itself actual. Moreover, they ought not to be sup- pressed, but merely to be in conformity with reason. They, are, too, in conformity with it; for moral action is nothing else than self-realising consciousness — con- sciousness taking on the form of an impulse, i.e. it is immediately the realised, actually present harmony Dissemblance 631 of impulse and morality. But, in point of fact, the impulse is not only this empty conscious form, which might possibly have within itself a spring of action other than the impulse in question, and be driven on by that. For sensibility is a kind of nature, which con- tains within itself its own laws and springs of action: consequently, morality cannot seriously mean to be the inciting motive (Triebfeder) for impulses (Triebe), the angle of inclination for inclinations. For, since these latter have their own fixed character and peculiar con- tent, the consciousness, to which they were to conform, would rather be in conformity with them — a conformity which moral self-consciousness declines to adopt. The harmony between the two is thus merely implicit and postulated.
In moral action the realised or present harmony of morality and sensibility was set up at one moment, and at the next is " displaced." The harmony is in a misty distance beyond consciousness, where there is nothing more to be accurately distinguished or grasped; for, to grasp this unity, which we have just tried to do, has proved impossible.
In this merely immanent or implicit harmony, how- ever, consciousness gives up itself altogether. This im- manent state is its moral completion, where the struggle of morality and sensibility has ceased, and the latter is in conformity to the former in a way which cannot be made out. On that account, this completion is again merely a dissemblance of the actual case; for in point of fact morality would be really giving up itself in that completion, because it is only consciousness of absolute purpose qua pure and simple purpose, i.e. in opposition to all other purposes. Morality is both the 632 Phenomenology of Mind activity of this pure purpose, and at the same time the consciousness of rising above sensibility, of being mixed up with sensibility and of opposing and struggling with it. That this moral completion is not taken seri- ously is directly expressed by consciousness in the fact that it shifts this completion away into infinity, i.e. asserts that the completion is never completed.
Thus it is really only the middle state of being incom- plete that is admitted to have any value: a state never- theless which at least ought to be one of progress to- wards completion. Yet it cannot be so; for advancing in morality would mean approaching its annihilation and disappearance. For the goal would be the nothingness above mentioned, the abolition of morality and con- sciousness itself: but to come ever nearer and nearer to nothing means to decrease. Besides, " advancing " would, in general, in the same way as "decreasing/' introduce distinctions of quantity into morality: but these are quite inadmissible in such a sphere. In morality qua mode of consciousness which takes the ethical end to be pure duty, we cannot think at all of difference, least of all of the superficial difference of quantity: there is only one virtue, only one pure duty, only one morality.
Since, then, it is not moral completion that is taken seriously, but rather the middle state, i.e., as just ex- plained, the condition of no morality, we thus come by another way back to the content of the first postu- late. For we cannot perceive how happiness is to be demanded for this moral consciousness on the ground of its worthiness to be happy. It is well aware of its not being complete, and cannot, therefore, in point of fact, demand happiness as a desert, as something of Dissemblance 633 which it is worthy. It can ask happiness to be given merely as an act of free grace, i.e. it can only ask for happiness as such, and as a substantive element by it- self; it cannot expect it except as the result of chance and caprice, not because there is any absolute reason of the above sort. The condition of non-morality herein expresses just what it is — that it is concerned, not about morality, but about happiness alone, with- out reference to morality.
By this second aspect of the moral point of view, the assertion of the first aspect, wherein disharmony be- tween morality and happiness is presupposed, is also cancelled. One may pretend to have found by experience that in the actual present the man who is moral often fares badly, while the man who is not, often comes off happily. Yet the middle state of incomplete morality, the condition which has proved to be the essential one, shows clearly that this perception that morality fares badly, this experience which ought to be but is not, is merely a dissemblance of the real facts of the case. For, since morality is not completed, i.e. since morality in point of fact is not, what can there be in experience that morality should fare badly?
