752 Phenomenology of Mind reality and action of the powers of the substance, its com- ponent individualities, and of the powers of the abstract thought of good and evil. For none of them by itself is the real essence; this consists in the undisturbed calm of the whole within itself, the immovable unity of Fate, the quiescent existence and hence want of activity and vitality in the family and government, and the equal honour and consequent indifferent unreality of Apollo and the Furies, and the return of their spiritual life and activity into Zeus solely and simply.
This destiny completes the depopulation of Heaven — of that unthinking mixture of individuality and ultimate Being — a blending whereby the action of this absolute Being appears as something incoherent, inconsistent, contingent, unworthy of itself; for in- dividuality, when attaching in a merely superficial way to absolute Being, is unessential. The expulsion of such unreal insubstantial ideas, which was demanded by the philosophers of antiquity, thus already has its beginning in tragedy in general, through the fact that the division of the substance is controlled by the notion, and hence individuality is the essential individuality, and the specific determinations are absolute characters. The self-consciousness represented in tragedy knows and acknowledges on that account only one highest power, Zeus. This Zeus is known and acknowledged only as the power of the state or of the hearth and home, and, in the opposition falling inside knowledge, merely as the Father of the particular knowledge assum- ing a definite shape; he is the Zeus acknowledged in the taking of oaths, the Zeus of the Furies, the Zeus of what is universal, of the inner being dwelling in concealment. The further moments taken from the The Spiritual Work of Art 753 notion (Begriff) and dispersed in the form of ideal presentation (Vorstellung), moments which the chorus permits to hold good one after the other, are, on the other hand, not the " pathos " of the hero; they sink to the level of passions in the hero — to the level of acci- dental, insubstantial moments, which the impersonal chorus no doubt praises, but which are not capable of constituting the character of heroes, nor of being expressed and regarded by them as their real nature.
But, further, the persons of the divine Being itself, as well as the characters of its substance, coalesce into the simplicity of what is devoid of consciousness. This necessity has, in contrast to self-consciousness, the char- acteristic of being the negative power of all the forms that appear, a power in which they do not recognise themselves, but perish therein. The self appears as merely allotted amongst the different characters, and not as the mediating factor of the process. But self-con- sciousness, the simple certainty of self, is in point of fact the negative power, the unity of Zeus, the unity of the substantial essence and abstract necessity; it is the spiritual unity into which everything returns. Because actual self-consciousness is still distinguished from the substance and Fate, it is partly the chorus, or rather the crowd looking on, whom this movement of the divine life fills with fear as being something alien and strange, or in whom this movement, as something closely touching themselves, produces merely the emo- tion of passive pity. Partly again, so far as conscious- ness co-operates and belongs to the various characters, this alliance is of an external kind, is a hypocrisy — because the true union, that of self, fate, and substance, is not yet present. The hero, who appears before the VOL, II.— Z 754 Phenomenology of Mind onlookers, breaks up into his mask and the actor, into the person of the play and the actual self.
The self-consciousness of the heroes must step forth from its mask and be represented as knowing itself to be the fate both of the gods of the chorus and of the absolute powers themselves, and as being no longer separated from the chorus, the universal consciousness.
Comedy has, then, first of all, the aspect that actual self-consciousness represents itself as the Fate of the gods. These elemental Beings are, qua universal moments, no definite self, and are not actual. They are, indeed, endowed with the form of individuality, but this is in their case merely put on, and does not really and truly suit them. The actual self has no such abstract moment as its substance and content. The subject, therefore, is raised above such a moment, as it would be above a particular property, and when clothed with this mask gives utterance to the irony of such a property trying to be something on its own account. The pretentious claims of the universal abstract nature are shown up and discovered in the actual self; it is seen to be caught and held in a con- crete reality, and lets the mask drop, just when it wants to be something right. The self, appearing here in its significance as something actual, plays with the mask which it once puts on, in order to be its own person; but it breaks away from this seeming and pretence just as quickly again, and comes out in its own naked- ness and usual character, which it shows not to be distinct from the proper self, the actor, nor again from the onlooker.
