VI.A. Objective Spirit: The Ethical Order

Spirit, in its ultimate simple truth, is consciousness, and breaks asunder its moments from one another. An act divides spirit into spiritual substance on the one side, and consciousness of the substance on the other; and divides the substance as well as consciousness. The substance appears in the shape of a universal inner nature and purpose standing in contrast to itself qua particularised reality. The middle or mediating term, infinite in character, is self-consciousness, which, being implicitly the unity of itself and that substance, becomes so, now, explicitly (für sich), unites the universal inner nature and its particular realisation, raises the latter to the former and becomes ethical action: and, on the other hand, brings the former down to the latter and carries out the purpose, the substance presented merely in thought. In this way it brings to light the unity of its self and the substance, and produces this unity in the form of a “work” done, and thus as actual concrete fact (Wirklichkeit).

When consciousness breaks up into these elements, the simple substance has in part preserved the attitude of opposition to self-consciousness; in part it thereby manifests in itself the very nature of consciousness, which consists in distinguishing its own content within itself,—manifests a world articulated into separate areas. The substance is thus an ethical being split up into distinct elemental forms, a human and a divine law. In the same way, the self-consciousness appearing over against the substance assigns itself, in virtue of its inner nature, to one of these powers, and, qua involving knowledge, gets broken up into ignorance of what it is doing on the one hand, and knowledge of this on the other, a knowledge which for that reason proves a deception. It learns, therefore, through its own act at once the contradictory nature of those powers into which the inner substance divided itself, and their mutual overthrow, as well as the contradiction between its knowledge of the ethical character of its act and what is truly and essentially ethical, and so finds its own destruction. In point of fact, however, the ethical substance has by this process become actual concrete self-consciousness: in other words this particular self has become self-sufficient and self-dependent (An und Fürsichseyenden), but precisely thereby the ethical order has been overthrown and destroyed.

The simple substance of spirit, being consciousness, divides itself into parts. In other words, just as consciousness of abstract sensuous existence passes over into perception, so does immediate certainty of real ethical existence; and just as for sense perception bare “being” becomes a “thing” with many properties, so for ethical perception a given act becomes a reality involving many ethical relations. For the former, again, the unnecessary plurality of properties concentrates itself into the form of an essential opposition between individual and universal; and still more for the latter, which is consciousness purified and substantial, the plurality of ethical moments is reduced to and assumes a twofold form, that of a law of individuality and a law of universality. Each of these areas or “masses” of the substance remains, however, spirit in its entirety. If in sense-perception “things” have no other substantial reality than the two determinations of individual and universal, these determinations express, in the present instance, merely the superficial opposition of both sides to one an-other.

Individuality, in the case of the subject (Wesen) we are here considering, has the significance of self-consciousness in general, not of any particular consciousness we care to take. The ethical substance is, thus, in this determination actual concrete substance, Absolute Spirit realised in the plurality of distinct consciousnesses definitely existing. It [this spirit] is the community (Gemeinwesen) which, as we entered the stage of the practical embodiment of reason in general, came before us as the absolute and ultimate reality, and which here comes objectively before itself in its true nature as a conscious ethical reality (Wesen) and as the essential reality, for that mode of consciousness we are now dealing with. It is spirit which is for itself, since it maintains itself by being reflected in the minds of the component individuals; and which is in itself or substance, since it preserves them within itself. Qua actual substance, that spirit is a Nation (Volk); qua concrete consciousness, it is the Citizens of a nation. This consciousness has its essential being in simple spirit, and is certain of itself in the actual realisation of this spirit, in the entire nation; it has its truth there directly, not therefore in something unreal, but in a spirit which exists and makes itself felt.

This spirit can be named Human Law, because it has its being essentially in the form of self-conscious actuality. In the form of universality, that spirit is law known to everybody, familiar and recognised, and is every-day present Customary Convention (Sitte); in the form of particularity it is the concrete certainty of itself in any and every individual; and the certainty of itself as a single individuality is that spirit in the form of Government. Its true and complete nature is seen in its authoritative validity openly and unmistakably manifested, an existence which takes the form of unconstrained independent objective fact, and is immediately apprehended with conscious certainty in this form.

Over against this power and publicity of the ethical secular human order there appears, however, another power, the Divine Law. For the ethical power of the state, being the movement of self-conscious action, finds its opposition in the simple immediate essential being of the moral order; qua actual concrete universality, it is a force exerted against the independence of the individual; and, qua actuality in general, it finds inherent in that essential being something other than the power of the state.

We mentioned before that each of the opposite ways in which the ethical substance exists, contains that substance in its entirety, and contains all moments of its contents. If, then, the community is that substance in the form of self-consciously realised action, the other side has the form of immediate or directly existent substance. The latter is thus, on the one hand, the inner principle (Begriff) or universal possibility of the ethical order in general, but, on the other hand, contains within it also the moment of self-consciousness. This moment which expresses the ethical order in this element of immediacy or mere being, which, in other words, is an immediate consciousness of self (both as regards its essence and its particular thisness) in an “other,”—and hence, is a natural ethical community—this is the Family. The family, as the inner indwelling principle of sociality operating in an unconscious way, stands opposed to its own actuality when explicitly conscious; as the basis of the actuality of a nation, it stands in contrast to the nation itself; as the immediate ethical existence, it stands over against the ethical order which shapes and preserves itself by work for universal ends; the Penates of the family stand in contrast to the universal spirit.

Although the ethical existence of the family has the character of immediacy, it is within itself an ethical entity, but not so far as it is the natural relation of its component members, or so far as their connexion is one immediately holding between individual concrete beings. For the ethical element is intrinsically universal, and this relation established by nature is essentially just as much a spiritual fact, and is only ethical by being spiritual. Let us see wherein its peculiar ethical character consists.

