussed and analysed.
It is noteworthy that from this point onwards the argument is less negative in its result either directly or indirectly, and is more systematic and constructive. This is no doubt largely because hitherto individual mind as such has been under review, and this is an abstraction from social mind or spiritual existence.]
* The term " Spirit " seems better to render the word " Geist " used here, than the word " mind '' would do. Up to this stage of experience the word "mind" is sufficient to convey the meaning. But spirit is mind at a much higher level of existence.
VI SPIRIT T3 EASON is spirit, when its certainty of being all reality JL\ has been raised to the level of truth, and reason is consciously aware of itself as its own world, and of the world as itself. The development of spirit was indicated in the iTnTnp.fHfl.tp.ly preceding movement of mind, where the object of consciousness, the category pure and simple, rose to be the notion of reason. When reason " observes/' this pure unity of ego and existence, the unity of subjectivity and objectivity, of for-itself-ness and in-itself-ness — this unity is immanent, has the character of implicitness or of being; and consciousness of reason finds itself. But the true nature of " observa- tion " is rather the transcendence of this instinct of finding its object lying directly at hand, and passing beyond this unconscious state of existence. The directly perceived (angeschauf) category, the thing simply "found," enters consciousness as the self-existence of the ego, — ego, which now knows itself in the objective realit)', and knows itself there as the self. But this feature of the category, viz. of being for-itself as opposed to being immanent within itself, is equally one-sided, and a moment that cancels itself. The category therefore gets for consciousness the character which it possesses in its universal truth — it is self-contained Spirit 431 essential reality (an und fursichseyndes Weseri). This character, still abstract, which constitutes the nature of absolute fact, of "fact itself," is to begin with " spiritual reality " (das geistige Wesen): and its mode of consciousness is here a formal] \cnooo |^ge»f that reahty, a knowledge which is occupied with the varied and manifold content thereof. This consciousness is still, in point of fact, a particular individual distinct from the general substance, and either prescribes arbitrary laws or pretends to possess within its own knowledge as such the laws as they absolutely are (an und fur sick), and takes itself to be the power that passes judgment on them. Or again, looked at from the side of the sub- stance, this is seen to be the self-contained and self- sufficient spiritual reality, which is not yet a conscious- ness of its own self. The self-contained and self-suffi- cient reality, however, which is at once aware of being actual in the form of consciousness and presents itself to itself, is Spirit.
Its essential spirtual being (Wesen) has been above designated as the ethical substance; spirit, however, is concrete ethical actuality (Wirklichkeit). Spirit is the self of the actual consciousness, to which spirit stands opposed, or rather which appears over against itself, as an objective actual world that has lost, however, all sense of strangeness for the self, just as the self has lost all sense of having a dependent or independent existence by itself, cut off and separated from that world. Being substance and universal self-identical permanent essence (Wesen), spirit is the immovable irreducible basis and the starting point for the action of all and every one; it is their purpose and their goal, because the ideally implicit nature (Ansich) of all self-conscious- 432 Phenomenology of Mind nesses. This substance is likewise the universal product, wrought and created by the action of each and all, and giving them unity and likeness and identity of meaning; for it is self -existence (Fursichseyri), the self, action. Qua substance^seKrvY- ^ oHibending righteous self-same- ness, self -identity; but qua for-itself, self-existent and self-determined (Fursichseyri), its continuity is resolved into discrete elements, it is the self-sacrificing soul of goodness, the benevolent essential nature, in which each fulfils his own special work, rends the continuum of the universal substance, and takes his own share of it. This resolution of the essence into individual forms is just the aspect of the separate action and the separate self of all the several individuals; it is the moving soul of the ethical substance, the resultant universal spiritual being. Just because this substance is a being resolved in the self, it is not a lifeless essence, but actual and alive.
Spirit is thus the self-supporting absolutely real ultimate being (Weseri). All the previous modes of consciousness are abstractions from it: they are constituted by the fact that spirit analyses itself, distinguishes its moments, and halts at each individual mode in turn. The isolating of such moments pre- supposes spirit itself and requires spirit for its subsist- ence, in other words, this isolation of modes only exists within spirit, which is existence. Taken in isolation they appear as if they existed as they stand. But their advance and return upon their real ground and essential being showed that they are merely moments or vanishing quantities; and this essential being is precisely this move- ment and resolution of these moments. Here, where spirit, the reflection of these moments into itself, has Spirit 433 become established, our reflection may briefly recall them in this connexion: they were consciousness, self- consciousness, and reason. Spirit is thus Consciousness in general, which contains sense-experience, perception and understanding, so far as in analysing its own self it holds fast by the moment of being a reality objective to itself, and by abstraction eliminates the fact that this reality is its own self objectified, its own self-existence. When again it holds fast by the other abstract moment produced by analysis, the fact that its object is its own self become objective to itself, is its self-existence, then it is Self -consciousness. But as immediate consciousness of its inherent and its explicit being, of its immanent self and its objective self, as the unity of consciousness and self-consciousness, it is that type of consciousness which h * Reason: it is the consciousness which, as the word have " indicates, has the object in a shape which is implicitly and inherently rational, or is cate- gorised, but in such a way that the object is not yet taken by the consciousness in question to have the value of a category. Spirit here is that consciousness from the immediately preceding consideration of which we have arrived at the present stage. Finally, when this reason, which spirit " has," is seen by spirit to be reason which actually is, to be reason which is actual in spirit, and is its world, then spirit has come to its truth; it is spirit, the essential nature of ethical life actually existent.
