668 Phenomenology of Mi existence. And to preserve the purity of its heart, it flees from contact with actuality, and steadfastly perseveres in a state of self-willed impotence to renounce a self which is pared away to the last point of abstraction, and to give itself substantial existence, or, in other words, to transform its thought into being, and commit itself to absolute distinction [that between thought and being]. The hollow object, which it produces, now fills it, therefore, with the feeling of emptiness. Its activity consists in yearning; it merely loses itself in becoming an unsubstantial shadowy object, and, rising above this loss and falling back on itself, finds itself merely as lost. In this transparent purity of its moments it becomes a sorrow-laden " beautiful soul," as it is called; its light dims and dies within it, and it vanishes as a shapeless vapour dissolving into thin air.* This silent fusion of the pithless unsubstantial elements of evaporated life has, however, still to be taken in the other sense of the reality of conscience, and in the way its process actually appears. Conscience has to be considered as acting. The objective moment in this phase of consciousness took above the determinate form of universal consciousness. The knowing of self is, qua this particular self, different from another self. Language in which all reciprocally recognise and acknowledge each other as acting conscientiously — this general equality breaks up into the inequality of each individual existing for himself; each consciousness turns from its universality back into itself, each is just as much reflected absolutely into itself as it is universal. By this means there necessarily comes about * Cf. Hegel's remarks on Jacobi's conception of the " beautiful soul '': Evil and Forgiveness 669 the opposition of individuality to other individuals and to the universal. And this relation and its procedure we have to consider.
Or, again, this universality and duty have the absolutely opposite significance; they signify determinate individuality, exempting itself from what is universal, individuality which looks on pure duty as universality that has appeared merely on the surface and is turned on its outside: " duty is merely a matter of words/' and passes for that whose being is for something else. Conscience, which in the first instance takes up merely a negative attitude towards duty, qua a given determinate duty, feels itself detached from it. But since conscience fills empty duty with a determinate content drawn from its own self, it is positively aware of the fact that it, qua this particular self, makes its own content. Its pure self, as it is empty knowledge, is without content and without definiteness. The content which it supplies to that knowledge is drawn from its own self, qua this determinate self, is drawn from itself as a natural individuality. In speaking of the conscientiousness of its action, it is doubtless aware of its pure self, but in the purpose of its action — a purpose which brings in a concrete content — it is conscious of itself as this particular individual, and is conscious of the opposition between what it is for itself and what it is for others, of the opposition of universality or duty and its state of being reflected into self away from the universal.
While in this way the opposition, into which conscience passes when it acts, finds expression in its inner life, the opposition is at the same time disparity on its outer side, in the sphere of existence — the disparity 670 Phenomenology of Mind or discordance of its particular individuality with reference to another individual. Its special peculiarity consists in the fact that the two elements constituting its consciousness — viz. the self and the inherent nature (Ansich] — are unequal in value and significance within it; in being accepted as valid, they are so determined that certainty of self is the essential fact as against the inherent nature, or the universal, which is taken to be merely a moment. Over against this internal determination there thus stands the element of existence, the universal consciousness; and for this latter it is rather universality, duty, which is the essential fact, while individuality, which exists for itself and is opposed to the universal, has merely the value of a superseded moment. The first consciousness is held to be Evil by the consciousness which thus stands by the fact of duty, because of the lack of congruity or identity of its internal subjective life with the universal; and since at the same time the first consciousness declares its act to be identity with itself, to be duty and conscientiousness, it is held by that universal consciousness to be Hypocrisy.
The course taken by this opposition is, in the first instance, the formal reinstatement of the identity between what the evil consciousness is in its own nature and what it declares itself to be. It has to be made manifest that it is evil, and its objective existence thus made congruent with its real nature; the hypocrisy must be unmasked. This return of the disparity, present in hypocrisy, into the state of congruency or identity is not at once brought to pass by the mere fact that, as people usually say, hypocrisy just proves its reverence for duty and virtue through assuming the appearance of them, and using this as Evil and Forgiveness 671 a mask to hide itself from its own consciousness no less than from another — as if, in this acknowledgment and recognition in itself of its opposite, eo ipso congruency and agreement were implied and contained. Yet even then it is just as truly done with this recognition in words and is reflected into self; and in the very fact of its using the inherent and essential reality merely as something which has a significance for another consciousness, there is really implied its own contempt for that inherent principle, and the demonstration of the worthlessness of that reality for all. For what lets itself be used as an external instrument shows itself to be a thing, which has within it no proper weight and worth of its own.