This general dissolution, which the formally em- bodied essential nature as a whole undergoes when it The Spiritual Work of Art 755 assumes individuality, becomes in its content more serious, and hence more petulant and bitter, in so far as the content possesses its more serious and necessary meaning. The divine substance combines the meaning of natural and ethical essentiality.
As regards the natural element, actual self-conscious- ness shows, in the very fact of applying elements of nature for its adornment, for its abode and so on, and again in feasting on its own offering, that itself is the Fate to which the secret is disclosed, no matter what its position with regard to the independent substanti- ality of nature. In the mystery of the bread and wine it makes its very own this self-subsistence of nature together with the significance of inner reality; and in Comedy it is conscious of the irony lurking in this meaning.
So far, again, as this meaning contains the essence of ethical reality, it is partly the nation in its two aspects of the state, or Demos proper, and individual family life; partly, however, it is self-conscious pure knowledge, or rational thought of the universal. Demos, the general mass, which knows itself as master and governor, and is also aware of being the insight and intelligence which demand respect, exerts com- pulsion and is befooled through the particularity of its actual life, and exhibits the ludicrous contrast between its own opinion of itself and its immediate existence, between its necessity and contingency, its universality and its vulgarity. If the principle of its individual existence, cut off from the universal, breaks out in the proper form of actual reality and openly usurps and administers the commonwealth, to which it is a secret harm and detriment, then immediately there 756 Phenomenology of Mind is disclosed the contrast between the universal in the sense of an abstract theory, and that with which practice is concerned; there stands exposed the entire emancipation of the ends and aims of the mere in- dividual from all universal order, and the scorn the mere individual shows for such order.* Kational thinking removes contingency of form and shape from the divine Being; and, in opposition to the uncritical wisdom of the chorus — a wisdom, giving utterance to all sorts of ethical maxims and stamping with validity and authority a multitude of laws and specific conceptions of duty and of right — rational thought lifts these into the simple Ideas of the Beautiful and the Good. The process of this abstraction is the consciousness of the dialectic in- volved in these maxims and laws themselves, and hence the consciousness of the disappearance of that absolute validity with which they previously appeared. Since the contingent character and superficial individuality which mere presentation lent to the divine Beings, vanish, they are left, as regards their natural aspect, with merely the nakedness of their immediate existence; they are Clouds, f a passing vapour, like those presenta- tions. Having passed in accordance with their essential character, as determined by thought, into the simple thoughts of the Beautiful and the Good, these latter submit to being filled with every kind of content. The force of dialectic knowledge J puts determinate laws and maxims of action at the mercy of the pleasure and levity of youth, led astray therewith, and gives weapons * cp. Cleon in Aristophanes, Knights. t cp. Aristophanes, Clouds. J The age of the Sophists.
The Spiritual Work of Art 757 of deception into the hands of solicitous and apprehen- sive old age, restricted in its interests to the individual details of life. The pure thoughts of the Beautiful and the Good thus display a comic spectacle: — through their being set free from opinion, which contains both their determinateness in the sense of content and also their absolute determinateness, the firm hold of con- sciousness upon them, they become empty, and, on that very account, the sport of the private opinion and caprice of any chance individuality.
Here, then, the Fate, formerly without conscious- ness, consisting in mere rest and forgetfulness, and separated from self-consciousness, is united with self- consciousness. The individual * self is the negative force through which and in which the gods, as also their moments, (nature as existent fact and the thoughts of their determinate characters), pass away and disappear. At the same time, the individual self is not the mere vacuity of disappearance, but preserves itself in this very nothingness, holds to itself and is the sole and only reality. The religion of art is ful- filled and consummated in it, and is come full circle. Through the fact that it is the individual conscious- ness in its certainty of self which is shown to be this absolute power, this latter has lost the form of something ideally presented (vorgestellt), separated from and alien to consciousness in general — as were the statue and also the living embodiment of beauty or the content of the Epic and the powers and persons of Tragedy. Nor again is the unity the uncon- scious unity of the cult and the mysteries; rather the self proper of the actor coincides with the part * Iu comedy.
