The characteristic of purely negative independent self-existence, however, consumes itself in this active hatred towards one another; and through this pro- cess, involved in its very principle, spirit enters into another shape. Independent self-existence can- celled and abolished is the form of the object, a form which is produced by the self, or rather is the self produced, the self-consuming self, i.e. the self that becomes a " thing." The agent at work, therefore, retains the upper hand over these animal spirits merely tearing each other to pieces; and his action is not merely negative, but composed and creative. The consciousness of spirit is, thus, now the process which is above and beyond the immediate inherent [universal] nature, as well as transcends the abstract self-existence in isolation. Since the implicit inherent nature is relegated, through opposition, to the level of a specific character, it is no longer the proper form of Absolute Spirit, but a reality which its consciousness * Sacred animals in Indian religion, VOL. H.— V 706 Phenomenology of Mind finds lying over against itself as an ordinary existing fact and cancels; at the same time this consciousness is not merely this negative cancelling self-existent being, but produces its own objective idea of itself, — self- existence put forth in the form of an object. This process of production is, all the same, not yet perfect production; it is a conditioned activity, the forming of a given material.
c THE ARTIFICER* Spirit, then, here takes the form of the artificer, and its action, when producing itself as object, but without having as yet grasped the thought of itself, is an instinctive kind of working, like bees building their cells.
The first form, because immediate, has the abstract character of " understanding," and the work accom- plished is not yet in itself endued with spirit. The crystals of Pyramids and Obelisks, simple combinations of straight lines with even surfaces and equal relations of parts in which incommensurability of curvature is set aside — these are the works produced in strict geo- metrical form by this artificer. Owing to the purely abstract intelligible nature of the form, it is not in itself the true significance of the form; it is not the spiritual self. Thus, either the works produced only receive spirit into them as an alien, departed spirit, one that has forsaken its living suffusion and permeation with reality, and, being itself dead, enters into these lifeless crystals; or they take up an external relation to spirit as something which is itself external and not there as spirit — they are related to it as to the orient Light, which throws its significance on them.
The separation of elements from which spirit as * Egyptian religions.
708 Phenomenology of Mind artificer starts — the separation of the implicit essential nature, which becomes the material it works upon, and independent self-existence, which is the aspect of self-consciousness at work — this division has become objective in the result achieved. Its further endeavour has to be directed to cancelling and doing away with this separation of soul and body; it must strive to clothe and give embodied shape to soul per se, and endow the body with soul. The two aspects, since they are brought closer to one another, bear towards each other, in this condition, the character of ideally presented spirit and of enveloping shell. Spirit's oneness with itself contains this opposition of indi- viduality and universality. Since the aspects of the work produced become closer by performance of it, there comes about thereby at the same time the other fact, that the work gets nearer to the self-consciousness performing it, and that the latter attains in the work knowledge of itself as it truly is. In this way, however, the work merely constitutes to begin with the abstract side of the activity of spirit, which does not yet per- ceive the content of this activity within itself but in its work, which is a " thing." The artificer as such, spirit in its entirety, has not yet appeared; the artificer is still the inner, hidden reality, which qua entire is present only as broken up into active self-consciousness and the object it has produced.
The surrounding habitation, external reality, which to begin with is raised merely to the abstract form of the understanding, is worked up by the artificer and made into a more animated form. The artificer em- ploys plant life for this purpose, which is no longer sacred, as in the previous case of inactive impotent The Artificer 709 pantheism; rather, the artificer, who holds ' himself to be the self-existent reality, takes that plant life as something to be used and degrades it to an ex- ternal aspect, to the level of an ornament. But it is not turned to use without some alteration: for the worker producing the self-conscious form destroys at the same time the transitoriness, inherently characteristic of the immediate existence of this life, and brings its organic forms nearer to the more exact and more uni- versal forms of thought. The organic form, which, left to itself, grows and thrives in particularity, being on its side subjugated by the form of thought, elevates in turn these straight-lined and level shapes into more animated roundedness — a blending which becomes the root of free architecture.* This dwelling, (the aspect of the universal element or inorganic nature of spirits), also includes within it now a form of individuality, which brings nearer to actuality the spirit that was formerly separated from existence and external or internal thereto, and thus makes the work to accord more with active self-con- sciousness. The worker lays hold, first of all, on the form of self-existence in general, on the forms of animal life. That he is no longer directly aware of himself in animal life, he shows by the fact that in reference to this he constitutes himself the productive force, and knows himself in it as being his own work, whereby the productive force at the same time is one which is super- seded and becomes the hieroglyphic symbol of another meaning, the hieroglyph of a thought., Hence also this force is no longer solely and entirely used by the worker, but becomes blended with the shape embody- * The Egyptian columns and architecture.