Since, at the same time, it has come out that the point at issue concerns happiness alone, it is manifest that, in making the judgment, '* the man who has no morality comes off well," there was no intention to convey thereby that there is something wrong in such a case. The designation of an individual as one devoid of morality necessarily falls to the ground, when morality in general is incomplete; such a characterisation rests, indeed, on pure caprice. Hence the sense and content of that judgment of experience is simply this, that 634 Phenomenology of Mind happiness as such should not have fallen to some who got it, i.e. the judgment is an expression of envy, which is assuming the covering cloak of morality. The reason, however, why we think good luck, as we call it, should fall to the lot of others is good friendship, which un- grudgingly grants and wishes them, and wishes itself too, this favour, this accident of good fortune.
Morality, then, in the moral consciousness, is not completed. This is what is now established. But its essence consists in being merely what is complete, and so pure morality: incomplete morality is, therefore, impure, in other words, is Immorality. Morality it- self thus exists in another being than the actual con- crete consciousness. This other is a holy moral legis- lator.
Morality which is not completed in consciousness, the morality which is the reason for making those postulates, means, in the first instance, that morality, when it is set up as actual in consciousness, stands in relation to something else, to an existence, and thus itself preserves and implies otherness or distinction, whence arises a manifold plurality of moral commands. The moral self-consciousness at the same time, however, looks on these many duties as unessential; for it is concerned with merely the one pure duty, and this plurality of duties, so far as they are determinate duties, have no true reality for self-consciousness. They can thus have their real truth accepted only in another consciousness, and are (what they are not for the actual moral self-consciousness) sacred through a holy law- giver.
But this, too, is again merely a dissembling of the actual fact. For moral self -consciousness is to itself Dissemblance 635 the absolute, and duty is simply and solely what it knows to be duty. It, however, recognises only pure duty as duty: what is not sacred in its view is not in itself sacred at all, and what is not per se sacred cannot be rendered so by some being that is sacred. Moral consciousness, further, is not really serious in allowing something to be made sacred by another consciousness than its own. For, only that is without qualification sacred in its eyes which is made sacred through its own action, and is sacred within it. It is thus just as little in earnest in treating this other being as a holy being; for this would mean that, within it, something was to attain an essential significance, which, for the moral consciousness, i.e. in itself, has none.
If the sacred being was postulated, in order that duty might have binding validity within the moral con- sciousness, not qua pure duty, but as a plurality of specific duties, then this must again be dissembled and the other being must be solely sacred in so far as only pure duty has binding validity within the moral consciousness. Pure duty has also, in point of fact, validity and bindingness only in another being, not in the moral consciousness. Although, within the latter, pure morality seems alone to hold good, still this must be put right in another form, for it is, at the same time, a natural consciousness. Morality is, in it, affected and conditioned by sensibility, and thus is not by itself self-contained, but a contingent result of free will; in it, however, qua pure will, morality is a con- tingency of knowledge. Taken by itself, therefore, morality is in another being, is self-complete only in another reality than the actual moral consciousness.
This other being, then, is here absolutely complete 636 Phenomenology of Mind morality, because in its case morality does not stand in relation to nature and sensibility. Yet the reality of pure duty lies in its actualisation in nature and sensibility. The moral consciousness accounts for its incompleteness by the fact that morality, in its case, has a positive rela- tion to nature and sensibility, since it holds an essential moment of morality to be that morality should have simply and solely a negative relation towards nature and sensibility. The pure moral being, on the other hand, because far above the struggle with nature and sense, does not stand in a negative relation to them. Thus, in point of fact, the positive relation to them alone remains in its case, i.e. there remains just what a moment ago passed for the incomplete, for what was not moral. Pure morality, however, entirely cut off from actual reality so as likewise to be even without positive relation to reality, would be a blank unreal abstraction, where the very notion of morality, which consists in thinking of pure duty and in willing and doing, would be absolutely done away with. This other being, so purely and entirely moral, is again, therefore, a mere dissemblance of the actual fact, and has to be given up.