"75& Phenomenology of Mind he impersonates, just as the onlooker is perfectly at home in what is represented before him, and sees himself playing in the drama before him. What this self-consciousness beholds is that that, which assumes the form of essentiality as against self-consciousness, is resolved and dissolved within its thought, its existence and action, and is quite at its mercy. It is the return of everything universal into certainty of self, a cer- tainty which, in consequence, is this complete loss of fear of everything strange and alien, and complete loss of substantial reality on the part of what is alien and external. Such certainty is a state of spiritual good health and of self-abandonment thereto, on the part of consciousness, in a way that, outside this kind of comedy, is not to be found anywhere.* c EEVEALED RELIGION * Through the Religion of Art spirit has passed from the form of Substance into that of Subject; for art brings out its shape and form, and imbues it with the nature of action or establishes in it the self- consciousness which merely disappears in the awe- some substance and in the attitude of simple trust does not itself comprehend itself. This incarnation in human form of the Divine Being begins with the statue, which has in it only the outward shape of the self, while the inner life thereof, its activity, falls outside it. In the case of the cult, however, both aspects have become one; in the outcome of the re- ligion of art this unity in being completely attained has at the same time also passed over to the extreme of self; in the type of spirit, which becomes perfectly certain of itself in the individual existence of con- sciousness, all essential content is swallowed up and submerged. The proposition, which gives this light- hearted action expression, runs thus: ' The Self is Absolute Being." The Being which was substance, and in which the self was the accidental element, has dropped to the level of a predicate; and in this self -consciousness, over against which nothing appears in the form of objec- tive Being, spirit has lost its aspect of consciousness.!
* Christianity. t Which implies such opposition.
760 Phenomenology of Mind This statement, " The Self is Absolute Being/' belongs, as is evident on the face of it, to the non- religious, the concrete actual spirit; and we have to recall what the form thereof is which gives expression to it. This form will contain at once the movement of that spirit and its conversion, which lowers the self to the note of a predicate and raises substance into subject. This we must understand to take place in such a way that the converse statement does not per se, or for us, make substance into subject, or, what is the same thing, does not reinstate substance again so that the consciousness of spirit is carried back to its commencement in natural religion; but rather in such a way that this conversion is brought about for and through self-consciousness itself. Since this latter consciously gives itself up, it is preserved and maintained in thus relinquishing itself, and remains the subject of the substance; but as being likewise ^/-relinquished, it has at the same time the con- sciousness of this substance. In other words, since by thus offering itself up, it produces substance as subject, this subject remains its own very self. If, then, taking the two propositions, in the first the subject merely disappears in substantiality, and in the second the substance is merely a predicate, and both sides are thus present in each with contrary inequality of value — the result hereby effected is that the union and transfusion of both natures [subject and sub- stance] become apparent. In this union both, with equal value and worth, are at once essential and also merely moments. Hence it is that spirit is equally consciousness of itself as its objective substance, as well as simple self-contained self-consciousness.
Revealed Religion 761 The religion of art belongs to the spirit animating the ethical sphere,* the spirit which we formerly saw sink and disappear in the condition of right, i.e. in the proposition: " The self as such, the abstract person, is absolute Being." In ethical life the self is absorbed in the spirit of its nation, it is universality filled to the full. Simple abstract individuality, however, rises out of this content, and its lightheartedness clarifies and rarifies it till it becomes a " person " and attains the abstract universality of right. Here the substantial reality of the ethical spirit is lost, the abstract insub- stantial spirits of national individuals are gathered together into a pantheon; not into a pantheon repre- sented in idea (Vorstellung), whose impotent form lets each alone to do as it likes, but into the pantheon of abstract universality, of pure thought, which disem- bodies them, and bestows on the spiritless self, on the individual person, complete existence on its own ac- count.
But this self, through its being empty, has let the content go; this consciousness is Being merely with- in itself. Its own very existence, the legal recognition of the person, is an unfulfilled empty abstraction. It thus really possesses merely the thought of itself; in other words, as it there exists and knows itself as object, it is something unreal. Consequently, it is merely stoic independence, the independence of thought; and this finds, by passing through the process of scepticism, its ultimate truth in that form we called the " unhappy self -consciousness " — the soul of despair.
