The spirit animating wealth had an unreal insubstan- tial independence; wealth was something to be given up. By communicating what it has, however, it passes into something essential and inherent; since it fulfils its nature in sacrificing itself, it cancels the aspect of par- ticularity, of merely seeking enjoyment for one's own particular self, and, being thus sublated qua particular, the type of spirit here is universality or essentially real.
What it imparts, what it gives to others, is self- existence. It does not hand itself over, however, as a natural self-less object, as the frankly and freely offered condition of unconscious life, but as self-conscious, as a reality keeping hold of itself: it is not like the power of an inorganic element which is felt by the conscious- ness receiving its force to be inherently transitory; it is the power over self, a power aware that it is indepen- dent and voluntary, and knowing at the same time that what it dispenses becomes the self of some one else.
Culture and Us Sphere of Reality 523 Wealth thus shares reprobation with its clientele; but in place of revolt appears arrogance. For in one aspect it knows, as well as the self it benefits, that its self-existence is a matter of accident; but itself is this accident in whose power personality is placed. In this mood of arrogance — which thinks it has secured through a dole an alien ego -nature, and thereby brought its inmost being into submis- sion— it overlooks the secret rebellion of the other self: it overlooks the fact of all bonds being com- pletely cast aside, overlooks this pure disintegra- tion, in which, the self-identity of what exists for its own sake having become sheer internal discordance, all oneness and concord, all subsistence is rent asunder, and in which in consequence the thoughts and inten- tions of the benefactor are the first to be shattered. It stands directly in front of this abyss, cleaving it to the innermost, this bottomless pit, where every solid base and stay have vanished: and in the depths it sees nothing but a common thing, a display of whims on its part, a chance result of its own caprice. Its spirit consists in quite unreal imagining, in being super- ficiality forsaken of all true spiritual import.
Just as self-consciousness had its own manner of speech in dealing with state-power, in other words, just as spirit took the form of expressly and actually mediat- ing between these two extremes, self-consciousness has also a mode of speech in dealing with wealth; but still more when in revolt does it adopt a language of its own. The form of utterance which supplies wealth with the sense of its own essential significance, and thereby makes it master of itself, is likewise the language of flattery, but of ignoble flattery; for what it gives 524 Phenomenology of Mind out to be the essential reality, it knows to be a reality without an inherent nature of its own, to be something at the mercy of another. The language of flattery, however, as already remarked, is that of a one-sided spirit. To be sure its constituent elements are, on the one hand, a self moulded by service into a shape where it is reduced to bare existence, and, on the other, the inherent reality of the power dominating the self. Yet the bare principle, the pure conception, in which the mere self and the inherent reality (Ansich), that pure ego and this pure reality or thought, are one and the same thing — this conceptual unity of the two aspects between which the reciprocity takes effect, is not consciously felt when this language is used. The object is consciously still the inherent reality in opposition to the self; in other words, the object is not for consciousness at the same time its own proper self as such.
The language expressing the condition of disintegra- tion, wherein spiritual life is rent asunder, is, however, the perfect form of utterance for this entire stage of spiritual culture and development, the formative process of moulding self-consciousness (Bildung), and expresses the spirit in which it most truly exists. This self-con- sciousness, which finds befitting the rebellion that repudiates its own repudiation, is eo ipso absolute self- identity in absolute disintegration, the pure activity of mediating pure self-consciousness with itself. It is the oneness expressed in the identical judgment, where one and the same personality is subject as well as predicate. But this identical judgment is at the same time the infinite judgment; for this personality is absolutely split in two, and subject and predicate Culture and its Sphere of Reality 525 are entities utterly indifferent one to the other, which have nothing to do with each other, with no necessary unity, so much so that each has the power of an in- dependent personality of its own. What exists as a self on its own account has for its object its own self-existence, which is object in the sense of an absolute other, and yet at the same time directly in the form of itself — itself in the sense of an other, not as if this had an other content, for the content is the same self in the form of an absolute opposite, with an existence completely all its own and indifferent.
