In this its characteristically peculiar performance, absolute freedom becomes objective to itself, and self-consciousness finds out what this freedom is. In itself it is just this abstract self-consciousness, which destroys all distinction and all fixedness of distinction within itself. It is object to itself in this shape; the terror of death is the direct apprehension (Anschauung) of this its negative nature. This its reality, however, finds absolute free self-conscious- ness quite different from what its own notion of itself was, viz. that the universal will is merely the positive substance of personality, and that this latter knows itself in it only positively, knows itself preserved there. Rather for this self - consciousness, which qua pure insight completely separates its positive and negative nature — separates the unpredicated Absolute qua pure thought and qua pure matter — the absolute transition from the one to the other is found here present within Absolute Freedom and Terror 601 its reality. The universal will, qua absolutely positive concrete self-consciousness — because it is this self-con- scious actuality raised to the level of pure thought or abstract matter — turns round into the negative entity, and shows itself at the same time to be what cancels and does away with self- thinking or self - conscious- ness.
Absolute freedom qua pure self-identity of universal will thus carries with it negation; but in doing so contains distinction in general, and develops this again as concrete actual difference. For pure negativity finds in the self-identical universal will the element of sub- sistence, or the substance in which its moments get their realisation; it has the matter which it can turn into the specific nature of the substance; and in so far as this substance has manifested itself to be the negative element for the individual consciousness, the organisation of the spiritual groups or "masses" of the substance, to which the plurality of conscious individuals is assigned, thus takes shape and form once more. These individuals, who felt the fear of death, their absolute lord and master, submit to negation and distinction once more, arrange themselves into groups, and return to a restricted and apportioned task, but thereby to their substantial reality.
Out of this tumult spirit would be thrown back upon its starting-point, the ethical world and the real world of spiritual culture, which would thus have been merely refreshed and rejuvenated by the fear of the lord, that has again entered their hearts. Spirit would have anew to traverse and continually repeat this cycle of necessity, if only complete interpenetra- tion of self-consciousness and the substance were 602 Phenomenology of Mind the final result. In such an interpenetration self-con- sciousness might seek to experience the force of its universal nature operating negatively upon it, would try to know and find itself not as this particular self- consciousness but only as universal, and hence, too, would be able to endure the objective reality of uni- versal spirit, a reality, excluding self-consciousness qua particular.
But this is not the form the final result assumes. For in absolute freedom there was no reciprocal interaction either between an external world and consciousness, which is absorbed in manifold existence or sets itself determinate purposes and ideas, or between consciousness and an external objective world, be it a world of reality or of thought. What that freedom contained was the world absolutely in the form of consciousness, as a universal will, and, along with that, self-consciousness gathered out of all the dispersion and manifoldness of existence or all the manifold ends and judgments of mind, and concentrated into the bare and simple self. The form of culture, which it attains in interaction with that essential nature, is, therefore, the grandest and the last, is that of seeing its pure and simple reality immediately disappear and pass away into empty nothingness.* In the sphere of culture itself it does not get the length of viewing its negation or alienation in this form of pure abstraction; its negation is nega- tion with a filling and a content — either honour and wealth, which it gains in the place of the self that it has alienated from itself; or the language of esprit and insight, which the distraught consciousness acquires; or, again, the negation is the heaven of belief or the element * Kant's "thing in itself" f Absolute Freedom and Terror 603 of utility belonging to the stage of enlightenment. All these determinate elements disappear with the disaster and ruin that overtake the self in the state of absolute freedom; * its negation is meaningless death, sheer horror of the negative which has nothing positive in it, nothing that gives a filling.
At the same time, however, this negation in its actual manifestation is not something alien and external. It is neither that universal background of necessity in which the moral world is swamped, nor the particular accident of private possession, the whims and humours of the owner, on which the distraught consciousness finds itself dependent; it is universal will, which in this its last abstraction has nothing positive, and hence can give nothing in return for the sacrifice. But just on that account this will is in unmediated oneness with self-consciousness, it is the pure positive because it is the pure negative; and that meaningless death, the insubstantial, vacuous negativity of self, in its inner constitutive principle, turns round into abso- lute positivity. For consciousness, the immediate unity of itself with universal will, its demand to see and find itself as a determinate particular focus in the universal will, is changed and converted into the absolutely oppo- site experience. What it loses there, is abstract being, the immediate existence of that insubstantial focus; and this vanished immediacy is the universal will as such which it now knows itself to be, so far as it is superseded and cancelled immediacy, so far as it is pure knowledge or pure will. By this means it knows that will to be itself, and knows itself to be essential reality; but not as the immediate essence, not will as revolutionary * la the sense of abstract autonomy.
