stance qua particular consciousness. Their universal actuality is the nation and the family; while they get their natural self, and their operative individuality, in man and woman. Here in this content of the ethical world, we see attained those purposes which the previous insubstantial modes of conscious life set before them. What Reason apprehended only as an object, has become Self-consciousness, and what self-consciousness merely contained within it is here explicit true reality. What Observation knew, — an object given externally and picked up, and one in the constitution of which the sub- ject knowing had no share, — is here a given ethical con- dition, a custom found lying ready at hand, but a reality whifch is at the same time the deed and the product of the subject finding it. The individual who seeks the " pleasure " of enjoying his particular individuality, finds it in the family life, and the " necessity "* in which that pleasure passes away is his own self-consciousness as a citizen of his nation. Or, again, it is knowing the " la\v of his own heart "f as the law of all hearts, know- ing the consciousness of self to be the recognised and universal ordinance of society: it is " virtue, "J which enjoys the fruits of its own sacrifice, which brings about what it sets out to do, viz. to bring the essential nature into the light of the actual present, — and its enjoyment lies in this universal life. Finally, consciousness of " fact a.s such " (der Sache selbst) § gets satisfaction in the real sub. tance, which contains and maintains in positive form tt » abstract aspects of that empty category. That su', stance finds a genuine content in the powers of the i chical order, a content that takes the place of those iasubstantial commands which the " healthy 456 Phenomenology of Mind human reason "* wanted to give and to know: and in consequence thus gets a concrete inherently determinate standard for " testing," not the laws, but what is done. The whole is a stable equilibrium of all the parts, and each part a spirit in its native element, a spirit which does not seek its satisfaction beyond itself, but has the satisfaction within itself for the reason that itself is in this balanced equipoise with the whole. This condition of stable equilibrium can, of course, only be living by inequality arising within it, and being brought back again to equipoise by Righteousness and Juscice. Justice, however, is neither an alien principle (Wesen) holding somewhere remote from the present, nor the realisation (unworthy of the name of justice) of mutual malice, treachery, ingratitude, etc., which, in the un- intelligent way of chance and accident, would fulfil the law by a kind of irrational connection with- out any controlling idea, action by commission and omission, without any consciousness of what was involved. On the contrary, being justice in human law, it brings back to the whole, to the universal 5fe of society, what has broken away separately from the harmony and equilibrium of the whole: — the ic depen- dent classes and individuals. In this way justice is the government of the nation, and is its all-pervading essen- tial life in a consciously present individual form, and is the personal self-conscious will of all. b&That justice, however, which restores to equilibrium the universal when getting the mastery over lie par- ticular individual, is similarly the simple singV jpirit of the individual who has suffered wrong; it is not broken up into the two elements, one who has suffered The Ethical World 457 wrong and a far away remote reality (Wesen). The individual himself is the power of the " nether " world, and that reality is his " fury/' wreaking vengeance upon him.* For his individuality, his blood, still lives in the house, his substance has a lasting actuality. The wrong, which can be brought upon the individual in the realm of the ethical world, consists merely in this, that a bare something by chance happens to him. The power which perpetrates on the conscious individual this wrong of making him into a mere thing, is " nature "; it is the universality not of the community, but the abstract universality of mere existence. And the particular individual, in wiping out the wrong suffered, turns not against the community — for he has not suffered at its hands — but against the latter. As we saw, those who consciously share the blood of the in- dividual remove this wrong in such a way, that what has happened becomes rather a work of their own doing, ana hence bare existence, the last state, gets al»o to be something willed, and thus an object of gratification.
The ethical realm remains in this way permanently a world without blot or stain, a world untainted by any internal dissension. So, too, its process is an untroubled transition from one of its powers to the other, in such a way that each preserves and produces the other. We see it no doubt divided into two ultimate elements and their realisation: but their opposition is rather the confirming and substantiation of one through the other; and where they directly come in contact and affect each other as actual factors, their mediating common element straightway permeates and suffuses the one with the * The reference here is to Orestes.
458 Phenomenology of Mind other. The one extreme, universal spirit conscious of itself, becomes, through the individuality of man, linked together with its other extreme, its force and its element, with unconscious spirit. On the other hand, divine law is individualised, the unconscious spirit of the particular individual finds its existence, in woman, through the mediation of whom the spirit of the individual comes out of its unrealisedness into actuality, out of the state of unknowing and un- known, and rises into the conscious realm of universal spirit. The union of man with woman constitutes the operative mediating agency for the whole, and con- stitutes the element which, while separated into the extremes of divine and human law, is, at the same time, their immediate union. This union, again, turns both those first mediate connections (Schlusse) into one and the same synthesis, and unites into one process the twofold movement in opposite directions, — one from reality to unreality, the downward movement of human law, organised into independent members, to the danger and trial of death, — the other, from un- reality to reality, the upward movement of the law of the nether world to the daylight of conscious existence. Of these movements the former falls to man, the latter to woman.
