VII.B. Religion in the Form of Art

Spirit has raised the shape in which it is object for its own consciousness into the form of consciousness itself; and spirit sets such a form before itself. The artificer has given up the external synthesising activity, that blending of the heterogeneous forms of thought and nature. When the shape has gained the form of self-conscious activity, the artificer has become a spiritual workman.

If we next ask, what the actual spirit is, which finds in the religion of art the consciousness of its Absolute, it turns out that this is the ethical or objective spirit. This spirit is not merely the universal substance of all individuals; but when this substance is said to have, as an objective fact for actual consciousness, the form of consciousness, this amounts to saying that the substance, which is individualised, is known by the individuals within it as their proper essence and their own achievement. It is for them neither the Light of the World, in whose unity the self-existence of self-consciousness is contained only negatively, only transitorily, and beholds the lord and master of its reality; nor is it the restless waste and destruction of hostile nations; nor their subjection to “casts,” which together constitute the semblance of organisation of a completed whole, where, however, the universal freedom of the individuals concerned is wanting. Rather this spirit is a free nation, in which custom and order constitute the common substance of all, whose reality and existence each and every one knows to be his own will and his own deed.

The religion of the ethical spirit, however, raises it above its actual realisation, and is the return from its objectivity into pure knowledge of itself. Since an ethically constituted nation lives in direct unity with its own substance, and does not contain the principle of pure individualism of self-consciousness, the religion characteristic of its sphere first appears in complete form in severance from its stable security. For the reality of the ethical substance rests partly on its quiet unchangeableness as contrasted with the absolute process of self-consciousness; and consequently on the fact that this self-consciousness has not yet left its serene life of customary convention and its confident security therein, and gone into itself. Partly, again, that reality rests on its organisation into a plurality of rights and duties, as also on its organised distribution into groups of stations and classes, each with its particular way of acting which co-operates to form the whole; and hence rests on the fact that the individual is contented with the limitation of his existence, and has not yet grasped the unrestricted thought of his free self. But that serene immediate confidence in the substance of this ethical life returns to trust in self and to certainty of self; and the plurality of rights and duties, as well as the restricted particular action this involves, is the same dialectic process in the sphere of the ethical life as the plurality of “things” and their various “qualities”—a process which only comes to rest and stability in the simplicity of spirit certain of self.

The complete fulfilment of the ethical life in free self-consciousness, and the destined consummation (Schicksal) of the ethical world, are therefore found when individuality has entered into itself; the condition is one of absolute levity on the part of the ethical spirit; it has dissipated and resolved into itself all the firmly established distinctions constituting its own stability, and the separate components of its own articulated organisation, and, being perfectly sure of itself, has attained to boundless cheerfulness of heart and the freest enjoyment of itself. This simple certainty of spirit within itself has a double meaning; it is quiet stability and solid truth, as well as absolute unrest, and the disappearance of the ethical order. It turns round, however, into the latter; for the truth of the ethical spirit lies primarily just in this substantial objectivity and trust, in which the self does not think of itself as free individual, and where the self, therefore, in this inner subjectivity, in becoming a free self, falls to the ground. Since then its trust is broken, and the substance of the nation cracked, spirit, which was the connecting medium of the unstable extremes, has now come forward as an extreme—that of self-consciousness taking itself to be essential and ultimate. This is spirit certain within itself, which mourns over the loss of its world, and now produces out of the abstraction of self its own essential being, raised far above actual reality.

At such an epoch art in absolute form comes on the scene. At the earlier stage it is instinctive in its operation; being absorbed and steeped in existence, it works out of and works into this element; it does not find its substance in the free life of an ethical order, and hence, too, the self operating does not consist of free spiritual activity.

Later on, spirit goes beyond art in order to gain its higher manifestation, viz. that of being not merely the substance born and produced out of the self, but of being in its manifestation object of this self; it seeks at that higher level not merely to bring forth itself out of its own notion, but to have its very notion as its form, so that the notion and the work of art produced may know each other reciprocally as one and the same.

Since, then, the ethical substance has withdrawn from its objective existence into its bare self-consciousness, this is the aspect of the notion, or the activity with which spirit brings itself forward as object. It is pure form, because the individual in ethical obedience and service has so worked off every unconscious existence and every fixed determination, as the substance has itself become this fluid and undifferentiated entity. This form is the night in which the substance was betrayed, and made itself subject. It is out of this night of pure certainty of self that the ethical spirit rises again in a shape freed from nature and its own immediate existence.

The existence of the pure notion into which spirit has fled from its bodily shape, is an individual, which spirit selects as the vessel for its sorrow. Spirit acts in this individual as his universal and his power, from which he suffers violence, as his element of “Pathos,” by having given himself over to which his self-consciousness loses freedom. But that positive power belonging to the universal is overcome by the pure self of the individual, the negative power. This pure activity, conscious of its inalienable force, wrestles with the unembodied essential being. Becoming its master, this negative activity has turned the element of pathos into its own material, and given itself its content; and this unity comes out as a work, universal spirit individualised and consciously presented.

The first work of art is, because immediate, abstract and particular. On its own side it has to move away from this immediate and objective phase towards self-consciousness, while, on the other side, the latter for itself endeavours in the “cult” to do away with the distinction, which it at first gave itself in contrast to its own spirit, and by so doing to produce a work of art inherently endowed with life.

The first way in which the artistic spirit keeps as far as possible removed from each other its form and its active consciousness, is immediate in character—the form assumed is there as a “thing.” in general. It breaks up into the distinction of particularity, which contains the form of the self, and universality, which represents the inorganic elements in reference to the form adopted, and is its environment and habitation. This shape assumed obtains its pure form, the form belonging to spirit, by the whole being raised into the sphere of the pure notion. It is not the crystal, belonging as we saw to the level of understanding, a form which housed and covered a lifeless element, or is shone upon externally by a soul. Nor, again, is it that commingling of the forms of nature and thought, which first arose in connection with plants, thought’s activity here being still an imitation. Rather the notion strips off the remnant of root, branches and leaves, still clinging to the forms, purifies the forms and makes them into figures in which the crystal’s straight lines and surfaces are raised into incommensurable relations, so that the animation of the organic is taken up into the abstract form of understanding, and, at the same time, its essential nature—incommensurability—is preserved for understanding.