In the first place, because the ethical element is the intrinsically universal element, the ethical relation between the members of the family is not that of sentiment or the relationship of love. The ethical element in this case seems bound to be placed in the relation of the individual member of the family to the entire family as the real substance, so that the purpose of his action and the content of his actuality are taken from this substance, are derived solely from the family life. But the conscious purpose which dominates the action of this whole, so far as that purpose concerns that whole, is itself the individual member. The procuring and maintaining of power and wealth turn, in part, merely on needs and wants, and are a matter that has to do with desire; in part, they become in their higher aspect something which is merely of mediate significance. This aspect does not fall within the family itself, but concerns what is truly universal, the community; it acts rather in a negative way on the family, and consists in setting the individual outside the family, in subduing his merely natural existence and his mere particularity and so drawing him on towards virtue, towards living in and for the whole. The positive purpose peculiar to the family is the individual as such. Now in order that this relationship may be ethical, neither the individual who does an act nor he to whom the act refers, must show any trace of contingency such as obtains in rendering some particular help or service. The content of the ethical act must be substantial in character, or must be entire and universal; hence it can only stand in relation to the entire individual, to the individual qua universal. And this, again, must not be taken as if it were merely in idea that an act of service furthered his entire happiness, whereas the service, taken as an immediate or concrete act, only does something particular in regard to him. Nor must we think that the service really takes him as its object, and deals with him as a whole, in a series of efforts, as if it were a process of education, and produces him as a kind of work, where apart from the purpose, which operates in a negative way on the family, the real act has merely a limited content. Finally, just as little should we take it that the service rendered is a help in time of need, by which in truth the entire individual is saved; for it is itself an entirely casual act which can as well be as not be, the occasion of which is an ordinary actuality. The act, then, which embraces the entire existence of the blood relation, does not concern the citizen, for he does not belong to the family, nor does it deal with one who is going to be a citizen and so will cease to have the significance of a mere particular individual: it has as its object and content this specific individual belonging to the family, takes him as a universal being, divested of his sensuous, or particular reality. The act no longer concerns the living but the dead, one who has passed through the long sequence of his broken and diversified existence and gathered up his being into its one completed embodiment, who has lifted himself out of the unrest of a life of chance and change into the peace of simple universality. Because it is only as citizen that he is real and substantial, the individual, when not a citizen, and belonging to the family, is merely unreal insubstantial shadow.

This condition of universality, which the individual as such reaches, is mere being, death; it is the immediate issue of a natural process, and is not the action of a conscious mind. The duty of the member of a family is on that account to attach this aspect too, in order that this last phase of being also, (this universal being), may not belong to nature alone, and remain something irrational, but may be something actually done, and the right of consciousness be asserted in it. Or rather the significance of the act is that, because in truth the peace and universality of a self-conscious being does not belong to nature, the apparent claim which nature has made to act in this way, may be given up and the truth reinstated.

What nature did in the individual’s case, concerns the aspect in which his process of becoming universal is manifested as the movement of an existent. It takes effect no doubt within the ethical community, and has this in view as its purpose: death is the fulfilment and final task which the individual as such undertakes on its behalf. But so far as he is essentially a particular individual, it is an accident that his death was connected directly with his labour for the universal whole, and was the outcome of his toil; partly because if it was so, it is the natural course of the negativity of the individual qua existent, in which consciousness does not return into itself and become self-conscious; or, again, because, since the process of the existent consists in becoming cancelled and transcended and attaining the stage of independent self-existence, death is the aspect of diremption, where the self-existence, which is obtained, is something other than that being which entered on the process.

Because the ethical order is spirit in its immediate truth, those aspects into which its conscious life breaks up, fall also into this form of immediacy; and the individual’s particularity passes over into this abstract negativity, which, being in itself without consolation or reconcilement, must receive them essentially through a concrete and external act.

Blood-relationship therefore supplements the abstract natural process by adding to it the process of consciousness, by interrupting the work of nature, and rescuing the blood-relation from destruction; or better, because destruction, the passing into mere being, is necessary, it takes upon itself the act of destruction.

Through this it comes about that the universal being, the sphere of death, is also something which has returned into itself, something self-existent; the powerless bare particular unity is raised to universal individuality. The dead individual, by his having detached and liberated his being from his action or his negative unity, is an empty particular, merely existing passively for some other, at the mercy of every lower irrational organic agency, and the [chemical, physical] forces of abstract material elements, both of which are now stronger than himself, the former on account of the life which they have, the latter on account of their negative nature. The family keeps away from the dead this dishonouring of him by the desires of unconscious organic agencies and by abstract elements, puts its own action in place of theirs, and weds the relative to the bosom of the earth, the elemental individuality that passes not away. Thereby the family makes the dead a member of a community which prevails over and holds under control the powers of the particular material elements and the lower living creatures, which sought to have their way with the dead and destroy him.

This last duty thus accomplishes the complete divine law, or constitutes the positive ethical act towards the given individual. Every other relation towards him which does not remain at the level of love, but is ethical, belongs to human law, and has the negative significance of lifting the individual above the confinement within the natural community to which he belongs as a concrete individual. But, now, though human right has for its content and power the actual ethical substance consciously aware of itself, the entire nation, while divine right and law derive theirs from the particular individual who is beyond the actual, yet he is still not without power. His power lies in the abstract pure universal, the shadowy individual, which seizes upon the individuality that cuts itself loose from the element and constitutes the self-conscious reality of the nation, and draws it back into the pure abstraction which is the essential nature of the shadowy individual, while at the same time the latter is its ultimate ground as well. How this power is made explicit in the nation itself will come out more fully as we proceed.

Now in the one law as in the other there are differences and stages. For since these laws involve the element of consciousness in both cases, distinction is developed within themselves: and this is just what constitutes the peculiar process of their life. The consideration of these differences brings out the way they operate, and the kind of self-consciousness at work in both the universal essential principles (Wesen) of the ethical world, as also their connection and transition into one an-other.

The community, the higher law whose validity is open to the light of day, makes its concrete activity felt in government; for in government it is an individual whole. Government is concrete actual spirit reflected into itself, the self pure and simple of the entire ethical substance. This simple force allows, indeed, the community to unfold and expand into its component members, and to give each part subsistence and self-existence of its own (Fürsichseyn). Spirit finds in this way its realisation or its objective existence, and the family is the medium in which this realisation takes effect. But spirit is at the same time the force of the whole, combining these parts again within the unity which negates them, giving them the feeling of their want of independence, and keeping them aware that their life only lies in the whole. The community may thus, on the one hand, organise itself into the systems of property and of personal independence, of personal right and right in things; and, on the other hand, articulate the various ways of working for what in the first instance are particular ends—those of gain and enjoyment—into their own special guilds and associations, and may thus make them independent. The spirit of universal assemblage and association is the single and simple principle, and the negative essential factor at work in the segregation and isolation of these systems. In order not to let them get rooted and settled in this isolation and thus break up the whole into fragments and let the common spirit evaporate, government has from time to time to shake them to the very centre by War. By this means it confounds the order that has been established and arranged, and violates that right to independence, while the individuals, (who, being absorbed therein, get adrift from the whole, striving after inviolable self-existence (Fürsichseyn) and personal security), are made, by the task thus imposed on them by government, to feel the power of their lord and master, death. By thus breaking up the form of fixed stability, spirit guards the ethical order from sinking into merely natural existence, preserves the self of which it is conscious, and raises that self to the level of freedom and its own powers. The negative essential being shows itself to be the might proper of the community and the force it has for self-maintenance. The community therefore finds the true principle and corroboration of its power in the inner nature of divine law, and in the kingdom of the nether world.