ETHICAL ACTION. KNOWLEDGE, HUMAN AND DIVINE. GUILT AND DESTINY.
[A fundamental condition of social order is that it is maintained by action on the part of the individual members of a society; action is a fundamental principle of distinction between individuals, is the way they make their contribution to social life, and ia also the way by which the continuance of social life is ceaselessly broken and reconstituted. In a comprehensive sense therefore action is the principle by which distinction in unity is carried out in social life. The consideration of its significance is thus an essential problem for the analysis of social mind. Action must be considered at once with reference to individuality and also with refer- ence to those conceptions of social order as containing both " divine " and " human " law. In the following section, this analysis is undertaken.
The specific historical background of Hegel's thought in this section, and to some extent in the preceding section, is supplied by the social life of the Greek city state. The Greek city state has been taken as the type, so to say, of spiritual existence realised as a self-complete ethical order. But the social life of Greece is here in large measure read and interpreted in the light of the dramatisation of Greek ethical conceptions by the great Greek tragedians, especially Sophocles. This accounts for the re- peated reference to the purely dramatic conception of the " destiny" or the "pathic" element in the life of the individual whose spiritual existence is completely bound up with the established social order. It is in Greece that we find most fully realised the all-sufficiency of the state for the individual, which Hegel has here in view, a sufficiency which was at once the strength and beauty, as well as the pathos and weakness of Greek social life.
With this and the preceding section should be read Hegel's Philosophy of History, Part II, "The Greek World."]
ETHICAL ACTION. KNOWLEDGE, HUMAN AND DIVINE. GUILT AND DESTINY.
In the form presented by the opposition of elements in the realm just dealt with, self -consciousness has not yet come to its rights as a particular individuality. Individuality there has, on one side, the sense of merely universal will, on the other, of consanguinity of the family. This particular individual has merely the signifi- cance of shadowy unreality. There is as yet no perform- ance of an act. The act, however, is the realised self. It breaks in upon the untroubled stable organisation and movement of the ethical world. What there appears as ordinance and harmony between both its constituent elements, each of which confirms and complements the other, becomes through the performing of an act a transition of opposites into one another, by which each proves to be the annihilation rather than the confirma- tion of its self and its opposite. It becomes the process of negation or destruction, the eternal necessity of awful destiny, which engulfs in the abyss of its bare identity divine and human law alike, as well as both the self- conscious factors in which these powers subsist; and, to our view, passes over into the absolute self- existence of mere particular self-consciousness.
The basis from which this movement proceeds, and on which it takes effect, is the kingdom of the ethical order. But the activity at work in this process is self- consciousness. Being ethical consciousness, it is the Ethical Action 461 pure and simple direction of activity towards the essential principle of the ethical life — it is Duty. There is no caprice, and likewise no struggle, no indecision in it, since it has given up legislating and testing laws: the essential ethical principle is, for it, something immediate, unwavering, without contradiction. There is therefore neither the painful spectacle of find- ing itself in a collision between passion and duty, nor the comic spectacle of a collision between duty and duty — a collision, which so far as content goes is the same as that between passion and duty; for passion can also be presented as a duty, because duty, when consciousness withdraws into itself and leaves its immediate essential substance (Wesenheit), comes to be the formal universal, into which one content fits equally well with another, as we found before. The collision of duties is, however, comical, because it brings out the contradiction inherent in the idea of an absolute standing opposed to another absolute, expresses some- thing absolute and then directly the annihilation of this so-called absolute or duty. The ethical conscious- ness, however, knows what it has to do; and is decided, whether it is to belong to divine or human law. This directness which characterises its decision is something immanent and inherent (Ansicliseyri), and hence has at the same time the significance of a natural condition of being, as we saw. Nature, not the accident of circumstances or choice, assigns one sex to one law, the other to the other law; or conversely both the ethical powers themselves establish their individual existence and actualisation in the two sexes.