In this purely moral being, however, the moments of the contradiction, in which this synthetic ideational process is carried on, come closer together. So, like- wise, do the opposites taken up alternately, now this and also that, and also the other, opposites which are allowed to follow one after the other, with one opposite constantly set aside by another, yet without these ideas ever being brought together. So close do they come, that consciousness here has to give up its moral view of the world and retreat within itself.
Dissemblance 637 Dissemblance 637 It knows its morality as incomplete because it is affected by an opposing sensibility and nature, which partly perturb morality as such, and partly give rise to a plurality of duties, by which, in concrete cases of real action, consciousness finds itself embarrassed. For each case is the concrete focus of many moral relations, just as an object of perception in general is a thing with many qualities. And since a determinate duty is a purpose, it has a content; its content is a part of the purpose, and so morality is not pure morality. This latter, then, has its real existence in some other being. But such reality means nothing else than that morality is here self -complete, in itself and for itself — for itself, i.e. is morality of a con- sciousness: in itself, i.e. has existence and actuality.
In that first incomplete consciousness, morality is not realised and carried out. It is there something immanent and implicit, in the sense of a mere thought- element; for it is associated with nature and sensi- bility, with the actuality of [external] existence and conscious life, which constitutes its content; and nature and sensibility are morally nothing. In the second, morality is present as completed, and not in the form of an unrealised thought-element. But this completion consists just in the fact that morality has reality in a consciousness, in the sense of free reality, objective exist- ence in general, is not something empty, but filled out, full of content. That is to say, the completion of morality is placed in this, that what a moment ago was character- ised as morally nothing is found present in morality and inherent in it. It is at one time to have validity simply and solely as the unrealised thought-element, a product of pure abstraction; but, on the other hand, is just as 638 Phenomenology of Mind certainly to have in this form no validity at all: its true nature is to consist in being opposed to reality, detached altogether therefrom, and empty, and then again to consist in being actual reality.
The syncretism, or fusion, of these contradictions, which is expressed in extenso in the moral attitude of experience, collapses internally, since the distinction on which it rests — its distinction from something which must be thought and stated as a necessity, and is yet at the same time not essential — passes into one which does not any longer exist even in words. What, at the end, is affirmed to be something with different aspects, both to be nothing and also real, is one and the very same — existence and reality. And what is to be absolute only as something beyond actual existence and actual con- sciousness, and at the same time to be only in conscious- ness and so, qua beyond, nothing at all — this absolute is pure duty and the knowledge that pure duty is the essen- tially real. The consciousness, which makes this distinc- tion that is no distinction, which announces actuality to be at once what is nothing and what is real, pronounces pure morality to be both the ultimate truth and also to be devoid of all true reality, and expresses together in one and the same breath ideas which it formerly separated — such a consciousness itself proclaims that it is not in earnest with this characterisation and separation of the moments of self and inherent reality. It shows, on the contrary, that, what it announces as absolute existence apart from consciousness, it really keeps enclosed within the self of self-consciousness; and that, what it gives out as something entirely in thought or abso- lutely inherent and implicit, it just for that reason takes to be something which has no truth at all.
Dissemblance 639 It becomes clear to consciousness that placing these moments apart from each other is mentally " dis- placing" them, is a dissemblance, and it would be hypocrisy were it really to keep to this. But, being pure moral self-consciousness, it flees from this discord- ance between what it represents and what constitutes its essential nature, flees from this untruth, which gives out as true what it holds to be untrue, and, turning away with abhorrence, it hastens back into itself. The consciousness, which scorns such a moral idea of the world, is pure Conscience (Gewissen): it is, in its inmost being, simply spirit consciously assured or " certain " (gewiss) of itself, spirit which acts directly in the light of this assurance, which acts conscientiously (gewissen- haft), without the intervention of those ideas, and finds its true nature in this direct immediacy.