The divine law which holds sway in the family has also on its side distinctions within itself, the relations among which make up the living process of its realisation. Amongst the three relationships, however, of husband and wife, parents and children, brothers and sisters, the relationship of husband and wife is to begin with the primary and immediate form in which one consciousness recognises itself in another, and in which each finds reciprocal recognition. Being natural self-knowledge, knowledge of self on the basis of nature, and not on that of ethical life, it merely represents and typifies in a figure the life of spirit, and is not spirit itself actually realised. This figurative representation, however, gets its realisation in an other than it is. This relationship, therefore, finds itself realised not in itself as such, but in the child—an other, in whose coming into being that relationship consists, and with which it passes away. And this change from one generation onwards to another is permanent in and as the life of a nation.

The reverent devotion (Pietät) of husband and wife towards one another is thus mixed up with a natural relation and with feeling, and their relationship is not inherently self-complete; similarly, too, the second relationship, the reverent devotion of parents and children to one another. The devotion of parents towards their children is affected and disturbed just by its being consciously realised in what is external to themselves (viz. the children), and by seeing them become something on their own account without this returning to the parents: independent existence on the part of the children remains a foreign reality, a reality all their own. The devotion of children, again, towards their parents is conversely affected by their coming into being from, or having their essential nature in, what is external to themselves (viz. the parents) and passes away; and by their attaining independent existence and a self-consciousness of their own solely through separation from the source whence they came—a separation in which the spring gets exhausted.

Both these relationships are constituted by and hold within the transience and the dissimilarity of the two sides, which are assigned to them.

An unmixed intransitive form of relationship, however, holds between brother and sister. They are the same blood, which, however, in them has entered into a condition of stable equilibrium. They therefore stand in no such natural relation as husband and wife, they do not desire one another; nor have they given to one another, nor received from one another, this independence of individual being; they are free individualities with respect to each other. The feminine element, therefore, in the form of the sister, premonises and foreshadows most completely the nature of ethical life (sittliches Wesen). She does not become conscious of it, and does not actualise it, because the law of the family is her inherent implicit inward nature, which does not lie open to the daylight of consciousness, but remains inner feeling and the divine element exempt from actuality. The feminine life is attached to these household divinities (Penates), and sees in them both her universal substance, and her particular individuality, yet so views them that this relation of her particular being to them is at the same time not the natural one of pleasure.

As a daughter, the woman must now see her parents pass away with natural emotion and yet with ethical resignation, for it is only at the cost of this condition that she can come to that individual existence of which she is capable. She thus cannot see her independent existence positively attained in her relation to her parents. The relationships of mother and wife, however, are individualised partly in the form of something natural, which brings pleasure; partly in the form of something negative which finds simply its own evanescence in those relationships; partly again the individualisation is just on that account something contingent, which can be replaced by an other particular individuality. In a household of the ethical kind, a woman’s relationships are not based on a reference to this particular husband, this particular child, but to a husband, to children in general,—not to feeling, but to the universal. The distinction between her ethical life (Sittlichkeit), (while it determines her particular existence and brings her pleasure), and that of her husband consists just in this, that it has always a directly universal significance for her, and is quite alien to the impulsive condition of mere particular desire. On the other hand, in the husband these two aspects get separated; and since he possesses, as a citizen, the self-conscious power belonging to the universal life, the life of the social whole, he acquires thereby the rights of desire, and keeps himself at the same time in detachment from it. So far, then, as particularity is implicated in this relationship in the case of the wife, her ethical life is not purely ethical; so far, however, as it is ethical, the particularity is a matter of indifference, and the wife is without the moment of knowing herself as this particular self in and through an other.

The brother, however, is in the eyes of the sister a being whose nature is unperturbed by desire and is ethically like her own; her recognition in him is pure and unmixed with any sexual relation. The indifference characteristic of particular existence, and the ethical contingency thence arising, are, therefore, not present in this relationship; instead, the moment of individual selfhood, recognising and being recognised, can here assert its right, because it is bound up with the balance and equilibrium resulting from their being of the same blood, and from their being related in a way that involves no mutual desire. The loss of a brother is thus irreparable to the sister, and her duty towards him is the highest.

This relationship at the same time is the limit, at which the circumscribed life of the family is broken up, and passes beyond itself. The brother is the member of the family in whom its spirit becomes individualised, and enabled thereby to turn towards another sphere, towards what is other than and external to itself, and pass over into consciousness of universality. The brother leaves this immediate, rudimentary, and, therefore, strictly speaking, negative ethical life of the family, in order to acquire and produce the concrete ethical order which is conscious of itself.

He passes from the divine law, within whose realm he lived, over to the human law. The sister, however, becomes, or the wife remains, director of the home and the preserver of the divine law. In this way both the sexes overcome their merely natural being, and become ethically significant, as diverse forms dividing between them the different aspects which the ethical substance possesses. Both these universal factors of the ethical world have their specific individuality in naturally distinct self-consciousnesses, for the reason that the spirit at work in the ethical order is the immediate unity of the substance [of ethical life] with self-consciousness—an immediacy which thus appears as the existence of a natural difference, at once as regards its aspect of reality and of difference. It is that aspect which, in the notion of spiritual reality, came to light as “original determinate nature,” when we were dealing with the stage of “Individuality which is real to itself.” This moment loses the indeterminateness which it still has there, and the contingent diversity of “constitution” and “capacities.” It is now the specific opposition of the two sexes, whose natural character acquires at the same time the significance of their respective ethical determinations.

The distinction of the sexes and of their ethical content remains all the same within the unity of the ethical substance, and its operation is just the constant process of that substance. The husband is sent forth by the spirit of the family into the life of the community, and finds there his self-conscious reality. Just as the family thereby finds in the community its universal substance and subsistence, conversely the community finds in the family the formal element of its own realisation, and in the divine law its power and confirmation. Neither of the two is alone self-complete. Human law as a living and active principle proceeds from the divine, the law holding on earth from that of the nether world, the conscious from the unconscious, mediation from immediacy; and returns too whence it came. The power of the nether world, on the other hand, finds its realisation upon earth; it comes through consciousness to have existence and efficacy.