Moreover, this congruency or identity, is not brought about either by the evil consciousness persisting onesidedly in its own state, or by the judgment of the universal consciousness. If the former disclaims the consciousness of duty, and maintains that what the latter pronounces to be baseness, to be absolute discordance with universality, is an action according to inner law and conscience, then, in this onesided assurance of identity and concord, there still remains its want of agreement with the other, since this other universal consciousness certainly does not believe the assurance and does not acknowledge it. In other words, since onesided insistence on one extreme destroys itself, evil would indeed thereby confess to being evil, but in so doing would at once cancel itself and cease to be hypocrisy, and so would not qua hypocrisy be unmasked. It confesses itself, in fact, to be evil by asserting that, while opposing what is recognised as universal, it is acting according to inner 672 Phenomenology of Mind law and conscience. For were this law and conscience not the law of its particularity and caprice, it would not be something inward, something private, but what is universally accepted and acknowledged. When, therefore, any one says he acts towards others from a law and conscience of his own, he is saying, in point of fact, that he is abusing and wronging them. But actual conscience is not this insistence on a knowledge and a will which are opposed to what is universal; the universal is the element of its existence, and its very language pronounces its action to be recognised duty.
Just as little, when the universal consciousness emphasises and persists in its own judgment, does this unmask and dissipate hypocrisy. When that universal consciousness stigmatises hypocrisy as bad, base, and so on, it appeals, in passing such a judgment, to its own law, just as the evil consciousness, on its side, does too. For the former law makes its appearance in opposition to the latter, and thereby is a particular law. It has, therefore, no antecedent claim over the other law; rather it legitimises this other law. Hence the universal consciousness, by thus emulating the other, does precisely the opposite of what it means to do: for it shows that its so-called " true duty," which ought to be universally acknowledged, is something not acknowledged and recognised, and consequently it grants the other an equal right of independently existing on its own account.
This judgment [of universal consciousness], however, has, at the same time, another side to it, from which it leads the way to the dissolution of the opposition in question. Consciousness of the universal does not proceed, qua real and qua acting, to deal with the evil Evil and Forgiveness 673 consciousness; for this latter, rather, is the real. In opposing the latter, it is a consciousness which is not entangled in the opposition of particular and universal involved in action. It stays within the universality of thought, takes up the attitude of an apprehending intelligence, and its first act is merely that of judgment. Through this judgment it now places itself, as was just observed, alongside the first consciousness, and the latter, through this identity, this likeness, between them, comes to see itself in this other consciousness. For in the attitude of apprehension consciousness of duty is passive. Thereby it is in contradiction with itself as the absolute will of duty, as the self that determines absolutely from itself. It may well preserve itself in its purity, for it does not act; it is hypocrisy, which wants to see the fact of judging taken for the actual deed, and instead of proving its uprightness and honesty by acts does so by expressing fine sentiments. It is thus constituted entirely in the same way as that against which the reproach is made of putting its phrases in place of duty. In both cases alike the aspect of reality is distinct from the express statements — in the one case owing to the selfish purpose of the action, in the other through failure to act at all, a result which is inevitable when there is mere talk about duty, for duty without deeds is altogether meaningless.
The act of judging, however, has also to be looked at as a positive act of thought and has a positive content: this aspect makes the contradiction present in the apprehending consciousness and its identity with the first consciousness still more complete. The active consciousness declares its specific deed to be its duty, and the consciousness that passes judgment cannot deny VOL. II. — S 674 Phenomenology of Mind V this; for duty as such is form void of all content and capable of any. In other words, concrete action, inherently implying diversity in its manysidedness, involves the universal aspect, which is that which is taken as duty, just as much as the particular, which constitutes the share and interest the individual has in the act. The consciousness expressing its judgment does not now stop at the former aspect of duty and rest content with the knowledge which the active agent has of this, viz. that this is its duty, the condition and the status of its reality. It holds on to the other aspect, diverts the act into the inner realm, and explains the act from selfish motives and from its inner intention, an intention different from the act itself. As every act is capable of treatment in respect of its dutifulness, so, too, each can be considered from this other point of view of particularity; for as an act it is the actuality of an individual.