While, however, this sphere of dissemblance is nothing else than the development of moral self-consciousness in its various moments and is consequently its reality, so too this self-consciousness, by returning into itself, will become, in its inmost nature, nothing else. This returning into itself, indeed, simply means that it has come to be conscious that its truth is a pretended truth, a mere pretence. As returning into itself it had to be always giving out this pretended truth as its real truth, for it had to express and display itself as an objective idea; but it had to know all the same that this is merely a dissemblance. It would consequently be, in point of fact, hypocrisy all the while, and its abhorrence of such dissemblance would be itself the first expression of hypocrisy.
CONSCIENCE: THE "BEAUTIFUL SOUL": EVIL AND THE FORGIVENESS OF IT [The one-sidedness of each of the preceding stages is removed when the moral consciousness assumes the attitude of Conscience. Here the indi- vidual is at once self-legislating and yet sure of the unity and self- completeness of its own will in the midst of all diversity of moral content. The immediacy involved in the idea of a " self-legislating" will appears in the perceptual directness of the action of conscience: it " sees " what is right and does the right without hesitation. But it is not an abstract " faculty " of willing independent of the varied content of the individual's moral experience. The universality of the individual permeates and per- vades all the content of his being, and makes him a concrete moral individuality, at home with himself in the smallest detail as well as in the larger issues of his self-complete spiritual existence. Conscience, as Butler says, is a ' system ' or ' constitution,' analogous in the case of the indi- vidual to the objectified system of the state and its institutions. The self-deception of the second one-sided phase of moral experience seems also to have no place in Conscience, for Conscience is the transparent and self- revealing unity in all the content of moral individuality. Only on this condition can it be absolutely confident and certain of itself in all its functions, and this certainty of itself is the inalienable characteristic of conscience. It thinks it cannot be deceived about itself, can neither delude itself nor others, but freely realises all that it professes to be and professes to be all that it realises. It is thus the supreme achievement of finite spiritual existence; but it has no meaning apart from the existence of finite spirit in the form of society.
Its very conditions, however, give rise to delusion and deception of another kind. For, so complete is its world and its life that it may attempt to cut itself off from the concrete substance of actual society which alone makes possible the existence of conscience. It then tries to cultivate goodness in solitary isolation from the actual social whole. This is the attitude of the " beautiful soul," a type of spiritual life cultivated by the "Moravians," and familiar during the Romantic movement. Novalia is the best-known example; the classical interpretation of the mood was Conscience 641 Conscience 641 given in Goethe's Meisters Lehrjahre, Bk. 6. It has the self-confidence and individual inspiration of Conscience, but frankly rejects the con- crete objectivity which secures for Conscience liberation from mere sub- jectivity. The very rejection of objectivity is the only achievement of the " beautiful soul," and is held to be the greatest triumph of its self- conscious freedom. It flees from concrete moral action, and luxuriates in a state of self-hypnotised inactivity. Still it takes up this attitude in the interests of " pure goodness," and hence in withdrawing from the lowly deeds of the daily moral life it indulges all the more in the self-cloistered cult of the beauty of holiness. It is moral individualism turned into mystic self-absorption. Hegel's analysis brings out that this type of spirit is in principle as it was in fact the direct ally of moral evil. For (1) its refusal to act means indifference to all action, good and bad alike, and the rejection of the demands of duty is precisely immorality: (2) its self-closed isolation destroys the very principle of true morality, universality of will, recognition and acknowledgment by others of the claims of the individual will.
But this extremity of finite spiritual experience is the opportunity of Absolute Spirit. The attitude of this mystical moral individuality is indirectly an indication of the finitude of the moral point of view and therefore of its failure to supply the absolute self-completeness which spirit requires. The very consciousness by finite spirit of its inherent incompleteness is implicitly a consciousness of the Absolute Spirit. The consciousness of Absolute Spirit is the attitude of experience known as Religion.]