710 Phenomenology of Mind ing thought, with the human form.* Still, the work lacks the form and existence where self as self appears: it also fails to express in its very nature that it includes within itself an inner meaning; it lacks language, the element in which the sense and meaning contained are actually present. The work done, therefore, even when quite purified of the animal aspect, and bearing the form and shape of self-consciousness alone, is still the silent soundless form, which needs the rays of the rising sun in order to have a sound which, when produced by light, is even then merely noise and not speech, shows merely an outer self, not the inner self.f Contrasted with this outer self of the form and shape, stands the other form, which indicates that it has in it an inner being. Nature, turning back into its essen- tial being, degrades its multiplicity of life, ever individualising itself and confounding itself in its own process, to the level of an external encasing shell, which is the covering for the inner being. And still this inner being is primarily mere darkness, the un- moved, the black formless stone. $ Both representations contain inwardness and ex- istence— the two moments of spirit: and both kinds of manifestation contain both moments at once in a relation of opposition, the self both as inward and as outward. Both have to be united. The soul of the statue in human form does not yet come out of the inner being, is not yet speech, objective existence of self which is inherently internal, — and the inner being of multiform existence is still without voice or sound, * The representations of the gods with forms half animal, half human.
t The statues of Memnon.
J The Black Stone of Mecca: a fetish still worshipped by the faithful.
The Artificer 711 still draws no distinctions within itself, and is still separated from its outer being, to which all distinctions belong. The artificer, therefore, combines both by blending the forms of nature and self-consciousness; and these ambiguous beings, a riddle to themselves — the conscious struggling with what has no consciousness, the simple inner with the multiform outer, the darkness of thought mated with clearness of expression — these break out into the language of a wisdom that is darkly deep and difficult to understand.* With the production of this work, the instinctive method of working ceases, which, in contrast to self- consciousness, produced a work devoid of consciousness, For here the activity of the artificer, which constitutes self-consciousness, comes face to face with an inner being equally self-conscious and giving itself ex- pression. He has therein raised himself by his work up to the point where his conscious life breaks asunder, where spirit greets spirit. In this unity of self-conscious spirit with itself, so far as it is aware of being embodi- ment and object of its own consciousness, its blending and mingling with the unconscious condition of im- mediate forms of nature become purified. These monsters in form and shape, word and deed, are resolved and dissolved into a shape which is spiritual — an outer which has entered into itself, an inner which ex- presses itself out of itself and in itself, — they pass into thought, which brings forth itself, preserves the shape and form suited to thought, and is transparent exist- ence. Spirit is Artist.
* Sphinxes B RELIGION IN THE FORM OF ART* Spirit has raised the shape in which it is object for its own consciousness into the form of conscious- ness itself; and spirit sets such a form before itself. The artificer has given up the external synthesising activity, that blending of the heterogeneous forms of thought and nature. When the shape has gained the form of self-conscious activity, the artificer has become a spiritual workman.
If we next ask, what the actual spirit is, which finds in the religion of art the consciousness of its Absolute, it turns out that this is the ethical or objective spirit. This spirit is not merely the universal substance of all individuals; but when this substance is said to have, as an objective fact for actual consciousness, the form of consciousness, this amounts to saying that the substance, which is individualised, is known by the individuals within it as their proper essence and their own achievement. It is for them neither the Light of the World, in whose unity the self-existence of self-consciousness is contained only negatively, only transitorily, and beholds the lord and master of its reality; nor is it the restless waste and destruction of hostile nations; nor their subjection to " casts," which together constitute the semblance of organisation * Greek religion.
'Religion in the form of Art 713 of a completed whole, where, however, the universal freedom of the individuals concerned is wanting. Rather this spirit is a free nation, in which custom and order constitute the common substance of all, whose reality and existence each and every one knows to be his own will and his own deed.
The religion of the ethical spirit, however, raises it above its actual realisation, and is the return from its objectivity into pure knowledge of itself. Since an ethically constituted nation lives in direct unity with its own substance, and does not contain the principle of pure individualism of self-consciousness, the religion characteristic of its sphere first appears in com- plete form in severance from its stable security. For the reality of the ethical substance rests partly on its quiet unchangeableness as contrasted with the absolute process of self-consciousness; and con- sequently on the fact that this self-consciousness has not yet left its serene life of customary convention and its confident security therein, and gone into itself. Partly, again, that reality rests on its organisation into a plurality of rights and duties, as also on its organised distribution into groups of stations and classes, each with its particular way of acting which co-operates to form the whole; and hence rests on the fact that the individual is contented with the limitation of his existence, and has not yet grasped the unrestricted thought of his free self. But that serene immediate confidence in the substance of this ethical life returns to trust in self and to certainty of self; and the plurality of rights and duties, as well as the restricted particular action this involves, is the same dialectic process in the sphere of the ethical life as the plurality of " things " 714 Phenomenology of Mind and their various " qualities " — a process which only comes to rest and stability in the simplicity of spirit certain of self.