The indwelling god, however, is the black stone extracted from the animal encasement, and suffused with the light of consciousness. The human form strips off the animal character with which it was mixed up. The animal form is for the god merely an accidental vestment; the animal appears alongside its true form, and has no longer a value on its own account, but has sunk into being a significant sign of something else, has become a mere symbol. By that very fact, the form assumed by the god in itself casts off even the need for the natural conditions of animal existence, and hints at the internal arrangements of organic life melted down into the surface of the form, and pertaining only to this surface.

The essential being of the god, however, is the unity of the universal existence of nature and of self-conscious spirit which in its actuality appears confronting the former. At the same time, being in the first instance a particular form, its existence is one of the elements of nature, just as its self-conscious actuality is a particular national spirit. But the former is, in this unity, that element reflected back into spirit, nature made transparent by thoughts and united with self-conscious life. The form of the gods retains, therefore, within it its nature-element as something transcended, as a shadowy, obscure memory. The utter chaos and confused struggle amongst the elements existing free and detached from each other, the non-ethical disordered realm of Titans, is vanquished and banished to the outskirts of self-transparent reality, to the cloudy boundaries of the world which finds itself in the sphere of spirit and is at peace. These ancient gods, first-born children of the union of Light with Darkness, Heaven, Earth, Ocean, Sun, earth’s aimless typhonic Fire, and so on, are supplanted by forms and shapes, which do but darkly recall those earlier titans, and which are no longer things of nature, but spirits clarified by the ethical life of self-conscious nations.

This simple form has thus destroyed within itself restless endless individuation, the individuation both in the life of nature, which operates with necessity only qua universal essence, but is contingent in its actual existence and process; and also in the life of a nation, which is scattered and broken into particular spheres of action and into individual centres of self-consciousness, and has an existence manifold in action and meaning. All this individuation the simplicity of this form has abolished, and brought together into an individuality at peace with itself. Hence the condition of unrest stands contrasted with this form; confronting quiescent individuality, the essential reality, stands self-consciousness, which, being its source and origin, has nothing left over for itself except to be pure activity. What belongs to the substance, the artist gave entirely along with his work; to himself, however, as a specific individuality there belongs in his work no reality. He could only have conferred completeness on it by relinquishing his particular nature, divesting himself of his own being, and rising to the abstraction of pure action.

With the first and immediate act of production, the separation of the work “and his self-conscious activity is not yet healed again. The work is, therefore, not by itself really a spiritual entity; it is a whole only when its process of coming to be is taken along with it. The obvious and common element in the case of a work of art, that it is produced in consciousness and is made by the hand of man, is the aspect of the notion existing qua notion, and standing in contrast to the work produced. And if this notion, qua the artist or spectator, is unselfish enough to declare the work of art to be per se absolutely spiritual, and to forget himself qua agent or onlooker, then, as against this,”the notion of spirit has to be insisted on; spirit cannot dispense with the moment of being conscious of itself. This moment, however, stands in contrast to the work, because spirit, in this its primary disruption, gives the two sides their abstract and specifically contrasted characteristics of “doing” something and of being a “thing”; and their return to the unity they started from has not yet come about.

The artist finds out, then, in his work, that he did not produce a reality like himself. No doubt there comes back to him from his work a consciousness in the sense that a wondering multitude honours it as the spirit, which is their own true nature. But this way of animating or spiritualising his work, since it renders him his self-consciousness merely in the form of admiration, is rather a confession that the work is not animated in the same manner as the artist. Since the work comes back to him in the form of gladness in general, he does not find in it the pain of his self-discipline and the pain of production, nor the exertion and strain of his own toil. People may, moreover, judge the work, or bring him offerings and gifts, or endue it with their consciousness in whatever way they like—if they with their knowledge set themselves over it, he knows how much more his act is than what they understand and say; if they put themselves beneath it, and recognise in it their own dominating essential reality, he knows himself as the master of this.

The work of art hence requires another element for its existence; God requires another way of going forth than this, in which, out of the depths of his creative night, he drops into the opposite, into externality, to the character of a “thing” with no self-consciousness. This higher element is that of Language—a way of existing which is directly self-conscious existence. When individual self-consciousness exists in that way, it is at the same time directly a form of universal contagion; complete isolation of independent self-existent selves is at once fluent continuity and universally communicated unity of the many selves; it is the soul existing as soul. The god, then, which takes language as its medium of embodiment, is the work of art inherently spiritualised, endowed with a soul, a work which directly in its existence contains the pure activity which was apart from and in contrast to the god when existing as a “thing.” In other words, self-consciousness, when its essential being becomes objective, remains in direct relation with itself. It is, when thus at home with itself in its essential nature, pure thought or devotion, whose inwardness gets at the same time express existence in the Hymn. The hymn keeps within it the individuality of self-consciousness, and this individual character is at the same time perceived to be there universal. Devotion, kindled in every one, is a spiritual stream which in all the manifold self-conscious units is conscious of itself as one and the same function in all alike and a simple state of being. Spirit, being this universal self-consciousness of every one, holds in a single unity its pure inwardness as well as its objective existence for others and the independent self-existence of the individual units.

This kind of language is distinct from another way God speaks, which is not that of universal self-consciousness. The Oracle, both in the case of the god of the religions of art as well as of the preceding religions, is the necessary and the first form of divine utterance. For its very principle implies that God is at once the essence of nature and of spirit, and hence has not merely natural but spiritual existence as well. In so far as this moment is implied primarily in its principle and is not yet realised in religion, the language used is, for the religious self-consciousness, the speech of an alien and external self-consciousness. The self-consciousness which remains alien and foreign to its religious communion, is not yet there in the way its essential principle requires it should be. The self is simple self-existence, and thereby is altogether universal self-existence; that self, however, which is cut off from the self-consciousness of the communion, is primarily a mere particular self.

The content of this its own peculiar and individual form of speech is supplied from the general determinate character which the Absolute Spirit as such adopts in its religion. Thus the universal spirit of the East, which has not yet particularised its existence, utters about the Absolute equally simple, abstract, and universal statements, whose substantial content is sublime in the simplicity of its truth, but at the same time appears, because of this universality, trivial to the self-consciousness developing further.

The further developed self, which advances to being distinctively for itself, rises above the pure “pathos” of [unconscious] substance, gets the mastery over the objectivity of the principle of Light in Eastern religion, and knows that simplicity of abstract truth to be the inherent reality (das Ansichseyende) which does not possess the form of contingent existence through an utterance of an alien self, but is the sure and unwritten law of the gods, a law that “lives for ever, and no man knows what time it came.”