We have, then, here the spirit of this real world of formative culture, conscious of its own nature as it truly is, and conscious of its ultimate and essential principle (Begriff).
This type of spiritual life is the absolute and universal inversion of reality and thought, their entire estrange- ment the one from the other; it is pure culture. What is found out in this sphere is that neither the concrete realities, state-power and wealth, nor their determin- ate conceptions, good and bad, nor the consciousness of good and bad (the consciousness that is noble and the consciousness that is base) possess real truth; it is found that all these moments are inverted and trans- muted the one into the other, and each is the opposite of itself.
The universal power, which is the substance, since it gains a spiritual nature peculiarly its own through the principle of individuality, accepts the possession of a self of its own merely as a name by which it is described, and, even in being actual power, is really so powerless as to have to sacrifice itself. But this self-less reality given over to another, this.
526 Phenomenology of Mind self that is turned into a thing, is in fact the return of the reality into itself; it is a self-existence that is there for its own sake, the existential form of spirit.
The principles belonging to these realities, the thoughts of good and bad, are similarly transmuted and reversed in this process; what is characterised as good is bad, and vice versa. The consciousness of each of these moments by itself, the conscious types judged as noble and base — these are rather in their real truth simi- larly the reverse of what these specific forms should be; nobility is base and repudiated, just as what is repudiated as base turns round into the nobleness that characterises the most highly developed form of free self-conscious- ness.
Looked at formally, everything is likewise in its external aspects the reverse of what it is internally for itself; and again it is not really and in truth what it is for itself, but something else than it wants to be; self-existence on its own account is, strictly speaking, the loss of self, and alienation of self is really self- preservation.
The state of things brought about here, then, is that all moments execute justice on one another all round, each is just as much in a condition of inherent alienation as it fancies itself in its opposite, and in this way reverses its nature.
Spirit truly objective, however, is just this unity of absolutely separate moments, and in fact comes into existence as the common ground, the mediating agency, just through the independent reality of these self-less extremes. Its very existence lies in universal talk and depreciatory judgment rending and tearing everything, before which all those moments are broken Culture and its Sphere of Reality 527 up that are meant to signify something real and to stand for actual members of the whole, and which at the same time plays with itself this game of self-dis- solution. This judging and talking is, therefore, the real truth, which cannot be got over, while it over- powers everything — it is that which in this real world is alone truly of importance. Each part of this world comes to find there its spirit expressed, or gets to be spoken of with spirit and finds said of it what it is.
The honest * soul takes each moment as a permanent and essential fact, and is an uncultivated unreflective condition, which does not think and does not know that it is just doing the very inverse. The distraught and disintegrated soul is, however, aware of inversion; it is, in fact, a condition of absolute inversion: the con- ceptual principle predominates there, brings together into a single.unity the thoughts that lie far apart in the case of the honest soul, and the language clothing its meaning is, therefore, full of esprit and wit (geistreich).
The content uttered by spirit and uttered about itself is, then, the inversion and perversion of all con- ceptions and realities, a universal deception of itself and of others. The shamelessness manifested in stating this deceit is just on that account the greatest truth. This style of speech is the madness of the musician " who piled and mixed up together some thirty airs, Italian, French, tragic, comic, of all sorts and kinds; now, in a deep undertone, he descended to the depths of hell, then, contracting his throat to a high, piping falsetto, he rent the vault of the skies, raving and soothing, haughtily 528 Phenomenology of Mind imperious and mockingly j eering by turns. ' ' * The placid soulf that in simple honesty of heart takes the music of the good and true to consist in harmony of sound and uniformity of tone, i.e. in a melodious chord, regards this style of expression as a fickle fantasy of wisdom and folly, a melee of so much skill and low cunning, composed of ideas as likely to be right as wrong, with as complete a perversion of sentiment, with as much consummate shamefulness in it, as abso- lute frankness, candour, and truth. It is not able to refrain from bringing out the sound of every note, and running up and down the whole gamut of feeling, from the depths of contempt and repudiation to the highest pitch of admiration and stirring emotion. A vein of the ridiculous will be diffused through the latter, which takes away from their nature "; the former will find in their very candour a strain of atoning reconcilement, will find in their shuddering depths the all-powerful qualities which give spirit a self.
