Since self-consciousness knows how to bring out, in its purpose, a positive side (§ 135), which it necessarily has because it belongs to the purpose of concrete, actual acting, it is able, for the sake of such a positive side, as a duty and an excellent intention, to maintain the action — whose negative, essential content stands at the same time within self-consciousness itself, as reflected into itself and thus conscious of the universal of the will, in comparison with this content — to be good for others and for itself: for others, and this is hypocrisy; for itself, and this is the still higher pinnacle of subjectivity asserting itself as the absolute.

This last, most abstruse form of evil, whereby evil is turned into good and good into evil, and consciousness knows itself as this power and therefore knows itself as absolute, is the highest pinnacle of subjectivity on the moral standpoint — the shape to which evil has attained in our time, and indeed through philosophy, that is, through a shallowness of thought that has displaced a deep concept into this shape, and that arrogates to itself the name of philosophy, just as it arrogates to evil the name of the good. I wish, in this remark, briefly to indicate the principal shapes that this subjectivity, now become common currency, has taken. As regards

a) hypocrisy: it contains the moments: α) the knowledge of the true universal, whether in the form merely of a feeling for right and duty, or in the form of a further acquaintance and cognition of it; β) the willing of the particular that resists this universal, and indeed, γ), as a knowing that compares both moments, such that, for the willing consciousness itself, its own particular willing is determined as evil. These determinations express acting with a bad conscience, not yet hypocrisy as such. — It was once a very important question whether an action is evil only insofar as it is done with a bad conscience, that is, with the developed consciousness of the moments just indicated. — Pascal draws the consequence very well from an affirmative answer to this question (Les Provinciales, 4th letter): “Ils seront tous damnés ces demi-pécheurs, qui ont quelque amour pour la vertu. Mais pour ces francs pécheurs, pécheurs endurcis, pécheurs sans mélange, pleins et achevés, l’enfer ne les tient pas: ils ont trompé le diable à force de s’y abandonner.”² The subjective right of self-consciousness — that it should know the action under the determination of being good or evil in and for itself — must not be conceived as colliding with the absolute right of the objectivity of this determination in such a way that both are represented as separable, indifferent, and contingent with respect to one another — a relation that was in particular also laid at the basis of the former disputes concerning efficacious grace.³ (3. In the manuscript: efficacious grace — man absolutely passive; grace finds nothing immanent to man.) Evil is, on the formal side, the individual’s very own, since it is precisely his subjectivity positing itself as purely and simply his own, and hence quite simply his guilt (see § 139 and the Remark to the preceding §); and, on the objective side, the human being is, according to his concept, as spirit, something rational in general, and has the determination of self-knowing universality quite simply within him. It is therefore not to treat him according to the honour of his concept if the side of the good, and thus the determination of his evil action as an evil one, is separated from him and not imputed to him as evil. However determinately, or with whatever degree of clarity or obscurity, the consciousness of these moments in their distinctness is developed into a cognition, and to whatever extent an evil action is committed with more or less of a formal bad conscience — this is the more indifferent side, concerning what is empirical.

b) But to act in an evil way and with a bad conscience is not yet hypocrisy; here there is added the formal determination of untruth — of asserting the evil, in the first instance to others, to be good, and of presenting oneself, in general, outwardly, as good, conscientious, pious, and the like — which, in this way, is merely a piece of deceit practised on others. But the evil person can, further, in his other good deeds or piety, in good grounds generally, find, for himself, an entitlement to evil, since through them he turns it, for himself, into good. This possibility lies in subjectivity, which, as abstract negativity, knows all determinations as subjected to it and as proceeding from it. To this perversion belongs, in the first place,

c) that shape which is known as probabilism. It makes it a principle that an action for which consciousness knows how to produce some good ground or other — even if it be only the authority of some theologian, and even though it knows other theologians to differ from his judgment ever so much — is permitted, and that conscience can be secure about it. Even in this representation there is still present the correct consciousness that such a ground and authority give only probability, although this suffices for the security of conscience; it is thereby conceded that a good ground is of such a nature that there may be other, equally good, grounds alongside it. Even this trace of objectivity is still to be recognized here, that it is supposed to be a ground that determines. But since the decision as to good or evil is made to rest on the many good grounds, among which those authorities too are included, and since these grounds are so many and so opposed, it lies therein at the same time that it is not this objectivity of the matter but subjectivity that has to decide — the side through which liking and arbitrariness are made the deciding factor concerning good and evil, and ethical life, like religiosity, is undermined. But that it is one’s own subjectivity into which the decision falls is not yet expressed as the principle; rather, as noted, a ground is given out as what decides; probabilism is, to this extent, still a shape of hypocrisy.

