With the attainment of this, however, rational observation seems in fact to have also reached its culminating point, at which it must take leave of itself and turn right about; for it is only when anything is entirely bad that there is an inherent and immediate necessity in it to wheel round completely into its opposite.
Just so it may be said of the Jews that it is precisely because they stand directly before the door of salvation, that they are and have been the most reprobate and abandoned: — what the nation should be in and for itself, this, the true inner nature of its self, it is not conscious of being, but puts away beyond itself. By this process of deprivation and renunciation it creates for itself the possibility of a higher level of existence, if once it could get the object thus renounced back again to itself, than if it had never left its natiiral immediate state of existence, — because spirit is all the greater the greater the opposition out of which it returns into itself; and such an opposition spirit brings about for itself, by doing away with its immediate unity, and laying aside its self-existence, the possession of a separate hfe of its own. But if such a consciousness does not mediate and reflect itself, the middle position or term where it has a determinate existence is the fatal unholy void, since what should give it substance and filling has been turned into a rigidly fixed extreme. It is thus that this last stage of reason's function of observation is its very worst, and for that reason its complete reversal becomes necessary.
For the survey of the series of relations dealt with up to this point, which constitute the content and object of observation, shows that even in its first form, in observation of the relations of inorganic nature, sensuous Phrenology 331 being vanished from its ken. The moments of natm-es' condition present themselves as pure abstractions and as bare and simple notions, which should be kept connected with the existence of things, but this gets lost, so that the abstract moment proves to be a pure movement and a universal. This free, self-complete process retains the significance of something objective; but now appears as a unit. In the process of the inorganic the unit is the inner with no existence. When the process does have existence qua unit, as one and single, it is an organism.
The unit qua self-existent or negative entity stands in antithesis to the universal, throws ofi its control, and remains independent by itself, so that the notion, being only reahsed in the condition of absolute dissociation, fails to find in organic existence its genuine expression, in the sense that it is not there in the form of a universal; it remains an "outer," or, what is the same thing, an " inner " of organic nature.
The organic process is merely free imphcitly; it is not so exphcitly, " for itself." The exphcit phase of its freedom appears in the idea of purpose, has its existence in the form of something else, of a self-directing aim and guidance, that hes outside the mere process. Reason's function of observation thus turns its attention to this aim and guidance, to mind, to the notion actually existuig as universahty, or to the purpose existing in the form of purpose; and what constitutes its own essential nature is now the object before it.
Reason here in the activity of observation is directed first to the pure abstract form of its essential nature. But since reason, in its apprehension of the object thus working and moving amidst its own distinctions takes 332 Phenomenology of Mind this object as something that exists, observation becomes aware of laws of thought, relations of one constant factor to another constant element. The content of these laws being, however, merely moments, they pass away into the single one of self-consciousness.
This new object taken in the same way as existent, is the contingent individual self-consciousness. The process of observation, therefore, keeps within the " conjectured" meaning of mind, and within the contingent relation of conscious to unconscious reaUty. Mind alone in itself is the necessity of this relation. Observation, therefore, attacks it at closer quarters, and compares its reahsation through will and action with its reahty when it contemplates and is reflected into itself, a reaUty which is itself objective. This external aspect, although an utterance of the individual which he himself contains, is at the same time, qua symbol, something indifferent to the content which it is intended to denote, just as what finds for itself the symbol is indifferent to this symbol.
For this reason, observation finally passes from this variable form of utterance back to the permanent fixed being, and in principle declares that externality is the outer immediate reahty of mind, not in the sense of an organ, and not like a language or a symbol, but in the sense of a lifeless thing. What the very first form of observation of inorganic nature did away with and superseded, viz. the idea that the notion should appear in the shape of a thing, this last form of observation reinstates so as to turn the reahty of mind itself into a thing, or expressing it the other way about, so as to give hfeless being the significance of mind.