As the universal truth, revealed by the “Light” of the world, has here returned into what is within or what is beneath, and has thus got rid of the form of contingent appearance; so too, on the other hand, in the religion of art, because God’s form or shape has taken on consciousness and hence particularity in general, the peculiar utterance of God, who is the spirit of an ethically constituted nation, is the Oracle, which knows its special circumstances and situation, and announces what is serviceable to its interests. Reflective thought, however, satisfies itself as to the universal truths enunciated, because these are known as the essential implicit reality of the nation’s life; and the utterance of them is thus for such reflection no longer a strange and alien speech, but is its very own. Just as that wise man of old searched in his own thought for what was worthy and good, but left it to his “Daimon” to find out and decide the petty contingent content of what he wanted to know—whether it was good for him to keep company with this or that person, or good for one of his friends to go on a journey, and such like unimportant things; the same way the universal consciousness draws the knowledge about the contingent from birds, or trees, or fermenting earth, the steam from which deprives the self-conscious mind of its powers of discrimination. For what is accidental is something undiscerned, undiscriminated, and extraneous; and hence the ethical consciousness lets itself, as if by a throw of the dice, settle the matter in a manner that is similarly undiscriminating and extraneous. If the individual, by his understanding, determines on a certain course, and selects, after consideration, what is useful for him, it is the specific nature of his particular character which is the ground of this self-determination. This basis is just what is contingent; and that knowledge which his understanding supplies as to what is useful for the individual, is hence just such a knowledge as that of “oracles” or of the “lot”; only that he who questions the oracle or lot, thereby shows the ethical sentiment of indifference to what is accidental, while the former, on the contrary, treats the inherently contingent as an essential concern of his thought and knowledge. Higher than both, however, is to make careful reflection the oracle for contingent action, but yet to recognise that this very act reflected on is something contingent, because it refers to what is opportune and has a relation to what is particular.

The true self-conscious existence, which spirit receives in the form of speech, which is not the utterance of extraneous and so accidental, i.e. not universal, self-consciousness, is the work of art which we met with before. It stands in contrast to the statue, which has the character of a “thing.” As the statue is existence in a state of rest, the other is existence in a state of transience. In the case of the former, objectivity is set free and dispenses with the immediate presence of the self proper; in the latter, on the other hand, objectivity is too much bound up with the self, attains insufficiently to definite embodiment, and is, like time, no longer there just as soon as it is there.

The religious Cult constitutes the process of the two sides—a process in which the divine embodiment in motion within the pure feeling-element of self-consciousness and its embodiment at rest in the element of thinghood, reciprocally abandon the different character each possesses, and the unity, which is the underlying principle of their being, becomes an existing fact. Here in the Cult, the self gives itself a consciousness of the Divine Being descending from its remoteness into it, and this Divine Being, which was formerly the unreal and merely objective, thereby receives the proper actuality of self-consciousness.

This principle of the Cult is essentially contained and present already in the flow of the melody of the Hymn. These hymns of devotion are the way the self obtains immediate pure satisfaction through and within itself. It is the soul purified, which, in the purity it thus attains, is immediately and only absolute Being, and is one with absolute Being. The soul, because of its abstract character, is not consciousness distinguishing its object from itself, and is thus merely the night of its existence and the place prepared for its form. The abstract Cult, therefore, raises the self into being this pure divine element. The soul brings about the attainment of this purity in a conscious way. Still it is not yet the self, which has descended to the depths of its being, and knows itself as evil. It is something that merely is, a soul, which cleanses its exterior with the washing of water, and robes it in white, while its innermost traverses the path set before itself of labour, punishment, and reward, the way of spiritual discipline, of altogether relinquishing its particularity—the road by which it reaches the mansions and the fellowship of the blest.

This ceremonial cult is, in its first form, merely in secret, i.e. is merely a performance accomplished subjectively in idea, and unrealised. It has to become a real act, for an unreal act is a contradiction in terms. Consciousness proper, thereby, rises to the level of its pure self-consciousness. The essential Being has in it the significance of a free object; through the actual cult this object turns back to the self; and in so far as, in pure consciousness, it has the significance of absolute Being dwelling in its purity beyond actual reality, this Being descends, through this mediating process of the cult, from its universality into individual form, and thus combines and unites with actual reality.

The way the two sides make their appearance in the act is of such a character that the self-conscious aspect, so far as it is actual consciousness, finds the absolute Being manifesting itself as actual nature. On the one hand, nature belongs to self-consciousness as its possession and property, and stands for what has no existence per se. On the other hand, nature is its proper immediate reality and particularity, which is equally regarded as not truly real and essential, and is abrogated. At the same time, that external nature has the opposite significance for its pure consciousness—viz. the significance of being the inherently real, for which the self sacrifices its own [relative] unreality, just as, conversely, the self sacrifices the unessential aspect of nature to itself. The act is thereby a spiritual movement, because it is this double-sided process of cancelling the abstraction of absolute Being (in the way devotion determines the object), and making it something concrete and actual, and, on the other hand, of cancelling the actual (in the way the agent determines the object and the self acting), and raising it into universality.

The practice of the religious Cult begins, therefore, with the pure and simple “offering up” or “surrender” of a possession, which the owner apparently considers quite useless for himself and spills on the ground or lets rise up in smoke. By so doing he renounces before the ultimate Being of his pure consciousness all possession and right of property and enjoyment thereof; renounces personality and the reversion of his action to his self; and instead, reflects the act into the universal, into the absolute Being rather than into himself. Conversely, however, the objective ultimate Being too is annihilated in that very process. The animal offered up is the symbol of a god; the fruits consumed are the actual living Ceres and Bacchus. In the former die the powers of the upper law [the Olympians] which has blood and actual life, in the latter the powers of the lower law [the Furies] which possesses in bloodless form secret and crafty power.