d) The next higher stage is that the good will is supposed to consist in willing the good; this willing of the abstract good is supposed to suffice, indeed to be the sole requirement, for the action to be good. Since the action, as determinate willing, has a content, while the abstract good determines nothing, it is reserved to the particular subjectivity to give it its determination and fulfilment. Just as, in probabilism, for one who is not himself a learned révérend père, it is the authority of such a theologian on the strength of which the subsumption of a determinate content under the universal determination of the good can be made, so here every subject is immediately invested with this dignity, of placing the content into the abstract good, or, what is the same, of subsuming a content under a universal. This content is, in the action as something concrete in general, one side among several that it has — sides that may perhaps even give it the predicate of being criminal and bad. But that subjective determination of mine of the good is the good known by me in the action, the good intention (§ 114). There thus enters an opposition of determinations, according to one of which the action is good, but according to others criminal. With this, the question also seems to arise, in the actual action, whether the intention is really good. But that the good is the actual intention can now not only be the case in general, but must, on the standpoint where the subject has the abstract good as the determining ground, even always be able to be the case. What is violated, by such an action determining itself in other respects as criminal and evil, by the good intention, is of course also good, and it might seem to depend on which of these sides is the most essential. But this objective question falls away here, or rather it is the subjectivity of consciousness itself whose decision alone constitutes the objective. Essential and good are, in any case, synonymous; the one is just such an abstraction as the other; good is what is essential with respect to the will, and the essential in this respect is supposed to be precisely this: that an action is determined, for me, as good. The subsumption, however, of any content whatever under the good results directly, for itself, from the fact that this abstract good, since it has no content at all, reduces itself entirely to signifying something positive in general — something that counts in some respect or other, and, according to its immediate determination, can also count as an essential purpose, for example, doing good to the poor, providing for myself, for my life, for my family, and so on. Further, just as the good is the abstract, so too the bad is the contentless, that which receives its determination from my subjectivity; and there results, from this side too, the moral purpose of hating and rooting out the indeterminate bad. — Theft, cowardice, murder, and so on, as actions, that is, as in general accomplished by a subjective will, have immediately the determination of being the satisfaction of such a will, and hence a positive thing, and, in order to make the action a good one, all that is needed is to know this positive side as my intention in it; and this side is, for the determination of the action as good, the essential one, precisely because I know it as the good in my intention. Theft, in order to do good to the poor; cowardice, running away from battle, in order, for duty’s sake, to provide for one’s life, for one’s (perhaps also poor) family; murder out of hatred and revenge, that is, in order to satisfy the self-feeling of one’s right, of right in general, and the feeling of the badness of the other, of his wrong against me or against others, against the world or the people in general, through the extermination of this bad person who has the bad within himself, whereby at least a contribution is made toward the extirpation of the bad — all these are, in this way, made into a good intention, and hence into a good action, for the sake of the positive side of their content. It requires only the slightest degree of intellectual cultivation to find, like those learned theologians, a positive side to every action, and hence a good ground and intention. Thus it has been said that there really is no such thing as an evil person, for no one wills evil for evil’s sake, that is, wills the purely negative as such, but always wills something positive, and hence, on this standpoint, something good. In this abstract good, the distinction between good and evil, and all actual duties, have vanished; hence to will merely the good, and to have a good intention in an action, is all the more precisely evil, insofar as the good is willed only in this abstraction, and its determination is thereby reserved to the arbitrariness of the subject.