If we consider, by way of contrast to the mode of utterance indulged in by this self-transparent distracted type of mind, the language adopted by that simple, placid consciousness of the good and the true, we find that it can only speak in monosyllables when face to face with the frank and self-conscious eloquence of the mind developed under the influence of culture; for it can say nothing to the latter that the latter does not know and say. If it gets beyond speaking in monosyllables, then it says the same thing that the cultivated mind expresses, but in doing so commits, * Diderot, Rameau's Neffe.
t The " philosopher " in Diderot's Dialogue.
Culture and its Sphere of Reality 529 in addition, the folly of imagining that it is saying something new, something different. Its very syllables, "disgraceful, " "base," are this folly already, for the other says them of itself. This latter type of mind perverts in its mode of utterance everything that sounds the same, because this self-sameness is merely an abstraction, but in its actual reality is intrinsically and inherently perversion. On the other hand, again, the unsophisti- cated mind takes under its protection the good and the noble (i.e. what retains its identity of meaning in being objectively expressed), and takes care of it in the only way here possible — that is to say, the good must not lose its value because it may be linked with what is bad or mingled with it, for to be thus associated with badness is its condition and necessity, and the wisdom of nature lies in this fact. Yet this unsophisticated mind, while it intended to contradict, has merely, in doing so, gathered into a trifling form the mean- ing of what spirit said, and put it in a manner which, by turning the opposite of noble and good into the necessary condition of noble and good, means, in an unthinking way, to state something else than that the so-called noble and good is by its very nature the reverse of itself, or that what is bad is, conversely, something excellent.
If the naive consciousness makes up for this barren, soulless idea by the concrete reality of what is excellent, when it produces an example of what is excellent, whether in the form of a fictitious case or a true story, and thus shows it to be not an empty name, but an actual fact, then the universal reality of perverted action stands in sharp contrast to the entire real world, where that example constitutes merely something VOL. II.— I 530 Phenomenology of Mind quite isolated and particular, merely an espece, a sort of thing. And to represent the existence of the good and the noble as an isolated particular anecdote, whether fictitious or true, is the bitterest thing that can be said about it.
Finally, should the naive mind require this entire sphere of perversion to be dissolved and broken up, it cannot ask the individual to withdraw out of it, for even Diogenes in his tub [with his pretence of withdrawal] is under the sway of that perversion; and to ask this of the particular individual is to ask him to do pre- cisely what is taken to be bad, viz. to care for the self as particular. But if the demand to withdraw is directed at the universal individual, it cannot mean that reason must again give up the culture and development of spiritual conscious life which has been reached, that reason should let the extensive riches of its moments sink back into the naivete of natural emotion, and revert and approximate to the wild condition of the animal consciousness, which is also called the natural state of innocence. On the contrary, the demand for this dissolution when addressed to the spirit realised in culture can only mean that it must qua spirit return out of its confusion into itself, and win for itself a still higher level of conscious life.
In point of fact, however, spirit has already accom- plished this result. To be conscious of its own distraught and torn condition and to express itself accordingly, —this is to pour scornful laughter on its existence, on the confusion pervading the whole and on itself as well: it is at the same time this whole confusion dying away and yet apprehending itself to be doing so. This self-apprehending vanity of all reality and of every Culture and its Sphere of Reality 531 definite principle reflects the real world into itself in a twofold form: — in the particular self of consciousness qua particular, and in the pure universality of con- sciousness, in thought. According to the one aspect, mind thus come to itself has directed its gaze into the world of actual reality, and makes that reality its own purpose and its immediate content: from the other side, its gaze is in part turned solely on itself and against that world of reality, in part turned away from it towards heaven, and its object is the region beyond the world.
