The four passages of the Phenomenology of Spirit (Bamberg and Würzburg 1807) to which Hegel refers in the Groundlines, in the context of their sections. The page numbers of the first edition which Hegel gives are accurate: pp. 101 f. the beginning of self-consciousness (§ 35), pp. 115 ff. lordship and bondage (§ 57), pp. 550 ff. the moral view of the world and dissemblance (§ 135), pp. 605 ff. the section on conscience (§ 140).
The text follows the Werke (volume 3).
Contents
- IV. The Truth of the Certainty of Itself — Groundlines § 35
- A. Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness; Lordship and Bondage — Groundlines § 57
- C. The Spirit Certain of Itself. Morality — Groundlines § 135
- a. The Moral View of the World — Groundlines § 135
- b. Dissemblance — Groundlines § 135
- c. Conscience. The Beautiful Soul, Evil and its Forgiveness — Groundlines § 140
IV. The Truth of the Certainty of Itself
In the modes of certainty hitherto considered, the true is for consciousness something other than consciousness itself. But the concept of this true vanishes in the experience of it; as the object immediately was in itself — the being of sensuous certainty, the concrete thing of perception, the force of the understanding — so it rather proves not to be in truth, but this in-itself shows itself to be a mode in which the object is only for an other; the concept of the object sublates itself in the actual object, or the first immediate representation sublates itself in experience, and certainty was lost in truth. But now there has arisen what did not come about in these earlier relations, namely a certainty which is equal to its truth; for certainty is its own object to itself, and consciousness is to itself the true. There is indeed also a being-other within it; consciousness distinguishes, but it distinguishes something which for it is at the same time not distinguished. If we call the movement of knowing the concept, but call the object knowing as quiescent unity or as I, then we see that not only for us, but for knowing itself, the object corresponds to the concept. — Or, in the other way, if we call the concept what the object is in itself, but call the object what it is as object or for an other, then it is evident that being-in-itself and being-for-an-other are the same; for the in-itself is consciousness; but it is equally that for which an other (the in-itself) is; and it is for consciousness that the in-itself of the object and its being for an other are the same; the I is the content of the relation and the relating itself; it is itself over against an other, and at the same time reaches out over this other, which for it is equally only itself.
With self-consciousness, then, we have now entered the native realm of truth. We must see how the shape of self-consciousness first comes forward. If we consider this new shape of knowing, the knowing of itself, in relation to the preceding one, the knowing of an other, then the latter has indeed vanished; but its moments have at the same time equally been preserved, and the loss consists in this, that they are present here as they are in themselves. The being of what is meant, the singularity and the universality of perception opposed to it, as well as the empty inner of the understanding, are no longer as essences, but as moments of self-consciousness, that is, as abstractions or differences which for consciousness itself are at the same time null, or are no differences and are purely vanishing essences. It seems, then, that only the chief moment itself has been lost, namely the simple self-subsistent subsistence for consciousness. But in fact self-consciousness is the reflection out of the being of the sensuous and perceived world, and essentially the return out of being-other. As self-consciousness it is movement; but in so far as it distinguishes only itself as itself from itself, the difference is for it immediately sublated as a being-other; the difference is not, and self-consciousness is only the motionless tautology of “I am I”; in so far as the difference does not for it have the shape of being too, it is not self-consciousness. There is therefore for it being-other as a being, or as a distinct moment; but there is for it also the unity of itself with this difference as a second distinct moment. With that first moment self-consciousness is as consciousness, and for it the whole expanse of the sensuous world is preserved, but at the same time only as related to the second moment, the unity of self-consciousness with itself; and that world is thereby for it a subsistence which, however, is only appearance or a difference which in itself has no being. This opposition of its appearance and its truth has, however, only truth, namely the unity of self-consciousness with itself, for its essence; this unity must become essential to it, that is, self-consciousness is desire in general. As self-consciousness, consciousness now has a twofold object: the one, the immediate one, the object of sensuous certainty and of perceiving, which however is marked for it with the character of the negative, and the second, namely itself, which is the true essence and is at first present only in opposition to the first. Self-consciousness here presents itself as the movement in which this opposition is sublated and in which its equality with itself comes to be for it.
But the object which for self-consciousness is the negative is for its part, for us or in itself, just as much gone back into itself as consciousness is on the other side. Through this reflection-into-self it has become life. What self-consciousness distinguishes from itself as a being has, in so far as it is posited as a being, not merely the mode of sensuous certainty and of perception at it, but is being reflected into itself, and the object of immediate desire is a living thing. For the in-itself, or the universal result of the relation of the understanding to the inner of things, is the distinguishing of what is not to be distinguished, or the unity of what is distinguished. But this unity is, as we have seen, just as much its repelling of itself from itself, and this concept divides itself into the opposition of self-consciousness and of life: the former the unity for which the infinite unity of the differences is; the latter, however, is only this unity itself, so that it is not at the same time for itself. As self-subsistent, then, as consciousness is, so self-subsistent in itself is its object. Self-consciousness, which is simply for itself and immediately marks its object with the character of the negative, or which is at first desire, will therefore rather make the experience of the self-subsistence of that object.
The determination of life, as it results from the concept or from the universal result with which we enter this sphere, is sufficient to characterize it, without its nature having to be further developed from that result; its circle closes in the following moments. The essence is infinity as the being-sublated of all differences, the pure movement revolving on its axis, the repose of itself as absolutely restless infinity; self-subsistence itself, in which the differences of the movement are dissolved; the simple essence of time, which in this self-equality has the solid shape of space. But the differences are just as much as differences in this simple universal medium; for this universal fluidity has its negative nature only in being a sublating of them; but it cannot sublate the differentiated terms if they do not have a subsistence. Precisely this fluidity, as self-equal self-subsistence, is itself the subsistence or the substance of those terms, in which they are therefore as differentiated members and parts existing for themselves. Being no longer has the meaning of the abstraction of being, nor has their pure essentiality the meaning of the abstraction of universality; rather their being is just that simple fluid substance of pure movement within itself. The difference of these members from one another, however, as difference consists in general in no other determinateness than the determinateness of the moments of infinity or of pure movement itself.
The self-subsistent members are for themselves; but this being-for-self is rather just as immediately their reflection into unity as this unity is the division into the self-subsistent shapes. The unity is divided because it is absolutely negative or infinite unity; and because it is the subsistence, the difference too has self-subsistence only at it. This self-subsistence of the shape appears as something determinate, for an other, for it is something divided; and the sublating of the division takes place to that extent through an other. But it is just as much at the shape itself; for precisely that fluidity is the substance of the self-subsistent shapes; but this substance is infinite; the shape is therefore in its very subsistence the division or the sublating of its being-for-self.
If we distinguish more closely the moments contained herein, we see that we have as the first moment the subsistence of the self-subsistent shapes, or the suppression of what differentiating is in itself, namely not to be in itself and to have no subsistence. But the second moment is the subjection of that subsistence to the infinity of difference. In the first moment there is the subsisting shape; as an infinite substance existing for itself or in its determinateness, it comes forward against the universal substance, denies this fluidity and continuity with it, and asserts itself as not dissolved in this universal but rather as preserving itself through separation from this its inorganic nature and through consuming it. Life in the universal fluid medium, a quiescent laying out of the shapes, becomes precisely thereby the movement of these shapes, or life as process. The simple universal fluidity is the in-itself, and the difference of the shapes the other. But this fluidity itself becomes the other through this difference; for it is now for the difference, which is in and for itself and therefore the infinite movement by which that quiescent medium is consumed — it is life as a living thing. — But this inversion is for that reason again the invertedness in its own self; what is consumed is the essence; the individuality which preserves itself at the cost of the universal and gives itself the feeling of its unity with itself thereby sublates precisely its opposition to the other, through which it is for itself; the unity with itself which it gives itself is precisely the fluidity of the differences or the universal dissolution. But conversely, the sublating of individual subsistence is equally the generating of it. For since the essence of the individual shape, universal life, and what exists for itself is in itself simple substance, it sublates, by positing the other within itself, this its simplicity or its essence, that is, it divides it, and this dividing of the undifferentiated fluidity is precisely the positing of individuality. The simple substance of life, then, is the division of itself into shapes and at the same time the dissolution of these subsisting differences; and the dissolution of the division is just as much a dividing or an articulating. The two sides of the whole movement which were distinguished — namely the formation of shapes quiescently laid out in the universal medium of self-subsistence, and the process of life — thereby fall into one another; the latter is just as much the formation of shapes as it is the sublating of the shape; and the first, the formation of shapes, is just as much a sublating as it is the articulation. The fluid element is itself only the abstraction of the essence, or it is actual only as shape; and that it articulates itself is again a dividing of what is articulated or a dissolving of it. This whole circuit constitutes life — neither what is first pronounced, the immediate continuity and solidity of its essence, nor the subsisting shape and the discrete existing for itself, nor the pure process of these, nor yet the simple gathering together of these moments, but the whole which develops itself and dissolves its development and in this movement simply preserves itself.