II.— Q CONSCIENCE: THE " BEAUTIFUL SOUL ": EVIL AND THE FORGIVENESS OF IT The antinomy in the moral view of the world — viz. that there is a moral consciousness and that there is none, or that the validity, the bindingness, of duty has its ground beyond consciousness, and conversely only takes effect in consciousness — these contradictory elements had been combined in the idea, in which the non-moral consciousness is to pass for moral, its contingent know- ledge and will to be accepted as fully sufficing, and happiness to be its lot as a matter of grace. Moral self- consciousness took this self-contradictory idea not upon itself, but transferred it to another being. But this putting outside itself of what it must think as neces- sary is as much a contradiction in form as the other was in content. But that which appears as contra- dictory, and that in the division and again dissolution of which lies the round of activity peculiar to the moral attitude, are inherently the same: for pure duty qua pure knowledge is nothing else than the self of consciousness, and the self of consciousness is existence and actuality; and, in the same way, what is to be beyond actual consciousness is nothing else than pure thought, is, in fact, the self. Because this is so, self- consciousness, for us or per se, passes back into itself, and becomes aware that that being is its self, in which the actual is at once pure knowledge and pure duty.
Conscience 643 It takes itself to be absolutely valid in its contingency, to be that which knows its immediate particular existence as pure knowledge and action, as the true objective reality and harmony.
This self of Conscience, the phase of spiritual life immediately certain of itself as absolute truth and objective being, is the third type of spiritual self. It is the outcome of the third sphere of the spiritual world,* and may be shortly contrasted with the two former types of self.
The totality or actuality which is revealed as the final result of the ethical world, the world of the social order, is the self of a Person, ethical personality: its existence lies in its being recognised and acknowledged. As the person is the self devoid of substance, its exist- ence is abstract reality too. The person has a definite standing, and that directly and unconditionally: its self is the point in the sphere of its existence which is immediately at rest. That point is not torn away from its universality; the two [the particular focus and its universality] are therefore not in a relational process with regard to one another: the universal is in it without distinction, and is neither the content of the self, nor is the self filled by itself.
The second self is the final truth and outcome of a world of culture, is spirit that has recovered itself after and through disruption, is absolute freedom. In this self, the former immediate unity of individual exist- ence and universality finds its elements separated from one another. The universal, which remains at the same time a purely spiritual entity, the state of recognition or * Viz. Morality, the first being the Ethical Order of Society, the second the sphere of^Cultu. •.
644 Phenomenology of Mind universal will and universal knowledge — the universal is object and content of the self, and its universal actual- ity. But the universal has not there the form of exist- ence detached from the self: in this mode of self it therefore gets no filling, no positive content, no world.
Moral self-consciousness, indeed, lets its universal aspect get detached, so that this aspect becomes a nature of its own; and at the same time it retains this universality within itself in a superseded form. But it is merely a game of dissembling; it constantly inter- changes these two characteristics. In the form of Con- science, with its certainty of itself, it first finds the content to fill the former emptiness of duty as well as the emptiness of right and the empty universal will. And because this certainty of self is at the same time immediacy, it finds in conscience definite existence.
Having reached this level of its truth, moral self- consciousness then leaves, or rather supersedes, this state of internal division and self-separation, whence arose dissimulation — the separation of its inherent being from the self, of pure duty, qua pure purpose, from reality qua a nature and a sensibility opposed to mere purpose. It is, when thus returned into itself, con- crete moral spirit, which does not make for itself a bare abstract standard out of the consciousness of pure duty, a standard to be set up against 'actual conscious life; on the contrary, pure duty, as also the sensuous nature opposed to pure duty, are superseded moments. This mode of spirit, in its immediate unity, is a moral being making itself actual, and an act is immediately a con- crete embodiment of morality.
Given a case of action; it is an objectVe reality for the knowing mind. The latter, qua cor science, knows Conscience 645 it in a direct concrete manner; and at the same time it is merely as conscience knows it to be. When know- ledge is something other than its object, it is contingent in character. Spirit, however, which is sure of its self, is not at all an accidental knowledge of that kind, is not a way of producing inside its own being ideas from which reality is divorced. On the contrary; since the separation between what is essential or inherent and self has been given up, a case of moral action falls, just as it is per se, directly within immediate conscious certainty, the sensible [feeling] form of knowledge, and it merely is per se as it is in this form of knowledge.