In respect of that return into self the vanity of all things is its own peculiar vanity, it is itself vain. It is self existing for its own sake, a self that knows not only how to sum up and chatter about everything, but with esprit and wit to hit off the contradiction that lies in the heart of the all so solid seeming reality, and the fixed determinations which judgment sets up; and that contradiction is their real truth. Looked at formally it finds everything estranged from itself, self-existence is cut off from essential being (Ansich), what is intended and the purpose are separated from real truth, and from both again existence for another, what is ostensibly put forward is cut off from the proper meaning, the real fact, the true intention.
It thus knows exactly how to put each moment in antithesis to every other, knows in short how to express correctly the perversion that dominates all of them: it knows better than each what each is, no matter how it is constituted. Since it apprehends what is substantial from the side of that disunion and contradiction of elements combined within its nature, but not from the side of this union itself, it under- 532 Phenomenology of Mind stands very well how to pass judgment on this substantial reality, but has lost the capacity of truly grasping it.
This vanity needs at the same time the vanity of all things, in order to get from them consciousness of itself; it therefore itself creates this vanity, and is the soul that supports it. State-power and wealth are the supreme purposes of its strenuous exertion, it is aware that through renunciation and sacrifice it is moulded into universal shape, that it attains universality, and in possessing universality finds general recognition and acceptance: state-power and wealth are the real and actually acknowledged sources of power. But its gain- ing acceptance thus is itself vain, and just by the fact that it gets the mastery over them it knows them to be not real by themselves, knows rather itself to be the power within them, and them to be vain and empty. That in possessing them it thus itself is able to stand apart from and outside them, — this is what it expresses in spirited languages; and to express this is, therefore, its supreme interest, and the true meaning of the whole process. In such utterance this self, — in the form of a pure self not associated with or bound by determina- tions derived either from reality or thought, — comes consciously to be a spiritual entity having a truly universal significance and value. It is the condition in which the nature of all relationships is rent asunder, and it is the conscious rending of them all. But only by self- consciousness being roused to revolt does it know its own peculiar torn and shattered condition; and in its know- ing this it has ipso facto risen above that condition. In that state of self-conscious vanity all substantial content comes to have a negative significance, which can no Culture and 'its Sphere of Reality 533 longer be taken in a positive sense. The positive object is merely the pure ego itself; and the consciousness that is rent in sunder is inherently and essentially this pure self-identity of self-consciousness returned to itself.
BELIEF AND PURE INSIGHT* The spiritual condition of self-alienation exists in the sphere of culture as a fact. But since this whole has become estranged from itself, there lies beyond this sphere the nonactual region of pure consciousness, of thought. Its content consists of what has been reduced purely to thought, its absolute element is thinking. Since, however, thinking is in the first instance the element of this sphere, consciousness has merely these thoughts, but it does not as yet think them or does not know that they are thoughts: to consciousness they appear in the form of presentations, they are objects in the form of ideas. For it comes out of the sphere of actuality into that of pure consciousness, but is itself still to all intents and purposes in the sphere of actuality with the determinateness that implies. The conscious state of being rent and torn to pieces is still essentially and inherently the self-identity of pure consciousness not as a fact that itself is aware of but only as presented to us who are considering its condition. It has thus not as yet completed within itself the process of rising above this condition, it is simply there; and it still has within itself the opposite * The contrast between these two elements is found both in the pre- Reformation period and in the eighteenth century period; — in the latter the contrast assumes perhaps its acutest form.
Belief and Pure Insight 535 principle by which it is conditioned, without as yet having become master of that principle through a mediating process. Hence the essential content of its thought is not taken to be an essential object merely in the form of abstract immanence (Ansich}, but in the form of a common object, an object that has merely been elevated into another element, without having lost the character of an object that is not constituted by thought.