This process of judging, then, takes the act out of the sphere of its objective existence, and turns it back into that of the inner realm, into the form of specific and individual particularity. If the act carries glory with it, then the inner aspect is judged as love of fame. If it altogether fits in with the position and status of the individual, without going beyond this position, and is so constituted that the individuality in question does not have the position hanging on to it as an external appendage, but through itself supplies the content to this universality, and by that very process shows itself to be capable of a higher status — then the inner nature of the act is judged as ambition; and so on. Since, in the act in general, the individual who acts comes to see himself in objective form, or gets the feeling of his Evil and Forgiveness 675 own being in his objective existence and thus attains enjoyment, the judgment on the act finds the inner nature of it to be an impulse towards personal and private happiness, even though this happiness were to consist merely in inner moral vanity, the enjoyment of a sense of personal excellence, and in the foretaste and hope of a happiness to come.
No act can escape.being judged in such a way; for " duty for duty's sake," this bare purpose, is something unreal. What reality it has lies in the deed of some individuality, and the action thereby has in it the aspect of particularity. No hero is a hero to his valet, not, however, because the hero is not a hero, but because the valet is — the valet, with whom the hero has to do, not as a hero, but as a man who eats, drinks, and dresses, who, in short, appears as a particular individual with certain personal wants and idiosyncrasies. In the same way, there is no act in which that process of judgment cannot oppose the particular aspect of the individuality to the universal aspect of the act, and set the valet of morality against the hero who does the act.* The consciousness, that so passes judgment, is in consequence itself base and mean, because it divides the act up, and brings out and holds on to its inherent inconsistency and self-discordance. It is, furthermore, hypocrisy, because it gives out this way of judging, not as another fashion of being wicked, but as the correct consciousness of the act; sets itself up, in its unreality, in this vanity of knowing well and better, far above the deeds it decries; and wants to find its mere words without deeds taken for an admirable kind of reality.
On this account, then, putting itself on a level with * Cp. with above Philosophy of History, Intro. (Eng. trans., p. 32 ff.)
676 Phenomenology of Mind the agent on whom it passes judgment, it is recognised by the latter as the same as himself. This latter does not merely find himself apprehended as something alien or external to, and unlike or discordant with that other: but rather finds the other in its peculiar constitutive character identical with himself. Seeing this similarity and giving this expression, he openly declares himself to the other, and expects in like manner that the other, having in point of fact put itself on the same level, will respond in the same terms on its side, will give voice to the likeness found within it, and that thus the state of mutual recognition will be brought about. His confession is not an attitude of abasement or humiliation before the other, is not flinging himself away. For to give the matter expression in this way has not the one-sided character which would fix and establish his disparity with the other: on the contrary, it is solely because of seeing the likeness of the other to him that he gives himself utterance. In making his confession he announces, from his side, their common likeness, and does so for the reason that language is the existence of spirit as an immediate self. He thus expects that the other will make its own contribution to this manner of existence.
But the admission on the part of the one who is wicked, " I am so," is not followed by a reply making a similar confession. This was not what that way" of judging meant at all: far from it! It repels this community of nature, and is the " hardheartedness," which keeps to itself and rejects all continuity with the other. By so doing the scene is changed. The one who made the confession sees himself thrust off, and takes the other to be in the wrong when he refuses to Evil and Forgiveness 677 let his own inner nature go forth in the objective shape of an express utterance, opposes and contrasts the beauty of his own soul with the wicked individual, and opposes to the confession of the penitent the stiffnecked attitude of the self-consistent equable character, and the rigid silence of one who keeps himself to himself and refuses to throw himself away for some one else. Here we find asserted the highest pitch of revolt to which a spirit certain of itself can reach. For it beholds itself, qua this bare self-knowledge, in another conscious being, and in such a way that the external form of this other is not an unessential " thing," as in the case of an object of wealth, but thought; knowledge itself is what is opposed to it. It is this absolutely unbroken continuity of pure knowledge which refuses to establish communication with an other, which had, ipso facto, by making its confession, renounced separate isolated self-existence, had affirmed its particularity to be cancelled, and thereby established itself as continuous with the other, i.e. established itself as universal. The other, however, retains in its own case and reserves to itself its uncommunicative, isolated independence: in the case of the individual making the confession it retains just the very thing which that individual has already cast away. It thereby proves itself to be a form of consciousness which has forsaken and denies the very nature of spirit; for it does not understand that spirit, in the absolute certainty of itself, is master and lord over every deed, and over all reality, and can reject and cast them off and make them as if they had never been. At the same time, it does not see the contradiction it is committing in not allowing a rejection, which has been 678 Phenomenology of Mind made in express language, to pass for genuine rejection, while itself has the certainty of its own spiritual life, not in a concrete real act, but in its inner nature, and finds the objective existence of this inner being in the mere utterance of its own judgment. It is thus its own self which checks that other's return from the act to the spiritual objectivity of spoken utterance, and to spiritual identity and agreement, and by its stiffness produces the discordance and dissimilarity which still remain.