The sacrifice of the divine substance, so far as it is active, belongs to the side of self-consciousness. That this concrete act may be possible, the absolute Being must have from the start implicitly sacrificed itself. This it has done in the fact that it has given itself definite existence, and made itself an individual animal and fruit of the earth. The self actively sacrificing demonstrates in actual existence, and sets before its own consciousness, this already implicitly completed self-renunciation on the part of absolute Being; and replaces that immediate- reality, which absolute Being has, by the higher, viz. that of the self making the sacrifice. For the unity which has arisen, and which is the outcome of transcending the particularity and separation of the two sides, is not merely negative destructive fate, but has a positive significance. It is merely for the abstract Being of the netherworld that the sacrifice offered to it is wholly surrendered and devoted; and, in consequence, it is only for that Being that the reflection of personal possession and individual self-existence back into the Universal is marked distinct from the self as such. At the same time, however, this is only a trifling part; and the other act of sacrifice is merely the destruction of what cannot be used, and is really the preparation of the offered substance for a meal, the feast that cheats the act out of its negative significance. The person making the offering at that first sacrifice reserves the greatest share for his own enjoyment; and reserves from the latter sacrifice what is useful for the same purpose. This enjoyment is the negative power which supersedes the absolute Being as well as the unity; and this enjoyment is, at the same time, the positive actual reality in which the objective existence of absolute Being is transmuted into self-conscious existence, and the self has consciousness of its unity with its Absolute.

This cult, for the rest, is indeed an actual act, although its meaning lies for the most part only in devotion. What pertains to devotion is not objectively produced, just as the result when confined to the feeling of enjoyment is robbed of its external existence. The Cult, therefore, goes further, and replaces this defect, in the first instance by giving its devotion an objective subsistence, since the cult is the common task—or the individual task for each and all to do—which produces for the honour and glory of God a House for Him to dwell in and adornment for His presence. By so doing the external objectivity of statuary is partly cancelled; for by thus dedicating his gifts and his labours the worker makes God well disposed towards him and looks on his self as attached and appertaining to God. Furthermore, this course of action is not the individual labour of the artist; this particularity is dissolved in universality. But it is not only the honour of God which is brought about, and the blessing of His countenance and favour is not only shed in idea and imagination on the worker; the work has also a meaning the reverse of the first which was that of self-renunciation and of honour done to what is alien and external. The Halls and Dwellings of God are for the use of man, the treasures preserved there are in time of need his own; the honour which God enjoys in his decorative adornment, is the honour and glory of a refined artistic and high-spirited nation. At the festival season, the people adorn their own dwellings, their own garments, and their establishments too with the furnishings of elegance and grace. In this manner they receive a return for their gifts from a responsive and grateful God; and receive the proofs of His favour—wherewith the nation became bound to the God because of the work done for Him—not as a hope and a deferred realisation, but rather, in testifying to His honour and in presenting gifts, the nation finds directly and at once the enjoyment of its own wealth and adornment.

That nation which approaches its god in the cult of the religion of art is an ethically constituted nation, knowing its State and the acts of the State to be the will and the achievement of its own activity. This universal spirit, confronting the self-conscious nation, is consequently not the “Light” of the world, which, being selfless, does not contain the certainty of the individual selves, but is only their universal ultimate Being and the dominating imperious power, wherein they disappear. The religious cult of this simple unembodied ultimate Being gives back, therefore, to its votaries in the main merely this: that they are the nation of their god. It secures for them merely their stable subsistence, and their bare substance as a whole; it does not secure for them their actual self; this is indeed rejected. For they revere their god as the empty profound, not as spirit. The cult, however, of the religion of art, on the other hand, dispenses with that abstract simplicity of the absolute Being, and therefore with its “profundity.” But that Being, which is directly at one with the self, is inherently spirit and comprehending truth, although not yet known explicitly, in other words it does not know the “depths” of its nature. Because this Absolute, then, implies self, consciousness finds itself at home with it when it appears; and, in the cult, this consciousness receives not merely the general title to its own subsistence, but also its self-conscious existence within it: just as, conversely, in a despised and outcast nation whose mere substance is acknowledged, the absolute Being has not a selfless reality, but in the nation whose self is acknowledged as living in its substance.

From the ceremonial cult, then, self-consciousness that is at peace and satisfied in its ultimate Being turns away, as also does the god that has entered into self-consciousness as into its place of habitation. This place is, by itself, the night of mere “substance,” or its pure individuality; but no longer the strained and striving individuality of the artist, which has not yet reconciled itself with its essential Being that gradually becomes objective; it is substance satisfied, having its “pathos” within it and in want of nothing, because it comes back from mere intuition, from objectivity which is overcome and superseded.

This “pathos”is, by itself, the Being of the Orient, a Being, however, which has now “set” and disappeared within itself, and has its own “setting,” self-consciousness, within it, and so contains existence and reality.

It has here traversed the process of its actualisation. Descending from its pure essentiality and becoming an objective force of nature and the expressions of this force, it is an existence relative to an other, an objective existence for the self by which it is consumed. The silent inner being of selfless nature attains in its fruits the stage where nature, duly prepared and digested, is offered as material for the life which has a self. In its being useful for food and drink it reaches its highest perfection. For therein it is the possibility of a higher existence, and comes in touch with spiritual existence. In its metamorphosis the spirit of the earth has developed and become partly a silently energising substance, partly spiritual ferment; in the first case it is the feminine principle, the nursing mother, in the other the masculine principle, the self-driving force of self-conscious existence.

In this enjoyment, then, that orient “Light” of the world is discovered for what it really is: Enjoyment is the Mystery of its being. For mysticism is not concealment of a secret, or ignorance; it consists in the self knowing itself to be one with absolute Being, and in this latter, therefore, becoming revealed. Only the self is revealed to itself; or what is manifest is so merely in the immediate certainty of itself. But it is just in such certainty that simple absolute Being has been placed by the cult. As a thing that can be used, it has not only existence which is seen, felt, smelt, tasted; it is also object of desire, and, by actually being enjoyed, it becomes one with the self, and thereby disclosed completely to this self, and made manifest.

When we say of anything, “it is manifest to reason, to the heart,” it is in point of fact still secret, for it still lacks the actual certainty of immediate existence, both the certainty regarding what is objective, and the certainty of enjoyment, a certainty which in religion, however, is not only immediate and unreflecting, but at the same time fully cognitive certainty of self.

What has thus been, through the cult, revealed to self-conscious spirit within itself, is simple absolute Being; and this has been revealed partly as the process of passing out of its dark night of concealment up to the level of consciousness, to be there its silently nurturing substance; partly, however, as the process of losing itself again in nether darkness, in the self, and of waiting above merely with the silent yearning of motherhood. The more conspicuous moving impulse, however, is the variously named “Light” of the East and its tumult of heaving life, which, having likewise desisted from its abstract state of being, has first embodied itself in objective existence in the fruits of the earth, and then, surrendering itself to self-consciousness, attained there to its proper realisation; and now it curvets and careers about in the guise of a crowd of excited, fervid women, the unrestrained revel of nature in self-conscious form.