Since we set out from the first immediate unity and, through the moments of the formation of shapes and of the process, return to the unity of these two moments and thus again to the first simple substance, this reflected unity is another than the first. Over against that immediate unity, pronounced as a being, this second is the universal unity, which has all these moments within it as sublated. It is the simple genus, which in the movement of life itself does not exist for itself as this simple thing; rather, in this result life points to something other than it is, namely to consciousness, for which it is as this unity or as genus.
But this other life, for which the genus as such is and which is for itself genus, self-consciousness, is at first to itself only this simple essence and has as its object the pure I; in its experience, which is now to be considered, this abstract object will enrich itself for it and receive the unfolding which we have seen in life.
The simple I is this genus or the simple universal for which the differences are none, only in so far as it is the negative essence of the shaped self-subsistent moments; and self-consciousness is thus certain of itself only through the sublating of this other, which presents itself to it as self-subsistent life; it is desire. Certain of the nullity of this other, it posits that nullity for itself as its truth, annihilates the self-subsistent object and thereby gives itself the certainty of itself as true certainty, as a certainty which has come to be for it in an objective manner.
In this satisfaction, however, it makes the experience of the self-subsistence of its object. Desire, and the certainty of itself attained in its satisfaction, are conditioned by the object, for that certainty is through the sublating of this other; that this sublating may be, this other must be. Self-consciousness is therefore unable, through its negative relation, to sublate the object; it rather generates it again, as it does desire. It is in fact something other than self-consciousness that is the essence of desire; and through this experience this truth has come to be for self-consciousness itself. At the same time, however, self-consciousness is just as much absolutely for itself, and is so only through the sublating of the object, and its satisfaction must come to be for it, for it is the truth. On account of the self-subsistence of the object it can therefore attain satisfaction only in so far as the object itself carries out the negation upon itself; and it must carry out this negation of itself in itself, for it is in itself the negative, and must be for the other what it is. Since it is the negation in its own self and therein is at the same time self-subsistent, it is consciousness. In life, which is the object of desire, the negation is either in an other, namely in desire, or as determinateness over against another indifferent shape, or as its inorganic universal nature. But this universal self-subsistent nature, in which the negation is as absolute, is the genus as such, or as self-consciousness. Self-consciousness attains its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness.
Only in these three moments is the concept of self-consciousness completed: a) the pure undifferentiated I is its first immediate object. b) But this immediacy is itself absolute mediation; it is only as the sublating of the self-subsistent object, or it is desire. The satisfaction of desire is indeed the reflection of self-consciousness into itself, or the certainty that has become truth. c) But the truth of that certainty is rather the doubled reflection, the doubling of self-consciousness. There is an object for consciousness which in its own self posits its being-other, or the difference, as something null, and is therein self-subsistent. The differentiated, merely living shape does indeed also sublate its self-subsistence in the process of life itself, but with its difference it ceases to be what it is; the object of self-consciousness, however, is just as self-subsistent in this negativity of itself; and thereby it is for itself genus, universal fluidity in the ownness of its separation; it is living self-consciousness.
It is a self-consciousness for a self-consciousness. Only thereby is it in fact self-consciousness; for only herein does the unity of itself in its being-other come to be for it; the I, which is the object of its concept, is in fact not an object; but the object of desire is only self-subsistent, for it is the universal indestructible substance, the fluid self-equal essence. Since a self-consciousness is the object, the object is just as much I as object. — With this the concept of spirit is already present for us. What consciousness will further come to is the experience of what spirit is, this absolute substance which, in the perfect freedom and self-subsistence of its opposition, namely of different self-consciousnesses existing for themselves, is their unity; the I that is We, and the We that is I. Consciousness first has its turning point in self-consciousness, as the concept of spirit, at which it steps out of the coloured semblance of the sensuous here and now and out of the empty night of the supersensible beyond into the spiritual day of the present.
A. Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness; Lordship and Bondage
Self-consciousness is in and for itself in so far as, and through the fact that, it is in and for itself for an other; that is, it is only as something recognized. The concept of this its unity in its doubling, of the infinity realizing itself in self-consciousness, is a many-sided and ambiguous interlacing, so that its moments must partly be kept exactly apart, and partly, within this distinguishing, must at the same time be taken and known as not distinguished, or always in their opposite meaning. The double meaning of what is distinguished lies in the essence of self-consciousness, which is to be infinitely, or immediately, the opposite of the determinateness in which it is posited. The laying out of the concept of this spiritual unity in its doubling presents to us the movement of recognition.
There is for self-consciousness another self-consciousness; it has come outside itself. This has a double meaning: first, it has lost itself, for it finds itself as an other essence; secondly, it has thereby sublated the other, for it does not see the other as essence either, but itself in the other.
It must sublate this its being-other; this is the sublating of the first double meaning and therefore itself a second double meaning; first, it must set about sublating the other self-subsistent essence, in order thereby to become certain of itself as the essence; secondly, it thereby sets about sublating itself, for this other is itself.
This doubly meaningful sublating of its doubly meaningful being-other is equally a doubly meaningful return into itself; for first, through the sublating it gets itself back, for it becomes equal to itself again through the sublating of its being-other; secondly, however, it gives the other self-consciousness back to it again in the same way, for it was to itself in the other, it sublates this its being in the other, and thus releases the other again as free.
But this movement of self-consciousness in relation to another self-consciousness has in this way been represented as the doing of the one; but this doing of the one has itself the double meaning of being just as much its own doing as the doing of the other; for the other is equally self-subsistent, enclosed within itself, and there is nothing in it that is not through it itself. The first does not have the object before it as it at first is only for desire, but a self-subsistent object existing for itself, over which it can therefore do nothing for itself unless the object does in its own self what the first does to it. The movement is thus simply the doubled movement of both self-consciousnesses. Each sees the other do the same as it does; each itself does what it demands of the other, and therefore does what it does only in so far as the other does the same; a one-sided doing would be useless, because what is to happen can come about only through both.
The doing is therefore doubly meaningful not only in so far as it is a doing just as much towards itself as towards the other, but also in so far as it is inseparably just as much the doing of the one as of the other.
In this movement we see repeated the process which presented itself as the play of forces, but now in consciousness. What in that process was for us is here for the extremes themselves. The middle term is self-consciousness, which decomposes itself into the extremes; and each extreme is this exchange of its determinateness and absolute passing over into the opposite. As consciousness, however, it does indeed come outside itself; yet in its being outside itself it is at the same time held back within itself, is for itself, and its being outside itself is for it. It is for it that it immediately is and is not another consciousness; and likewise that this other is for itself only in so far as it sublates itself as existing for itself and is for itself only in the being-for-self of the other. Each is to the other the middle term through which each mediates itself with itself and closes together with itself, and each is to itself and to the other an immediate essence existing for itself, which at the same time is thus for itself only through this mediation. They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another.
This pure concept of recognition, of the doubling of self-consciousness within its unity, is now to be considered as its process appears for self-consciousness. It will first present the side of the inequality of the two, or the stepping out of the middle term into the extremes, which as extremes are opposed to one another, and of which the one is only what is recognized, the other only what recognizes.
Self-consciousness is at first simple being-for-self, self-equal through the exclusion of everything other from itself; its essence and absolute object is to it I; and in this immediacy, or in this being of its being-for-self, it is a single individual. What is other for it is an unessential object marked with the character of the negative. But the other is also a self-consciousness; one individual comes forward over against another individual. Coming forward thus immediately, they are for one another in the manner of ordinary objects; self-subsistent shapes, consciousnesses submerged in the being of life — for as life the object that is has here determined itself — which have not yet accomplished for one another the movement of absolute abstraction, of annihilating all immediate being and of being only the purely negative being of self-equal consciousness, or have not yet presented themselves to one another as pure being-for-self, that is, as self-consciousnesses. Each is indeed certain of itself, but not of the other, and therefore its own certainty of itself has as yet no truth; for its truth would only be that its own being-for-self had presented itself to it as a self-subsistent object, or, what is the same, that the object had presented itself as this pure certainty of itself. But this is not possible, according to the concept of recognition, except in such a way that, as the other is for it, so it is for the other, each in its own self accomplishing this pure abstraction of being-for-self through its own doing and again through the doing of the other.