The complete fulfilment of the ethical life in free self-consciousness, and the destined consummation (Schicksal) of the ethical world, are therefore found when individuality has entered into itself; the condition is one of absolute levity on the part of the ethical spirit; it has dissipated and resolved into itself all the firmly established distinctions constituting its own stability, and the separate components of its own articulated organisation, and, being perfectly sure of itself, has attained to boundless cheerfulness of heart and the freest enjoyment of itself. This simple certainty of spirit within itself has a double meaning; it is quiet stability and solid truth, as well as absolute unrest, and the disappearance of the ethical order. It turns round, however, into the latter; for the truth of the ethical spirit lies primarily just in this substantial objectivity and trust, in which the self does not think of itself as free individual, and where the self, therefore, in this inner subjectivity, in becoming a free self, falls to the ground. Since then its trust is broken, and the sub- stance of the nation cracked, spirit, which was the connecting medium of the unstable extremes, has now come forward as an extreme — that of self-consciousness taking itself to be essential and ultimate. This is spirit certain within itself, which mourns over the loss of its world, and now produces out of the abstraction of self its own essential being, raised far above actual reality.
At such an epoch art in absolute form* comes on the scene. At the earlier stage it is instinctive in its * The religion of pure beauty. * Religion in the Form of Art 715 operation; being absorbed and steeped in existence, it works out of and works into this element; it does not find its substance in the free life of an ethical order, and hence, too, the self operating does not consist of free spiritual activity.
Later on, spirit goes beyond art in order to gain its higher manifestation, viz. that of being not merely the substance born and produced out of the self, but of being in its manifestation object of this self; it seeks at that higher level not merely to bring forth itself out of its own notion, but to have its very notion as its form, so that the notion and the work of art pro- duced may know each other reciprocally as one and the same.* Since, then, the ethical substance has withdrawn from its objective existence into its bare self -conscious- ness, this is the aspect of the notion, or the activity with which spirit brings itself forward as object. It is pure form, because the individual in ethical obedience and service has so worked off every unconscious existence and every fixed determination, as the sub- stance has itself become this fluid and undifferentiated entity. This form is the night in which the substance was betrayed, and made itself subject. It is out of this night of pure certainty of self that the ethical spirit rises again in a shape freed from nature and its own immediate existence.
The existence of the pure notion into which spirit has fled from its bodily shape, is an individual, which spirit selects as the vessel for its sorrow. Spirit acts in this individual as his universal and his power, from which he suffers violence, as his element of "Pathos," * This paragraph may be regarded as an interpolated note.
716 Phenomenology of Mind by having given himself over to which his self- consciousness loses freedom. But that positive power belonging to the universal is overcome by the pure self of the individual, the negative power. This pure activity, conscious of its inalienable force, wrestles with the unembodied essential being. Becoming its master, this negative activity has turned the element of pathos into its own material, and given itself its content; and this unity comes out as a work, universal spirit individualised and consciously presented.
a THE ABSTRACT WORK OF ART The first work of art is, because immediate, abstract and particular. On its own side it has to move away from this immediate and objective phase towards self- consciousness, while, on the other side, the latter for itself endeavours in the " cult " to do away with the distinction, which it at first gave itself in contrast to its own spirit, and by so doing to produce a work of art inherently endowed with life.
The first way in which the artistic spirit keeps as far as possible removed from each other its form and its active consciousness, is immediate in character — the form assumed is there as a " thing " in general. It breaks up into the distinction of particularity, which contains the form of the self, and universality, which represents the inorganic elements in reference to the form adopted, and is its environment and habitation. This shape assumed obtains its pure form, the form belonging to spirit, by the whole being raised into the sphere of the pure notion. It is not the crystal, belong- ing as we saw to the level of understanding, a form which housed and covered a lifeless element, or is shone upon externally by a soul. Nor, again, is it that com- mingling of the forms of nature and thought, which first arose in connection with plants, thought's activity here being still an imitation. Rather the notion strips off 718 Phenomenology of Mind the remnant of root, branches and leaves, still clinging to the forms, purifies the forms and makes them into figures in which the crystal's straight lines and surfaces are raised into incommensurable relations, so that the animation of the organic is taken up into the abstract form of understanding, and, at the same time, its essential nature — incommensurability — is preserved for understanding.