Still, however, it is only Absolute Spirit in the sense of this simple abstract Being, not as spirit per se, that is discovered to consciousness: i.e. it is merely immediate spirit, the spirit of nature. Its self-conscious life is therefore merely the mystery of the Bread and the Wine, of Ceres and Bacchus, not of the other, the strictly higher, gods [of Olympus], whose individuality includes, as an essential moment, self-consciousness as such. Spirit has not yet qua self-conscious spirit offered itself up to it, and the mystery of bread and wine is not yet the mystery of flesh and blood.

This unstable divine revel must come to rest as an object, and the enthusiasm, which did not reach consciousness, must produce a work which confronts it as the statue stands over against the enthusiasm of the artist in the previous case,—a work too that is equally complete and finished, yet not as an inherently lifeless but as a living self. Such a cult is the Festival which man makes in his own honour, though not imparting to a cult of that kind the significance of the Absolute Being; for it is the ultimate Being that is first revealed to him, not yet Spirit—not such a Being as essentially takes on human form. But this cult provides the basis for this revelation, and lays out its moments individually and separately. Thus we here get the abstract moment of the living embodiment of ultimate Being, just as formerly we had the unity of both in the state of unconstrained emotional fervency. In the place of the statue man thus puts himself as the form elaborated and moulded for perfectly free movement, just as the statue is the perfectly free state of quiescence. If every individual knows how to play the part at least of a torchbearer, one of them comes prominently forward who is the very embodiment of the movement, the smooth elaboration, the fluent energy and force of all the members. He is a lively and living work of art, which matches strength with its beauty; and to him is given, as a reward for his force and energy, the adornment, with which the statue was decorated [in the former type of religion], and the honour of being, amongst his own nation, instead of a god in stone, the highest bodily representation of what the essential Being of the nation is.

In both the representations, which have just come before us, there is present the unity of self-consciousness and spiritual Being; but they still lack their due balance and equilibrium. In the case of the bacchic revelling enthusiasm the self is beside itself; in bodily beauty of form it is spiritual Being that is outside itself. The gloominess of consciousness in the one case and its wild stammering utterance, must be taken up into the transparent existence of the latter; and the clear but spiritless form of the latter, into the emotional inwardness of the former. The perfect element in which the inwardness is as external as the externality is inward, is once again Language. But it is neither the language of the oracle, entirely contingent in its content and altogether individual in character; nor is it the emotional hymn sung in praise of a merely individual god; nor is it the meaningless stammer of delirious bacchantic revelry. It has attained to its clear and universal content and meaning. Its content is clear, for the artificer has passed out of the previous state of entirely insubstantial enthusiasm, and worked himself into a definite shape, which is his own proper existence, permeated through all its movements by self-conscious soul, and is that of his contemporaries. Its content is universal, for in this festival, which is to the honour of man, there vanishes the onesidedness peculiar to figures represented in statues, which merely contain a national spirit, a determinate character of the godhead. The finely built warrior is indeed the honour and glory of his particular nation; but he is a physical or corporeal individuality in which are sunk out of sight the expanse and depth of meaning, the seriousness of significance, and the inner character of the spirit which underlies the particular mode of life, the cravings, the needs and the customs of his nation. In relinquishing all this for complete corporeal embodiment, spirit has laid aside the particular impressions, the special tones and chords of that nature which it, as the actual spirit of the nation, includes. Its nation, therefore, is no longer conscious in this spirit of its special particular character, but rather of having laid this aside, and of the universality of its human existence.

The national spirits, which find their being in the form of some particular animal, coalesce into one single spirit. Thus it is that the separate artistically beautiful national spirits combine to form a Pantheon, the element and habitation of which is Language. Pure intuition of self in the sense of universal human nature takes, when the national or tribal spirit is actualised, this form: the national spirit combines with the others (which together with it constitute, through nature and natural conditions, one people), in a common undertaking, and for this task builds up a collective nation, and, with that, a collective heaven. This universality, to which spirit attains in its existence, is, nevertheless, merely this first universality, which, to begin with, starts from the individuality of ethical life, has not yet overcome its immediacy, has not yet built up a single state out of these separate national elements. The ethical life of an actual national spirit rests partly on the simple confiding trust of individuals in the whole of their nation, partly in the direct share which all, in spite of differences of position, take in the decisions and acts of its government. In the union, not in the first instance to secure a permanent order but merely for a common act, that freedom of participation on the part of each and all is for the nonce set aside. This first community of life is, therefore, an assemblage of individualities rather than the dominion and control of abstract thought, which would rob the individuals of their self-conscious share in the will and act of the whole.

The assembly of national spirits constitutes a circle of forms and shapes, which now embraces the whole of nature, as well as the whole ethical world. They are too under the supreme command rather than the supreme dominion of one. By themselves, they are the universal substances embodying what the self-conscious essential reality inherently is and does. This, however, constitutes the moving force, and, in the first instance, at least the centre, with which those universal entities are concerned, and which, to begin with, seems to unite in a merely accidental way all that they variously accomplish, But it is the return of the divine Being to self-consciousness which already contains the reason that self-consciousness forms the centre for those divine forces, and conceals their essential unity in the first instance under the guise of a friendly external relation between both worlds.

The same universality, which belongs to this content, has necessarily also that form of consciousness in which the content appears. It is no longer the concrete acts and deeds of the cult; it is an action which is not indeed raised as yet to the level of the notion, but only to that of ideas, the synthetic connection of self-conscious and external existence. The element in which these presented ideas exist, language, is the earliest language, the Epic as such, which contains the universal content, at any rate universal in the sense of completeness of the world presented, though not in the sense of universality of thought. The Minstrel is the individual and actual spirit from whom, as a subject of this world, it is produced, and by whom it is borne. His “pathos” is not the deafening powers of nature, but Mnemosyne, Recollection, a gradually evolved inwardness, the memory of an essential mode of being once directly present. He is the organ and instrument whose content is passing away; it is not his own self which is of any account, but his muse, his universal song. What, however, is present in fact, has the form of an inferential process, where the one extreme of universality, the world of gods, is connected with individuality, the minstrel, through the middle term of particularity. The middle term is the nation in its heroes, who are individual men like the minstrel, but only ideally presented, and thereby at the same time universal like the free extreme of universality, the gods.