604 Phenomenology of Mind government or anarchy struggling to establish an anar- chical constitution, nor itself as a centre of this faction or the opposite: the universal will is its pure knowing and willing, and it is universal will qua this pure knowledge and volition. It does not lose itself there, for pure knowledge and volition is it qua atomic point of con- sciousness. It is thus the interaction of pure knowledge with itself; pure knowledge qua essential reality is universal will, while this essence is simply and solely pure knowledge. Self-consciousness is thus pure know- ledge of essential reality in the sense of pure knowledge. Furthermore, qua particular self it is merely the form of the subject or concrete real action, a form which by it is known as form. In the same way objective reality, 11 being," is for it absolutely self-less form; for that objective reality would be what is not known: this knowledge, however, knows knowledge to be the essen- tial fact.
Absolute freedom has thus squared and balanced the opposition of universal and particular will with its own nature. The self-alienated type of mind, driven to the acme of its opposition, where pure volition and the purely volitional agent are still kept distinct, reduces that opposition to a transparent form, and therein finds itself.
Just as the realm of the real and actual world passes over into that of belief and insight, absolute freedom leaves its self-destructive sphere of reality, and passes over into another land of self-conscious spirit, where in this unreality freedom is taken to be and is accepted as the truth. In the thought of this truth spirit refreshes and revives itself (so far as spirit is thought and remains so), and knows this being which self- Absolute Freedom and Terror 605 consciousness involves [viz. thought] to be the complete and entire essence of everything. The new form and mode of experience that now arises is that of the Moral Life of Spirit.
c SPIRIT IN THE CONDITION OF BEING CERTAIN OF ITSELF: MORALITY [The following section deals with the final and highest stage in the life of finite spiritual experience as realised in the concrete form of a historical society. Here the substance of the social order is the real content of the self-conscious individual: that substance has become subjectified; we have therefore a self-contained spiritual subject. TJie discordance in- volved in the sphere of culture and enlightenment is overcome by the self knowing and realising itself as a completely universal self -determin- ing free will, its world within itself, and its self its own world. Each reflects the whole (the totality of social life) in itself so perfectly that what it does is transparently the doing of the whole as much as its own doing. Such a sphere of spiritual existence is Morality, the all-sufficient spiritual order of the finite spirit as an individual. The meaning assigned to " morality " here is that expressed by Kant when he says that morality is "the relation of actions to the autonomy of the will, i.e. to possible universal legislation through maxims of the will." In other words, all the universality constituting the interrelations of finite spirits in a society are epitomised in the soul of the acting individual, who can thus quite legitimately, look upon itself as the self-regulating source of all universal conditions of action.
It is inevitable that such a concrete mode of experience should have various aspects and should pass through various stages in the process of fully realising its nature. The individual may lay exclusive stress on the self -completeness which he possesses through being the source and origin of his own laws. His self -legislative function, just because it carries with it the sense of universality, may appear so supremely important that all the actual detail of his life comes to be treated as external, indifferent, and contingent. This detail no doubt is essential to give body and substance to his spiritual individuality, but the universality of his will so far tran- scends each and every detail of content as to seem by itself the sole and all-sufficient reality of his being. The content of his life only enters into consideration as an element to be regulated and made to conform to the universal: the relation so constituted between content and universal is Morality 607 Morality 607 found in the consciousness of Duty. Since the content is thus subor- dinate, though absolutely essential to give even meaning to the idea and the " fulfilment " of duty, and since the universal is the supremely im- portant fact, not merely is duty to be fulfilled for duty's sake, but the duty in question is pure duty. The " good will " is the purely universal will, and is the only will in the world from this point of view.
In the first section (a) Hegel analyses this phase of the moral life.
The historical material the writer has in mind is a moral attitude which came into prominence at the time of the Romantic movement towards the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. It found its philosophical expression in the moral theories of Kant and Fichte; and Lessing may be taken as a typical representative in literature of the same attitude.]
SPIRIT IN THE CONDITION OP BEING CERTAIN OF ITSELF: MORALITY MORALITY The ethical order of the community found its con- summation and its truth in the type of spirit existing in mere solitude and separation within it — the individual self. This legal person, however, has its substance and its fulfilment outside that ethical order. The process of the world of culture and belief does away with this abstraction of a mere person; and by the completion of the process of estrangement, by reaching the ex- tremity of abstraction, the self of spirit finds the sub- stance become first the universal will, and finally its own possession. Here, then, knowledge seems at last to have become entirely at one with the truth at which it aims; for its truth is this knowledge itself. All opposition between the two sides has vanished, and that, too, not for us (who are tracing the process), not merely implicitly, but actually for self-consciousness itself. That is to say, knowledge has itself got the mastery over the opposition which consciousness had to face. This rests on the opposition between certainty of self and the object. Now, however, the object for it is the certainty of self, knowledge: just as the cer- tainty of itself as such has no longer ends of its own, is no longer conditioned and determinate, but is pure knowledge.
