The national spirits, which find their being in the form of some particular animal, coalesce into one single spirit.* Thus it is that the separate artistically beau- tiful national spirits combine to form a Pantheon, the element and habitation of which is Language. Pure intuition of self in the sense of universal human nature takes, when the national or tribal spirit is actualised, this form: the national spirit combines with the others (which together with it constitute, through nature and natural conditions, one people), in a common undertaking, and for this task builds up a collective nation, and, with that, a collective heaven. This universality, to which spirit attains in its existence, is, nevertheless, merely this first universality, which, to begin with, starts from the individuality of ethical life, has not yet overcome its immediacy, has not yet built up a single state out of these separate national elements. The ethical life of an actual national spirit rests partly on the simple confiding trust of individuals in the whole of their nation, partly in the direct share which all, in spite of differences of position, take in the decisions and acts of its government. In the union, not in the first instance to secure a permanent order but merely for a common act, that freedom of participation The Spiritual Work of Art 739 on the part of each and all is for the nonce set aside. This first community of life is, therefore, an assemblage of individualities rather than the dominion and control of abstract thought, which would rob the individuals of their self-conscious share in the will and act of the whole.
The assembly of national spirits constitutes a circle of forms and shapes, which now embraces the whole of nature, as well as the whole ethical world. They are too under the supreme command rather than the supreme dominion of one. By themselves, they are the universal substances embodying what the self-conscious essential reality inherently is and does. This, however, con- stitutes the moving force, and, in the first instance, at least the centre, with which those universal entities are concerned, and which, to begin with, seems to unite in a merely accidental way all that they variously accomplish. But it is the return of the divine Being to self-consciousness which already contains the reason that self -consciousness forms the centre for those divine forces, and conceals their essential unity in the first instance under the guise of a friendly external relation between both worlds.
The same universality, which belongs to this content, has necessarily also that form of consciousness in which the content appears. It is no longer the concrete acts and deeds of the cult; it is an action which is not indeed raised as yet to the level of the notion, but only to that of ideas, the synthetic connection of self- conscious and external existence. The element in which these presented ideas exist, language, is the earliest language, the Epic as such, which contains the universal content, at any rate universal in the sense / 740 Phenomenology of Mind of completeness of the world presented, though not in the sense of universality of thought. The Minstrel is the individual and actual spirit from whom, as a subject of this world, it is produced, and by whom it is borne. His " pathos " is not the deafening powers of nature, but Mnemosyne, Kecollection, a gradually evolved inwardness, the memory of an essential mode of being once directly present. He is the organ and instrument whose content is passing away; it is not his own self which is of any account, but his muse, his universal song. What, however, is present in fact, has the form of an inferential process, where the one extreme of universality, the world of gods, is connected with individuality, the minstrel, through the middle term of particularity. The middle term is the nation in its heroes, who are individual men like the minstrel, but only ideally presented, and thereby at the same time universal like the free extreme of universality, the gods.
In this Epic, then, what is inherently established in the cult, the relation of the divine to the human, is set forth and displayed as a whole to consciousness. The content is an ''act"* of the essential Being con- scious of itself. Acting disturbs the peace of the sub- stance, and awakens the essential Being; and by so doing its simple unity is divided into parts, and opened up into the manifold world of natural powers and ethical forces. The act is the violation of the peaceful earth; it is the trench which, vivified by the blood of the living, calls forth the spirits of the departed, who are thirsting for life, and who receive it in the action of self-consciousness.t There are two * A "drama.75 t The Epic exorcises the dead past; v. Odyssey, XI.
The Spiritual Work of Art 741 sides to the business the universal activity is concerned to accomplish: the side of the self — in virtue of which it is brought about by a collection of actual nations with the prominent individualities at the head of them; and the side of the universal — in virtue of which it is brought about by their substantial forces. The re- lation of the two, however, took formerly the character of being the synthetic connection of universal and individual, i.e. of being the process of ideal presentation. On this specific character depends the judgment re- garding this world.