This knows how the case stands with the actual claims to validity which the abstract [legal] person puts * The Roman State.
762 Phenomenology of Mind forward, as also with the validity of these claims in pure thought [in Stoicism]. It knows that a vindica- tion of such claims means really being altogether lost; it is just this loss become conscious of itself, and is the surrender and relinquishment of its knowledge about itself. We see that this " unhappy consciousness " con- stitutes the counterpart and the complement of the per- fectly happy consciousness, that of comedy. All divine reality goes back into this latter type of consciousness; it means, in other words, the complete relinquishment and emptying of substance. The former, on the con- trary, is conversely the tragic fate that befalls certainty of self which aims at being absolute, at being self- sufficient. It is consciousness of the loss of everything of significance in this certainty of itself, and of the loss even of this knowledge or certainty of self — the loss of its substance as well as of self; it is the bitter pain which finds expression in the cruel words, " God is dead."* In the condition of right or law, then, the ethical world has vanished, and its type of religion has passed away in the mood of Comedy. The " un- happy consciousness " the soul of despair, is just the knowledge of all this loss. It has lost both the worth and dignity it attached to its immediate personality [as a legal person] as well as that attaching to its per- sonality when reflected in the medium of thought [in the case of Stoicism]. Trust in the eternal laws of the Gods is silenced, just as the oracles are dumb, whose work it was to know what was right in particular cases. The statues set up are now corpses in stone whence the animating soul has flown, while the hymns * From a hymn of Luther.
Revealed Religion 763 of praise are words from which all belief has gone. The tables of the gods are bereft of spiritual food and drink, and from his games and festivals man no more receives the joyful sense of his unity with the divine Being. The works of the muse lack the force and energy of the spirit which derived the certainty and assurance of itself just from the crushing ruin of gods and men. They are themselves now just what they are for us — beautiful fruit broken off the tree; a kindly fate has passed on those works to us, as a maiden might offer such fruit off a tree. It is not their actual life as they exist, that is given us, not the tree that bore them, not the earth, and the elements, which constituted their substance, nor the climate that determined their constitutive character, nor the change of seasons which controlled the process of their growth. So too it is not their living world that Fate preserves and gives us with those works of ancient art, not the spring and summer of that ethical life in which they bloomed and ripened, but the veiled remembrance alone of all this reality. Our action, therefore, when we enjoy them is not that of worship, through which our conscious life might attain its complete truth and be satisfied to the full: our action is external; it consists in wiping off some drop of rain or speck of dust from these fruits, and in place of the inner elements composing the reality of the ethical life, a reality that environed, created and inspired these works, we erect in prolix detail the scaffolding of the dead elements of their outward existence, — language, historical circumstances, etc. All this we do, not in order to enter into their very life, but only to represent them ideally or pic- torially (vorstelleri) within ourselves. But just as the 764 Phenomenology of Mind maiden who hands us the plucked fruits is more than the nature which presented them in the first instance — the nature which provided all their detailed conditions and elements, tree, air, light and so on — since in a higher way she gathers all this together into the light of her self-conscious eye, and her gesture in offering the gifts; so too the spirit of the fate, which presents us with those works of art, is more than the ethical life realised in that nation. For it is the inwardising in us, in the form of conscious memory (Er-innerung), of the spirit which in them was manifested in an outward external way; — it is the spirit of the tragic fate which collects all those individual gods and at- tributes of the substance into the one Pantheon, into the spirit which is itself conscious of itself as spirit.