It is essentially distinct from the immanent nature which constitutes the essential being of the stoic type of consciousness. The significant factor for Stoicism was merely the form of thought as such, which has any content foreign to it that is drawn from reality. In the case of the consciousness just described, however, the form of thought is not the significant element. Similarly it is essentially distinct from the inherent principle of the virtuous type of conscious life; here the essential fact stands, no doubt, in a relation to reality; it is the essence of reality itself: but it is no more than an unrealised essence of it. In the above type of consciousness the essence, although no doubt beyond reality, stands all the same for an actual real essence. In the same way, the inherently right and good which reason as lawgiver establishes, and the universal operating when consciousness tests and examines laws — neither of these has the character of actual reality.
Hence while pure thought fell within the sphere of spiritual culture as an aspect of the estrangement characteristic of this sphere, as the standard in fact for judging abstract good and abstract bad, it has become enriched, by having gone through the process 536 Phenomenology of Mind of the whole, with the element of reality and thereby with content. This reality of its essential being, how- ever, is at the same time merely a reality of pure consciousness, not of concrete actual consciousness: it is no doubt lifted into the element of thought, but this concrete consciousness does not yet take it for a thought; it is beyond the reality peculiar to this con- sciousness, for it means flight from the latter.
In the form in which Religion here appears — for it is religion obviously that we are speaking about — as the belief which belongs to the realm of culture, religion does not yet appear as it is truly and completely (an und fur sick). It has already come before us in other phases, viz. as the un- happy consciousness, as a form of conscious process with no substantial content in it. So, too, in the case of the ethical substance, it appeared as a belief in the nether-world. But a consciousness of departed spirits is, strictly speaking, not belief, not the inner essence subsisting in the element of pure consciousness away beyond the actual: there the belief has itself an immediate existence in the present; its element, its substance is the family.
But at the stage we are now considering, religion is in part the outcome of the substance, and is the pure consciousness of that substance; in part this pure consciousness is alienated from its concrete actual consciousness, the essence from its existence. It is thus doubtless no longer the insubstantial process of con- sciousness; but it has still the characteristic of opposi- tion to reality qua the given reality in general, and of opposition to the reality of self-consciousness in par- ticular. It is essentially therefore merely a belief.
Belief and Pure Insight 537 This pure consciousness of Absolute Being is a con- sciousness in alienation. Let us see more closely what is the characteristic of that whose other it is; we can only consider it in connection with this other. In the first instance this pure consciousness seems to have over against it merely the world of actuality. But since its nature is to flee from this actuality, and thereby is characterised by opposition, it has this actuality inherent within its own being; pure consciousness is, therefore, essentially in its very being self-alienated, and belief constitutes merely one side of it. The other side has already arisen too. For pure consciousness is reflexion out of the world of culture in such a way that the substantial content of this sphere, as also the separate fragments into which it falls, are shown to be what they inherently are, — essential modes of spiritual life, abso- lutely restless processes or determinate moments which are at once cancelled in their opposite. Their essential nature, bare consciousness, is thus the bare simplicity of absolute distinction, distinction which as it stands is no distinction. Consequently it is pure self-existence not of a particular self, but essentially universal self, whose being consists in a restless process invading and pervading the stable existence of actual fact. In it is found the certainty that knows itself at once to be the truth; there we have pure thought in the sense of absolute notion with all its power of negativity, which annihilates every objective existence that would claim to stand over against consciousness, and turns it into a form of conscious existence.
This pure consciousness is at the same time simple and undifferentiated as well, just because its distinction is no distinction. Being this form of bare and simple 538 Phenomenology of Mind reflexion into self, however, it is the element of belief, in which spirit has the special feature of positive universality, of what is inherent and essential in contrast with that self-existence on the part of self-consciousness.