The universal elements of the ethical life are thus the (ethical) substance qua universal, and that substance qua particular consciousness. Their universal actuality is the nation and the family; while they get their natural self, and their operative individuality, in man and woman. Here in this content of the ethical world, we see attained those purposes which the previous insubstantial modes of conscious life set before them. What Reason apprehended only as an object, has become Self-consciousness, and what self-consciousness merely contained within it is here explicit true reality. What Observation knew,—an object given externally and picked up, and one in the constitution of which the subject knowing had no share,—is here a given ethical condition, a custom found lying ready at hand, but a reality which is at the same time the deed and the product of the subject finding it. The individual who seeks the “pleasure” of enjoying his particular individuality, finds it in the family life, and the “necessity” in which that pleasure passes away is his own self-consciousness as a citizen of his nation. Or, again, it is knowing the “law of his own heart” as the law of all hearts, knowing the consciousness of self to be the recognised and universal ordinance of society: it is “virtue,” which enjoys the fruits of its own sacrifice, which brings about what it sets out to do, viz. to bring the essential nature into the light of the actual present,—and its enjoyment lies in this universal life. Finally, consciousness of “fact as such” (der Sache selbst) gets satisfaction in the real substance, which contains and maintains in positive form the abstract aspects of that empty category. That substance finds a genuine content in the powers of the ethical order, a content that takes the place of those insubstantial commands which the “healthy human reason” wanted to give and to know: and in consequence thus gets a concrete inherently determinate standard for “testing,” not the laws, but what is done.

The whole is a stable equilibrium of all the parts, and each part a spirit in its native element, a spirit which does not seek its satisfaction beyond itself, but has the satisfaction within itself for the reason that itself is in this balanced equipoise with the whole. This condition of stable equilibrium can, of course, only be living by inequality arising within it, and being brought back again to equipoise by Righteousness and Justice. Justice, however, is neither an alien principle (Wesen) holding somewhere remote from the present, nor—the realisation (unworthy of the name of justice) of mutual malice, treachery, ingratitude, etc., which, in the unintelligent way of chance and accident, would fulfil the law by a kind of irrational connection without any controlling idea, action by commission and omission, without any consciousness of what was involved. On the contrary, being justice in human law, it brings back to the whole, to the universal life of society, what has broken away separately from the harmony and equilibrium of the whole:—the independent classes and individuals. In this way justice is the government of the nation, and is its all-pervading essential life in a consciously present individual form, and is the personal self-conscious will of all. That justice, however, which restores to equilibrium the universal when getting the mastery over the particular individual, is similarly the simple single spirit of the individual who has suffered wrong; it is not broken up into the two elements, one who has suffered wrong and a far away remote reality (Wesen). The individual himself is the power of the “nether” world, and that reality is his “ fury,” wreaking vengeance upon him. For his individuality, his blood, still lives in the house, his substance has a lasting actuality. The wrong, which can be brought upon the individual in the realm of the ethical world, consists merely in this, that a bare something by chance happens to him. The power which perpetrates on the conscious individual this wrong of making him into a mere thing, is “nature”; it is the universality not of the community, but the abstract universality of mere existence. And the particular individual, in wiping out the wrong suffered, turns not against the community—for he has not suffered at its hands—but against the latter. As we saw, those who consciously share the blood of the individual remove this wrong in such a way, that what has happened becomes rather a work of their own doing, and hence bare existence, the last state, gets also to be something willed, and thus an object of gratification.

The ethical realm remains in this way permanently a world without blot or stain, a world untainted by any internal dissension. So, too, its process is an untroubled transition from one of its powers to the other, in such a way that each preserves and produces the other. We see it no doubt divided into two ultimate elements and their realisation: but their opposition is rather the confirming and substantiation of one through the other; and where they directly come in contact and affect each other as actual factors, their mediating common element straightway permeates and suffuses the one with the other. The one extreme, universal spirit conscious of itself, becomes, through the individuality of man, linked together with its other extreme, its force and its element, with unconscious spirit. On the other hand, divine law is individualised, the unconscious spirit of the particular individual finds its existence, in woman, through the mediation of whom the spirit of the individual comes out of its unrealisedness into actuality, out of the state of unknowing and unknown, and rises into the conscious realm of universal spirit. The union of man with woman constitutes the operative mediating agency for the whole, and constitutes the element which, while separated into the extremes of divine and human law, is, at the same time, their immediate union. This union, again, turns both those first mediate connections (Schlusse) into one and the same synthesis, and unites into one process the twofold movement in opposite directions,—one from reality to unreality, the downward movement of human law, organised into independent members, to the danger and trial of death,—the other, from unreality to reality, the upward movement of the law of the nether world to the daylight of conscious existence. Of these movements the former falls to man, the latter to woman.

In the form presented by the opposition of elements in the realm just dealt with, self-consciousness has not yet come to its rights as a particular individuality. Individuality there has, on one side, the sense of merely universal will, on the other, of consanguinity of the family. This particular individual has merely the significance of shadowy unreality. There is as yet no performance of an act. The act, however, is the realised self. It breaks in upon the untroubled stable organisation and movement of the ethical world. What there appears as ordinance and harmony between both its constituent elements, each of which confirms and complements the other, becomes through the performing of an act a transition of opposites into one another, by which each proves to be the annihilation rather than the confirmation of its self and its opposite. It becomes the process of negation or destruction, the eternal necessity of awful destiny, which engulfs in the abyss of its bare identity divine and human law alike, as well as both the self-conscious factors in which these powers subsist; and, to our view, passes over into the absolute self-existence of mere particular self-consciousness.

The basis from which this movement proceeds, and on which it takes effect, is the kingdom of the ethical order. But the activity at work in this process is self-consciousness. Being ethical consciousness, it is the pure and simple direction of activity towards the essential principle of the ethical life—it is Duty. There is no caprice, and likewise no struggle, no indecision in it, since it has given up legislating and testing laws: the essential ethical principle is, for it, something immediate, unwavering, without contradiction. There is therefore neither the painful spectacle of finding itself in a collision between passion and duty, nor the comic spectacle of a collision between duty and duty—a collision, which so far as content goes is the same as that between passion and duty; for passion can also be presented as a duty, because duty, when consciousness withdraws into itself and leaves its immediate essential substance (Wesenheit), comes to be the formal universal, into which one content fits equally well with another, as we found before. The collision of duties is, however, comical, because it brings out the contradiction inherent in the idea of an absolute standing opposed to another absolute, expresses something absolute and then directly the annihilation of this so-called absolute or duty. The ethical consciousness, however, knows what it has to do; and is decided, whether it is to belong to divine or human law. This directness which characterises its decision is something immanent and inherent (Ansichseyn), and hence has at the same time the significance of a natural condition of being, as we saw. Nature, not the accident of circumstances or choice, assigns one sex to one law, the other to the other law; or conversely both the ethical powers themselves establish their individual existence and actualisation in the two sexes.