But the presentation of itself as the pure abstraction of self-consciousness consists in showing itself as the pure negation of its objective mode, or in showing that it is tied to no determinate existence, not tied to the universal singularity of existence in general, not tied to life. This presentation is the doubled doing: the doing of the other and the doing through itself. In so far as it is the doing of the other, each thus seeks the death of the other. But therein the second, the doing through itself, is also present; for the former includes within it the staking of one’s own life. The relation of the two self-consciousnesses is thus determined in such a way that they prove themselves and one another through the struggle of life and death. — They must enter into this struggle, for they must raise the certainty of themselves, of being for themselves, to truth in the other and in themselves. And it is solely the staking of life by which freedom is proved, by which it is proved that for self-consciousness the essence is not being, not the immediate manner in which it comes forward, not its being submerged in the expanse of life — but rather that there is nothing present in it which would not for it be a vanishing moment, that it is only pure being-for-self. The individual who has not risked life may well be recognized as a person; but it has not attained the truth of this being recognized as a self-subsistent self-consciousness. Likewise each must seek the death of the other, just as it stakes its own life; for the other counts to it no more than itself; its essence presents itself to it as an other, it is outside itself, it must sublate its being outside itself; the other is a consciousness entangled in manifold ways and existing; it must intuit its being-other as pure being-for-self or as absolute negation.
But this proving through death sublates the truth which was supposed to emerge from it just as much as it thereby sublates the certainty of itself in general; for as life is the natural position of consciousness, self-subsistence without absolute negativity, so death is the natural negation of consciousness, negation without self-subsistence, which therefore remains without the required significance of recognition. Through death there has indeed arisen the certainty that both risked their lives and despised life in themselves and in the other; but not for those who survived this struggle. They sublate their consciousness posited in this alien essentiality which is natural existence, or they sublate themselves and are sublated as the extremes which want to be for themselves. But with this there vanishes from the play of exchange the essential moment of decomposing into extremes of opposed determinatenesses; and the middle term collapses into a dead unity which is decomposed into dead, merely existing, not opposed extremes; and the two do not mutually give and receive one another back through consciousness, but leave one another free only indifferently, as things. Their deed is abstract negation, not the negation of consciousness, which sublates in such a way that it preserves and maintains what is sublated and thereby survives its being sublated.
In this experience it comes to be for self-consciousness that life is as essential to it as pure self-consciousness. In immediate self-consciousness the simple I is the absolute object, which however for us or in itself is absolute mediation and has subsisting self-subsistence as its essential moment. The dissolution of that simple unity is the result of the first experience; through it there is posited a pure self-consciousness and a consciousness which is not purely for itself but for an other, that is, as an existing consciousness or consciousness in the shape of thinghood. Both moments are essential; — since they are at first unequal and opposed, and their reflection into unity has not yet resulted, they are as two opposed shapes of consciousness: the one the self-subsistent, for which being-for-self is the essence, the other the dependent, for which life or being for an other is the essence; the former is the lord, the latter the bondsman.
The lord is the consciousness existing for itself, but no longer merely the concept of such a consciousness; rather, a consciousness existing for itself which is mediated with itself through an other consciousness, namely through one to whose essence it belongs that it is synthesized with self-subsistent being or with thinghood in general. The lord relates himself to these two moments, to a thing as such, the object of desire, and to the consciousness for which thinghood is the essential; and since he is a) as the concept of self-consciousness an immediate relation of being-for-self, but b) is now at the same time mediation, or a being-for-self which is for itself only through an other, he relates himself a) immediately to both and b) mediately to each through the other. The lord relates himself to the bondsman mediately through self-subsistent being; for it is precisely by this that the bondsman is held; it is his chain, from which he could not abstract in the struggle and by which he therefore showed himself to be dependent, to have his self-subsistence in thinghood. But the lord is the power over this being, for he showed in the struggle that it counted to him only as something negative; since he is the power over it, while this being is the power over the other, he has in this syllogism that other under him. Likewise the lord relates himself mediately through the bondsman to the thing; the bondsman, as self-consciousness in general, also relates himself negatively to the thing and sublates it; but it is at the same time self-subsistent for him, and he cannot therefore, through his negating, finish with it to the point of annihilation, or he only works upon it. For the lord, by contrast, there comes to be, through this mediation, the immediate relation as the pure negation of the thing, or enjoyment; what desire did not achieve, he achieves, namely to finish with it and to satisfy himself in enjoyment. Desire did not achieve this on account of the self-subsistence of the thing; but the lord, who has interposed the bondsman between it and himself, thereby closes together only with the dependence of the thing and enjoys it purely; the side of self-subsistence, however, he leaves to the bondsman, who works upon it.
In these two moments there comes to be for the lord his being recognized through another consciousness; for the latter posits itself in them as unessential, once in the working upon the thing, and again in the dependence upon a determinate existence; in both it cannot become master over being and attain absolute negation. There is therefore present here that moment of recognition in which the other consciousness sublates itself as being-for-self and thereby itself does what the first does towards it. Likewise the other moment, that this doing of the second is the first’s own doing; for what the bondsman does is properly the doing of the lord; to the lord only being-for-self is the essence; he is the pure negative power to which the thing is nothing, and thus the pure essential doing in this relation; the bondsman, however, is a doing that is not pure but unessential. But for recognition proper there is lacking the moment that what the lord does towards the other he also does towards himself, and that what the bondsman does towards himself he also does towards the other. Through this a one-sided and unequal recognition has arisen.
The unessential consciousness is herein for the lord the object which constitutes the truth of the certainty of himself. But it is evident that this object does not correspond to its concept, but rather that in that in which the lord has accomplished himself, something quite other than a self-subsistent consciousness has come to be for him. It is not such a consciousness that is for him, but rather a dependent one; he is therefore not certain of being-for-self as the truth; rather his truth is the unessential consciousness and the unessential doing of that consciousness.
The truth of the self-subsistent consciousness is accordingly the bondsman’s consciousness. This indeed appears at first outside itself and not as the truth of self-consciousness. But just as lordship showed that its essence is the inverse of what it wants to be, so too bondage will in its accomplishment rather become the opposite of what it immediately is; as a consciousness driven back into itself it will go into itself and turn round into true self-subsistence.
We saw only what bondage is in the relation of lordship. But it is self-consciousness, and what it accordingly is in and for itself is now to be considered. At first the lord is the essence for bondage; thus the self-subsistent consciousness existing for itself is to it the truth, which however is not yet at it for it. Yet bondage has this truth of pure negativity and of being-for-self in fact in its own self; for it has experienced this essence at itself. This consciousness has, namely, been anxious not about this or that, nor for this or that moment, but about its whole essence; for it has felt the fear of death, of the absolute lord. Therein it has been inwardly dissolved, has trembled through and through within itself, and everything fixed has quaked in it. But this pure universal movement, the absolute becoming fluid of all subsistence, is the simple essence of self-consciousness, absolute negativity, pure being-for-self, which is thus at this consciousness. This moment of pure being-for-self is also for it, for in the lord it is its object. It is further not only this universal dissolution in general, but in serving it accomplishes that dissolution actually; therein it sublates in all single moments its attachment to natural existence and works it away.
But the feeling of absolute power in general, and in the particulars of service, is only dissolution in itself, and although the fear of the lord is the beginning of wisdom, consciousness is therein for itself, not being-for-self. Through work, however, it comes to itself. In the moment which corresponds to desire in the consciousness of the lord, the side of the unessential relation to the thing seemed indeed to have fallen to the serving consciousness, in that the thing therein retains its self-subsistence. Desire reserved to itself the pure negating of the object and thereby the unmixed feeling of self. But this satisfaction is for that very reason itself only a vanishing, for it lacks the objective side or subsistence. Work, by contrast, is checked desire, arrested vanishing, or it forms. The negative relation to the object becomes the form of the object and something enduring, precisely because for the worker the object has self-subsistence. This negative middle term, or the forming activity, is at the same time singularity or the pure being-for-self of consciousness, which now in work steps outside itself into the element of enduring; the working consciousness thus comes hereby to the intuition of self-subsistent being as of itself.
But forming has not only this positive significance, that the serving consciousness therein becomes, as pure being-for-self, something that is, but also the negative significance over against its first moment, fear. For in the forming of the thing its own negativity, its being-for-self, becomes an object to it only through its sublating the opposed existing form. But this objective negative is precisely the alien essence before which it trembled. Now, however, it destroys this alien negative, posits itself as such a negative in the element of enduring, and thereby becomes for itself something existing for itself. In the lord, being-for-self is to it an other or only for it; in fear, being-for-self is at itself; in forming, being-for-self comes to be for it as its own, and it comes to the consciousness that it itself is in and for itself. The form, by being set out, does not become to it an other than itself; for precisely the form is its pure being-for-self, which therein becomes truth for it. Thus, through this rediscovery of itself by itself, it becomes a mind of its own, precisely in the work in which it seemed to be only an alien mind. — For this reflection the two moments of fear and of service in general, as well as of forming, are necessary, and both at the same time in a universal manner. Without the discipline of service and obedience, fear remains at the formal level and does not spread over the conscious actuality of existence. Without forming, fear remains inward and mute, and consciousness does not become for itself. If consciousness forms without the first absolute fear, it is only a vain mind of its own; for its form or negativity is not negativity in itself; and its forming can therefore not give it the consciousness of itself as the essence. If it has not endured absolute fear but only some anxiety, the negative essence has remained something external to it, its substance is not infected through and through by it. Since not all the fulfilments of its natural consciousness have been shaken, it still belongs in itself to determinate being; the mind of its own is self-will, a freedom which still remains within bondage. As little as pure form can become the essence for it, so little is that form, considered as an extension over the single, a universal forming, an absolute concept; rather it is a skill which has power only over some things, not over the universal power and the whole objective essence.
