660 Phenomenology of Mind put forward, but rather is the reality which it has in its absolute certainty of itself.
The other self-consciousnesses do not know, then, whether this particular conscience is morally good or is wicked; or, rather, not merely can they not know this conscience, but they must take it to be also wicked. For just as it stands loose to the determinate content of duty, and detached from duty as inherently existing, so do they likewise. What is placed before them, they themselves know how to " displace " or dissemble: it is something expressing merely the self of another individual, not their own: they do not merely know themselves to be detached and free from it, but have to resolve and dissipate it within their own conscious- ness, reduce it to nothingness by judgments and explanations in order to preserve their own self.
But the act of conscience is not merely this deter- mination of existence, a determinate content forsaken by the pure self. What ought to be binding as duty and get recognised as such, only is so through knowledge and conviction as to its being duty, by knowledge of self in the deed done. When the deed ceases to have in it this element of self, it ceases to be what is alone its essential nature. Its existence, if deserted by this consciousness of self, would be an ordinary reality, and the act would appear to us a way of fulfilling one's plea- sure and desire. What ought to exist has here essen- tiality only by its being known to be individuality giving itself expression. And its being thus known is the fact acknowledged and recognised by others, and is that which as such ought to have existence.
The self enters existence as self. The spirit which is certain of itself exists as such for others; its immediate Conscience 661 act is not what is accepted and real; what is acknow- ledged by others is, not the determinate element, not the inherent being, but solely and simply the self know- ing itself as such. The element which gives perma- nence and stability is universal self-consciousness. What enters this element cannot be the effect of the act: the latter does not last there, and maintains no permanence: only self-consciousness is what is recognised and gains concrete reality.
Here again,* then, we see Language to be the form in which spirit finds existence. Language is the way self-consciousness exists for others; it is self-conscious- ness which is there immediately present as such, and in the form of this actual universal self-consciousness. Language is self separating itself from itself, which comes objectively before itself as the pure ego identical with ego, which at once maintains itself in this objective form as this actual self, and at the same time fuses directly with others and is their self-consciousness. The self perceives itself at the same time that it is perceived by others: and this perceiving is just existence which has become a self.
The content, which language has here obtained, is no longer the self we found in the world of culture, perverted, perverting, and distraught. It is spirit which, having returned to itself, is certain of itself, certain in itself of its truth, of its own act of recognition, and of being recognised as this knowledge. The language of the ethical spirit of society is law, and simple command and complaint, which is but a tear shed over necessity. Moral consciousness, on the other hand, remains dumb, shut up within its inner life; for self has no existence 662 Phenomenology of Mind as yet in its case: rather existence and self there stand, in the first instance, in external relation to each other. Language, however, comes forward merely as the mediating element between independent self-conscious- nesses recognised and acknowledged; and the existent self means immediately universal recognition, means recognition in manifold ways and in this very mani- foldness simple recognition. What the language of conscience contains is the self knowing itself as essential reality. This alone is what that language expresses, and this expression is the true realisation of " doing " anything, and renders the act valid and acceptable. Consciousness expresses its convic- tion: in this conviction alone is the action duty: it holds good as duty, too, solely by the conviction being expressed. For universal self-consciousness stands detached from the specific act which merely exists: the act qua existence means nothing to it: what it holds of importance is the conviction that the act is a duty; and this appears concretely in language.
To realise the act means here not translating its content from the form of purpose, or subjectivity, into the form of abstract reality: it means translating it from the form of immediate certainty of self, which takes its knowledge, its self-existence, to be the essential fact, into the form of the assurance that consciousness is convinced of its duty, and, being conscience, knows of itself what duty is. This assurance thus guarantees that it is convinced of its conviction being the essential fact.
Whether the assurance, that it acts from conviction of duty, is true, whether that really is duty which is done — these questions or doubts have no meaning if Conscience 663 directed against conscience. In the case of the ques- tion, whether the assurance is true, it would be assumed that the inner intention is different from the one put forward, i.e. that the willing of a particular self can be separated from duty, from the will of the universal and pure consciousness: the latter will would in that case be a matter of words, while the former would be strictly the real moving principle of the act. But such a distinction between the universal consciousness and the particular self is precisely what has been cancelled, and the superseding of it constitutes conscience. Im- mediate knowledge on the part of self which is certain of itself is law and duty. Its intention, by being its own intention, is what is right. All that is required is that it should know this, and state its conviction that its knowledge and will are the right. The expression of this assurance ipso facto cancels the form of its par- ticularity. It recognises thereby the necessary univer- sality of the self. In that it calls itself conscience, it calls itself pure self-knowledge and pure abstract will, i.e. it calls itself a universal knowledge and will which acknowledges and recognises others, is like them — for they are just this pure self-knowledge and will — and which is on that account also recognised by them. In the willing of the self which is certain of itself, in this knowledge of the self as the essential reality, lies the essence of the right.