Self-consciousness thus now takes the knowledge of itself to be the substance itself. This substance is, for it, at once immediate and absolutely mediated in one Morality 609 Morality 609 indivisible unity. It is immediate — just in the way the " ethical " consciousness knows and itself does its duties, and is bound to the substance as to its own nature: but it is not character, just as that ethical consciousness, which in virtue of its immediacy is a determinate type of spirit, belongs merely to one of the essential features of ethical life, and has the peculiarity of not being conscious explicit know- ledge. It is, again, absolute mediation, as involving the conscious processes of culture and belief; for it is essen- tially the movement of the life of self to transcend the abstract form of immediate existence, and become con- sciously universal — and yet to do so neither by simply estranging and rending itself as well as reality, nor by fleeing from it. Rather, it is directly and immediately present in its very substance; for this substance is its knowledge, it is the pure certainty of self become trans- parently visible. And just this very immediacy, which constitutes its actual reality, is the entire actuality; for the immediate is being, and qua pure immediacy, immediacy made transparent by thoroughgoing nega- tion, this immediacy is pure being, is being in general, is all being.
Absolute essential Being is, therefore, not exhausted by the characteristic of being the simple essence of 'thought; it is all actuality, and this actuality exists merely as knowledge. What consciousness did not know would have no sense and can be no power in its life.
Into its self-conscious knowing will, all objectivity, the . whole world, has withdrawn. It is absolutely free in that it knows its freedom; and just this very knowledge of its freedom is its substance, its purpose, its sole and . only content.
VOL. II. — O a THE MORAL VIEW OF THE WORLD Self-consciousness knows and accepts duty as the Absolute. It is bound by that alone, and this sub- stance is its own conscious life pure and simple; duty cannot, for it, take on the form of something alien and external. When thus shut up and confined within itself, however, moral self-consciousness is not yet affirmed and looked at as consciousness* The object is immediate knowledge, and, being thus permeated purely by the self, is not object. But, this knowledge being essentially mediation and negativity, there is im- plied in its very conception relation to some otherness; and thus it is consciousness. This other, because duty constitutes its sole essential purpose and objective con- tent, is a reality completely devoid of significance for consciousness. But again because this consciousness is so entirely confined within itself, it takes up towards this otherness a perfectly free and detached attitude; and the existence of this other is, therefore, an exis- tence completely set free from self-consciousness, and in like manner relating itself merely to itself. The freer self-consciousness becomes, the freer also is the negative object of its consciousness. The object is thus a complete world within itself, with an individuality of * i.e. there is not the opposition of an object to subject which con- sciousness requires.
The Moral View of the World 611 its own, an independent whole of laws peculiar to it- self, as well as an independent procedure and an un- fettered active realisation of those laws. It is alto- gether a nature, a nature whose laws and also whose action belong to itself as a being which is not dis- turbed about the moral self-consciousness, just as the latter is not troubled about it.
Starting with a specific character of this sort, there is formed and established a moral outlook or point of view which consists in a process of relating the im- plicit aspect of morality (moralisches Ansichseyri) and the explicit aspect (moralisches Fursichseyri). This relation presupposes both thorough reciprocal indifference and specific independence as between nature and moral purposes and activity; and also, on the other side, a conscious sense of duty as the sole essential fact, and of nature as entirely devoid of independence and essential significance of its own. The point of view or attitude of the moral life consists in the development of these moments, which are involved in this relation of such entirely antithetic and contradictory presuppo- sitions.
To begin with, then, the moral consciousness in general is presupposed. It takes duty to be the essen- tial reality: itself is actual and active, and in its actuality and action fulfils duty. But this moral con- sciousness, at the same time, finds before it the assumed freedom of nature: it learns by experience that nature is not concerned about giving consciousness a sense of the unity of its reality with that of nature, and hence discovers that nature may let it become happy, but perhaps also may not. The non-moral consciousness on the other hand finds, by chance perhaps, its realisa- 612 Phenomenology of Mind tion where the moral consciousness sees merely an occa- sion for acting, but does not see itself enjoying through its action the success of performance and the satisfaction of achievement. It therefore finds reason for bewailing a situation where there is no correspondence between itself and existence, and lamenting the injustice which confines it to having its object merely in the form of pure duty but refuses to let it see this object and itself actually realised.