Thus, then, because on the one side the ethical order consists essentially in this immediate directness 462 Phenomenology of Mind of decision, and therefore only the one law is for con- sciousness the essential reality; while, on the other side, the powers of the ethical order are actual in the self of conscious life, — in this way these forces acquire the significance of excluding one another and of being opposed to one another. They are explicit in self- consciousness just as they were merely implicit in the realm of the ethical order. The ethical consciousness, because it is decisively on the side of one of them, is essentially Character. There is not for it equal essentiality in both. The opposition therefore appears as an unfortunate collision of duty merely with reality, on which right has no hold. The ethical con- sciousness is qua self-consciousness in this opposition, and being so, it at once proceeds either to subdue by force this reality opposing it to the law which it accepts, or to get round this reality by craft. Since it sees right only on its own side, and wrong on the other, so, of these two, that which belongs to divine law detects, on the other side, mere arbitrary fortuitous human violence, while what appertains to human law, finds in the other the obstinacy and disobedience of subjective self-sufficiency. For the commands of government have a universal sense and meaning open to the light of day; the will of the other law, however, is the inner concealed meaning of the realm of darkness (unterirdisch), a meaning which appears expressed as the will of a particular being, and in contradicting the first is malicious offence.
There arises in this way in consciousness the opposi- tion between what is known and what is not known, just as, in the case of substance, there was an opposition between the conscious and the unconscious; and the Ethical Action 463 absolute right of ethical self-consciousness comes into conflict with the divine right of the essential reality. Self-consciousness, qua consciousness, takes the objective actuality, as such, to have essential being. Look- ing at its substance, however, it is the unity of itself and this opposite, and the ethical self-consciousness is consciousness of that substance: the object, qua opposed to self-consciousness, has, therefore, entirely lost the characteristic of having essential being by itself. Just as the spheres [of conscious life] where the object is merely a "thing" are long past and gone, so, too, are these spheres, where consciousness sets up and establishes something from out itself, and turns a particular moment into the essential reality (Weseri). Against such one-sidedness actual concrete reality has a power of its own; it takes the side of truth against consciousness and shows consciousness itself what the truth is. The ethical consciousness, however, has drunk from the cup of the absolute substance, forgotten all the one-sidedness of isolating self-existence, all its purposes and peculiar notions, and has, therefore, at the same time drowned in this Stygian stream all essentiality of nature and all the independence claimed by the objective reality. Its absolute right, therefore, when it acts in accordance with ethical law, is to find in this actualisation nothing else than the fulfilment and performance of this law itself: and that the deed should manifest nothing but ethical action.
The ethical, being absolute essence and absolute power at once, cannot endure any perversion of its content. If it were merely absolute essence without power, it might undergo perversion at the hands of 464 Phenomenology of Mind individuality. But this latter, being ethical conscious- ness, has renounced all perverting when it gave up its one-sided subjectivity (Fursichseyn). Conversely, again, mere power might be perverted by the essential reality, if power were still a subjectivity of that kind. On account of this unity, individuality is a pure form of the substance which is the content, and action consists in transition from thought over into reality, merely as the process of an unreal opposition, whose moments have no special and particular content distinct from one another, and no essential nature of their own. The absolute right of ethical consciousness is, therefore, that the deed, the mode and form of its realisation, should be nothing else than it knows it to be.
But the essential ethical reality has split asunder into two laws, and consciousness, taking up an un- divided single attitude towards law, is assigned only to one. Just as this simple consciousness takes its stand on the absolute right that the essential reality has appeared to it qua ethical as that reality inherently is, so, too, this essence insists on the right belonging to its reality, i.e. the right of having a double form.* This right of the essential reality does not, however, at the same time stand over against and opposed to self- consciousness, as if it were to be found anywhere else; rather it is the essential nature of self-consciousness. Only there has it its existence and its power; and its opposition is the act of self-consciousness itself. For the latter, just because it is a self to itself, and proceeds to act, lifts itself out of the state of simple immediacy, and itself sets up the division into two. By the act it gives up the specific character of the ethical life, that of * viz, divine and human law, Ethical Action 465 being pure and simple certainty of immediate truth, and sets up the division of itself into self as active and reality over against it, and for it, therefore, negative. By the act it thus becomes Guilt. For the deed is its doing, and doing is its inmost nature. And the guilt acquires also the meaning of Crime; for as simple ethical consciousness it has turned to and conformed itself to the one law, but turned away from the other, and thus has broken the latter by its deed.
Guilt is not an external indifferent entity (Weseri) with the double meaning, that the deed, as actually manifested to the light of day, may be an action of the guilty self, or may not be so, as if with the doing of it there could be connected something external and accidental that did not belong to it, from which point of view, therefore, the action would be innocent. Rather the act is itself this diremption, this affirming itself for itself, and establishing over against this an alien external reality. That such a result takes place is due to the deed itself, and is the outcome of it. Hence, innocence is an attribute merely of the want of action (Nicht-thun), a state like the mere being of a stone, and one which is not even true of a child.