When any one says, therefore, he is acting from conscience, he is saying what is true, for his conscience is the self which knows and wills. He must, however, necessarily say so, for this self has to be at the same time universal self. It is not universal in the content o f the act: for this content is per se indifferent on 664 Phenomenology of Mind account of its being specific and determinate. The universality lies in the form of the act. It is this form which is to be affirmed as real: the form is the self, which as such is actual in language, pronounces itself to be the truth, and just by so doing acknowledges all other selves, and is recognised by them.
Conscience, then, in its majestic sublimity above any specific law and every content of duty, puts whatever content there is into its knowledge and willing. It becomes moral genius and originality, which takes the inner voice of its immediate knowledge to be a voice divine; and since in such knowledge it directly knows existence as well, it is divine creative power, which contains living force in its very conception. It is in itself, too, divine worship, "service of God," for its action consists in beholding this its own proper divinity.
This solitary worship, this " service of God " in soli- tude of soul, is at the same time essentially " service of God " in public, on the part of a religious community; and pure inward self-knowledge and perception of self pass to being a moment of consciousness.* To behold itself is to exist objectively, and this objective element is the utterance of its knowledge and will in a universal way. Through such expression the self becomes estab- lished and accepted, and the act becomes an effective deed, a deed carrying out a definite result. What gives reality and subsistence to its deed is universal self- consciousness. When, however, conscience finds expres- sion, this puts the certainty of itself in the form of pure self and thereby as universal self. Others let the act * i.e. into a state which implies distinction and opposition of subject and object.
The "Beautiful Soul" 665 hold as valid, owing to the explicit terms in which the self is thus expressed and acknowledged to be the essential reality. The spirit and the substance of their community are, thus, the mutual assurance of their conscientiousness, of their good intentions, the rejoicing over this reciprocal purity of purpose, the quickening and refreshment received from the glorious privilege of knowing and of getting expression, of fostering and cherishing a state so altogether excellent and desirable.
So far as this sphere of conscience still distinguishes its abstract consciousness from its self-consciousness, its life is merely hid in God. God is indeed imme- diately present to its mind and heart, to its self. But what is revealed, its actual consciousness and the mediating process of this consciousness, is, to it, some- thing other than that hidden inner life and the imme- diacy of God's presence. But, with the completion of conscience, the distinction between its abstract con- sciousness and its self-consciousness is done away. It knows that the abstract consciousness is just this self, this individual self-existence which is certain of itself: that the very difference between the terms is abolished in the immediateness of the relation of the self to the ultimate Being, which, when placed outside the self, is the abstract essence, and a Being concealed from it. For a relation is mediate when the terms related are not one and the same, but each is a different term for the other, and is one only with the other in some third term: an immediate relation, however, means, in fact, nothing else than the unity of the terms. Having risen above the meaningless position of holding these distinctions, which are not distinctions at all, to be still such, consciousness knows the immediateness of 666 Phenomenology of Mind the presence of ultimate Being within it to be the unity of that Being and its self: it thus knows itself to be the living inherent reality, and takes its knowledge to be Religion, which, qua kno wedge viewed as an object or knowledge with an objective existence, is the utter- ance of the religious communion regarding its own spirit.
We see then, here, self-consciousness withdrawn into the inmost retreats of its being, with all externality, as such, gone and vanished from it — returned into the intuition of ego as altogether identical with ego, an intuition where this ego is all that is essential, and all that exists. It is absorbed in this conception of itself; for it is driven to the extreme limit of its extreme positions, and in such a way that the moments distinguished, moments through which it is real or still consciousness, are not merely for us these bare ex- tremes; rather what it is for itself, and what, to it, is inherent, and what is, for it, existence — all these moments evaporate into abstractions. They have no longer stability, no substantial existence for this phase of consciousness. Everything, that was hitherto for consciousness essential, has reverted into these abstrac- tions. When clarified to this degree of transparency, consciousness exists in its poorest form, and the poverty, constituting its sole and only possession, is itself a process of disappearance. This absolute cer- tainty into which the substance has been resolved is absolute untruth, which collapses within itself; it is absolute self-consciousness, in which consciousness [with its relation of self and object] is submerged and goes under.