In this Epic, then, what is inherently established in the cult, the relation of the divine to the human, is set forth and displayed as a whole to consciousness. I The content is an “act” of the essential Being conscious of itself. Acting disturbs the peace of the substance, and awakens the essential Being; and by so doing its simple unity is divided into parts, and opened up into the manifold world of natural powers and ethical forces. The act—is the violation of the peaceful earth; it is the trench which, vivified by the blood of the living, calls forth the spirits of the departed, who are thirsting for life, and who receive it in the action of self-consciousness. There are two sides to the business the universal activity is concerned to accomplish: the side of the self—in virtue of which it is brought about by a collection of actual nations with the prominent individualities at the head of them; and the side of the universal in virtue of which it is brought about by their substantial forces. The relation of the two, however, took formerly the character of being the synthetic connection of universal and individual, i.e. of being the process of ideal presentation. On this specific character depends the judgment regarding this world.

The relation of the two is, by this means, a commingling of both, which illogically divides the unity of the action, and in a needless fashion throws the act from one side over to the other. The universal powers assume the form of individual beings, and thus have in them the principle from which action comes; when they effect anything, therefore, this seems to proceed as entirely from them and to be as free as in the case of men. Hence both gods and men have done one and the same thing. The seriousness with which those divine powers go to work is ridiculously unnecessary, since they are in point of fact the moving force of the individualities engaged in the acts; while the strain and toil of the latter again is an equally useless effort, since the former direct and manage everything. Over-zealous mortal creatures, who are as nothing, are at the same time the mighty self that brings into subjection universal beings, violates the gods, and procures for them actual reality and an interest in acting. Just as, conversely, these powerless gods, these impotent universal beings, which procure their sustenance from the gifts of men and, through men, first get something to do, are the natural inner principle and the substance of all events, as also the ethical material, and the “pathos” of action. If their cosmic natures first get reality and a sphere of effectual operation through the free self of individuality, it is also the case that they are the universal, which withdraws from and avoids this connection, remains unrestricted and unconstrained in its own character, and, by the inexhaustible elasticity of its unity, extinguishes the atomic singleness of the individual acting and his various aspects, preserves itself in its purity, and dissolves all that is individual in the current of its own continuity.

Just as the gods fall into this contradictory relation with the antithetic nature having the form of self, in the same way their universality comes into conflict with their own specific character and the relation in which it stands to others. They are the eternal and resplendent individuals, who exist in their own calm, and are removed from the changes of time and the influence of alien forces. But they are at the same time determinate elements, particular gods, and thus stand in relation to others. But that relation to others, which, in virtue of the opposition it involves, is one of strife, is a comic self-forgetfulness of their eternal nature. The determinateness they possess is rooted in the divine subsistence, and, in its specific limitation, has the independence of the whole individuality; owing to this, their characters at once lose the sharpness of their distinctive peculiarity, and in their ambiguity blend together.

One purpose of their activity and their activity itself, being directed against an “other” and so against an invincible divine force, are a contingent and futile piece of bravado, which passes away at once, and transforms the pretence of seriousness in the act into a harmless, self-confident piece of sport with no result and no issue. If, however, in the nature of their divinity, the negative element, the specific determinateness of that nature, appears merely as the arbitrariness of their activity, and as the contradiction between the purpose and result, and if that difference outweighs and overbalances the element of determinateness, then, by that very fact, the pure force of negativity confronts and opposes their nature, and moreover with a power to which it must finally submit, and over which it can in no way prevail. They are the universal, and the positive, as against the individual self of mortals, which cannot hold out against their power and might. But the universal self, for that reason, hovers over these mortal selves, and over this whole world of ideal presentation to which the entire content belongs; and is for them the empty form of bare Necessity, not determined conceptually—a mere event to which they stand related selfless and sorrowing, for these determinate natures do not find themselves in this purely formal necessity.

This necessity, however, is the unity of the notion, a unity dominating and controlling the contradictory independent subsistence of the individual moments, a unity in which the inconsistency and fortuitousness of their action is coherently regulated, and the sportive character of their acts receives its serious value! in those moments themselves. The content of the world of ideal presentation carries on its process in the midst unrestrained and detached by itself, gathering round the individuality of some hero, who, however, feels the strength and splendour of his life broken, and mourns the early death he sees ahead of him. For the actual individuality, firmly fixed in itself, is isolated and excluded to the utmost point, and severed into its elements, which have not yet found each other and united. The one individual element, the abstract unreal moment, is necessity which takes no share in the life of the mediating term just as little as does the other, the concrete real individual element, the minstrel, who keeps himself outside it, and disappears in what he ideally presents. Both extremes must get nearer the content; the one, necessity, has to get filled with it, the other, the language of the minstrel, must have a share in it. And the content formerly left to itself must preserve in it the certainty and the fixed character of the negative.

This higher language, that of Tragedy, gathers and keeps more closely together the dispersed and disintegrated moments of the inner essential world and the world of action. The substance of the divine falls apart, in accordance with the nature of the notion, into its shapes and forms, and their movement is likewise in conformity with that notion. In regard to form, the language here ceases to be narrative, in virtue of the fact that it enters into the content, just as the content ceases to be merely one that is ideally presented. The hero is himself the spokesman, and the representation given brings before the audience—who are also spectators—self-conscious human beings, who know their own rights and purposes, the power and the will belonging to their specific nature, and who know how to state them. They are artists who do not express with unconscious naivete and naturalness the merely external aspect of what they begin and what they decide upon, as is the case in the language accompanying ordinary action in actual life; they make the very inner being external, they prove the righteousness of their action, and the “pathos” controlling them is soberly asserted and definitely expressed in its universal individuality, free from all accident of circumstance and the particular peculiarities of personalities. Lastly, it is in actual human beings that these characters get existence, human beings who impersonate heroes, and represent them in actual speech, not in the form of a narrative, but speaking in their own person. Just as it is essential for a statue to be made by human hands, so is the actor essential to his mask—not as an external condition, from which, artistically considered, we have to abstract; or so far as abstraction must certainly be made, we thereby state just that art does not yet contain in it the true and proper self.

