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 compulsion 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 individual 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 involved 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 presentations. 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 apprehensive 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 consciousness 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 consciousness, consisting in mere rest and forgetfulness, and separated from self-consciousness, is united with selfconsciousness. 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 fulfilled and consummated in it, and is come full circle. Through the fact that it is the individual consciousness 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 unconscious 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 certainty 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 selfconsciousness which merely disappears in the awesome 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 religion 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 consciousness, all essential content is swallowed up and submerged. The proposition, which gives this lighthearted 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 objective 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 nonreligious, 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 consciousness 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 substance] 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 insubstantial spirits of national individuals are gathered together into a pantheon; not into a pantheon represented 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 disembodies them, and bestows on the spiritless self, on the individual person, complete existence on its own account.
But this self, through its being empty, has let the content go; this consciousness is Being merely within 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 vindication 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 " constitutes the counterpart and the complement of the perfectly 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 contrary, is conversely the tragic fate that befalls certainty of self which aims at being absolute, at being selfsufficient. 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 " unhappy 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 personality 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 pictorially (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 attributes 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 development of it, its notion, or the inherent production of it. The cycle of the creations of art embraces in its scope all forms in which the absolute substance 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-consciousness 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 yearning agony of the unhappy despairing self-consciousness, a pain which permeates all of them, and is the common 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 represented as the two converse statements: one is this, that substance empties itself of itself, and becomes selfconsciousness; the other is the converse, that selfconsciousness 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 selfexistence, 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 existence 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 religions, 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 object. This notion, which, being immediate, had also, for consciousness, the form of immediacy, has, in the second place, taken on the form of self-consciousness 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, however, 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 (angeschaut) necessity, and is also at home with itself in that necessity, knows it and comprehends it. The immediate inherent nature of spirit, which takes on the form of self-consciousness, means nothing else than that the concrete actual world-spirit has reached this knowledge of itself. It is then too that this knowledge first enters its consciousness, and enters it as truth. How that came about has already been explained.
That Absolute Spirit has taken on the form of self- 768 Phenomenology of Mind consciousness inherently and necessarily, and has done so too as a conscious fact — this position appears now as the belief of the world, the belief that spirit exists in fact as a definite self-consciousness, i.e. as an actual human being, that spirit is an object for immediate experience, that the believing mind sees, feels, and hears this divinity.* Taken thus it is not an imagination, not a fancy; it is actual in the believer. Consciousness in that case does not set out from its own inner life, does not start from thought, and enclose the thought of God along with existence; rather it sets out from immediate present existence, and finds God there.
The moment of immediate existence is present as an element in the notion, and present in such a way that the religious spirit, on the return of all ultimate reality into consciousness, has become simple positive self, just as the actual spirit as such, in the case of the " unhappy consciousness, " was just this simple self-conscious negativity. The self of the definitely existent spirit has in that way the form of complete immediacy. It is neither set up as something thought, or imaginatively represented, nor as something produced, as is the case with the immediate self both in natural religion, and in religion as art. Rather, this concrete God is beheld sensuously and immediately as a self, as a real individual human being; only so is it a self-consciousness.
This incarnation of the Divine Being, its having essentially and directly the form of self-consciousness, is the simple content of Absolute Religion. Here the Divine Being is known as spirit; this religion is the Divine Being's consciousness concerning itself that it is Spirit. For spirit is knowledge of itself in * e.g. in Christianity.
Revealed Religion 769 its state of self-relinquishment, the absolute Reality, which is the process of retaining its harmony and identity with itself in its otherness. This, however, is Substance, so far as in its accidents substance at the same time turns back into itself; and does so, not as being indifferent towards something unessential and, consequently, finding itself in some alien element, but as being there within itself, i.e. so far as it is subject or self.
In this form of religion the Divine Being is, on that account, revealed. Its being revealed obviously consists in this, that what it is, is consciously known. It is, however, known just in its being known as spirit, as a Being which is essentially self-consciousness.
There is something in the object always concealed from consciousness when the object is for consciousness an " other," something alien and extraneous, and when consciousness does not know the object as its self. This concealment, this secrecy, ceases when the Absolute Being qua spirit is object of consciousness. For here in its relation to consciousness the object is in the form of self; i.e. consciousness at once and immediately knows itself there, or is manifest, revealed, to itself in the object. Itself is manifest to itself merely in its own certainty of self; the object it has is the self; self, however, is nothing alien and extraneous, but inseparable unity with itself, the immediate universal. It is the pure notion, pure thought, or self-existence, being-for-self, which is immediately being, and, therewith, being-foranother, and, qua this being-for-another, is immediately turned back into itself and is at home with itself (bei sick). It is thus the truly and solely revealed. The Good, the Righteous, the Holy, Creator of Heaven 770 Phenomenology of Mind and Earth, etc. — all these are predicates of a subject, universal moments, which have their hold on this central point, and only are when consciousness goes back into thought.
As long as it is they that are known, their ground and essential being, the Subject itself is not yet revealed; and in the same way the specific determinations of the universal are not this universal itself. The Subject itself, and consequently this pure universal too, is, however, revealed as self; for this self is just this inner being reflected into itself, the inner being which is immediately given and is the proper certainty of that [other] self, for which it is object. To be in its notion that which reveals and is revealed — this is, then, the true form of spirit; and moreover, this form, its notion, is alone its very essence and its substance. Spirit is known as self-consciousness, and to this self-consciousness it is directly revealed, for it is this self-consciousness itself. The divine nature is the same as the human, and it is this unity which is intuitively apprehended (angeschaut).
Here, then, we find as a fact consciousness, or the general form in which Being is aware of Being — the shape which Being adopts — to be identical with its selfconsciousness. This shape is itself a self-consciousness; it is thus at the same time an existent object; and this existence possesses equally directly the significance of pure thought, of Absolute Being.
The absolute Being existing as a concrete actual selfconsciousness, seems to have descended from its eternal pure simplicity; but in fact it has, in so doing, attained for the first time its highest nature, its supreme reach of being. For when the notion of Being has reached its simple purity of nature, it is then both the absolute Revealed Religion 771 abstraction, which is pure thought and hence the pure singleness of self, and immediacy or objective being, on account of its pure simplicity.
What is called sense-consciousness is also just this pure abstraction; it is this kind of thought for which being is the immediate. The lowest is thus at the same time the highest; the revelation which has appeared entirely on the surface is just therein the deepest that can be made. That the Supreme Being is seen, heard, etc., as an existent self-consciousness, — this is, in very truth, the culmination and consummation of its notion. And through this consummation, the Divine Being is given to sense, exists immediately, in its character as Divine Being.