Observation has thus reached the point of explicitly Phrenology 333 expressing what our notion of observation was at the outset, viz. that rational certainty means objectivity of reason, that the certainty of reason seeks itself as an objective reahty.
This does not, indeed, mean that mind, which is represented by a skull, is defined as a thing. There shall be no materiahsm, as it is called, in this idea; mind rather must be something very different from these bones of the skull. But that mind is, means nothing else than that it is a thing. When being as such, or thingness, is predicated of the mind, the true and genuine expression for this is, therefore, that mind is such an entity as a bone is. Hence it must be considered as supremely important that the true expression has been found for the bare statement regarding mind — that it is. When the statement is ever made about mind, that it is, has a being, is a thing, an individual reahty, we do not mean it is something we can see, or knock about, or take in our hands, and so on, but that is what we say, and what the statement really amounts to is consequently conveyed in the expression that the existence of mind is a bone.
This result has now a twofold significance: one is its true meaning, in so far as the result is a completion of the outcome of the preceding movement of selfconsciousness. The unhappy self-consciousness renounced its self-sufficiency, its independence, and wrung out its distinctive self- existence into the shape of a thing. By doing so, it left the level of selfconsciousness and reverted to the condition of mere consciousness, i.e. to that phase of conscious life for which the object is an existent, a thing. But what is " thing " in this case is self-consciousness; "thing" here is the 334 Phenomenology of Mind unity of ego and being — -the Category. Wlien tlie object before consciousness is determined thus, consciousness possesses reason. Consciousness, as well as self-consciousness, is in itself properly reason in an implicit form; but only that consciousness can be said to liave reason whose object has the character of being the category. From this, however, the knowledge of what is reason is still distinct.
The category, which is the immediate unity of being and self {Seyn und Seinen), must traverse both forms, and the conscious attitude of observation is just where the category is set forth in the form of being. In its result, consciousness expresses that, whose unconscious implicit certainty it is, in the shape of a proposition — ■ the proposition which lies in the very notion of reason. This proposition is the infinite judgment that the self is a thing — a judgment that cancels and transcends itself.
Through this result, then, the category gets the added characteristic of being this self-cancelhng opposition. The "pure" category, which is present to consciousness in the form of being or immediacy, is still an unmediated, a merely given object, and the attitude of consciousness is also direct, has no mediation in it. That infinite judgment is the moment which brings about the transition of immediacy into mediation or negativity. The given present object is therefore characterised as a negative object, while consciousness in its relation towards it assumes the form of se?/-consciousness; or the category, which traversed the form of being in the process of observation, is now set up in the form of self-existence, has now a distinctive being for its own sake. Consciousness no longer seeks to find itself Phrenology 335 Phrenology 335 immediately, but to produce itself by its own activity. Consciousness itself is the purpose and end of its own action, as in the process of observation it has to do merely with things.
The other meaning of the result is the one already considered, that of unsystematic (begrifflos) observation. This has no other way of understanding and expressing what it is about than by declaring the reahty of selfconsciousness to consist in the skull-bone, just as it appears in the form of a thing of sense, stiU retaining its character as an object for consciousness. In stating this, however, it has no clear consciousness as to what the statement involves, and does not grasp the determinate character of the subject and predicate in the proposition and of their relation to one another, still less does it grasp the proposition in the sense of a selfresolving infinite judgment and a notion. Rather, in virtue of a deeper lying self-consciousness of mind, which has the appearance here of being an innate sincerity and honesty of nature, the ignominiousness of such an irrational crude thought as that of taking a bone for the reahty of self-consciousness, is concealed; and the very senselessness of introducing all sorts of relations of cause and effect, "symbol,"' "organ," etc., which are perfectly meaningless here, and of hiding away the glaring folly of the proposition behind distinctions derived from them — all this puts a gloss on that thought and whitewashes its naked absurdity.