C. Spirit Certain of Itself. Morality
The ethical world showed the spirit which in it was only departed, the single self, as its destiny and its truth. But this person of right has its substance and fulfilment outside itself. The movement of the world of culture and of faith sublates this abstraction of the person, and through completed estrangement, through the highest abstraction, substance becomes for the self of spirit first the universal will and finally its own property. Here, then, knowing seems at last to have become perfectly equal to its truth, for its truth is this knowing itself, and all opposition of the two sides has vanished — and indeed not for us or in itself, but for self-consciousness itself. For it has become master over the opposition of consciousness itself. This opposition rests upon the opposition of the certainty of itself and of the object; now, however, the object is to it itself the certainty of itself, is knowing — just as the certainty of itself as such no longer has purposes of its own, and is therefore no longer in determinateness, but is pure knowing.
The knowing of self-consciousness is therefore to it substance itself. Substance is for it just as immediate as it is absolutely mediated, in an undivided unity. Immediate — like the ethical consciousness, it itself knows and does duty and belongs to duty as to its nature; but it is not character as that consciousness is, which on account of its immediacy is a determinate spirit, belongs only to one of the ethical essentialities, and has the side of not knowing. — It is absolute mediation, like the consciousness which cultivates itself and the consciousness of faith; for it is essentially the movement of the self to sublate the abstraction of immediate existence and to become universal to itself — yet neither through pure estrangement and the rending apart of its self and of actuality, nor through flight. Rather it is immediately present to itself in its substance, for substance is its knowing, it is the intuited pure certainty of itself; and precisely this immediacy, which is its own actuality, is all actuality, for the immediate is being itself, and as the pure immediacy purified by absolute negativity it is pure being, is being in general, or all being.
The absolute essence is therefore not exhausted in the determination of being the simple essence of thinking, but is all actuality, and this actuality is only as knowing; what consciousness did not know would have no sense and can be no power for it; into its knowing will all objectivity and world have withdrawn. It is absolutely free in that it knows its freedom, and precisely this knowing of its freedom is its substance and purpose and sole content.
a. The moral view of the world
Self-consciousness knows duty as the absolute essence; it is bound only by duty, and this substance is its own pure consciousness; duty cannot receive for it the form of something alien. But enclosed in itself in this way, moral self-consciousness is not yet posited and considered as consciousness. The object is immediate knowing, and thus purely pervaded by the self it is not an object. But being essentially mediation and negativity, it has in its concept the relation to a being-other and is consciousness. This being-other is, on the one hand, because duty constitutes its sole essential purpose and object, an entirely meaningless actuality for it. But because this consciousness is so perfectly enclosed within itself, it relates itself to this being-other perfectly freely and indifferently; and existence is therefore, on the other hand, an existence wholly set free by self-consciousness, likewise relating itself only to itself; the freer self-consciousness becomes, the freer too the negative object of its consciousness. Thereby it is a world completed within itself into an individuality of its own, a self-subsistent whole of laws peculiar to it, as well as a self-subsistent course and free realization of those laws — a nature in general, whose laws as well as whose doing belong to itself, as to an essence which is unconcerned about moral self-consciousness, just as the latter is unconcerned about it.
From this determination onwards there forms itself a moral view of the world, which consists in the relation of moral being-in-and-for-self and natural being-in-and-for-self. At the ground of this relation lies both the complete indifference and peculiar self-subsistence of nature and of moral purposes and activity towards one another, and on the other side the consciousness of the sole essentiality of duty and of the complete dependence and unessentiality of nature. The moral view of the world contains the development of the moments which are present in this relation of such entirely conflicting presuppositions.
First, then, moral consciousness in general is presupposed; duty counts to it as the essence, to it which is actual and active and which in its actuality and deed fulfils duty. But for this moral consciousness there is at the same time the presupposed freedom of nature; or it experiences that nature is unconcerned to give it the consciousness of the unity of its actuality with nature’s own, and therefore lets it become perhaps happy, perhaps also not. The immoral consciousness, by contrast, perhaps finds its realization by chance, where the moral consciousness sees only occasion for acting, but does not see the good fortune of execution and of the enjoyment of accomplishment fall to it through that acting. It therefore finds rather ground for complaint over such a condition of inadequacy between itself and existence, and over the injustice which restricts it to having its object only as pure duty, but denies it the sight of that object and of itself realized.
Moral consciousness cannot renounce happiness and leave this moment out of its absolute purpose. The purpose, which is pronounced as pure duty, has essentially this about it, that it contains this single self-consciousness; individual conviction and the knowing of it constituted an absolute moment of morality. This moment in the purpose that has become objective, in fulfilled duty, is the single consciousness intuiting itself as realized, or enjoyment, which thus lies in the concept — not indeed immediately in the concept of morality considered as conviction, but in the concept of its realization. Thereby, however, it also lies in morality as conviction; for this is directed not at remaining conviction in opposition to acting, but at acting or realizing itself. The purpose, pronounced as the whole with the consciousness of its moments, is therefore this: that fulfilled duty be just as much a purely moral action as a realized individuality, and that nature, as the side of singularity over against the abstract purpose, be one with that purpose. — As necessary as the experience of the disharmony of the two sides is, because nature is free, so too is duty alone the essential, and nature over against it the selfless. That whole purpose which the harmony constitutes contains actuality itself within it. It is at the same time the thought of actuality. The harmony of morality and nature, or — since nature comes into consideration only in so far as consciousness experiences its unity with itself — the harmony of morality and happiness is thought as necessarily being, or it is postulated. For to demand expresses that something is thought as being which is not yet actual; a necessity not of the concept as concept, but of being. But necessity is at the same time essentially the relation through the concept. The demanded being therefore does not belong to the representing of contingent consciousness, but lies in the concept of morality itself, whose true content is the unity of pure and of single consciousness; to the latter it belongs that this unity be for it as an actuality, which in the content of the purpose is happiness, but in its form is existence in general. — This demanded existence, or the unity of the two, is therefore not a wish, nor, considered as a purpose, one whose attainment would still be uncertain; rather it is a demand of reason, or the immediate certainty and presupposition of reason.
That first experience and this postulate are not the only one; rather, a whole circle of postulates opens up. For nature is not only this entirely free external manner in which, as in a pure object, consciousness would have to realize its purpose. Consciousness is in its own self essentially such that for it this other free actual thing is, that is, it is itself something contingent and natural. This nature, which is its own, is sensibility, which in the shape of willing, as impulses and inclinations, has for itself its own determinate essentiality or single purposes, and is therefore opposed to the pure will and its pure purpose. Over against this opposition, however, what is essential to pure consciousness is rather the relation of sensibility to it, its absolute unity with it. Both, the pure thinking and the sensibility of consciousness, are in themselves one consciousness, and pure thinking is precisely that for which and in which this pure unity is; but for it as consciousness there is the opposition of itself and of the impulses. In this conflict of reason and sensibility, what is essential for reason is that the conflict dissolve itself and that as result the unity of the two emerge — a unity which is not that original one, that both are in one individual, but one which emerges from the known opposition of the two. Only such a unity is actual morality, for in it is contained the opposition through which the self is consciousness, or is first actual and in fact self and at the same time universal; or there is expressed therein that mediation which, as we see, is essential to morality. — Since among the two moments of the opposition sensibility is simply the being-other or the negative, whereas the pure thinking of duty is the essence of which nothing can be given up, it seems that the unity brought forth can come about only through the sublating of sensibility. But since sensibility is itself a moment of this becoming, the moment of actuality, one will at first have to be content, for this unity, with the expression that sensibility be conformable to morality. — This unity is likewise a postulated being; it is not there; for what is there is consciousness, or the opposition of sensibility and of pure consciousness. But it is at the same time not an in-itself like the first postulate, in which free nature constitutes one side and the harmony of nature with moral consciousness therefore falls outside the latter; rather nature is here that which is in consciousness itself, and it is here a matter of morality as such, of a harmony which is the doing self’s own; consciousness has therefore itself to bring it about and to make continual progress in morality. But the completion of morality is to be postponed to infinity; for if it actually came about, moral consciousness would sublate itself. For morality is moral consciousness only as the negative essence, for whose pure duty sensibility has only a negative significance, is only not conformable. In the harmony, however, morality as consciousness, or its actuality, vanishes, just as in moral consciousness, or in its actuality, its harmony vanishes. Completion is therefore not actually to be attained, but is to be thought only as an absolute task, that is, as one which simply remains a task. At the same time, however, its content is to be thought as one which simply must be and must not remain a task; whether one represents consciousness in this goal as wholly sublated or not, how matters properly stand with this can no longer be clearly distinguished in the dark distance of infinity, to which, precisely for that reason, the attainment of the goal is to be postponed. It will properly have to be said that the determinate representation should not interest us and should not be sought, because this leads to contradictions — of a task which is to remain a task and yet be fulfilled, of a morality which is to be no longer consciousness, no longer actual. But through the consideration that completed morality would contain a contradiction, the holiness of the moral essentiality would suffer, and absolute duty would appear as something unactual.