Now, so far as the spirit which is certain of itself, in the form of a " beautiful soul," does not possess the faculty of relinquishing the self-absorbed uncommunicative knowledge of itself, it cannot attain to any identity with the consciousness that is repulsed, and so cannot succeed in seeing the unity of its self in another life, cannot reach objective existence. The equality comes about, therefore, merely in a negative way, as a state of being devoid of spiritual character. The "beautiful soul/' then, has no concrete reality; it subsists in the contradiction between its pure self and the necessity felt by this self to externalise itself and turn into something actual; it exists in the immediacy of this rooted and fixed opposition, an immediacy which alone is the middle term mediating and reconciling an opposition which has arisen to its pure abstraction, and is pure being or empty nothingness. Thus the " beautiful soul," being conscious of this contradiction in its unreconciled immediacy, is unhinged, disordered, and runs to madness, passes away in yearning, and is consumed in pining inanition.* Thereby it gives up, as a fa,ct, its * This was the actual fate of Novalis, the " St. John of Romanticism " (d. 1801, set. 29). Cp. Hegel's remarks on Novalis WW X., 1, p. 201: Evil and Forgiveness 679 stubborn insistence on its own isolated self-existence, but only to bring forth the soulless, spiritless unity of abstract being.
The true, that is to say the self-conscious and actual, balance or adjustment of the two sides is necessitated by, and already contained in the foregoing. Breaking the hard heart and raising it to the level of universality is the same process which appeared in the case of the consciousness that expressly made its confession. The wounds of the spirit heal and leave no scars behind. The deed is not something imperishable; the spirit takes it back into itself; and the aspect of particularity present in it, whether in the form of an intention or of an existential negativity and limitation, immediately passes away. The process of actually realising self, the form of its act, is merely a moment of the whole; and the same is true of the knowledge functioning through judgment, and establishing and maintaining the distinction between the particular and universal aspects of action. The evil consciousness, spoken of, definitely yields up and relinquishes itself, or sets itself down as a moment, being drawn into the way of express confession by seeing itself in another. This other, however, must have its onesided, unaccepted, and unacknowledged judgment broken down, just as the former has to abandon its onesided unacknowledged existence in a state of particularity and isolation. And as the former displays the power of spirit over its reality, so this other must manifest the power of spirit over its constitutive and determinate notion.
The latter, however, renounces thought that divides and separates, and the rigid imperviousness of uncom- 680 Phenomenology of Mind municative self-existence, for the reason that, in point of fact, it sees itself in the first. That which, in this way, abandons its reality and makes itself into a superseded particular "this" (Diesen), shows itself thereby to be, in fact, universal. It turns away from its external reality back into itself as inner essence; and there the universal consciousness thus knows and finds itself.
The forgiveness it extends to the first is the renunciation of self, of its unreal being, since it identifies this unreal nature and that other element of real action, and recognises what was called bad — a determination assigned to action by thought — to be good; or rather it lets go and gives up this distinction of determinate thought with its self -determining isolated judgment, just as the other foregoes determining the act in isolation and for its own private behoof. The word of reconciliation is the objectively existent spirit, which sees and immediately apprehends the pure knowledge of itself qua universal being in its opposite, in the pure knowledge of itself qua absolutely self-confined single individual — a reciprocal recognition which is Absolute Spirit.
Absolute Spirit enters existence merely at the culminating point at which its pure knowledge about itself is the opposition and interchange with itself. Knowing that its pure knowledge is the abstract essential reality, Absolute Spirit is this knowing duty in absolute opposition to the knowledge which knows itself, qua absolute singleness of self, to be the essentially real. The former is the pure continuity of the universal, which knows the individuality, that thinks itself the real, to be inherently null and naught, to be evil. The latter, again, is absolute discreteness, which thinks Evil and Forgiveness 681 itself absolute in its pure oneness, and thinks the universal is the unreal which exists only for others. Both aspects are refined and clarified to this degree of purity, where there is no self- less existence left, no negative of consciousness in either of them, where, instead, the one element of " duty " is the self -identical character of its self-knowledge, and the other element of "evil" equally has its purpose in its own inner being and its reality in its own mode of utterance. The content of this utterance is the substance that gives it subsistence; the utterance is the assurance and asseveration of the certainty of spirit within its own self.