Brain-fibres and the hke, looked at as forms of the being of mind, are from the first an imagined, a merely hjrpothetical actuahty — not an existent reahty, not felt, seen, in short not true reality. If they do exist, if they are seen, they are hfeless objects, and then nq 336 Phenomenology of Mind, longer pass for the being of mind. But objectivity proper must take an immediate, a sensuous form, so that in this objectivity qua hfeless — for the bone is Kfeless so far as it is in the hving being itself — mind is definitely established as real, as actual.
The principle involved in this idea is that reason claims to be all thinghood, even thinghood of a purely objective kind. It is this, however, in conceptu: only the notion is its truth; and the purer the notion itself is, the more silly an idea does it become, if its content does not take the shape of a notion (Begriff), but of a mere presentation or idea {Vorstellung) — if the selfsuperseding judgment is not taken with the consciousness of its infinity, but is taken as a stable and permanent proposition, the subject and predicate of which hold good each on its own account, self fixed as self, thing as thing, while one has to be the other all the same.
Reason, essentially the notion, is immediately parted asunder into itself and its opposite, an opposition which just for that reason is immediately again superseded. But by presenting itself in this way as both itself and its opposite, and when held fast in the entirely particular moment of this disintegration, reason is apprehended in an irrational form; and the purer the moments of this opposition are, the more glaring is the appearance of this content, which is either solely a content for consciousness, or solely expressed by consciousness in a naive form.
The " depth " which mind brings out from within, but carries no further than to make it a presentation (Vorstellung), and let it remain at this level — and the " ignorance " on the part of this consciousness as to what it really says, are the same kind of connection of higher and lower which, in the case of the hving being, nature naively expresses when it combines the organ of its highest fulfilment, the organ of generation, with the organ of urination. The infinite judgment qua infinite would correspond to the fulfilment of hfe that comprehends itself, while the consciousness of life that remains at the level of presentation would correspond to urination.
VOL. I.—Z B The Realisation of Eational Self-Consciousness Through Its Own Activity [In this section we have the second form in which rational experience is realised. In " observation " mind is directly aware of itself aa in conscious unity with its object: it makes no effort of its own to realise this unity: it finds the unity by looking on, so to say. But it may have the same experience by creating through its own effort an object constituted and determined solely by its self. Here it does not find the unitj' of itself and its object; it makes the object at one with itself by moulding the character and content of the object after its own nature. As contrasted with observation, which may be called the operation of " theoretical " reason, this new way of having a rational experience may be called the operation of " practical " reason. In the first we have reason in the form of rational knowledge and science, in the second, reason is the sense of rational action and practice.
It is this second way of establishing the experience of reason which is analysed in the following sections. The immediately succeeding section describes the experience in its general features. We have here the sphere of conscious purpose and the foundation of moral and social life.]
The EEAiiisATioN of Rational Self-consciousness THROUGH ITS OWN ACTIVITY Self-consciousness found the " thing " in the form of itself, and itself in the form of a thing; that is to say, self-consciousness is exphcitly aware of being in itself the objective realitj^. It is no longer the immediate certainty of being all reality; it is rather that certainty for which the immediate in general assumes the form of something sublated, so that the objectivity of the immediate is regarded now as merely something superficial, whose inner core and essence is self-consciousness.
The object, therefore, to which seK-consciousness is positively related, is a self-consciousness. The object has the form and character of a thing, i.e. is independent: but self-consciousness has the conviction that this independent object is not ahen to itself; it knows straightway that itself is inherently and essentially recognised by the object. Self-consciousness is mind, which has the assm-ance of having, in the duplication of its self-consciousness and in the independence of both, its unity with its own self. This certainty has to be brought out now in all its truth; what self-consciousness holds as a fact, viz. that implicitly in itself and in its inner certainty it is, has to enter into full consciousness and become explicit for it.
What the general stages of this actuaHsation will be can be indicated in a general way by reference to the road thus far traversed. Just as reason, when exercised 3.3?
