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 conscious of itself. Acting disturbs the peace of the substance, 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 relation 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 regarding this world.
The relation of the two is, by this means, a commingling 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 proceed 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 useless effort, since the former direct and manage everything. 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 interest 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 dissolves 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 transforms 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-confidence outweighs and overbalances the element of determinateness, then, by that very fact, the pure force of negativity confronts and opposes their nature, and moreover with a power to which it must finally submit, and over which it can in no way prevail. They are the universal, 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 determinate 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 contradictory independent subsistence of the individual moments, a unity in which the inconsistency and fortuitousness of their action is coherently regulated, and the sportive 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 disintegrated 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 language 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 spectators— self-conscious human beings, who know their own rights and purposes, the power and the will belonging 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 external 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 consciousness 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 indifferent 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 character, 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 regards 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, confines 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 respect to knowledge. Spirit when acting, appears, qua consciousness, over against the object on which its activity is directed, and which, in consequence, is determined 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 allilluminating 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 knowledge 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 opposition 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 acting 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 belonging 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 concealed. 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 admonition 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 deception, 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 overthrow 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 752 Phenomenology of Mind reality and action of the powers of the substance, its component 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 individuality, 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 assuming 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 accidental, 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 characteristic 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-consciousness, 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 emotion of passive pity. Partly again, so far as consciousness 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 concrete 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 nakedness 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 embodied 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-consciousness 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 substantiality 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.