The first postulate was the harmony of morality and objective nature, the final purpose of the world; the second, the harmony of morality and the sensuous will, the final purpose of self-consciousness as such; the first, then, the harmony in the form of being-in-itself, the second in the form of being-for-self. But what connects these two extreme final purposes, which are thought, as the middle term, is the movement of actual acting itself. They are harmonies whose moments in their abstract distinctness have not yet become an object; this happens in actuality, in which the sides come forward in consciousness proper, each as the other of the other. The postulates that thereby arise contain, whereas previously they contained only the separate harmonies which are in themselves and for themselves, now harmonies which are in and for themselves.
Moral consciousness, as the simple knowing and willing of pure duty, is in acting related to an object opposed to its simplicity, to the actuality of the manifold case, and thereby has a manifold moral relationship. There arise here, as regards content, the many laws in general, and as regards form, the contradictory powers of the knowing consciousness and of the unconscious. — As concerns, first, the many duties, to moral consciousness only pure duty in them counts at all; the many duties as many are determinate duties and therefore as such nothing holy for moral consciousness. But being at the same time necessary through the concept of acting, which encloses within it a manifold actuality and therefore a manifold moral relation, they must be considered as being in and for themselves. Since, furthermore, they can be only in a moral consciousness, they are at the same time in another consciousness than that to which only pure duty is the pure duty in and for itself and holy.
It is therefore postulated that there be an other consciousness which sanctifies them, or which knows and wills them as duties. The first keeps pure duty indifferent towards all determinate content, and duty is only this indifference towards content. The other, however, contains the equally essential relation to acting and the necessity of the determinate content; since duties count to it as determinate duties, content as such is to it just as essential as the form through which it is duty. This consciousness is thereby one in which the universal and the particular are simply one, its concept therefore the same as the concept of the harmony of morality and happiness. For this opposition likewise expresses the separation of the self-equal moral consciousness from actuality, which as manifold being conflicts with the simple essence of duty. But if the first postulate expresses only the existing harmony of morality and nature, because nature therein is this negative of self-consciousness, the moment of being, now, by contrast, this in-itself is essentially posited as consciousness. For what is now has the form of the content of duty, or is the determinateness in determinate duty. The in-itself is therefore the unity of such as, being simple essentialities, are essentialities of thinking and therefore only in a consciousness. This consciousness is accordingly a lord and ruler of the world, who brings forth the harmony of morality and happiness and at the same time sanctifies the duties as many. The latter means that to the consciousness of pure duty determinate duty cannot be immediately holy; but because, for the sake of actual acting, which is something determinate, it is likewise necessary, its necessity falls outside that consciousness into another, which is thus the mediating consciousness of determinate and pure duty and the ground that determinate duty also counts.
In actual action, however, consciousness conducts itself as this self, as a completely single self; it is directed at actuality as such and has it as its purpose, for it wills to accomplish. Duty in general therefore falls outside it into another essence, which is consciousness and the holy lawgiver of pure duty. To the acting consciousness, precisely because it is acting, the other of pure duty counts immediately; pure duty is therefore the content of another consciousness and is holy to the acting one only mediately, namely in that other.
Because it is hereby posited that the validity of duty as the holy in and for itself falls outside actual consciousness, this consciousness thereby stands on one side as the imperfect moral consciousness. As regards its knowing, it knows itself as one whose knowing and conviction is incomplete and contingent; likewise as regards its willing, as one whose purposes are affected with sensibility. On account of its unworthiness it can therefore not regard happiness as necessary, but only as something contingent, and can expect it only from grace.
But although its actuality is imperfect, duty nevertheless counts as the essence for its pure willing and knowing; in the concept, in so far as this is opposed to reality, or in thinking, it is therefore perfect. But the absolute essence is precisely this thought and postulated beyond actuality; it is therefore the thought in which the morally imperfect knowing and willing counts as perfect, and which, since it takes that knowing and willing as of full weight, therefore also apportions happiness according to worthiness, namely according to the merit ascribed to it.
The view of the world is herein completed; for in the concept of moral self-consciousness the two sides, pure duty and actuality, are posited in one unity, and thereby the one as well as the other is posited not as being in and for itself, but as a moment, or as sublated. This comes to be for consciousness in the last part of the moral view of the world; it posits pure duty, namely, in another essence than it itself is, that is, it posits pure duty partly as something represented, partly as something which is not what counts in and for itself, but rather the non-moral counts as perfect. Likewise it posits itself as one whose actuality, which is inadequate to duty, is sublated and, as sublated, or in the representation of the absolute essence, no longer contradicts morality.
For moral consciousness itself, however, its moral view of the world does not have the significance that it therein develops its own concept and makes it its object; it has a consciousness neither of this opposition as regards form nor of the opposition as regards content, whose parts it does not relate and compare with one another, but rolls onward in its development without being the concept that holds the moments together. For it knows only the pure essence, or the object in so far as it is duty, in so far as it is an abstract object of its pure consciousness, as pure knowing or as itself. It therefore conducts itself only in a thinking manner, not in a comprehending one. Hence the object of its actual consciousness is not yet transparent to it; it is not the absolute concept, which alone grasps being-other as such, or its absolute opposite, as itself. Its own actuality, as well as all objective actuality, counts to it indeed as the unessential; but its freedom is the freedom of pure thinking, over against which, for that very reason, nature has arisen at the same time as something equally free. Because both are in it in the same way, the freedom of being and the enclosedness of being within consciousness, its object becomes something existing which is at the same time only thought; in the last part of its view the content is essentially posited in such a way that its being is something represented, and this connection of being and thinking is pronounced as what it in fact is: representing.
If we consider the moral view of the world in such a way that this objective mode is nothing other than the concept of moral self-consciousness itself, which it makes objective to itself, then through this consciousness about the form of its origin there results another shape of its presentation. — The first, namely, from which we set out, is actual moral self-consciousness, or that there is such a thing. For the concept posits it in the determination that to it all actuality in general has essence only in so far as it is conformable to duty, and it posits this essence as knowing, that is, in immediate unity with the actual self; this unity is thus itself actual, it is a moral actual consciousness. — This consciousness now, as consciousness, represents its content to itself as an object, namely as the final purpose of the world, as the harmony of morality and of all actuality. But since it represents this unity as an object and is not yet the concept which has power over the object as such, this unity is to it a negative of self-consciousness, or it falls outside it as a beyond of its actuality, yet at the same time as something which is also thought as being, but only thought.
What thus remains over for it, which as self-consciousness is an other than the object, is the disharmony of the consciousness of duty and actuality, and indeed of its own actuality. The proposition therefore now runs thus: there is no morally completed actual self-consciousness; and since the moral is at all only in so far as it is completed — for duty is the pure unmixed in-itself, and morality consists only in conformity to this pure in-itself — the second proposition runs in general thus, that there is nothing morally actual.
But since, thirdly, it is a self, it is in itself the unity of duty and of actuality; this unity therefore becomes an object to it, as completed morality — but as a beyond of its actuality — which nevertheless is to be actual.
In this goal of the synthetic unity of the first two propositions, self-conscious actuality as well as duty is posited only as a sublated moment; for neither is single, but they, in whose essential determination it lies to be free from the other, are thus each of them in the unity no longer free from the other, hence each is sublated; and thus they become, as regards content, objects of which each counts for the other, and as regards form in such a way that this exchange of them is at the same time only represented. — Or, what is actually not moral, because it is likewise pure thinking and elevated above its actuality, is in representation nevertheless moral and is taken as fully valid. Hereby the first proposition, that there is a moral self-consciousness, is restored, but connected with the second, that there is none — namely, there is one, but only in representation; or there is indeed none, but it is nevertheless allowed by another to count as one.
b. Dissemblance
In the moral view of the world we see, on the one hand, consciousness itself generating its object with consciousness; we see it neither find that object before it as something alien nor have it come to be for it unconsciously; rather it proceeds throughout according to a ground out of which it posits the objective essence; it therefore knows that essence as itself, for it knows itself as the active one which generates it. It thus seems here to come to its rest and satisfaction, for it can find these only where it no longer needs to go beyond its object, because the object no longer goes beyond it. On the other side, however, it rather posits the object outside itself, as a beyond of itself. But this being-in-and-for-itself is equally posited as something which is not free from self-consciousness, but is for the sake of self-consciousness and through it.