To this place also belongs the notorious proposition: the end justifies the means. — Taken by itself, in the first instance, this expression is trivial and says nothing. One can equally indefinitely reply that a holy end does indeed justify the means, but an unholy end does not justify them. If the end is right, so too are the means — this is, to this extent, a tautological expression, since the means is precisely that which is nothing for itself but exists for the sake of something else, and has its determination and value therein, in the end — if it is, namely, in truth a means. — But what is meant by that proposition is not the merely formal sense; something more determinate is understood by it, namely that, for the sake of a good end, to use as a means something that is, for itself, absolutely no means at all, to violate something that is, for itself, holy — in other words, to make a crime into the means of a good end — is permitted, indeed even a duty. In this proposition there hovers, on the one hand, the indeterminate consciousness of the dialectic, remarked on above, of the positive in isolated legal or ethical determinations, or of such equally indeterminate universal propositions as: thou shalt not kill, or: thou shalt provide for thy welfare, for the welfare of thy family. The courts, warriors, have not only the right but the duty to kill human beings — but only where it is precisely determined in respect of what quality of persons, and under what circumstances, this is permitted and a duty.⁶ So too must my welfare, the welfare of my family, be subordinated to higher purposes and thus reduced to means. But what characterizes itself as crime is not such an indeterminately left universality, still subject to a dialectic, but already has its determinate objective limitation. What is now set against such a determination, in the end that was supposed to take from crime its nature — the holy end — is nothing other than the subjective opinion of what is good and better. It is the same thing that happens when willing remains standing at the abstract good, namely that all determinacy of the good and the bad, of right and wrong, valid in and for itself, is sublated, and this determination is ascribed to the feeling, representing, and liking of the individual. — Subjective opinion is, finally, expressly pronounced to be the rule of right and duty, in that

e) conviction, which holds something to be right, is supposed to be sufficient for it to be so, whereby the ethical nature of an action is supposed to be determined. The good that one wills has, as yet, no content; the principle of conviction now contains this further point: that the subsumption of an action under the determination of the good falls to the subject. With this, even the semblance of an ethical objectivity has wholly vanished. Such a doctrine hangs directly together with that so-called philosophy, mentioned several times already, which denies the knowability of the true⁷ — and the true of willing spirit, its rationality, insofar as it actualizes itself, is precisely the ethical commandments. Since such a philosophizing declares the cognition of the true to be an empty, self-important vanity that overflies the circle of cognition — a circle that is supposed to be merely appearance — it must directly make what is merely apparent, in respect of acting too, into its principle, and must thus place the ethical into the peculiar world-view of the individual and his particular conviction.⁸ The degradation into which philosophy has thus sunk appears, at first sight, before the world, to be a matter of the utmost indifference, one that befalls only idle scholastic chatter; but such a view necessarily forms itself into the view of the ethical, as an essential part of philosophy, and only then does what lies in those views appear in, and for, actuality. — Through the spread of the view that subjective conviction alone is what determines the ethical nature of an action, it has come about that, whereas formerly much, nowadays little, is said of hypocrisy; for the qualification of evil as hypocrisy has as its basis that certain actions are, in and for themselves, transgressions, vices, and crimes, such that whoever commits them necessarily knows them as such, insofar as he knows and recognizes the principles and external actions of piety and rightfulness precisely in the semblance to which he misuses them. Or, with regard to evil in general, the presupposition held that it is a duty to know the good and to be able to distinguish it from evil. In any case, however, the absolute demand held that a human being should commit no vicious and criminal actions, and that these must be imputed to him as such, insofar as he is a human being and not a beast. But if the good heart, the good intention, and subjective conviction are declared to be what gives actions their worth, then there is no more hypocrisy and, in general, no more evil, for whatever anyone does, he knows how, through reflection on good intentions and motives, to make it into something good, and, through the moment of his conviction, it is good.⁹ Thus there are no longer crimes and vices in and for themselves, and, in place of the frank and free, hardened, unmixed sinning referred to above, there has stepped the consciousness of complete justification through intention and conviction. My intention of the good in my action, and my conviction that it is good, make it good. Insofar as there is talk of judging and passing sentence on the action, it is, by virtue of this principle, only according to the intention and conviction of the agent, according to his belief, that he is to be judged — not in the sense in which Christ demands a belief in objective truth, such that, for one who has a bad belief, that is, a conviction evil according to its content, the judgment too turns out badly, that is, in accordance with this evil content, but rather according to belief in the sense of fidelity to conviction, as to whether the human being has remained true to his conviction in his acting — the formal, subjective fidelity that alone is supposed to contain what is dutiful. — With this principle of conviction, since it is at the same time determined as something subjective, the thought of the possibility of an error must indeed also force itself in, in which there thus lies the presupposition of a law valid in and for itself. But the law does not act; it is only the actual human being who acts, and, with the value of human actions, it can, according to that principle, depend only on the extent to which he has taken up that law into his conviction. But if, accordingly, it is not the actions that are to be judged according to that law, that is, are in general to be measured by it, then it is not apparent what that law is still supposed to be and to serve for. Such a law is reduced to a mere external letter, in fact to an empty word, for it is only through my conviction that it is made into a law, into something obligating and binding me. — That such a law has the authority of God, of the state, for itself — even the authority of millennia, in which it was the bond in which human beings and all their doing and destiny hold together and subsist — authorities that comprise within themselves a countless number of convictions of individuals — and that I, against this, set up the authority of my single conviction — as my subjective conviction, its validity is only authority — this, at first sight monstrous-seeming, self-conceit is set aside by the principle itself, inasmuch as it makes subjective conviction the rule. — If, now, through the higher inconsistency that reason and conscience, ineradicable by shallow science and bad sophistry, bring in, the possibility of an error is conceded, then, with the claim that crime and evil in general are an error, the fault is reduced to its very least. For to err is human — who has not erred about this or that, whether I ate cabbage or kale yesterday for lunch, and about countless other things, more and less important? But the distinction between important and unimportant falls away if it is solely the subjectivity of conviction, and persistence in it, that matters. But that higher inconsistency, concerning the possibility of an error, which comes from the nature of the case, is, in the turn it takes, that a bad conviction is only an error, in fact only converted into the other inconsistency, that of dishonesty; at one moment it is conviction on which the ethical and the highest worth of the human being is supposed to be grounded, and it is thereby declared to be the highest and most sacred thing; and at the next moment it is nothing more, whatever it is a question of, than an erring, my being convinced something trifling and contingent, in fact something external, that can happen to me one way or another. In fact, my being convinced is something utterly trifling if I cannot cognize the true; then it is a matter of indifference how I think, and there remains to me, for thinking, only that empty good, the abstraction of the understanding. — It results, moreover, to remark this too, from this principle of entitlement on the ground of conviction, as a consequence for the manner in which others act toward my acting, that, since they hold my actions, according to their belief and conviction, to be crimes, they do quite right in so doing — a consequence by which I not only retain nothing in advance, but am, on the contrary, only put down, from the standpoint of freedom and honour, into the relation of unfreedom and dishonour, namely, in respect of justice, which is in itself also mine, to experience only an alien subjective conviction, and to believe myself, in its exercise, treated only by an external force.