340 Phenomenology of Mind in observation, repeated in the medium of categories tKe movement of " consciousness " as such, namely, sensecertainty,* perception,! and understanding,]; the course of reason here, too, will again traverse the double movement of " self-consciousness," and from independence pass over into its freedom. To begin with this active reason is aware of itself merely as "an individual,'' and must, being such, demand and bring forth its reahty in an " other. " Thereupon, however, its consciousness being hfted into universahty, it becomes universal reason, and is consciously aware of itself as reason, as something already recognised in and for itself, which within its mere consciousness unites all self-consciousness. It is, again, the simple ultimate spiritual reality (Wesen), which, by coming at the same time to consciousness, is the real substance, into which preceding forms return and in wliich they find their ground, so that they are, with reference to the latter, merely particular moments of its process of coming into being, moments which indeed break loose and appear as forms on their own account, but have in fact only existence and actuahty when borne and supported by it, and only retain their truth in so far as they are and remain in it.
If we take this final result of the process as it is when really accomplished — this end, which is the notion that has just come before us, viz. recognised self-consciousness, which has the certainty of itself in the other free self-consciousness, and finds its truth precisely there; in other words, if we bring this merely inward and unevolved mind to light as the substance that has de- * viz: in descriptive observation of nature as such.
t viz: in observation of living nature.
I viz; in observation of nature as the external reality of mind, Realisation of Rational Self-Consciousness 341 veloped into its concrete existence, — we shall find that in this notion there is opened up before us the realm of the Social Order, the Ethical World (SittlichJceit). For this latter is nothing else than the absolute spiritual unity of the essential substance (Wesen) of individuals in their independent realisation of themselves as individuals; it is an inherently universal self-consciousness, which is aware of being so concrete and real in an other consciousness, that this latter has complete independence, is looked on as a " thing," and the universal selfconsciousness is aware precisely therein of its unity with that " thing,'" and is only then self-consciousness, when thus in unity with this objective being (Wesen). This ethical substance when taken in its abstract universality is only the conception of law, thought-constituted law; but even so it is immediately actual self-consciousness, it is Custom (Sitte). The single individual, conversely, is only a " this," a given existent unit, since he is aware of the universal consciousness as his own being in his own particular individuahty, seeing that his action and existence are the universal custom.
In point of fact the notion of the realisation of self-conscious reason — of having a sense of complete unity with another in his independence: of having for my object an other in the form of a " thing," found detached and apart from me, and the negative of myself, and of taking this as my self-existence {Fur michseyn) — finds its actual fulfilment in the Hfe of a nation^ Reason appears here as the fluent universal substance, as unchangeable simple " thingness," which at the same time breaks up into many entirely independent beings, just as hght bursts asunder into stars as innumerable luminous points, each giving light on its 342 Phenomenology of Mind own account, and whose absolute self-existence {Fiirsichseyn) is dissolved, not merely implicitly {an sich), but explicitly for themselves {fiir sich), within the simple independent substance. They are conscious within themselves of being these individual independent beings through the fact that they surrender and sacrifice their particular individuality, and that this universal substance is their soul and essence: — as this universal again is the action of themselves as individuals, and is the work and product of their own activity.
The purely particular activity and business of the individual refer to needs and wants, which he has as a part of nature, i.e. as a mere existent particular. That even these, its commonest functions, do not come to nothing, but have reality, is brought about by the universal sustaining medium, the might of the entire nation.
It is not merely, however, this form of subsistence for his activity in general that the individual gets in the universal substance, but likewise also his content; what he does is what all are capable of doing, is the custom all follow. This content, in so far as it is completely particiiiarised, is, in its concrete reahty, not confined to the single individual, but involves and embraces the activity of all. The labour of the individual for his own wants and necessities is just as much a satisfaction of those of others as of himself, and the satisfaction of his own he attains only by the labour of others.
As the individual in his own. particular work if so facto accomplishes unconsciously a universal work so again he also performs the universal task as his conscious object. The whole becomes in its entirety his work, for Realisation of Rational Self-Consciousness 34S which he sacrifices himself, and precisely by that means receives back his own self from it.