Looking at this absorption and disappearance from The "Beautiful Soul" 667 within, the inherent and essential substance is, for consciousness, knowledge in the sense of its knowledge. Being consciousness, it is split up into the opposition between itself and the object, which is, for it, the essentially real. But this very object is what is perfectly transparent, is its self; and its consciousness is merely knowledge concerning itself. All life and all spiritual truth have returned into this self, and have lost their difference from the ego. The moments of conscious- ness are therefore these extreme abstractions, of which none holds its ground, but each loses itself in the other and produces it. We have here the process of the " unhappy soul/' * in restless change with self; in the present case, however, this is a conscious ex- perience going on inside itself, fully conscious of being the notion of reason, while the " unhappy soul " above spoken of was only reason implicitly. The absolute certainty of self thus finds itself qua consciousness, converted directly into a dying sound, a mere objectifi- cation of its subjectivity or self-existence. But this world so created is the utterance of its own voice, which in like manner it has directly heard, and the echo of which only returns to it. This return does not therefore mean that the self is there in its true reality (an und fiir sick): for the real is, for it, not an inherent being, is no per se, but its very self. Just as little has consciousness itself existence, for the objective aspect does not succeed in becoming something negative of the actual self, in the same way as this self does not reach complete actuality. It lacks force to externalise itself, the power to make itself a thing, and endure existence. It lives in dread of staining the radiance of its inner being by action and 668 Phenomenology of Mi existence. And to preserve the purity of its heart, it flees from contact with actuality, and steadfastly per- severes in a state of self-willed impotence to renounce a self which is pared away to the last point of abstraction, and to give itself substantial existence, or, in other words, to transform its thought into being, and commit itself to absolute distinction [that between thought and being]. The hollow object, which it produces, now fills it, therefore, with the feeling of emptiness. Its activity consists in yearning; it merely loses itself in becoming an unsubstantial shadowy object, and, rising above this loss and falling back on itself, finds itself merely as lost. In this transparent purity of its moments it becomes a sorrow-laden " beautiful soul," as it is called; its light dims and dies within it, and it vanishes as a shapeless vapour dissolving into thin air.* This silent fusion of the pithless unsubstantial ele- ments of evaporated life has, however, still to be taken in the other sense of the reality of conscience, and in the way its process actually appears. Conscience has to be considered as acting. The objective moment in this phase of consciousness took above the determinate form of universal consciousness. The knowing of self is, qua this particular self, different from another self. Language in which all reciprocally recognise and acknowledge each other as acting conscientiously — this general equality breaks up into the inequality of each individual existing for himself; each conscious- ness turns from its universality back into itself, each is just as much reflected absolutely into itself as it is universal. By this means there necessarily comes about * Cf. Hegel's remarks on Jacobi's conception of the " beautiful soul '': Evil and Forgiveness 669 the opposition of individuality to other individuals and to the universal. And this relation and its proce- dure we have to consider.
Or, again, this universality and duty have the abso- lutely opposite significance; they signify determinate individuality, exempting itself from what is universal, individuality which looks on pure duty as universality that has appeared merely on the surface and is turned on its outside: " duty is merely a matter of words/' and passes for that whose being is for something else. Conscience, which in the first instance takes up merely a negative attitude towards duty, qua a given determinate duty, feels itself detached from it. But since conscience fills empty duty with a determinate con- tent drawn from its own self, it is positively aware of the fact that it, qua this particular self, makes its own content. Its pure self, as it is empty knowledge, is without content and without definiteness. The content which it supplies to that knowledge is drawn from its own self, qua this determinate self, is drawn from itself as a natural individuality. In speaking of the conscientiousness of its action, it is doubtless aware of its pure self, but in the purpose of its action — a purpose which brings in a concrete content — it is conscious of itself as this particular individual, and is conscious of the opposition between what it is for itself and what it is for others, of the opposition of univer- sality or duty and its state of being reflected into self away from the universal.
While in this way the opposition, into which con- science passes when it acts, finds expression in its inner life, the opposition is at the same time disparity on its outer side, in the sphere of existence — the disparity 670 Phenomenology of Mind or discordance of its particular individuality with reference to another individual. Its special peculiarity consists in the fact that the two elements constituting its consciousness — viz. the self and the inherent nature (Ansich] — are unequal in value and significance within it; in being accepted as valid, they are so determined that certainty of self is the essential fact as against the inherent nature, or the universal, which is taken to be merely a moment. Over against this internal determina- tion there thus stands the element of existence, the universal consciousness; and for this latter it is rather universality, duty, which is the essential fact, while individuality, which exists for itself and is opposed to the universal, has merely the value of a superseded moment. The first consciousness is held to be Evil by the consciousness which thus stands by the fact of duty, because of the lack of congruity or identity of its internal subjective life with the universal; and since at the same time the first consciousness declares its act to be identity with itself, to be duty and conscientiousness, it is held by that universal consciousness to be Hypocrisy.