Looking at the content, however, the ethical act con- tains the element of wrongdoing, because it does not cancel and transcend the natural allotment of the two laws to the two sexes; but rather, being an undivided attitude towards the law, keeps within the sphere of natural immediacy, and, qua acting, turns this one-sided- ness into guilt, by merely laying hold of one side of the essential reality and taking up a negative relation towards the other, i.e. violating it. Where, in the general ethical life, guilt and crime, deeds and actions, VOL. II.— E 466 Phenomenology of Mind come in, will be more definitely brought out later. Meantime, so much is at once clear, that it is not this particular individual who acts and becomes guilty. For he, qua this particular self, is merely a shadowy reality; he is merely qua universal self, and indi- viduality is purely the formal aspect of doing anything at all, while its content is the laws and customs which are determined for the individual, the laws and customs of his class or station. He is the substance qua genus, which by its determinateness becomes, no doubt, a species, but the specific form remains at the same time the generic universal. Self-consciousness within the life of a nation descends from the universal only down as far as specific particularity, but not as far as the single indi- viduality, which sets up an exclusive self, establishes in its action a reality negative to itself. On the contrary, the action of that self-consciousness rests on secure confidence in the whole, into which there enters nothing alien or foreign, neither fear nor hostility.
Ethical self-consciousness now comes to find in its deed the full explicit meaning of concrete real action as much when it followed divine law as when it followed human. The law manifest to it is, in the essential reality, bound up with its opposite; the essential reality is the unity of both; but the deed has merely carried out one as against the other. But being bound up with this other in the inner reality, the fulfil- ment of the one calls forth the other, in the shape of something which, having been violated and now become hostile, demands revenge — an attitude which the deed has made it take up. In the case of action, only one phase of the decision is in general in evidence. The decision, however, is inherently something negative, Ethical Action 467 which plants an "other" in opposition to it, something foreign to the decision, which is clear knowledge. Actual reality, therefore, keeps concealed within itself this other aspect alien to clear knowledge, and does not show itself to consciousness as it fully and truly is (an und fur sick). In the story of OEdipus the son does not see his own father in the person of the man who has insulted him and whom he strikes to death, nor his mother in the queen whom he makes his wife. In this way a hidden power shunning the light of day, waylays the ethical self-consciousness, a power which bursts forth after the deed is done, and seizes the doer in the act. For the completed deed is the removal of the opposition between the knowing self and the reality over against it. The ethical consciousness cannot disclaim the crime and its guilt. The deed consists in setting in motion what was unmoved, and in bringing out what in the first instance lay shut up as a mere possibility, and thereby linking on the unconscious to the conscious, the non-existent to the existent. In this truth, there- fore, the deed comes to the light; — it is something in which a conscious element is bound up with what is unconscious, what is peculiarly one's own with what is alien and external: — it is an essential reality divided in sunder, whose other aspect consciousness discovers and also finds to be its own aspect, but as a power violated by its doing, and roused to hostility against it. It may well be that the right, which kept itself in reserve, is not in its peculiar form present to the con- sciousness of the doer, but is merely implicit, present in the subjective inward guilt of the decision and the action. But the ethical consciousness is more complete, its guilt purer, if it knows beforehand the 468 Phenomenology of Mind law and the power which it opposes, if it takes them to be sheer violence and wrong, to be a contingency in the ethical life, and wittingly, like Antigone, commits the crime. The deed when accomplished transforms its point of view: the very performance of it eo ipso expresses that what is ethical has to be actual; for the realisation of the purpose is the very purpose of acting. Acting expresses precisely the unity of reality and the substance; it expresses the fact that actuality is not an accident for the essential element, but that, in union with that element, is given to no right which is not true right. On account of this actuality and on account of its deed ethical consciousness must acknowledge its opposite as its own actuality; it must acknowledge its guilt.
Because of our sufferings we acknowledge we have erred.* To acknowledge this, is expressly to indicate that the severance between ethical purpose and actuality has been done away; it means the return to the ethical frame of mind, which knows that nothing counts but right. Thereby, however, the agent surrenders his character and the reality of his self, and has utterly collapsed. His being lies in belonging to his ethical law, as his substance; in acknowledging an opposite, however, he has ceased to find his sub- stance in this law; and instead of reality this has become an unreality, a mere sentiment, a frame of mind. The substance no doubt appears as the "pathic " element! in the individuality, and the individuality * An adaptation from Antigone, 926.
t The element that so permeates his being as to constitute his con- trolling necessity and destiny.
Guilt and Destiny 460 appears as the factor which animates the substance, and hence stands above it. But the substance is a " pathic " element which is at the same time his char- acter; the ethical individuality is directly and in- herently one with this its universal, exists in it alone, and is incapable of surviving the destruction which this ethical power suffers at the hands of its opposite.