Thus, then, because on the one side the ethical order consists essentially in this immediate directness of decision, and therefore only the one law is for consciousness the essential reality; while, on the other side, the powers of the ethical order are actual in the self of conscious life,—in this way these forces acquire the significance of excluding one another and of being opposed to one another. They are explicit in self-consciousness just as they were merely implicit in the realm of the ethical order. The ethical consciousness, because it is decisively on the side of one of them, is essentially Character. There is not for it equal essentiality in both. The opposition therefore appears as an unfortunate collision of duty merely with reality, on which right has no hold. The ethical consciousness is qua self-consciousness in this opposition, and being so, it at once proceeds either to subdue by force this reality opposing it to the law which it accepts, or to get round this reality by craft. Since it sees right only on its own side, and wrong on the other, so, of these two, that which belongs to divine law detects, on the other side, mere arbitrary fortuitous human violence, while what appertains to human law, finds in the other the obstinacy and disobedience of subjective self-sufficiency. For the commands of government have a universal sense and meaning open to the light of day; the will of the other law, however, is the inner concealed meaning of the realm of darkness (unterirdisch), a meaning which appears expressed as the will of a particular being, and in contradicting the first is malicious offence.

There arises in this way in consciousness the opposition between what is known and what is not known, just as, in the case of substance, there was an opposition between the conscious and the unconscious; and the absolute right of ethical self-consciousness comes into conflict with the divine right of the essential reality. Self-consciousness, qua consciousness, takes the objective actuality, as such, to have essential being. Looking at its substance, however, it is the unity of itself and this opposite, and the ethical self-consciousness is consciousness of that substance: the object, qua opposed to self-consciousness, has, therefore, entirely lost the characteristic of having essential being by itself. Just as the spheres [of conscious life] where the object is merely a “thing” are long past and gone, so, too, are these spheres, where consciousness sets up and establishes something from out itself, and turns a particular moment into the essential reality (Wesen). Against such one-sidedness actual concrete reality has a power of its own; it takes the side of truth against consciousness and shows consciousness itself what the truth is. The ethical consciousness, however, has drunk from the cup of the absolute substance, forgotten all the one-sidedness of isolating self-existence, all its purposes and peculiar notions, and has, therefore, at the same time drowned in this Stygian stream all essentiality of nature and all the independence claimed by the objective reality. Its absolute right, therefore, when it acts in accordance with ethical law, is to find in this actualisation nothing else than the fulfilment and performance of this law itself: and that the deed should manifest nothing but ethical action.

The ethical, being absolute essence and absolute power at once, cannot endure any perversion of its content. If it were merely absolute essence without power, it might undergo perversion at the hands of individuality. But this latter, being ethical consciousness, has renounced all perverting when it gave up its one-sided subjectivity (Fürsichseyn). Conversely, again, mere power might be perverted by the essential reality, if power were still a subjectivity of that kind. On account of this unity, individuality is a pure form of the substance which is the content, and action consists in transition from thought over into reality, merely as the process of an unreal opposition, whose moments have no special and particular content distinct from one another, and no essential nature of their own. The absolute right of ethical consciousness is, therefore, that the deed, the mode and form of its realisation, should be nothing else than it knows it to be.

But the essential ethical reality has split asunder into two laws, and consciousness, taking up an undivided single attitude towards law, is assigned only to one. Just as this simple consciousness takes its stand on the absolute right that the essential reality has appeared to it qua ethical as that reality inherently is, so, too, this essence insists on the right belonging to its reality, i.e. the right of having a double form. This right of the essential reality does not, however, at the same time stand over against and opposed to self-consciousness, as if it were to be found anywhere else; rather it is the essential nature of self-consciousness. Only there has it its existence and its power; and its opposition is the act of self-consciousness itself. For the latter, just because it is a self to itself, and proceeds to act, lifts itself out of the state of simple immediacy, and itself sets up the division into two. By the act it gives up the specific character of the ethical life, that of being pure and simple certainty of immediate truth, and sets up the division of itself into self as active and reality over against it, and for it, therefore, negative. By the act it thus becomes Guilt. For the deed is its doing, and doing is its inmost nature. And the guilt acquires also the meaning of Crime; for as simple ethical consciousness it has turned to and conformed itself to the one law, but turned away from the other, and thus has broken the latter by its deed.

Guilt is not an external indifferent entity (Wesen) with the double meaning, that the deed, as actually manifested to the light of day, may be an action of the guilty self, or may not be so, as if with the doing of it there could be connected something external and accidental that did not belong to it, from which point of view, therefore, the action would be innocent. Rather the act is itself this diremption, this affirming itself for itself, and establishing over against this an alien external reality. That such a result takes place is due to the deed itself, and is the outcome of it. Hence, innocence is an attribute merely of the want of action (Nicht-thun), a state like the mere being of a stone, and one which is not even true of a child.

Looking at the content, however, the ethical act contains the element of wrongdoing, because it does not cancel and transcend the natural allotment of the two laws to the two sexes; but rather, being an undivided attitude towards the law, keeps within the sphere of natural immediacy, and, qua acting, turns this one-sidedness into guilt, by merely laying hold of one side of the essential reality and taking up a negative relation towards the other, i.e. violating it. Where, in the general ethical life, guilt and crime, deeds and actions, come in, will be more definitely brought out later. Meantime, so much is at once clear, that it is not this particular individual who acts and becomes guilty. For he, qua this particular self, is merely a shadowy reality; he is merely qua universal self, and individuality is purely the formal aspect of doing anything at all, while its content is the laws and customs which are determined for the individual, the laws and customs of his class or station. He is the substance qua genus, which by its determinateness becomes, no doubt, a species, but the specific form remains at the same time the generic universal. Self-consciousness within the life of a nation descends from the universal only down as far as specific particularity, but not as far as the single individuality, which sets up an exclusive self, establishes in its action a reality negative to itself. On the contrary, the action of that self-consciousness rests on secure confidence in the whole, into which there enters nothing alien or foreign, neither fear nor hostility.

Ethical self-consciousness now comes to find in its deed the full explicit meaning of concrete real action as much when it followed divine law as when it followed human. The law manifest to it is, in the essential reality, bound up with its opposite; the essential reality is the unity of both; but the deed has merely carried out one as against the other. But being bound up with this other in the inner reality, the fulfilment of the one calls forth the other, in the shape of something which, having been violated and now become hostile, demands revenge—an attitude which the deed has made it take up. In the case of action, only one phase of the decision is in general in evidence. The decision, however, is inherently something negative. which plants an “other” in opposition to it, something foreign to the decision, which is clear knowledge. Actual reality, therefore, keeps concealed within itself this other aspect alien to clear knowledge, and does not show itself to consciousness as it fully and truly is (an und für sich). In the story of Œdipus the son does not see his own father in the person of the man who has insulted him and whom he strikes to death, nor his mother in the queen whom he makes his wife. In this way a hidden power shunning the light of day, waylays the ethical self-consciousness, a power which bursts forth after the deed is done, and seizes the doer in the act. For the completed deed is the removal of the opposition between the knowing self and the reality over against it. The ethical consciousness cannot disclaim the crime and its guilt. The deed consists in setting in motion what was unmoved, and in bringing out what in the first instance lay shut up as a mere possibility, and thereby linking on the unconscious to the conscious, the non-existent to the existent. In this truth, therefore, the deed comes to the light—it is something in which a conscious element is bound up with what is unconscious, what is peculiarly one’s own with what is alien and external:—it is an essential reality divided in sunder, whose other aspect consciousness discovers and also finds to be its own aspect, but as a power violated by its doing, and roused to hostility against it.