Spirit, so far as it is the immediate truth, is the ethical life of a nation: — the individual, which is a world. It has to advance to the consciousness of what it is immediately; it has to abandon and transcend the beautiful simplicity of ethical life, and get to a VOL. II.— C 434 Phenomenology of Mind knowledge of itself by passing through a series of stages and forms. The distinction between these and those that have gone before consists in their being real spiritual individualities (Geister), actualities proper, and instead of being forms of consciousness, they are forms of a world.
The living ethical world is spirit in its truth. As it first comes to an abstract knowledge of its essential nature, ethical life (Sittlichkeit) is destroyed in the formal universality of right or legality (Recht). Spirit, being now sundered within itself, traces one of its worlds in the element of its objectivity as in a crass solid actuality; this is the realm of Culture and Civilisation; while over against this in the element of thought is traced the world of Belief or Faith, the realm of the Inner Life and Truth (Wesen). Both worlds -However, when in the grip of the notion — when gasped by spirit which, after this loss of self through self- diremption, penetrates itself, — are thrown into con- fusion and revolutionised through individual Insight (Einsickt), and the general diffusion of this attitude, known as the " Enlightenment " (Aufkldrung). And the realm which had thus been divided and expanded into the "present " and the "remote beyond," into.the "here" and the " yonder," turns back into self -consciousness. This self-consciousness, again, taking now the form of Morality (the inner moral life) apprehends itself as the essential truth, and the real essence as its actual self: no longer puts its world and its ground and basis away outside itself, but lets everything fade into itself, and in the form of Conscience (Gewissen) is spirit sure and certain (gewiss) of itself.
The ethical world, the world rent asunder into the Spirit 435 " here " and the " yonder," and the moral point of view (moralische Weltanschauung) are, then, individual forms of spirit (Geister) whose process and whose return into the self of spirit, a self simple and self-existent (fursichseynd), will be developed. When these attain their goal and final result, the actual self-consciousness of Absolute Spirit will make its appearance.
A OBJECTIVE SPIRIT,* — THE ETHICAL ORDER!
Spirit, in its ultimate simple truth, is consciousness, and breaks asunder its moments from one another. An act divides spirit into spiritual substance on the one side, and consciousness of the substance on the other; and divides the substance as well as conscious- ness. The substance appears in the shape of a universal inner nature and purpose standing in contrast to itself qua particularised reality. The middle or mediating term, infinite in character, is self-consciousness, which, being implicitly the unity of itself and that substance, becomes so, now, explicitly (fur sick), unites the universal inner nature and its particular realisation, raises the latter to the former and becomes ethical action: and, on the other hand, brings the former down to the latter and carries out the purpose, the substance presented merely in thought. In this way it brings to light the unity of its self and the substance, and produces this unity in the form of a "work" done, and thus as actual concrete fact (WirTdichkeit).
When consciousness breaks up into these elements, the simple substance has in part preserved the attitude of opposition to self-consciousness; in part it thereby manifests in itself the very nature of consciousness, which consists in distinguishing its own content within * Der wahre Geist. t Sittlichkeit.
Objective Spirit 437 itself, — manifests a world articulated into separate areas. The substance is thus an ethical being split up into distinct elemental forms, a human and a divine law. In the same way, the self-conscious- ness appearing over against the substance assigns itself, in virtue of its inner nature, to one of these powers, and, qua involving knowledge, gets broken up into ignorance of what it is doing on the one hand, and knowledge of this on the other, a knowledge which for that reason proves a deception. It learns, therefore, through its own act at once the contradictory nature of those powers into which the inner substance divided it- self, and their mutual overthrow, as well as the contra- diction between its knowledge of the ethical character of its act and what is truly and essentially ethical, and so finds its own destruction. In point of fact, however, the ethical substance has by this process become actual concrete self-consciousness: in other words this parti- cular self has become self-sufficient and self-dependent (An und Fursichseyenderi), but precisely thereby the ethical order has been overthrown and destroyed.
a THE ETHICAL WORLD: LAW HUMAN AND DIVINE: MAN AND WOMAN [The first step in the analysis of spirit is to take spirit as a realised actual social order, immediately given as a historical fact, and present directly to the minds of the individuals composing it. This is social life as an estab- lished routine of human adjustments, where the natural characteristics and constitution of its moral individuals are absorbed and built into the single substance of the living social whole. It is spirit as an objectively embodied whole of essentially spiritual individuals, without any con- sciousness of opposition to one another or to the whole, and with an absolute unbroken sense of their own security and fulfilment within the substance of social mind. It is spirit at the level of naive acqui- escence in the law and order of conventional life.
But such a self-complete type of experience has various levels of realisation. It cannot exist except through the union of opposing elements; and the central principle of all experience, self-consciousness, which assumes here such a concrete form, has abundant material on which to exercise its function of creating and imiting distinctions. The first level is determined by the fact that the substance of social life is consti- tuted out of the quasi-natural phenomena of human genus and species, of race and nationality, on the one hand, and the purely natural element of specialised individual sex on the other. These two aspects go together; the sex-relations of individuals maintain race and nationality, the nation lives in and through its sexually distinct individuals. The social order as an order is realised and maintained in the medium of these elements. The fact that this order is an order of universal mind gives it a perma- nence, an inviolability, an absoluteness, which are inseparable from it, so inseparable that the order is looked on as having its roots in the Absolute Mind, and as deriving its authority from it. The social order on this aspect consists of a divinely established and divinely sanctioned regime; the gods are the guardians of the city, of the hearth and the home. On the other hand the expression of this order varies, and is enunciated from time to time in the history of a community. The order in this sense is made by man; the law of the social order thus becomes a human law, determined by human conditions and human ends; it is a round of conventions and customs. These two forms of order are inseparable in the life of a community, and they subsist together and side