There is nothing here which could not be reciprocal, nothing in regard to which the independence of the individual might not, in dissipating its existence on its own account {Fursicliseyn), in negating itself, give itself its positive significance of existing for itself. This unity of existing for another, or making self a " thing," and of existence for self, this universal substance, utters its universal language in the customs and laws of a nation. But this existent unchangeable nature (Wesen) is nothing else than the expression of the particular individuality which seems opposed to it: the laws give expression to that which each individual is and does; the individual knows them not merely to be what constitutes his universal objective nature as a " thing," but knows himself, too, in that form, or knows it to be particularised in his own individuahty and in each of his feUow-citizens. In the universal mind, there-. fore, each is certain of himself only because he finds in the actual reaUty nothing but himself; he is as certain of the others as of himself. I apprehend and see in all of, them that they are in their own eyes (filr sick sdhst) only these independent beings just as I am. I see in their case the free unity with others in such wise that just as this unity exists through me, so it exists through the others too — I see them as myself, myself as them.
In a free nation, therefore, reason is in truth reahsed. ] It is a present hving mind, where the individual not only finds his determinate nature, i.e. his universal and particular being, expressed and given to him in the form; of a " thing," but himself is this real being, and has; also attained his constitutive character and position.
344 Phenomenology of Mind The wisest men of antiquity for that reason declared that wisdom and virtue consist in living in accordance with the customs of one's own nation.
From this happy state, however, of having attained its determinate nature, and of living in it, the selfconsciousness, which in the first instance is only immediately and in principle mind, has broken away; or perhaps it has not yet attained it: for both can be said with equal truth.
Reason must pass out of and leave this happy condition. For only imphcitly or immediately is the hfe of a free nation real ob j ective ethical order {SittUchJceit). In other words, the latter is a merely existent social order, and in consequence this universal mind is also something particular. The totality of customs and laws is a specifically determinate ethical substance, which casts off this restricted Limitation only when it reaches the higher moment, namely, when it becomes conscious regarding its own nature; only with this knowledge does it get its absolute truth, and not as it is immediately in its bare existence. In this latter form it is partly restricted and circumscribed, partly the absolute limitation consists just in this that mind is there in the form of existence.
Hence, further, the individual, as he immediately finds his existence in the actual objective social order, in the life of his nation, has a soKd imperturbable confidence; the universal mind has not here resolved itself into its abstract moments, and thus, too, he does not think of himself as existing in singleness and independence. When however he has once arrived at this knowledge, as indeed he must, this immediate unity with mind, this undifferentiated existence in the substance Realisation of Rational Self-Consciousness 345 of mind, his sense of naive confidence, is lost. Isolated by himself he is himself now the central essential reality — no longer universal mind. The element of this singleness of self-consciousness is no doubt in universal mind itself, but merely as a vanishing quantity, which, as it appears with an existence of its own, is straightway resolved within the universal, and only becomes consciously felt in the form of that sense of confidence. When the individual gets fixity in the form of singleness (and every moment, being a moment of the essential reality, must manage to reveal itself as essential), the individual has thereby set himself in opposition to the laws and customs. These latter are looked on as merely a thought without absolutely essential significance, an abstract theory without reality; while he qua this particular ego is in his own view the Hving truth.
Or, again [we can say, as above stated, that] self- ' consciousness has not yet attained this happy state of being ethical substance, the mind of a nation. For, ' after leaving the process of rational Observation, mind, at first, is not yet as such actually realised through itself; it is merely afiirmed as inner nature and essence, or as abstraction. In other words, mind is first immediate. As immediately existing, however, it is particular. It is practical consciousness, which steps into the world it finds lying ready-made with the intention of duplicating itself in the determinate form of an individual, of producing itself as this particular individual, and creating this its own existential counterpart, and thus becoming conscious of this unity of its own actual reahty with the objective world. Self-consciousness possesses the certainty of this unity; it holds that the unity is implicitly {an sich) already 346 Phenomenology of Mind present, or that this union and agreement between itself and " thinghood" (objective existence) is akeady a fait accom'pli, and has only to become expressly so through its own agency; or that its making that unity is at the same time and as much its finding the unity. Since this unity means happiness, the individual is thus sent forth into the world by his own spirit to seek his happiness.