It may well be that the right, which kept itself in reserve, is not in its peculiar form present to the consciousness of the doer, but is merely implicit, present in the subjective inward guilt of the decision and the action. But the ethical consciousness is more complete, its guilt purer, if it knows beforehand the law and the power which it opposes, if it takes them to be sheer violence and wrong, to be a contingency in the ethical life, and wittingly, like Antigone, commits the crime. The deed when accomplished transforms its point of view: the very performance of it eo ipso expresses that what is ethical has to be actual; for the realisation of the purpose is the very purpose of acting. Acting expresses precisely the unity of reality and the substance; it expresses the fact that actuality is not an accident for the essential element, but that, in union with that element, is given to no right which is not true right. On account of this actuality and on account of its deed ethical consciousness must acknowledge its opposite as its own actuality; it must acknowledge its guilt.

Because of our sufferings we acknowledge we have erred.

To acknowledge this, is expressly to indicate that the severance between ethical purpose and actuality has been done away; it means the return to the ethical frame of mind, which knows that nothing counts but right. Thereby, however, the agent surrenders his character and the reality of his self, and has utterly collapsed. His being lies in belonging to his ethical law, as his substance; in acknowledging an opposite, however, he has ceased to find his substance in this law; and instead of reality this has become an unreality, a mere sentiment, a frame of mind. The substance no doubt appears as the “pathic” element in the individuality, and the individuality appears as the factor which animates the Substance, and hence stands above it. But the substance is a “pathic” element which is at the same time his character; the ethical individuality is directly and inherently one with this its universal, exists in it alone, and is incapable of surviving the destruction which this ethical power suffers at the hands of its opposite.

This individuality, however, has all the same the certainty, that that individuality, whose “pathic” element is this opposite power [the substance], suffers no more harm than it has inflicted. The opposition of the ethical powers to one another, and the process of the individualities setting up these powers in life and action, have reached their true end merely in the fact that both sides undergo the same destruction. For neither of the powers has any advantage over the other that it should be a more essential moment of the substance common to both. The fact of their being equally and to the same degree essential, and subsisting independently beside each other means their having no separate self; in the act they have a self-nature, but a different self,—which contradicts the unity of the self and cancels their claim to independent right, and thus brings about their necessary destruction. Character, too, in part, looking at its “pathic” element, the substance, belongs to one alone; in part, when we look at the aspect of knowledge, the one character like the other is divided into a conscious element and an unconscious: and since each itself calls forth this opposition, and the want of knowledge is by the act also its doing, each falls into the guilt which consumes it. The victory of one power and its character, and the defeat of the other side, would thus be merely the part and the incomplete work, which steadily advances till the equilibrium between the two is attained. It is in the equal suppression of both sides that absolute right is first accomplished, and the ethical substance, as the negative force devouring both sides, in other words omnipotent and righteous Destiny, makes its appearance.

If both powers are taken according to their specific content and its individualisation, we have the scene presented of a contest between them as individuated. On its formal side, this is the struggle of the ethical order and of self-consciousness with unconscious nature and a contingency due to this nature. The latter has a right as against the former, because this is only objective spirit, merely in immediate unity with its substance. On the side of content, the struggle is the rupture of divine and human law. The youth goes forth from the unconscious life of the family and becomes the individuality of the community [i.e. Ruler]. But that he still shares the natural life from which he has torn himself away, is seen in the fact that he emerges therefrom only to find his claim affected by the contingency that there are two brothers who with equal right take possession of the community; the inequality due to the one having been born earlier and the other later, an inequality which is a natural difference, has no importance for them when they enter the ethical life of society. But government, as the single soul, the self of the national spirit, does not admit of a duality of individuality: and in contrast to the ethical necessity of this unity, nature appears as by accident providing more than one. These two [brothers], therefore, become disunited; and their equal right in regard to the power of the state is destructive to both, for they are equally wrong. Humanly considered, he has committed the crime who, not being in actual possession, seizes on the community, at the head of which the other stood. While again he has right on his side who knew how to seize the other merely qua particular individual, detached from the community, and banish him, while thus powerless, out of the community; he has merely laid hands on the individual as such, not the community, not the essential nature of human right. The community, attacked and defended from a point of view which is merely particular, maintains itself; and both brothers find their destruction reciprocally through one another. For individuality, which involves peril to the whole in the maintenance of its own self-existence (Fürsichseyn), has thrust its own self out of the community, and is disintegrated in its own nature. The community, however, will do honour to the one who is found on its side; the government, the reestablished singleness of the self of the community, will punish by depriving of the last honour him who already proclaimed its devastation on the walls of the city. He who came to affront the highest spiritual form of conscious life, the spirit of the community, must be stripped of the honour of his entire and complete nature, the honour due to the spirit of the departed.

But if the universal thus lightly knocks off the highest point of its pyramid, and doubtless triumphs victoriously over the family, the rebellious principle of individuation, it has thereby merely put itself into conflict with divine law, the self-conscious with the unconscious spirit. For the latter, this unconscious spirit, is the other essential power, and therefore the power undestroyed, but only insulted by the former. It finds, however, only a bloodless shade to lend it help towards actually carrying itself out in the face of that masterful and openly enunciated law. Being the law of weakness and of darkness, it therefore gives way, to begin with, before law which has force and publicity; for the strength of the former is effective in the nether realm, not on earth and in the light of day. But the actual and concrete, which has taken away from what is inward its honour and its power, has thereby consumed its own real nature. The spirit which is manifest to the light of day has the roots of its power in the lower world: the certainty felt by a nation, a certainty of which it is sure and which makes itself assured, finds the truth of its oath binding all its members into one, solely in the mute unconscious substance of all, in the waters of forgetfulness. In consequence, the fulfilment of the public spirit turns round into its opposite, and learns that its supreme right is supreme wrong, its victory rather its own defeat. The slain, whose right is injured, knows, therefore, how to find means of vengeance which are of the same reality and strength as the power at whose hands it has suffered. These powers are other communities, whose altars the dogs or birds defiled with the corpse of the dead, which is not raised into unconscious universality by being restored, as is its due, to the ultimate individuum, the elemental earth, but instead has remained above ground in the sphere of reality, and has now received, as the force of divine law, a self-conscious actual universality. They rise up in hostility, and destroy the community which has dishonoured and destroyed its own power, the sacred claims, the “piety” of the family.