The general ground, on which the movement of these shapes produced from the notion takes place, is the consciousness of the first form of language, where the content is ideally presented, and its detail spread out without reference to self. It is the commonalty in general, whose wisdom finds utterance in the Chorus of the Elders; in the powerlessness of this chorus the generality finds its representative, because the common people itself compose merely the positive and passive material for the individuality of the government confronting it. Lacking the power to negate and oppose, it is unable to hold together and keep within bounds the riches and varied fullness of divine life; it allows each individual moment to go off its own way, and in its hymns of honour and reverence praises each individual moment as an independent god, now this god and now again another. Where, however, it detects the seriousness of the notion, and perceives how the notion proceeds to deal with these forms, shattering them as it goes along; and where it comes to see how badly its praised and honoured gods come off when they venture on the ground where the notion holds sway;—there it is not itself the negative power actively setting to work, but keeps itself within the abstract selfless thought of such power, confines itself to the consciousness of alien and external destiny, and produces the empty wish to tranquillize, and feeble ineffective talk intended to appease. In its terror before the higher powers, which are the immediate arms of the substance; in its terror before their struggle with one another, and before the simple and uniform action of that necessity, which crushes them as well as the living beings’ bound up with them; in its compassion for these living beings, whom it knows at once to be the same with itself—it is conscious of nothing but ineffective horror of this whole process, conscious of equally helpless pity, and, in fine, the mere empty peace of surrender to necessity, whose work is apprehended neither as the necessary act of character, nor as the action of the absolute Being within itself.

Spirit does not appear in its dissociated multiplicity on the plane of this spectacular consciousness, the indifferent ground, as it were, of presentation; it comes on the scene in the simple diremption of the notion. Its substance manifests itself, therefore, merely torn asunder into its two extreme powers. These elementary universal beings are, at the same time, self-conscious individualities—heroes who put their conscious life into one of these powers, find therein determinateness of character, and procure their effective activity and reality. This universal individualisation descends again, as will be remembered, to the immediate reality of existence proper, and is presented before a crowd of spectators, who find in the chorus their image and counterpart, or rather their own thought giving itself expression.

The content and movement of spirit, which is object to itself here, have been already considered as the nature and realisation of the substance of ethical life. In its form of religion spirit attains to consciousness about itself, or reveals itself to its consciousness in its purer form and its simpler mode of embodiment. If, then, the ethical substance by its very principle broke up, as regards its content, into two powers—which were defined as divine and human law, law of the nether world and law of the upper world, the one the family, the other state sovereignty, the first bearing the impress and character of woman, the other that of man—in the same way, the previously multiform circle of gods, with its wavering and unsteady characteristics, confines itself to these powers, which owing to this feature are brought closer to individuality proper. For the “previous dispersion of the whole into manifold abstract forces, which appear hypostatised, is the dissolution of the subject which comprehends them merely as moments in its self; and individuality is therefore only the superficial form of those entities. Conversely, a further distinction of characters than that just named is to be imputed to contingent and inherently external personality.”

At the same time, the essential nature [in the case of ethical substance] gets divided in its form, i.e. with respect to knowledge. Spirit when acting, appears, qua consciousness, over against the object on which its activity is directed, and which, in consequence, is determined as the negative of the knowing agent. The agent finds himself thereby in the opposition of knowing and not knowing. He takes his purpose from his own character, and knows it to be essential ethical fact; but owing to the determinateness of his character, he knows merely the one power of substance; the other remains for him concealed and out of sight. The objectively present reality, therefore, is one thing in itself, and another for consciousness. The higher and lower right come to signify in this connection the power that knows and reveals itself to consciousness, and the power concealing itself and lurking in the background. The one is the aspect of light, the god of the Oracle, who as regards its natural aspect [Light] has sprung from the allilluminating Sun, knows all and reveals all, Phoebus and Zeus, who is his Father. But the commands of this truth-speaking god, and his proclamations of what is, are really deceptive and fallacious. For this knowledge is, in its very principle, directly not knowledge, because consciousness in acting is inherently this opposition. He, who had the power to unlock the riddle of the sphinx, and he too who trusted with childlike confidence, are, therefore, both sent to destruction through what the god reveals to them. The priestess, through whose mouth the gracious god speaks, is in nothing different from the equivocal sisters of fate, who drive their victim to crime by their promises, and who, by the double-tongued, equivocal character of what they give out as a certainty, deceive the King when he relies upon the manifest and obvious meaning of what they say. There is a type of consciousness that is purer than the latter which believes in witches, and more discriminating, more thorough and more solid than the former which puts its trust in the priestess and the gracious god. This type of consciousness, therefore, lets his revenge tarry for the revelation which the spirit of his father makes regarding the crime that did him to death, and institutes other proofs in addition—for the reason that the spirit giving the revelation might possibly be the devil.

This mistrust has good grounds, because the knowing consciousness takes its stand on the opposition between certainty of itself on the one hand, and the objective essential reality on the other. Ethical rightness, which insists that actuality is nothing per se in opposition to absolute law, finds out that its knowledge is onesided, its law merely a law of its own character, and that it has laid hold of merely one of the powers of the substance. The act itself is this inversion of what is subjectively known into its opposite, into objective existence, turns round what is right from the point of view of character and knowledge into the right of the very opposite with which the former is bound up in the essential nature of the substance—turns it into the “Furies” who embody the right of the other power and character awakened into hostility. The lower right sits with Zeus enthroned, and enjoys equal respect and homage with the god revealed and known.

To these three supernatural Beings the world of the gods of the chorus is limited and restricted by the acting individuality. The one is the substance, the power presiding over the hearth and home and the spirit worshipped by the family, as well as the universal power dominating state and government. Since this distinction belongs to the substance as such, it is, when ideally presented, not individualised as two distinct forms [of the substance], but has in actual reality the two persons of its characters. On the other hand, the distinction between knowing and not knowing falls within each of the actual self-consciousnesses; and only in abstraction, in the element of universality, does it get divided into two individual shapes. For the self of the hero only exists as a whole consciousness, and hence includes essentially the whole of the distinction belonging to the form; but its substance is determinate, I and only one side of the content distinguished belongs to him. Hence both sides of consciousness, which have in concrete reality no separate individuality peculiarly their own, receive, when ideally represented, each its own particular form: the one that of the god revealed, the other that of the Furies keeping themselves concealed. In part both enjoy equal honour, while again, the form assumed by the substance, Zeus, is the necessity of the relation of the two to one another. The substance is the relation [1] that knowledge is for itself, but finds its truth in what is simple; [2] that the distinction, through and in which actual consciousness exists, has its basis in that inner being which destroys it; [3] that the clear conscious assurance of certainty has its confirmation in forgetfulness.