If, then, we for our part find the truth of this rational self-consciousness to be ethical substance, that selfconsciousness on its part finds here the beginning of its moral experience of the world. Looking at it as not having yet had such experience, this process drives it in that direction, and what is cancelled in the process are the particular moments which self-consciousness takes as valid in isolation. They have the form of an immediate will-process, or impulse of nature, which attains its satisfaction, this satisfaction itself being the content of a new impulse. Looking at self-consciousness, however, as having lost the happiness of being in the substance, these natural impulses are bound up with a consciousness that their purpose is the true vocation and essential nature of self-consciousness. Ethical substance has sunk to the level of a floating selfless adjective, whose hving subjects are individuals, which have to fill up their universality through themselves, and to provide for their vocation out of the same source.
Taken in the former sense, then, those forms and modes are the process by which the ethical substance comes to be, and precede this substance: in the latter they succeed it, and disclose for self-consciousness what its vocation is. In the former aspect the immediacy or raw brute impulses get lost in the process of finding out what their truth is, and their content Realisation of Rational Self-Consciousness 347 passes over to a higher. In the latter aspect, however, the false idea of consciousness, which puts its vocation in that immediacy, passes to a higher idea. In the former case the goal which they attain is the immediate ethical substance; while, in the latter, the end is the consciousness of that substance, such a consciousness as knows the substance to be its own essential being; and to that extent this process would be the development of morahty {Moralitdt), a higher state or attitude than the former (SittlichJceit). But these modes at the same time constitute only one side of the development of morality, that, namely, which belongs to selfexistence, or in which consciousness cancels its purposes; they do not constitute the side where morahty arises out of the substance itself. Since these moments cannot yet have the signification of being made into purposes in opposition to the lost social order {Sittlichheit), they hold here no doubt in their simple uncriticised content, and the end towards which they work is the ethical substance: but since with our time is more directly associated that form of these moments in which they appear after consciousness has lost its ethical custom-constituted {sittliches) hfe, and in the search for it repeats those forms, they may be represented more after this latter manner of expression. • >,,] Self-consciousness, which is merely at first the notion of mind, takes this path with the specific characteristic of being to itself the essential reahty qua individual mind, and its purpose, therefore, is to give itself actualisation as individual, and to enjoy itself, qua individual, in so doing.
In existing for itself it is aware of itself as the essentially real. In this character it is the negativity of the 348 Phenomenology of Mind other. There arises, therefore, within its consciousness an opposition between itself qua positive and something which no doubt exists, but for it not in the sense of existing substantially. Consciousness appears sundered into this objective reality found lying at its hand, and the purpose, which it carries out by the process of cancelling that objectivity, and which it makes the actual fact instead of the given object. Its primary purpose, however, is its immediate abstract existence for itself, its seeing itself as this particular individual in another, or in looking upon another selfconsciousness as itself. The experience of what the truth of this purpose is, places self-consciousness on a higher plane, and henceforth it is to itself purpose, in so far as it is at once universal, and has the law immediately within it. In carrying out this law of its heart, however, it learns that here the individual cannot preserve himself, but rather the good can only be performed through the sacrifice of the individual: and so it passes into Virtue. The experience which virtue goes through can be no other than that of finding that its purpose is already implicitly {an sicli) carried out, that happiness Ues immediately in action itself, and action is just the good. The principle and notion of this entire sphere of experience — viz. that "thinghood" is the independent self-existence of mind — becomes in the course of this experience an objective fact for selfconsciousness. When self-consciousness has foimd this principle it is aware of itself as reahty in the sense of directly self-expressing Individuality, which no longer finds any resistance in a reahty opposed to it, and whose object and purpose are merely this function of selfexpression.