The moral view of the world is therefore in fact nothing other than the working out of this underlying contradiction according to its various sides; it is, to use here a Kantian expression where it is most fitting, a whole nest of thoughtless contradictions. Consciousness conducts itself in this development in such a way that it fixes one moment and from there passes immediately over to the other and sublates the first; but as soon as it has now set up this second one, it also dissembles it again and rather makes the opposite into the essence. At the same time it is also conscious of its contradiction and of its dissembling, for it passes from one moment immediately in relation to this moment itself over to the opposite; because a moment has no reality for it, it posits precisely that moment as real; or, what is the same, in order to assert one moment as being in itself, it asserts the opposite one as that which is in itself. It thereby confesses that it is in fact in earnest about neither of them. This is to be considered more closely in the moments of this dizzying movement.
Let us first leave aside the presupposition that there is an actual moral consciousness, because it is not made immediately in relation to anything preceding, and turn to the harmony of morality and nature, the first postulate. It is supposed to be in itself, not for the actual consciousness, not present; rather the present is only the contradiction of the two. In the present, morality is assumed as at hand and actuality is so placed that it is not in harmony with it. But the actual moral consciousness is an acting one; precisely in this consists the actuality of its morality. In acting itself, however, that placement is immediately dissembled; for acting is nothing other than the realization of the inner moral purpose, nothing other than the bringing forth of an actuality determined by the purpose, or of the harmony of the moral purpose and actuality itself. At the same time the accomplishment of the action is for consciousness; it is the presence of this unity of actuality and of purpose; and because in the accomplished action consciousness realizes itself as this single individual, or intuits existence as returned into it, and enjoyment consists in this, there is at the same time contained in the actuality of the moral purpose that form of it which is called enjoyment and happiness. — Acting therefore in fact immediately fulfils what was set up as not taking place and as supposed to be only a postulate, only a beyond. Consciousness thus declares through the deed that it is not in earnest about the postulating, because the sense of acting is rather this: to make present what was not supposed to be in the present. And since the harmony is postulated for the sake of acting — for what is to become actual through acting must be so in itself, otherwise actuality would not be possible — the connection of acting and of the postulate is such that for the sake of acting, that is, for the sake of the actual harmony of purpose and actuality, this harmony is posited as not actual, as a beyond.
In so far as one acts, then, one is not in earnest at all about the inadequacy of purpose and actuality; but one does seem to be in earnest about the acting itself. Yet in fact the actual action is only the action of the single consciousness, hence itself only something single, and the work contingent. But the purpose of reason, as the universal, all-embracing purpose, is nothing less than the whole world; a final purpose which goes far beyond the content of this single action and which is therefore to be placed beyond all actual acting whatever. Because the universal best is to be carried out, nothing good is done. In fact, however, the nullity of actual acting and the reality only of the whole purpose, which are now set up, are on all sides dissembled again. Moral action is not something contingent and limited, for it has pure duty as its essence; this constitutes the sole, whole purpose, and the action, as its realization, is therefore, with whatever limitation of content besides, the accomplishment of the whole absolute purpose. Or, if actuality is again taken as nature, which has its own laws and is opposed to pure duty, so that duty therefore cannot realize its law in nature, then, since duty as such is the essence, it is in fact not a matter of the accomplishment of pure duty, which is the whole purpose; for the accomplishment would rather have for its purpose not pure duty but its opposite, actuality. But that it is not a matter of actuality is dissembled once more; for according to the concept of moral acting, pure duty is essentially active consciousness; there is therefore certainly to be action, the absolute duty is to be expressed in the whole of nature, and the moral law is to become a law of nature.
If, then, we let this highest good count as the essence, consciousness is not in earnest about morality at all. For in this highest good nature does not have another law than morality has. Thereby moral acting itself falls away, for acting is only under the presupposition of a negative which is to be sublated through the action. But if nature is conformable to the moral law, then this law would indeed be violated through acting, through the sublating of what is. — In that assumption, then, a condition is conceded as the essential one in which moral acting is superfluous and does not take place at all. The postulate of the harmony of morality and actuality — a harmony which is posited through the concept of moral acting, which is to bring the two into agreement — thus expresses itself from this side too as follows: because moral acting is the absolute purpose, the absolute purpose is that moral acting be not present at all.
If we put together these moments through which consciousness rolled onward in its moral representing, it is evident that it sublates each of them again in its opposite. It sets out from the position that for it morality and actuality do not harmonize, but it is not in earnest about this, for in the action the presence of this harmony is for it. But neither is it in earnest about this acting, since acting is something single; for it has so high a purpose, the highest good. But this again is only a dissembling of the matter, for therein all acting and all morality would fall away. Or, properly speaking, it is not in earnest about moral acting; rather the most desirable, the absolute, is that the highest good be carried out and moral acting be superfluous.
From this result consciousness must roll onward further in its contradictory movement and must necessarily dissemble once more the sublating of moral acting. Morality is the in-itself; for it to take place, the final purpose of the world cannot be carried out; rather moral consciousness must be for itself and must find before it a nature opposed to it. But in its own self it must be complete. This leads to the second postulate of the harmony of itself and of the nature which is immediately at it, sensibility. Moral self-consciousness sets up its purpose as pure, as independent of inclinations and impulses, so that it has extinguished the purposes of sensibility within it. — Only, it dissembles this sublating of the sensuous essence again as soon as it has set it up. It acts, brings its purpose into actuality, and self-conscious sensibility, which is supposed to be sublated, is precisely this middle term between pure consciousness and actuality — it is the instrument of the former for its realization, or the organ, and what is called impulse, inclination. It is therefore not in earnest about the sublating of the inclinations and impulses, for precisely these are self-consciousness realizing itself. But they are also not to be suppressed, but only to be conformable to reason. And they are conformable to it, for moral acting is nothing other than consciousness realizing itself, hence giving itself the shape of an impulse; that is, it is immediately the present harmony of impulse and morality. But in fact the impulse is not merely this empty shape, which could have within it a mainspring other than itself and be driven by it. For sensibility is a nature which has its own laws and springs in its own self; morality can therefore not be in earnest about being the mainspring of the impulses, the angle of inclination of the inclinations. For since these have their own fixed determinateness and peculiar content, it would rather be the consciousness to which they were conformable that was conformable to them — a conformity which moral self-consciousness declines. The harmony of the two is therefore only in itself and postulated. — In moral acting, the present harmony of morality and sensibility had just been set up, but this is now dissembled; that harmony lies beyond consciousness in a misty distance in which nothing can any longer be exactly distinguished or comprehended; for with the comprehending of this unity, which we have just attempted, it did not go well. — In this in-itself, however, consciousness gives itself up altogether. This in-itself is its moral completion, in which the struggle of morality and sensibility has ceased and the latter is conformable to the former in a manner which cannot be grasped. — This completion is therefore again only a dissembling of the matter, for in fact in it morality itself would rather give itself up, since morality is only consciousness of the absolute purpose as the pure one, hence in opposition to all other purposes; it is just as much the activity of this pure purpose as it is conscious of the elevation above sensibility, of sensibility’s intermixture, and of its opposition to and struggle with sensibility. — That it is not in earnest about moral completion, consciousness itself immediately declares by dissembling it out into infinity, that is, by asserting it as never completed.
Rather, then, only this intermediate condition of non-completion counts for it as valid — a condition which is nevertheless supposed to be at least a progression towards completion. But it cannot be this either, for progression in morality would rather be an approach to morality’s own ruin. For the goal would be the above nothing, or the sublating of morality and of consciousness itself; but to come nearer and nearer to nothing means to decrease. Besides, progression as well as decrease would assume differences of magnitude in morality; but of these there can be no talk in it. In morality, as the consciousness to which the ethical purpose is pure duty, no difference whatever is to be thought of, least of all the superficial difference of magnitude; there is only one virtue, only one pure duty, only one morality.
Since, then, it is not in earnest about moral completion, but rather about the middle condition, that is, as has just been discussed, about non-morality, we come back from another side to the content of the first postulate. For it is not to be seen how happiness is to be demanded for this moral consciousness on account of its worthiness. It is conscious of its non-completion and can therefore in fact not demand happiness as merit, not as something of which it would be worthy, but can only desire happiness as such, in and for itself, out of a free grace, and can expect it not from that absolute ground but according to chance and caprice. — Non-morality precisely herein declares what it is: that it is not a matter of morality but of happiness in and for itself, without relation to morality.