These spirits, both certain of themselves, have each no other purpose than its own pure self, and no other reality and existence than just this pure self. But they are still different, and the difference is absolute, because holding within this element of the pure notion. The difference is absolute, too, not merely for its [tracing the experience], but for the notions themselves which stand in this opposition. For while these notions are indeed determinate and specific relatively to one another, they are at the same time in themselves universal, so that they compass the whole range of the self; and this self can have no other content than this its own determinate constitution, which neither transcends the self nor is more restricted than it. For the one aspect, the absolutely universal, is pure self-knowledge as well as the other, the absolute discreteness of single individuality, and both are merely this pure self-knowledge. Both determinate aspects, then, are cognitive pure notions which know qua notions, whose very constitution consists in immediately knowing, or, in other words, whose relationship and opposition is the Ego. Because of this 682 Phenomenology of Mind they are for one another these absolutely opposed elements; it is what is completely inner that has in this way come into opposition to itself and entered objective existence; they constitute pure knowledge, which, owing to this opposition, takes the form of consciousness. But as yet it is not self -consciousness. It obtains this actualisation in the course of the process through which this opposition passes. For this opposition is really itself the indiscrete continuity and identity of ego = ego; and each by itself inherently cancels itself just through the contradiction in its pure universality, which, while implying continuity and identity, at the same time still resists its identity with the other, and separates itself from it. Through this relinquishment of separate selfhood, the knowledge, which in its existence is in a state of diremption, returns into the unity of the self; it is the concrete actual Ego, universal knowledge of self in its absolute opposite, in the knowledge which is internal to and within the self, and which, because of the very purity of its separate subjective existence, is itself completely universal. The reconciling affirmation, the " yes," with which both egos desist from their existence in opposition, is the existence of the ego expanded into a duality, an ego which remains therein one and identical with itself, and possesses the certainty of itself in its complete relinquishment and its opposite: it is God appearing in the midst of those who know themselves in the form of pure knowledge.
(CO) RELIGION [The appearance of Absolute Spirit as a principle constituting on its own account a distinctive stage of experience is at once a demand of the preceding development and a condition of making experience selfcomplete. Finite or socialised spiritual existence is at its best incapable of establishing the truth that " Spirit is the only reality "; for the more finite spirit approximates to the state of claiming to be self-contained the more is it dependent on universal self-consciousness. A trans-finite or Absolute Spiritual Being as such is thus necessary to realise and sustain the fullness of meaning which finite spirit possesses. Moreover, if " the truth is the whole," and only so is truth self-complete and self -explaining, and, if reality is essentially spiritual — then experience only finds its complete meaning realised in the principle of Absolute Spirit. Hence the final stage of the Phenomenology of experience is the appearance therein of Absolute Spirit. Moreover, Absolute Spirit, in its own distinctive existence, could only appear at the end of the process of experience, for the whole of that process is required to reveal and to constitute the substance of which the Absolute consists. But the peculiarity of the stage now reached is that here the Absolute operates in its undivided totality to form a definite type of experience; or, in the language of the text, we have the Absolute here " conscious of its self." No doubt, in all the previous stages, "consciousness," " reason," " spirit," the Absolute has been implied as a limiting principle, at once substantiating and determining the boundaries of each stage: hence each stage had an Absolute of its own, the character of which was derived in each case from the peculiarity of the stage in question. Now, however, we have the Absolute by itself, in its single self-completeness, as the sole formative factor of a certain type of experience.
The Absolute, then, in its own self-complete reality appears as the constitutive principle of experience. The experience here is the selfconsciousness of Absolute Spirit; it appears to itself in all its objects. Since all the modes of finitude hitherto considered (consciousness, selfconsciousness, etc.) are embraced in its single totality, it may use each and all of these various modes as the media through and in which to appear.
684 Phenomenology of Mind When it appears in and through these modes of finitude we have the attitude of Religion. Since these modes, as we saw, differ, the religious attitude differs; and accordingly we have various types or forms of religion.