f) The highest form, finally, in which this subjectivity completely grasps and expresses itself, is the shape that has been called, with a name borrowed from Plato, irony — for only the name is taken from Plato, who used it of a manner of Socrates, which the latter employed, in personal conversation, against the conceit of the uncultivated and of sophistical consciousness, in the service of the Idea of truth and justice, but treated ironically only that consciousness, not the Idea itself. Irony concerns only a mode of behaviour of conversation toward persons; without the personal direction, the essential movement of thought is dialectic, and Plato was so far from taking the dialectical for itself, or even irony, as the last word and as the Idea itself, that he rather sank the crossing-over and passing-back of thought, and above all of a subjective opinion, into the substantiality of the Idea, and there brought it to a close.¹⁰ — The pinnacle still to be considered here, of subjectivity grasping itself as the ultimate, can only be this: to know itself as that very deciding and determining, regarding truth, right, and duty, which is already present in itself in the preceding forms. It consists, therefore, in knowing the ethical objective well enough, yet, without forgetting itself and renouncing itself so as to immerse itself in its earnestness and to act out of it, in holding it at the same time, in relation to it, at a distance from oneself, and in knowing oneself as that which so wills and decides, and can, equally well, will and decide otherwise. — You take a law, in fact and honestly, as being in and for itself; I too am there, and in it, but also further than you; I am also beyond it, and can do it this way or that. It is not the matter that is excellent, but I who am excellent, and am master over both law and matter,¹¹ which I merely play with, as with my own liking, and, in this ironic consciousness in which I let the highest perish, only enjoy myself. — This shape is not only the vanity of all ethical content — rights, duties, laws — evil, and indeed evil that is, within itself, wholly universal — but it also adds to this the form, the subjective vanity, of knowing itself as this vanity of all content, and, in this knowing, of knowing itself as the absolute. — The extent to which this absolute self-complacency does not remain a solitary worship of itself, but can also form a community, whose bond and substance is, perhaps, also the mutual assurance of conscientiousness, of good intentions, the mutual delight in this reciprocal purity, but above all the relishing of the glory of this self-knowing and self-expressing, and of the glory of this cherishing and cultivating — the extent to which what has been called the beautiful soul, the nobler subjectivity fading away in the vanity of all objectivity, and hence in the unactuality of itself, and further other configurations, related turns to the stage here considered — I have dealt with in the Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 605 ff., where the whole section c), conscience, may also be compared, in particular also with regard to the transition — there, moreover, otherwise determined — into a higher stage in general.