The relation of the two is, by this means, a com- mingling of both, which illogically divides the unity of the action, and in a needless fashion throws the act from one side over to the other. The universal powers assume the form of individual beings, and thus have in them the principle from which action comes; when they effect anything, therefore, this seems to pro- ceed as entirely from them and to be as free as in the case of men. Hence both gods and men have done one and the same thing. The seriousness with which those divine powers go to work is ridiculously unnecessary, since they are in point of fact the moving force of the individualities engaged in the acts; while the strain and toil of the latter again is an equally use- less effort, since the former direct and manage every- thing. Over-zealous mortal creatures, who are as nothing, are at the same time the mighty self that brings into subjection universal beings, violates the gods, and procures for them actual reality and an in- terest in acting. Just as, conversely, these powerless gods, these impotent universal beings, which procure their sustenance from the gifts of men and, through 742 Phenomenology of Mind men, first get something to do, are the natural inner principle and the substance of all events, as also the ethical material, and the " pathos " of action. If their cosmic natures first get reality and a sphere of effectual operation through the free self of individuality, it is also the case that they are the universal, which withdraws from and avoids this connection, remains unrestricted and unconstrained in its own character, and, by the inexhaustible elasticity of its unity, extinguishes the atomic singleness of the individual acting and his various aspects, preserves itself in its purity, and dis- solves all that is individual in the current of its own continuity.
Just as the gods fall into this contradictory relation with the antithetic nature having the form of self, in the same way their universality comes into conflict with their own specific character and the relation in which it stands to others. They are the eternal and resplendent individuals, who exist in their own calm, and are removed from the changes of time and the influence of alien forces. But they are at the same time determinate elements, particular gods, and thus stand in relation to others. But that relation to others, which, in virtue of the opposition it involves, is one of strife, is a comic self-forgetfulness of their eternal nature. The determinateness they possess is rooted in the divine subsistence, and, in its specific limitation, has the independence of the whole individuality; owing to this, their characters at once lose the sharpness of their distinctive peculiarity, and in their ambiguity blend together.
One purpose of their activity and their activity itself, being directed against an " other " and so against The Spiritual Work of Art an invincible divine force, are a contingent and futile piece of bravado, which passes away at once, and trans- forms the pretence of seriousness in the act into a harmless, self-confident piece of sport with no result and no issue. If, however, in the nature of their divinity, the negative element, the specific determinateness of that nature, appears merely as the arbitrariness of their activity, and as the contradiction between the purpose and result, and if that independent self-confi- dence outweighs and overbalances the element of deter- minateness, then, by that very fact, the pure force of negativity confronts and opposes their nature, and more- over with a power to which it must finally submit, and over which it can in no way prevail. They are the uni- versal, and the positive, as against the individual self of mortals, which cannot hold out against their power and might. But the universal self, for that reason, hovers over these mortal selves, and over this whole world of ideal presentation to which the entire content belongs; and is for them the empty form of bare Necessity, not determined conceptually — a mere event to which they stand related selfless and sorrowing, for these deter- minate natures do not find themselves in this purely formal necessity.
This necessity, however, is the unity of the notion, a unity dominating and controlling the contradic- tory independent subsistence of the individual moments, a unity in which the inconsistency and fortuitousness of their action is coherently regulated, and the spor- tive character of their acts receives its serious value in those moments themselves. The content of the world of ideal presentation carries on its process in the midst unrestrained and detached by itself, gathering 744 Phenomenology of Mind round the individuality of some hero, who, however, feels the strength and splendour of his life broken, and mourns the early death he sees ahead of him. For the actual individuality, firmly fixed in itself, is isolated and excluded to the utmost point, and severed into its elements, which have not yet found each other and united. The one individual element, the abstract unreal moment, is necessity which takes no share in the life of the mediating term just as little as does the other, the concrete real individual element, the minstrel, who keeps himself outside it, and disappears in what he ideally presents. Both extremes must get nearer the content; the one, necessity, has to get filled with it, the other, the language of the minstrel, must have a share in it. And the content formerly left to itself must preserve in it the certainty and the fixed character of the negative.
This higher language, that of Tragedy, gathers and keeps more closely together the dispersed and disin- tegrated moments of the inner essential world and the world of action. The substance of the divine falls apart, in accordance with the nature of the notion, into its shapes and forms, and their movement is likewise in conformity with that notion. In regard to form, the lan- guage here ceases to be narrative, in virtue of the fact that it enters into the content, just as the content ceases to be merely one that is ideally presented. The hero is himself the spokesman, and the representation given brings before the audience — who are also spec- tators— self-conscious human beings, who know their own rights and purposes, the power and the will be- longing to their specific nature, and who know how to state them. They are artists who do not express with The Spiritual Work of Art 745 unconscious naivete and naturalness the merely ex- ternal aspect of what they begin and what they decide upon, as is the case in the language accompanying ordinary action in actual life; they make the very inner being external, they prove the righteousness of their action, and the "pathos" controlling them is soberly asserted and definitely expressed in its universal individuality, free from all accident of circumstance and the particular peculiarities of personalities. Lastly, it is in actual human beings that these characters get existence, human beings who impersonate heroes, and represent them in actual speech, not in the form of a narrative, but speaking in their own person. Just as it is essential for a statue to be made by human hands, so is the actor essential to his mask — not as an external condition, from which, artistically considered, we have to abstract; or so far as abstraction must certainly be made, we thereby state just that art does not yet contain in it the true and proper self.