Represented in this way, the movement of human and divine law finds the expression of its necessity in individuals, in whom the universal appears as a “pathic” element, and the activity of the movement as action of individuals, which gives the appearance of contingency to the necessity of the process. But individuality and its action constitute the principle of individuation in general, a principle which in its pure universality was called inner divine law. As a moment of the visible community it does not merely exhibit that unconscious activity of the nether world, its operation is not simply external in its existence; it has an equally manifest visible existence and process, actual in the actual nation. Taken in this form, what was represented as a simple process of the “pathic” element as embodied in individuals, assumes another look, and crime and the resulting ruin of the community assume the proper form of their existence.

Human law, then, in its universal mode of existence is the community, in its efficient operation in general is the manhood of the community, in its actual efficient operation is government. It has its being, its process, and its subsistence by consuming and absorbing into itself the separatist action of the household gods (Penates), the individualisation into insular independent families which are under the management of womankind, and by keeping them dissolved in the fluent continuum of its own nature. The family at the same time, however, is in general its element, the individual consciousness its universal operative basis. Since the community gets itself subsistence only by breaking in upon family happiness, and dissolving [individual] self-consciousness into the universal, it creates its enemy for itself within its own gates, creates it in what it suppresses, and what is at the same time essential to it—womankind in general. Womankind—the everlasting irony in the life of the community—changes by intrigue the universal purpose of government into a private end, transforms its universal activity into a work of this or that specific individual, and perverts the universal property of the state into a possession and ornament for the family. Woman in this way turns to ridicule the grave wisdom of maturity, which, being dead to all particular aims, to private pleasure, personal satisfaction, and actual activity as well, thinks of, and is concerned for, merely what is universal; she makes this wisdom the laughing-stock of raw and wanton youth, an object of derision and scorn, unworthy of their enthusiasm. She asserts that it is everywhere the force of youth that really counts; she upholds this as of primary significance; extols a son as one who is the lord and master of the mother who has borne him; a brother as one in whom the sister finds man on a level with herself; a youth as one through whom the daughter, deprived of her dependence (on the family unity), acquires the satisfaction and the dignity of wifehood.

The community, however, can preserve itself only by suppressing this spirit of individualism; and because the latter is an essential element, the community likewise creates it as well, and creates it, too, by taking up the attitude of seeking to suppress it as a hostile principle. Nevertheless, since, by cutting itself off from the universal purpose, this hostile element is merely evil, and in itself of no account, it would be quite ineffective if the community did not recognise the force of youth, (manhood, which, while immature, still remains in the condition of particularity), as the force of the whole. For the community, the whole, is a nation, it is itself individuality, and really only is something for itself by other individualities being for it, by its excluding these from itself and knowing itself independent of them. The negative side of the community, suppressing the isolation of individuals within its own bounds, but originating activity directed beyond those bounds, finds the weapons of its warfare in individuals. War is the spirit and form in which the essential moment of ethical substance, the absolute freedom of ethical self-consciousness from all and every kind of existence, is manifestly confirmed and realised. While, on the one hand, war makes the particular spheres of property and personal independence, as well as the personality of the individual himself, feel the force of negation and destruction, on the other hand this engine of negation and destruction stands out as that which preserves the whole in security. The individual who provides pleasure to woman, the brave youth, the suppressed principle of ruin and destruction, comes now into prominence, and is the factor of primary significance and worth. It is now physical strength and what seems like the chance of fortune, that decide as to the existence of ethical life and spiritual necessity. Because the existence of the ethical life thus rests on physical strength and the chances of fortune, it is eo ipso settled that its overthrow has come. While only household gods, in the former case, gave way before and were absorbed in the national spirit, here the living individual embodiments of the national spirit fall by their own individuality and disappear in one universal community, whose bare universality is soulless and dead, and whose living activity is found in the particular individual qua particular. The ethical form and embodiment of the life of spirit has passed away, and another mode appears in its place.

This disappearance of the ethical substance and its transition into another mode are thus determined by the ethical consciousness being directed upon the law essentially in an immediate way. It lies in this character of immediacy that nature at all enters into the acts which constitute the ethical life. Its realisation simply reveals the contradiction and the germ of destruction, which lie hid within that very peace and beauty belonging to the gracious harmony and unbroken equilibrium of the ethical spirit. For the essence and meaning of this immediacy contains a contradiction: it is at once the unconscious peace of nature and the self-conscious unresting peace of spirit. On account of this “naturalness,” the ethical life of a nation is, in general, a kind of individuality determined by, and therefore limited by, nature, and thus finds its dissolution in, and gives place to, another type of individuality. This characteristic being given a positive existence, is a limitation, but at the same time is the negative element in general and the self of individuality. Since, however, this determinateness passes away, the life of spirit and this substance, conscious of itself in all its component individuals, are lost. The determinate character comes forth and stands apart as a formal universality in the case of all the component individuals, and no longer dwells within them as a living spirit; instead, the uniform solidarity of its individuality has burst into a plurality of separate points.

The general comprehensive unity, into which the living immediate unity of individuality and the ethical substance falls back, is the soulless (geistlos) community, which has ceased to be the un-selfconscious substance of individuals, and in which they now, each in his separate individual existence, count as selves and substances with a being of their own. The universal being thus split up into the atomic units of a sheer plurality of individuals, this inoperative, lifeless spirit is a principle of equality in which all count for as much as each, i.e. have the significance of Persons. What in the realm of the ethical life was called the hidden divine law has in fact come out of concealment to the light of actuality. In the former the individual was, and was counted, actual merely as a blood relation, merely as sharing in the general life of the family. Qua particular individual, he was the selfless departed spirit; now, however, he has come out of his unreality. Because the ethical substance is only objective, “true,” spirit, only implies spirit, the individual on that account turns back to the immediate certainty of his own self; he is that substance qua positive universal, but his actuality consists in being a negative universal self.

We saw the powers and forms of the ethical world sink in the bare necessity of mere Destiny. This power of the ethical world is the substance turning itself back into its ultimate and simple nature. But that absolute being turning back into itself, that very necessity of characterless Destiny, is nothing else than the Ego of self-consciousness.

This is taken henceforth as what is absolutely real, as the ultimate self-contained reality. To be so acknowledged is its substantiality; but this is abstract universality, because its content is this rigid self, not the self dissolved in the substance.