The moral consciousness cannot renounce happiness and drop this element out of its absolute purpose. The purpose, which is expressed as duty pure and simple, essentially implies retention of individual self- consciousness and maintenance of its claims. Individual conviction and knowledge thereof constituted a funda- mental element in morality. This element in the objecti- fied purpose, in duty fulfilled, is the particular conscious- ness seeing itself as actually realised. In other words, this moment is that of enjoyment, which thus lies in the very principle of morality, not indeed of morality in the sense of immediate feeling and sentiment, but in the principle of the actualisation of morality. Owing to this, however, enjoyment is also involved in moral sentiment, for morality seeks, not to remain sentiment as opposed to action, but to act or realise itself. Thus the purpose, expressed as a whole along with the con- sciousness of its elements or moments, is that duty fulfilled shall be both a purely moral act and a real- ised individuality, and that nature, the aspect of par- ticularity in contrast with abstract purpose, shall be one with this purpose.
While experience must necessarily bring to light the disharmony between the two 'aspects, seeing that nature The Moral View of the World 613 is detached and apart, nevertheless duty is alone the es- sential fact and nature by contrast is devoid of self- hood. That purpose in its entirety, which the harmony of the two constitutes, contains within it actuality itself. It is, at the same time, the thought of actuality. The harmony of morality and nature, or — seeing that nature is taken account of merely so far as consciousness finds out nature's unity with it — the harmony of morality and happiness, is thought of as necessarily existing; it is postulated. For to postulate or demand means that something is thought to be which is not yet actual, — a necessity affecting, not the conception qua conception, but existence. But the requirement or necessity is at the same time essentially a relation through the conception. The existence demanded thus belongs, not to something present in the mind of some chance individual con- sciousness, but is implied in the very notion of morality itself, whose true content is the unity of pure with individual consciousness. It falls to the individual consciousness to see that this unity is, for it, an actu- ality: — happiness as regards the content of the purpose, and existence in general as regards its form. The ex- istence thus demanded — the unity of both — is therefore not a wish, nor, looked at qua purpose, is it of such a kind as to be still uncertain of attainment; the purpose is rather a demand of reason, or an imme- diate certainty and presupposition of reason.
The first experience above referred to and this postu- late are not the only experience and postulate; a whole round of postulates comes to light. For nature is not merely this completely detached external mode in which, as a bare pure object, consciousness has to realise its purpose. Consciousness is per se essentially 614 Phenomenology of Mind something for which this other detached reality exists, i.e. it is itself something contingent and natural. This nature, which is properly its own, is sensibility, which, taking the form of volition, in the shape of Impulses and Inclinations, has by itself a determinate essential being of its own, i.e. has specific particular purposes, and thus is opposed to abstract will with its pure purpose. In contrast with this opposition, however, pure conscious- ness rather takes the relation of sensibility to it, the absolute unity of sensibility with it, to be the essential fact. Both of these, pure thought and sensibility, are essentially and inherently one consciousness, and pure thought is just that for which and in which this pure unity exists; but for it qua consciousness the opposition between itself and its impulses holds. In this conflict between reason and sensibility, the essen- tial thing for reason is that the conflict should be re- solved, and that the unity of both should come out as a result: not the original unity which consisted in both the opposites being in one individual, but a unity which arises out of the known opposition of the two. So attained, such a unity is then the actual morality; for in it is contained the opposition through which the self is a consciousness, or first becomes concrete and in actual fact self, and at the same time universal. In other words, we find there expressed that process of mediation which, as we see, is essential to morality.
Since, of the two factors in opposition, sensibility is otherness out and out, is the negative, while, on the other hand, pure thought of duty is the ultimate essence which cannot possibly be surrendered in any respect, it seems as if the unity produced can be brought about only by doing away with sensibility. But since The Moral View of the World 6l5 sensibility is itself a moment of this process of pro- ducing the unity, is the aspect of actuality, we have, in the first instance, to be content to express the unity in this form — sensibility should be in conformity with morality.
This unity is likewise a postulated existence; it is not there as a fact; for what is there is consciousness, or the opposition of sensibility and pure consciousness. All the same, the unity is not a something per se like the first postulate, in which free external nature constitutes an aspect and the harmony of nature with moral consciousness in consequence falls outside the latter. Rather, nature is here that which lies within consciousness; and we have here to deal with morality (Moralitdt) as such, with a harmony which is the active self's very own. Consciousness has, therefore, of itself to bring about this harmonious unity, and " to be always making progress in morality." The completion of this result, however, is pushed away into the remote infinite, because if it actually entered the life of consciousness as an actual fact, the moral consciousness would be done away with. For morality is only moral consciousness qua negative force; sen- sibility has merely a negative significance for the con- sciousness of pure duty, it is something merely " not in conformity with " duty. By attaining that harmony, however, morality qua consciousness, i.e. its actuality, passes away, just as in the moral consciousness or actuality its harmony vanishes. The completion is,