The general ground, on which the movement of these shapes produced from the notion takes place, is the con- sciousness of the first form of language, where the content is ideally presented, and its detail spread out without reference to self. It is the commonalty in general, whose wisdom finds utterance in the Chorus of the Elders; in the powerlessness of this chorus the generality finds its representative, because the common people itself compose merely the positive and passive material for the individuality of the government confronting it. Lacking the power to negate and oppose, it is unable to hold together and keep within bounds the riches and varied fullness of divine life; it allows each individual moment to go off its own way, 746 Phenomenology of Mind and in its hymns of honour and reverence praises each individual moment as an independent god, now this god and now again another. Where, however, it detects the seriousness of the notion, and perceives how the notion proceeds to deal with these forms, shattering them as it goes along; and where it comes to see how badly its praised and honoured gods come off when they venture on the ground where the notion holds sway; — there it is not itself the negative power actively setting to work, but keeps itself within the abstract selfless thought of such power, confines itself to the consciousness of alien and external destiny, and produces the empty wish to tranquillize, and feeble ineffective talk intended to appease. In its terror before the higher powers, which are the immediate arms of the substance; in its terror before their struggle with one another, and before the simple and uniform action of that necessity, which crushes them as well as the living beings bound up with them; in its compassion for these living beings, whom it knows at once to be the same with itself — it is conscious of nothing but ineffective horror of this whole process, conscious of equally helpless pity, and, in fine, the mere empty peace of surrender to necessity, whose work is apprehended neither as the necessary act of character, nor as the action of the absolute Being within itself.
Spirit does not appear in its dissociated multiplicity on the plane of this spectacular consciousness, the in- different ground, as it were, of presentation; it comes on the scene in the simple diremption of the notion. Its substance manifests itself, therefore, merely torn asunder into its two extreme powers. These elementary universal beings are, at the same time, self-conscious individu- The Spiritual Work of Art 747 alities — heroes who put their conscious life into one of these powers, find therein determinateness of cha- racter, and procure their effective activity and reality. This universal individualisation descends again, as will be remembered, to the immediate reality of existence proper, and is presented before a crowd of spectators, who find in the chorus their image and counterpart, or rather their own thought giving itself expression.
The content and movement of spirit, which is object to itself here, have been already considered as the nature and realisation of the substance of ethical life. In its form of religion spirit attains to consciousness about itself, or reveals itself to its consciousness in its purer form and its simpler mode of embodiment. If, then, the ethical substance by its very principle broke up, as re- gards its content, into two powers — which were defined as divine and human law, law of the nether world and law of the upper world, the one the family, the other state sovereignty, the first bearing the impress and character of woman, the other that of man — in the same way, the previously multiform circle of gods, with its wavering and unsteady characteristics, con- fines itself to these powers, which owing to this feature are brought closer to individuality proper. For the previous dispersion of the whole into manifold abstract forces, which appear hypostatised, is the dissolution of the subject which comprehends them merely as moments in its self; and individuality is therefore only the superficial form of those entities. Conversely, a further distinction of characters than that just named is to be imputed to contingent and inherently external personality.
At the same time, the essential nature [in the case of 748 Phenomenology of Mind ethical substance] gets divided in its form, i.e. with re- spect to knowledge. Spirit when acting, appears, qua consciousness, over against the object on which its activity is directed, and which, in consequence, is deter- mined as the negative of the knowing agent. The agent finds himself thereby in the opposition of knowing and not knowing. He takes his purpose from his own character, and knows it to be essential ethical fact; but owing to the determinateness of his character, he knows merely the one power of substance; the other remains for him concealed and out of sight. The objectively present reality, therefore, is one thing in itself, and another for consciousness. The higher and lower right come to signify in this connection the power that knows and reveals itself to consciousness, and the power concealing itself and lurking in the background. The one is the aspect of light, the god of the Oracle, who as regards its natural aspect [Light] has sprung from the all- illuminating Sun, knows all and reveals all, Phcebus and Zeus, who is his Father. But the commands of this truth-speaking god, and his proclamations of what is, are really deceptive and fallacious. For this know- ledge is, in its very principle, directly not knowledge, because consciousness in acting is inherently this opposition. He,* who had the power to unlock the riddle of the sphinx, and he too who trusted with childlike confidence,! are, therefore, both sent to destruction through what the god reveals to them. The priestess, through whose mouth the gracious god speaks, J is in nothing different from the equivocal sisters of fate,§ who drive their victim to crime by * Oedipus. t Orestes.