Personality, then, has here risen out of the life and activity of the ethical substance. It is the condition in which the independence of consciousness has actual concrete validity. The unrealised abstract thought of such independence, which arises through renouncing actuality, was at an earlier stage before our notice in the form of “Stoical self-consciousness.” Just as the latter was the outcome of “Lordship and Bondage,” the mode in which self-consciousness exists immediately,—so personality is the outgrowth of the immediate life of spirit which is the universal controlling will of all, as well as their dutiful obedience and submissive service. What in Stoicism was implicit merely in an abstract way, is now an explicit concrete world. Stoicism is nothing else than the mood of consciousness which reduces to its abstract form the principle of legal status, the principle of the sphere of right,—an independence devoid of the qualities of spirit (geistlos). By its flight from actuality it attained merely the idea of independence: it is absolutely subjective, exists solely for itself, in that it does not link its being to anything that exists, but rather wants to give up every kind of existence, and places its essential meaning in the unity of mere thinking. In the same manner, the “right” of a “person” is not linked on to a richer or more powerful existence of the individual qua individual, nor again connected with a universal living spirit, but, rather, is attached to the mere unit of its abstract reality, or to that unit qua self-conscious ens in general.

Now just as the abstract independence of Stoicism set forth the stages of its actualisation, so, too, this last form of independence [Personality] will recapitulate the process of the former mode. The former [Stoicism] passes over into the state of sceptical confusion, into a fickle instability of negation, which without adopting any permanent form strays from one contingent mode of being and thinking to another, dissipates them indeed in absolute independence, but just as readily creates their independence once more. In fact, it is simply the contradiction of consciousness claiming to be at once independent and yet devoid of independence. In like manner, the personal independence characteristic of the sphere of right is really a similar universal confusion and reciprocal dissolution of this kind. For what passes for the absolute essential reality is self-consciousness in the sense of the bare empty unit of the person. As against this empty universality, the substance has the form of what supplies the filling and the content; and this content is now left completely detached and disconnected; for the spirit, which kept it in subjection and held it in its unity, is no longer present. The empty unit of the person is, therefore, as regards its reality, an accidental existence, a contingent insubstantial process and activity that comes to no durable subsistence. Just as was the case in Scepticism, the formalism of “right” is, thus, by its very conception, without special content; it finds at its hand the fact of “possession,” a fact subsisting in multiplicity, and imprints thereon the abstract universality, by which it is called “property,”—the same sort of abstraction as Scepticism made use of. But while the reality so determined is in Scepticism called a mere appearance, a mere semblance, and has merely a negative value, in the case of right it has a positive significance. The negative value in the former case consists in the real having the meaning of self qua thought, qua inherent universal; the positive significance in the latter case, however, consists in its being mine in the sense of the category, as something whose validity is admitted, recognised, and actual. Both are the same abstract universal. The actual content, the proper value of what is “mine”—whether it be an external possession, or again inner riches or poverty of mind and character—is not contained in this empty form and does not concern it. The content belongs, therefore, to a peculiar specific power, which is something different from the formal universal, is chance and caprice. Consciousness of right, therefore, in the course of the very process of making its claim good, finds that it loses its own reality, discovers its complete lack of inherent substantiality, and that to describe an individual as a “person” is to use an expression of contempt.

The free and unchecked power possessed by the content takes determinate shape in this way. The absolute plurality of dispersed atomic personalities is, by the nature of this characteristic feature gathered at the same time into a single centre, alien to them and just as devoid of the life of spirit (geistlos). That central point is, in one respect, like the atomic rigidity of their personality, a merely particular reality; but in contrast to their empty particularity, it has the significance of the entire content, and hence is taken to be the essential element; while again, in contrast to their pretended absolute, but inherently insubstantial, reality, it is the universal power, and absolute actuality. This “lord and master of the world” takes himself in this way to be the absolute person, comprising at the same time all existence within himself, for whom there exists no higher type of spirit. He is a person: but the sole and single person who has challenged, confronted, and conquered all. These all constitute and establish the triumphant universality of the one person; for this particular, as such, is truly what it is only qua universal plurality of particular units: cut off from this plurality, the solitary and single self is, in fact, a powerless and unreal self. At the same time, it is the consciousness of the content which is antithetically opposed to that universal personality. This content, however, when liberated from its negative power, means chaos of spiritual powers, which, when let loose as elemental independent agencies, break out into wild extravagances and excesses, and fall on one another in mad destruction. Their helpless self-consciousness is the powerless inoperative enclosure and the arena of their chaotic tumult. But this master and lord of the world, aware of his being the sum and substance of all actual powers, is the titanic self-consciousness, which takes itself to be the living God. Since, however, he exists merely qua formal self, which unable to tame and subdue those powers, his procedure and his self-enjoyment are equally gigantic extravagance.

The lord of the world becomes really conscious of what he is,—viz. the universal might of actuality,—by that power of destruction which he exercises against the contrasted selfhood of his subjects. For his power is not the spiritual union and concord in which the various persons might get to know their own self-consciousness. Rather they exist as persons separately for themselves, and all continuity with others is excluded from the absolute punctual atomicity of their nature. They are, therefore, in a merely negative relation, a relation of exclusion both to one another and to him, who is their principle of connection or continuity. Qua this continuity, he is the essential being and content of their formal nature,—a content, however, foreign to them, and a being hostile in character, which abolishes just what they take to be their very essence, viz. bare subjectivity without any content, mere empty independent existence each on its own account. And, again, qua the continuity of their personality, he destroys this very personality itself. Juridical personality thus finds itself, rather, without any substance of its own, since content alien to it is imposed on it and holds good within it,—and does so there, because such content is the reality of that type of personality. On the other hand the passion for destroying and turning over everything on this unreal field gains for itself the consciousness of its complete supremacy. But this self is barren desolation, and hence is merely beside itself, and is indeed the very abandonment and rejection of its own self-consciousness.

Such, then, is the constitution of that aspect in which self-consciousness qua absolute being is actual. The consciousness, however, that is driven back into itself out of this actuality, thinks this its insubstantiality, makes it an object of thought. Formerly we saw the stoical independence of pure thought pass through Scepticism and find its true issue in the “unhappy consciousness,”—the truth about what constitutes its inherent and explicit nature, its final reality. If this knowledge appeared at that stage merely as the one-sided view of a consciousness qua consciousness, here the actual truth of that view has made its appearance. The truth consists in the fact that this universal .accepted objectivity of self-consciousness is reality estranged from it. This objectivity is the universal actuality of the self; but this actuality is directly the perversion of the self as well—it is the loss of its essential being. The reality of the self that was not found in the ethical world, has been gained by its reverting into the “person.” What in the case of the former was all harmony and union, comes now on the scene, no doubt in developed form, but self-estranged.