All the conditions for its production are present, and this totality of its conditions constitutes the de- velopment of it, its notion, or the inherent produc- tion of it. The cycle of the creations of art embraces in its scope all forms in which the absolute sub- stance relinquishes itself. The absolute substance is in the form of individuality as a thing; as an object existing for sense experience; as mere language, or the process of that form whose existence does not get away from the self, and is a purely evanescent object; as immediate unity with universal self-con- sciousness when inspired with enthusiasm; as mediated unity when performing the acts of the cult; as corporeal embodiment of the self in a form of beauty; and finally as existence lifted into ideal representation (Vorstellung) and the expansion of this existence into a world which at length gathers its content together into universality, a universal which Revealed Religion 765 is at the same time pure certainty and assurance of itself. These forms, and, on the other side, the world of personality and legal right, the wild and desert waste of content with its constituent elements set free and detached, as also the thought-constituted personality of Stoicism, and the unresting disquiet of Scepticism — these compose the periphery of the circle of shapes and forms, which attend, an expectant and eager throng, round the birthplace of spirit as it becomes self-consciousness. Their centre is the yearn- ing agony of the unhappy despairing self-consciousness, a pain which permeates all of them, and is the com- mon birthpang at its production, — the simplicity of the pure notion, which contains those forms as its moments.
Spirit, here, has in it two sides, which are above re- presented as the two converse statements: one is this, that substance empties itself of itself, and becomes self- consciousness; the other is the converse, that self- consciousness empties itself of itself and makes itself into the form of " thing," or makes itself universal self. Both sides have in this way met each other, and, in consequence, their true union has arisen. The relinquishment or " kenosis " on the part of the substance, its becoming self-consciousness, expresses the transition into the opposite, the unconscious transition of necessity, in other words, that it is implicitly self-consciousness. Conversely, the emptying of self-consciousness expresses this, that implicitly it is Universal Being, or — because the self is pure self- existence, which is at home with itself in its opposite — that the substance is self-consciousness explicitly for the self, and, just on that account, is spirit. Of this spirit, 766 Phenomenology of Mind which has left the form of substance behind, and enters existence in the shape of self-consciousness, we may say, therefore — if we wish to use terms drawn from the process of natural generation — that it has a real mother but a potential or an implicit father. For actual reality, or self-consciousness, and implicit being in the sense of substance, are its two moments; and by the reciprocity of their kenosis, each relinquishing or " emptying " itself of itself and becoming the other, spirit thus comes into existence as their unity.
In so far as self-consciousness in a one-sided way grasps only its own relinquishment, although its object is thus for it at once both existence and self and it knows all existence to be spiritual in nature, yet true spirit has not become thereby objective for it. For, so far, being in general or substance, would not necessarily from its side be also emptied of itself, and become self-consciousness. In that case, then, all exist- ence is spiritual reality merely from the standpoint of consciousness, not inherently in itself. Spirit in this way has merely a fictitious or imaginary existence.* This fanciful imagination is fantastic extravagance of mind, which introduces into nature as well as history, the world and the mythical ideas of early religions, another inner esoteric meaning different from what they, on the face of them, bear directly to consciousness, and, in particular, in the case of reli- gions, another meaning than the self-consciousness, whose religions they were, could find and admit to be there. But this meaning is one that is borrowed, a garment, which does not cover the nakedness of the outer appearance, and secures no belief and respect; * As in neo-Platonism.
Revealed Religion 767 it is no more than murky darkness and a peculiar crazy twist of consciousness.
If then this meaning of the objective is not to be bare fancy and imagination, it must be inherent and essential (an sich), i.e. must at once arise in consciousness as springing from the very notion, and must come forward in its necessity. It is thus that self-knowing spirit has arisen; it has arisen by means of its necessary process through the knowledge of immediate consciousness, i.e. of consciousness of the immediately existing ob- ject. This notion, which, being immediate, had also, for consciousness, the form of immediacy, has, in the second place, taken on the form of self-conscious- ness essentially and inherently, i.e. by just the same necessity of the notion by which being or immediacy, the abstract object of sense-consciousness, renounces itself and becomes, for consciousness, Ego. The immediate entity (Ansich), or objectively existent necessity, is, how- ever, different from the subjective thinking entity, or the knowledge of necessity — a distinction which, at the same time, does not he outside the notion, for the simple unity of the notion is itself immediate being. The notion is at once what empties or relinquishes itself, or the explicit unfolding of directly apprehended (ange- schaut) necessity, and is also at home with itself in that