J In the Delphic Oracle. § The witches in " Macbeth."
The Spiritual Work of Art 749 their promises, and who, by the double-tongued, equivocal character of what they give out as a certainty, deceive the King when he relies upon the manifest and obvious meaning of what they say. There is a type of consciousness that is purer than the latter* which believes in witches, and more discriminating, more thorough and more solid than the former which puts its trust in the priestess and the gracious god. This type of consciousness,! therefore, lets his revenge tarry for the revelation * which the spirit of his father makes regarding the crime that did him to death, and institutes other proofs in addition — for the reason that the spirit giving the revelation might possibly be the devil.
This mistrust has good grounds, because the knowing consciousness takes its stand on the opposition between certainty of itself on the one hand, and the objective essential reality on the other. Ethical Tightness, which insists that actuality is nothing per se in opposi- tion to absolute law, finds out that its knowledge is onesided, its law merely a law of its own character, and that it has laid hold of merely one of the powers of the substance. The act itself is this inversion of what is subjectively known into its opposite, into objective existence, turns round what is right from the point of view of character and knowledge into the right of the very opposite with which the former is bound up in the essential nature of the substance — turns it into the " Furies " who embody the right of the other power and character awakened into hostility. The lower right sits with Zeus enthroned, and enjoys equal respect and homage with the god revealed and known.
To these three supernatural Beings the world of the * Macbeth, t Hamlet.
750 Phenomenology of Mind gods of the chorus is limited and restricted by the act- ing individuality. The one is the substance, the power presiding over the hearth and home and the spirit worshipped by the family, as well as the universal power dominating state and government. Since this distinction belongs to the substance as such, it is, when ideally presented, not individualised as two distinct forms [of the substance], but has in actual reality the two persons of its characters. On the other hand, the distinction between knowing and not knowing f alls within each of the actual self -consciousnesses; and only in abstraction, in the element of universality, does it get divided into two individual shapes. For the self of the hero only exists as a whole consciousness, and hence includes essentially the whole of the distinction be- longing to the form; but its substance is determinate, and only one side of the content distinguished belongs to him. Hence both sides of consciousness, which have in concrete reality no separate individuality peculiarly their own, receive, when ideally represented, each its own particular form: the one that of the god revealed, the other that of the Furies keeping themselves con- cealed. In part both enjoy equal honour, while again, the form assumed by the substance, Zeus, is the necessity of the relation of the two to one another. The substance is the relation [1] that knowledge is for itself, but finds its truth in what is simple; [2] that the distinction, through and in which actual consciousness exists, has its basis in that inner being which destroys it; [3] that the clear conscious assurance of certainty has its confirmation in forgetfulness.
Consciousness disclosed this opposition by action, through doing something. Acting in accordance with The Spiritual Work of Art 751 the knowledge revealed, it finds out the deceptiveness of that knowledge, and being committed, in view of the inner meaning, to one of the attributes of substance, it did violence to the other and thereby gave the latter right as against itself. When following that god who knows and reveals himself, it really seized hold of what is not revealed, and repents of having trusted the knowledge, whose equivocal character (since this is its very nature) had to come also before it, and admoni- tion thereanent to be found. The frenzy of the priestess, the inhuman shape of the witches, the voices of trees and birds, dreams, and so on, are not ways in which truth appears; they are admonitory signs of decep- tion, of want of discernment, of the individual and accidental character of knowledge. Or, what comes to the same thing, the opposite power, which consciousness has violated, is present as express law and authentic right, whether law of the family or law of the state; while consciousness, on the other hand, pursued its own proper knowledge, and hid from itself what was revealed. The truth, however, of the opposing powers of content and consciousness is the final result, that both are equally right, and, hence, in their opposition (which comes about through action) are equally wrong. The process of action proves their unity in the mutual over- throw of both powers and the self-conscious characters. The reconciliation of the opposition with itself is the Lethe of the netherworld in the form of Death — or the Lethe of the upper world in the form of absolution, not from guilt (for consciousness cannot deny its guilt, because the act was done), but from the crime, and of the atoning consolation and peace of soul which absolution gives. Both are forgetfulness, the disappearance of the