Consciousness disclosed this opposition by action, through doing something. Acting in accordance with the knowledge revealed, it finds out the deceptiveness of that knowledge, and being committed, in view of the inner meaning, to one of the attributes of substance, it did violence to the other and thereby gave the latter right as against itself. When following that god who knows and reveals himself, it really seized hold of what is not revealed, and repents of having trusted the knowledge, whose equivocal character (since this is its very nature) had to come also before it, and admonition thereanent to be found. The frenzy of the priestess, the inhuman shape of the witches, the voices of trees and birds, dreams, and so on, are not ways in which truth appears; they are admonitory signs of deception, of want of discernment, of the individual and accidental character of knowledge. Or, what comes to the same thing, the opposite power, which consciousness has violated, is present as express law and authentic right, whether law of the family or law of the state; while consciousness, on the other hand, pursued its own proper knowledge, and hid from itself what was revealed. The truth, however, of the opposing powers of content and consciousness is the final result, that both are equally right, and, hence, in their opposition (which comes about through action) are equally wrong. The process of action proves their unity in the mutual overthrow of both powers and the self-conscious characters. The reconciliation of the opposition with itself is the Lethe of the netherworld in the form of Death—or the Lethe of the upper world in the form of absolution, not from guilt (for consciousness cannot deny its guilt, because the act was done), but from the crime, and of the atoning consolation and peace of soul which absolution gives. Both are forgetfulness, the disappearance of the reality and action of the powers of the substance, its component individualities, and of the powers of the abstract thought of good and evil. For none of them by itself is the real essence; this consists in the undisturbed calm of the whole within itself, the immovable unity of Fate, the quiescent existence and hence want of activity and vitality in the family and government, and the equal honour and consequent indifferent unreality of Apollo and the Furies, and the return of their spiritual life and activity into Zeus solely and simply.

This destiny completes the depopulation of Heaven—of that unthinking mixture of individuality and ultimate Being—a blending whereby the action of this absolute Being appears as something incoherent, inconsistent, contingent, unworthy of itself; for individuality, when attaching in a merely superficial way to absolute Being, is unessential. The expulsion of such unreal insubstantial ideas, which was demanded by the philosophers of antiquity, thus already has its beginning in tragedy in general, through the fact that the division of the substance is controlled by the notion, and hence individuality is the essential individuality, and the specific determinations are absolute characters. The self-consciousness represented in tragedy knows and acknowledges on that account only one highest power, Zeus. This Zeus is known and acknowledged only as the power of the state or of the hearth and home, and, in the opposition falling inside knowledge, merely as the Father of the particular knowledge assuming a definite shape; he is the Zeus acknowledged in the taking of oaths, the Zeus of the Furies, the Zeus of what is universal, of the inner being dwelling in concealment. The further moments taken from the notion (Begriff) and dispersed in the form of ideal presentation (Vorstellung), moments which the chorus permits to hold good one after the other, are, on the other hand, not the “pathos” of the hero; they sink to the level of passions in the hero—to the level of accidental, insubstantial moments, which the impersonal chorus no doubt praises, but which are not capable of constituting the character of heroes, nor of being expressed and regarded by them as their real nature.

But, further, the persons of the divine Being itself, as well as the characters of its substance, coalesce into the simplicity of what is devoid of consciousness. This necessity has, in contrast to self-consciousness, the characteristic of being the negative power of all the forms that appear, a power in which they do not recognise themselves, but perish therein. The self appears as merely allotted amongst the different characters, and not as the mediating factor of the process. But self-consciousness, the simple certainty of self, is in point of fact the negative power, the unity of Zeus, the unity of the substantial essence and abstract necessity; it is the spiritual unity into which everything returns. Because actual self-consciousness is still distinguished from the substance and Fate, it is partly the chorus, or rather the crowd looking on, whom this movement of the divine life fills with fear as being something alien and strange, or in whom this movement, as something closely touching themselves, produces merely the emotion of passive pity. Partly again, so far as consciousness co-operates and belongs to the various characters, this alliance is of an external kind, is a hypocrisy—because the true union, that of self, fate, and substance, is not yet present. The hero, who appears before the onlookers, breaks up into his mask and the actor, into the person of the play and the actual self.

The self-consciousness of the heroes must step forth from its mask and be represented as knowing itself to be the fate both of the gods of the chorus and of the absolute powers themselves, and as being no longer separated from the chorus, the universal consciousness.

Comedy has, then, first of all, the aspect that actual self-consciousness represents itself as the Fate of the gods. These elemental Beings are, qua universal moments, no definite self, and are not actual. They are, indeed, endowed with the form of individuality, but this is in their case merely put on, and does not really and truly suit them. The actual self has no such abstract moment as its substance and content. The subject, therefore, is raised above such a moment, as it would be above a particular property, and when clothed with this mask gives utterance to the irony of such a property trying to be something on its own account. The pretentious claims of the universal abstract nature are shown up and discovered in the actual self; it is seen to be caught and held in a concrete reality, and lets the mask drop, just when it wants to be something right. The self, appearing here in its significance as something actual, plays with the mask which it once puts on, in order to be its own person; but it breaks away from this seeming and pretence just as quickly again, and comes out in its own nakedness and usual character, which it shows not to be distinct from the proper self, the actor, nor again from the onlooker.

This general dissolution, which the formally embodied essential nature as a whole undergoes when it assumes individuality, becomes in its content more serious, and hence more petulant and bitter, in so far as the content possesses its more serious and necessary meaning. The divine substance combines the meaning of natural and ethical essentiality.

As regards the natural element, actual self-consciousness shows, in the very fact of applying elements of nature for its adornment, for its abode and so on, and again in feasting on its own offering, that itself is the Fate to which the secret is disclosed, no matter what its position with regard to the independent substantiality of nature. In the mystery of the bread and wine it makes its very own this self-subsistence of nature together with the significance of inner reality; and in Comedy it is conscious of the irony lurking in this meaning.

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 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.

Rational 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, 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 X puts determinate laws and maxims of action at the mercy of the pleasure and levity of youth, led astray therewith, and gives weapons 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 self-consciousness. 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 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.