Through this second side of the moral view of the world the other assertion of the first side is also sublated, in which the disharmony of morality and happiness is presupposed. — For the experience is supposed to be made that in this present things often go badly for the moral person, whereas the immoral person is often fortunate. Only, the intermediate condition of uncompleted morality, which has shown itself to be the essential one, plainly shows that this perception and supposed experience is only a dissembling of the matter. For since morality is uncompleted, that is, since morality in fact is not, what can there be in the experience that things go badly for it? — Since it has at the same time come out that it is a matter of happiness in and for itself, it shows itself that in the judgement that things go well for the immoral person no injustice occurring here was meant. The designation of an individual as immoral falls away in itself, since morality is in general uncompleted, and therefore has only an arbitrary ground. The sense and content of the judgement of experience is thereby solely this: that happiness in and for itself ought not to fall to some — that is, the judgement is envy, which takes morality as its cloak. And the ground why the so-called good fortune ought to fall to others is good friendship, which grants and wishes them, and itself, this grace, that is, this chance.
Morality, then, is uncompleted in moral consciousness; this is what is now set up. But it is morality’s essence to be only the completed, the pure; uncompleted morality is therefore impure, or it is immorality. Morality itself is therefore in another essence than in the actual consciousness; it is a holy moral lawgiver. — The morality which is uncompleted in consciousness, and which is the ground of this postulating, has at first the significance that morality, in being posited in consciousness as actual, stands in relation to an other, to an existence, and therefore itself receives at it the being-other or the difference, whereby a manifold multitude of moral commandments arises. But moral self-consciousness at the same time holds these many duties to be unessential; for it is only a matter of the one pure duty, and for it they have, in so far as they are determinate, no truth. They can therefore have their truth only in an other and are, what they are not for it, holy through a holy lawgiver. — Only, this is itself again only a dissembling of the matter. For moral self-consciousness is the absolute to itself, and duty simply only what it knows as duty. But it knows only pure duty as duty; what is not holy to it is not holy in itself, and what is not holy in itself cannot be sanctified by the holy essence. Nor is moral consciousness in earnest at all about letting something be sanctified through another consciousness than it itself is; for to it only that is holy which is holy to it through itself and in itself. — Just as little, therefore, is it in earnest that this other essence be a holy one, for in it something was supposed to attain essentiality which for moral consciousness, that is, in itself, has no essentiality.
If the holy essence was postulated in order that in it duty should have its validity not as pure duty but as a multiplicity of determinate duties, then this must be dissembled again and the other essence must be holy only in so far as in it only pure duty has validity. And pure duty does in fact have validity only in another essence, not in moral consciousness. Although in the latter pure morality alone seems to count, this too must be placed otherwise, for it is at the same time natural consciousness. Morality in it is affected and conditioned by sensibility, hence not in and for itself but a contingency of the free will; but in it as pure will, a contingency of knowing; in and for itself morality is therefore in another essence.
This essence is therefore here purely completed morality, because in it morality does not stand in relation to nature and sensibility. Only, the reality of pure duty is its realization in nature and sensibility. Moral consciousness places its imperfection in the fact that in it morality has a positive relation to nature and sensibility, since it counts to it as an essential moment of morality that morality have simply only a negative relation to these. The pure moral essence, by contrast, because it is elevated above the struggle with nature and sensibility, does not stand in a negative relation to them. There therefore in fact remains over for it only the positive relation to them, that is, precisely that which just now counted as the uncompleted, as the immoral. But pure morality entirely separated from actuality, so that it would equally be without positive relation to it, would be an unconscious, unactual abstraction, in which the concept of morality — to be the thinking of pure duty and a will and a doing — would simply be sublated. This essence, so purely moral, is therefore again a dissembling of the matter and is to be given up.
In this purely moral essence, however, the moments of the contradiction in which this synthetic representing drives itself about, and the opposed alsos which it lets follow one upon another without bringing these its thoughts together, always relieving the one opposite by the other, come so close together that consciousness must here give up its moral view of the world and flee back into itself.
It recognizes its morality as not completed because it is affected by a sensibility and nature opposed to it, which partly clouds morality itself as such, partly brings about a multitude of duties through which it gets into embarrassment in the concrete case of actual acting; for every case is the concretion of many moral relations, just as an object of perception in general is a thing of many properties; and since determinate duty is a purpose, it has a content, and its content is a part of the purpose, and morality is not pure. — Morality therefore has its reality in another essence. But this reality means nothing other than that morality here be in and for itself — for itself, that is, that it be the morality of a consciousness; in itself, that is, that it have existence and actuality. — In that first uncompleted consciousness, morality is not carried out; it is therein the in-itself in the sense of a thought-thing; for it is associated with nature and sensibility, with the actuality of being and of consciousness, which constitutes its content, and nature and sensibility are what is morally null. — In the second, morality is present as completed and not as an uncarried-out thought-thing. But this completion consists precisely in morality’s having in a consciousness actuality as well as free actuality, existence in general, in its being not the empty but the fulfilled, the contentful — that is, the completion of morality is placed in the fact that what was just now determined as what is morally null is present in it and at it. Morality is at one time supposed to have validity simply only as the unactual thought-thing of pure abstraction, but is just as much to have no validity in this manner; its truth is supposed to consist in being opposed to actuality and wholly free and empty of it, and again in being actuality.
The syncretism of these contradictions, which is laid apart in the moral view of the world, collapses into itself, since the difference on which it rests — the difference between something which must necessarily be thought and posited and which yet is at the same time unessential — becomes a difference which no longer lies even in the words. What in the end is posited as something different, both as the null and as the real, is one and the same, existence and actuality; and what is supposed to be absolutely only the beyond of actual being and consciousness, and just as much only in it and, as a beyond, the null, is pure duty and the knowing of it as the essence. The consciousness which makes this difference, which is none, which declares actuality to be the null and at the same time the real, and pure morality just as much the true essence as the essenceless, pronounces together the thoughts which it previously separated, itself declares that it is not in earnest about this determination and about the placing apart of the moments of the self and of the in-itself, but that what it declares to be the absolute which is outside consciousness it rather keeps enclosed within the self of self-consciousness, and what it declares to be the absolutely thought, or the absolute in-itself, it takes for that very reason as something which has no truth. — It comes to be for consciousness that the placing apart of these moments is a dissembling, and it would be hypocrisy if it nevertheless retained it. But as moral pure self-consciousness it flees back into itself with abhorrence from this inequality of its representing with what is its essence, from this untruth which declares to be true what to it counts as untrue. It is pure conscience, which spurns such a moral representation of the world; it is in its own self the simple spirit certain of itself, which without the mediation of those representations acts immediately conscientiously and has its truth in this immediacy. — But if this world of dissemblance is nothing other than the development of moral self-consciousness in its moments, and thereby its reality, then through its return into itself it will become nothing other as regards its essence; its return into itself is rather only the attained consciousness that its truth is a pretended one. It would still have to give it out as its truth, for it would have to pronounce and present itself as an objective representation, but it would know that this is only a dissembling; it would thereby in fact be hypocrisy, and that spurning of the dissemblance would already be the first utterance of hypocrisy.
c. Conscience. The beautiful soul, evil and its forgiveness
The antinomy of the moral view of the world — that there is a moral consciousness and that there is none, or that the validity of duty is a beyond of consciousness and conversely takes place only in consciousness — had been gathered together into the representation in which the non-moral consciousness counts as moral, its contingent knowing and willing is taken as of full weight, and happiness falls to it out of grace. This self-contradictory representation moral self-consciousness did not take upon itself, but displaced it into an essence other than itself. But this positing outside itself of what it must think as necessary is just as much a contradiction as regards form as the former is as regards content. But since in itself precisely that which appears as contradictory, and in whose separation and re-dissolution the moral view of the world drives itself about, is the same — namely, pure duty as pure knowing is nothing other than the self of consciousness, and the self of consciousness is being and actuality, and likewise what is supposed to be beyond actual consciousness is nothing other than pure thinking, hence in fact the self — for us or in itself self-consciousness goes back into itself and knows as itself that essence in which the actual is at the same time pure knowing and pure duty. It is to itself what is fully valid in its contingency, that which knows its immediate singularity as pure knowing and acting, as the true actuality and harmony.