The course taken by this opposition is, in the first instance, the formal reinstatement of the identity be- tween what the evil consciousness is in its own nature and what it declares itself to be. It has to be made manifest that it is evil, and its objective existence thus made congruent with its real nature; the hypocrisy must be unmasked. This return of the disparity, present in hypocrisy, into the state of congruency or identity is not at once brought to pass by the mere fact that, as people usually say, hypocrisy just proves its reverence for duty and virtue through assuming the appearance of them, and using this as Evil and Forgiveness 671 a mask to hide itself from its own consciousness no less than from another — as if, in this acknow- ledgment and recognition in itself of its opposite, eo ipso congruency and agreement were implied and contained. Yet even then it is just as truly done with this recognition in words and is reflected into self; and in the very fact of its using the inherent and essential reality merely as something which has a significance for another consciousness, there is really implied its own contempt for that inherent principle, and the demonstration of the worthlessness of that reality for all. For what lets itself be used as an external instrument shows itself to be a thing, which has within it no proper weight and worth of its own.
Moreover, this congruency or identity, is not brought about either by the evil consciousness per- sisting onesidedly in its own state, or by the judgment of the universal consciousness. If the former disclaims the consciousness of duty, and maintains that what the latter pronounces to be baseness, to be absolute discordance with universality, is an action according to inner law and conscience, then, in this onesided assurance of identity and concord, there still remains its want of agreement with the other, since this other universal consciousness certainly does not believe the assurance and does not acknowledge it. In other words, since onesided insistence on one extreme destroys itself, evil would indeed thereby confess to being evil, but in so doing would at once cancel itself and cease to be hypocrisy, and so would not qua hypocrisy be unmasked. It confesses itself, in fact, to be evil by asserting that, while opposing what is recognised as universal, it is acting according to inner 672 Phenomenology of Mind law and conscience. For were this law and conscience not the law of its particularity and caprice, it would not be something inward, something private, but what is universally accepted and acknowledged. When, therefore, any one says he acts towards others from a law and conscience of his own, he is saying, in point of fact, that he is abusing and wronging them. But actual conscience is not this insistence on a knowledge and a will which are opposed to what is universal; the univer- sal is the element of its existence, and its very language pronounces its action to be recognised duty.
Just as little, when the universal consciousness emphasises and persists in its own judgment, does this unmask and dissipate hypocrisy. When that universal consciousness stigmatises hypocrisy as bad, base, and so on, it appeals, in passing such a judgment, to its own law, just as the evil consciousness, on its side, does too. For the former law makes its appearance in opposition to the latter, and thereby is a particular law. It has, therefore, no antecedent claim over the other law; rather it legitimises this other law. Hence the universal consciousness, by thus emulating the other, does precisely the opposite of what it means to do: for it shows that its so-called " true duty," which ought to be universally acknowledged, is something not acknowledged and recognised, and consequently it grants the other an equal right of independently exist- ing on its own account.
This judgment [of universal consciousness], however, has, at the same time, another side to it, from which it leads the way to the dissolution of the opposition in question. Consciousness of the universal does not proceed, qua real and qua acting, to deal with the evil Evil and Forgiveness 673 consciousness; for this latter, rather, is the real. In opposing the latter, it is a consciousness which is not entangled in the opposition of particular and universal involved in action. It stays within the universality of thought, takes up the attitude of an apprehending intelligence, and its first act is merely that of judgment. Through this judgment it now places itself, as was just observed, alongside the first consciousness, and the latter, through this identity, this likeness, between them, comes to see itself in this other consciousness. For in the attitude of apprehension consciousness of duty is passive. Thereby it is in contradiction with itself as the absolute will of duty, as the self that determines absolutely from itself. It may well preserve itself in its purity, for it does not act; it is hypocrisy, which wants to see the fact of judging taken for the actual deed, and instead of proving its uprightness and honesty by acts does so by expressing fine sentiments. It is thus constituted entirely in the same way as that against which the reproach is made of putting its phrases in place of duty. In both cases alike the aspect of reality is distinct from the express statements — in the one case owing to the selfish purpose of the