The indwelling god, however, is the black stone extracted from the animal encasement,* and suffused with the light of consciousness. The human form strips off the animal character with which it was mixed up. The animal form is for the god merely an accidental vestment; the animal appears alongside its true form,t and has no longer a value on its own account, but has sunk into being a significant sign of something else, has become a mere symbol. By that very fact, the form assumed by the god in itself casts off even the need for the natural conditions of animal existence, and hints at the internal arrangements of organic life melted down into the surface of the form, and pertaining only to this surface.
The essential being of the god, however, is the unity of the universal existence of nature and of self-conscious spirit which in its actuality appears confronting the former. At the same time, being in the first instance a particular form, its existence is one of the elements of nature, just as its self-conscious actuality is a par- ticular national spirit. £ But the former is, in this unity, that element reflected back into spirit, nature made transparent by thoughts and united with self- * v. sup., p. 710. t e.g. the eagle as the "bird of Zeus."
J e.g. Athene.
The Abstract Work of Art 719 conscious life. The form of the gods retains, therefore, within it its nature-element as something transcended, as a shadowy, obscure memory. The utter chaos and confused struggle amongst the elements existing free and detached from each other, the non-ethical dis- ordered realm of Titans, is vanquished and banished to the outskirts of self-transparent reality, to the cloudy boundaries of the world which finds itself in the sphere of spirit and is at peace. These ancient gods, first-born children of the union of Light with Darkness, Heaven, Earth, Ocean, Sun, earth's aimless typhonic Fire, and so on, are supplanted by forms and shapes, which do but darkly recall those earlier titans, and which are no longer things of nature, but spirits clarified by the ethical life of self-conscious nations.
This simple form has thus destroyed within itself restless endless individuation, the individuation both in the life of nature, which operates with necessity only qua universal essence, but is contingent in its actual existence and process; and also in the life of a nation, which is scattered and broken into parti- cular spheres of action and into individual centres of self-consciousness, and has an existence mani- fold in action and meaning. All this individuation the simplicity of this form has abolished, and brought together into an individuality at peace with itself. Hence the condition of unrest stands contrasted with this form; confronting quiescent individuality, the essential reality, stands self-consciousness, which, being its source and origin, has nothing left over for itself except to be pure activity. What belongs to the sub- stance, the artist gave entirely along with his work; to himself, however, as a specific individuality there 720 Phenomenology of Mind belongs in his work no reality. He could only have conferred completeness on it by relinquishing his particular nature, divesting himself of his own being, and rising to the abstraction of pure action.
With the first and immediate act of production, the separation of the work and his self-conscious activity is not yet healed again. The work is, therefore, not by itself really a spiritual entity; it is a whole only when its process of coming to be is taken along with it. The obvious and common element in the case of a work of art, that it is produced in consciousness and is made by the hand of man, is the aspect of the notion existing qua notion, and standing in contrast to the work produced. And if this notion, qua the artist or spectator, is unselfish enough to declare the work of art to be per se absolutely spiritual, and to forget himself qua agent or onlooker, then, as against this, the notion of spirit has to be insisted on; spirit cannot dispense with the moment of being conscious of itself. This moment, however, stands in contrast to the work, because spirit, in this its primary dis- ruption, gives the two sides their abstract and specific- ally contrasted characteristics of " doing " something and of being a " thing "; and their return to the unity they started from has not yet come about.
The artist finds out, then, in his work, that he did not produce a reality like himself. No doubt there comes back to him from his work a consciousness in the sense that a wondering multitude honours it as the spirit, which is their own true nature. But this way of animating or spiritualising his work, since it renders him his self-consciousness merely in the form of ad- miration, is rather a confession that the work is not The Abstract Work of Art 721 animated in the same manner as the artist. Since the work comes back to him in the form of gladness in general, he does not find in it the pain of his self-discipline and the pain of production, nor the exertion and strain of his own toil. People may, moreover, judge the work, or bring him offerings and gifts, or endue it with their consciousness in whatever way they like — if they with their knowledge set them- selves over it, he knows how much more his act is than what they understand and say; if they put themselves beneath it, and recognise in it their own dominating essential reality, he knows himself as the master of this. The work of art hence requires another element for its existence; God requires another way of going forth than this, in which, out of the depths of his creative night, he drops into the opposite, into ex- ternality, to the character of a " thing " with no self- consciousness. This higher element is that of Language — a way of existing which is directly self-conscious existence. When individual self-consciousness exists in that way, it is at the same time directly a form of universal contagion; complete isolation of indepen- dent self-existent selves is at once fluent continuity and universally communicated unity of the many selves; it is the soul existing as soul. The god, then, which takes language as its medium of em- bodiment, is the work of art inherently spiritualised, endowed with a soul, a work which directly in its existence contains the pure activity which was apart from and in contrast to the god when existing as a " thing." In other words, self -consciousness, when its essential being becomes objective, remains in direct relation with itself. It is, when thus at home with