This self of conscience, the spirit immediately certain of itself as of absolute truth and of being, is the third self which has come to be for us out of the third world of spirit, and is briefly to be compared with the previous ones. The totality or actuality which presents itself as the truth of the ethical world is the self of the person; its existence is being recognized. As the person is the substance-less self, so this its existence is likewise abstract actuality; the person counts, and indeed immediately; the self is the point immediately at rest in the element of its being; it is without the separation from its universality, and therefore the two are not in movement and relation to one another; the universal is in it without distinction and is neither the content of the self, nor is the self fulfilled through itself. — The second self is the world of culture which has come to its truth, or the spirit of disunion given back to itself — absolute freedom. In this self that first immediate unity of singularity and universality falls apart; the universal, which likewise remains purely spiritual essence, being recognized or universal will and knowing, is the object and content of the self and its universal actuality. But it does not have the form of an existence free from the self; in this self it therefore comes to no fulfilment and to no positive content, to no world. Moral self-consciousness does indeed set its universality free, so that it becomes a nature of its own, and it likewise holds that universality fast within itself as sublated. But it is only the dissembling play of alternation between these two determinations. Only as conscience does it have, in its self-certainty, the content for what was previously empty duty as well as for the empty right and the empty universal will; and, because this self-certainty is likewise the immediate, it has existence itself.
Having attained this its truth, moral self-consciousness therefore abandons, or rather sublates, the separation within itself out of which dissemblance sprang, the separation of the in-itself and of the self, of pure duty as the pure purpose and of actuality as a nature and sensibility opposed to the pure purpose. Having thus returned into itself, it is concrete moral spirit, which does not give itself in the consciousness of pure duty an empty standard that would be opposed to actual consciousness; rather pure duty as well as the nature opposed to it are sublated moments; it is a moral essence realizing itself in immediate unity, and the action is immediately a concrete moral shape.
A case of acting is at hand; it is an objective actuality for the knowing consciousness. This consciousness, as conscience, knows it in an immediate concrete manner, and it is at the same time only as consciousness knows it. Knowing is contingent in so far as it is an other than the object; but the spirit certain of itself is no longer such a contingent knowing and creating of thoughts within itself from which actuality would be different; rather, since the separation of the in-itself and of the self is sublated, the case is immediately, in the sensuous certainty of knowing, as it is in itself, and it is in itself only as it is in this knowing. — Acting as realization is thereby the pure form of the will; the mere reversal of actuality as an existing case into an actuality that has been done, of the mere mode of objective knowing into the mode of knowing of actuality as something brought forth by consciousness. As sensuous certainty is immediately taken up into, or rather reversed into, the in-itself of spirit, so too this reversal is simple and unmediated, a transition through the pure concept without alteration of the content, which is determined by the interest of the consciousness knowing it. — Conscience furthermore does not separate out the circumstances of the case into different duties. It does not conduct itself as a positive universal medium in which the many duties, each for itself, would receive unshifted substantiality, so that either no action at all could be taken, because every concrete case contains opposition in general and, as a moral case, the opposition of duties, so that in the determination of acting one side, one duty would always be violated — or that, if action is taken, the violation of one of the opposed duties would actually occur. Conscience is rather the negative One or absolute self, which extinguishes these various moral substances; it is simple acting in accordance with duty, which does not fulfil this or that duty but knows and does the concrete right. It is therefore only conscience that is moral acting as acting at all, into which the preceding deedless consciousness of morality has passed over. — The concrete shape of the deed may be analysed by the distinguishing consciousness into different properties, that is, here, into different moral relations, and these may either each be declared to be absolutely valid, as must be the case if it is to be duty, or else be compared and examined. In the simple moral action of conscience the duties are so buried that immediate injury is done to all these single essences, and the examining shaking of duty does not take place at all in the unwavering certainty of conscience.
Just as little is there present in conscience that to-and-fro uncertainty of consciousness which now places so-called pure morality outside itself in another holy essence and counts itself as the unholy one, but then again places moral purity within itself and the linking of the sensuous with the moral in the other essence.
It renounces all these placings and dissemblings of the moral view of the world by renouncing the consciousness which grasps duty and actuality as contradictory. According to the latter I act morally in so far as I am conscious of accomplishing only pure duty, not anything else; which in fact means in so far as I do not act. But in so far as I actually act, I am conscious of an other, of an actuality which is at hand and of one which I want to bring forth, I have a determinate purpose and fulfil a determinate duty; there is something other in it than the pure duty which alone was supposed to be intended. — Conscience, by contrast, is the consciousness that, when moral consciousness declares pure duty to be the essence of its acting, this pure purpose is a dissembling of the matter; for the matter itself is that pure duty consists in the empty abstraction of pure thinking and has its reality and content only in a determinate actuality, an actuality which is the actuality of consciousness itself, and of consciousness not as a thought-thing but as a single individual. Conscience has for itself its truth in the immediate certainty of itself. This immediate concrete certainty of itself is the essence; considered according to the opposition of consciousness, its own immediate singularity is the content of moral doing; and the form of that doing is precisely this self as pure movement, namely as knowing or as one’s own conviction.
Considered more closely in its unity and in the significance of its moments: moral consciousness grasped itself only as the in-itself or essence; but as conscience it grasps its being-for-self or its self. — The contradiction of the moral view of the world dissolves itself, that is, the difference lying at its ground shows itself to be no difference, and it runs together into pure negativity; but this is precisely the self; a simple self, which is just as much pure knowing as it is the knowing of itself as this single consciousness. This self therefore constitutes the content of the previously empty essence, for it is the actual, which no longer has the significance of being a nature alien to the essence and self-subsistent in laws of its own. As the negative it is the difference of the pure essence, a content, and indeed one which counts in and for itself.
Furthermore, this self as pure knowing equal to itself is the simply universal, so that precisely this knowing as its own knowing, as conviction, is duty. Duty is no longer the universal confronting the self, but is known to have no validity in this separateness; it is now the law which is for the sake of the self, not that for the sake of which the self is. But law and duty therefore have not only the significance of being-for-self but also of being-in-itself, for this knowing is, on account of its self-equality, precisely the in-itself. This in-itself also separates itself in consciousness from that immediate unity with being-for-self; thus confronting it, it is being, being for another. — Duty precisely is now known, as duty abandoned by the self, to be only a moment; it has sunk from its significance of being absolute essence to being which is not self, not for itself, and hence being for another. But this being for another remains for that very reason an essential moment, because the self as consciousness constitutes the opposition of being-for-self and of being for another, and duty is now at it immediately something actual, no longer merely the abstract pure consciousness.
This being for another is therefore the substance which is in itself and is distinguished from the self. Conscience has not given up pure duty or the abstract in-itself; rather it is the essential moment of relating oneself to others as universality. It is the communal element of self-consciousnesses, and this is the substance in which the deed has subsistence and actuality, the moment of being recognized by the others. Moral self-consciousness does not have this moment of being recognized, of pure consciousness which is there, and is thereby not acting at all, not realizing. Its in-itself is to it either the abstract unactual essence or being as an actuality which is not spiritual. But the existing actuality of conscience is one which is self, that is, the existence conscious of itself, the spiritual element of being recognized. Doing is therefore only the translating of its single content into the objective element, in which it is universal and recognized; and precisely this, that it is recognized, makes the action into actuality. The action is recognized and thereby actual because the existing actuality is immediately linked with the conviction or the knowing, or because the knowing of its purpose is immediately the element of existence, universal recognition. For the essence of the action, duty, consists in conscience’s conviction about it; this conviction is precisely the in-itself itself; it is the in itself universal self-consciousness or being recognized, and hence actuality. What is done with the conviction of duty is therefore immediately something which has subsistence and existence. There is thus no longer any talk of the good intention not coming about, or of things going badly for the good person; rather what is known as duty accomplishes itself and comes to actuality, because precisely what is in accordance with duty is the universal of all self-consciousnesses, the recognized and therefore existing. Taken separately and alone, however, without the content of the self, this duty is being for another, the transparent, which has only the significance of contentless essentiality in general.
If we look back at the sphere with which spiritual reality in general entered, the concept was that the uttering of individuality is the in-and-for-itself. But the shape which immediately expressed this concept was the honest consciousness, which drove itself about with the abstract matter itself. This matter itself was there a predicate; only in conscience is it subject, which has posited at it all the moments of consciousness, and for which all these moments — substantiality in general, external existence and the essence of thinking — are contained in this certainty of itself. The matter itself has substantiality in general in ethical life, external existence in culture, the self-knowing essentiality of thinking in morality; and in conscience it is the subject which knows these moments in its own self. If the honest consciousness only ever grasps the empty matter itself, conscience by contrast wins it in its fulfilment, which conscience gives it through itself. It is this power in that it knows the moments of consciousness as moments and, as their negative essence, has mastery over them.
Considering conscience in relation to the single determinations of the opposition which appears in acting, and its consciousness of their nature, it relates itself first as a knower to the actuality of the case in which action is to be taken. In so far as the moment of universality is at this knowing, it belongs to the knowing of conscientious acting to embrace the actuality before it in an unrestricted manner, and thus to know exactly and take into consideration the circumstances of the case. But this knowing, since it knows universality as a moment, is therefore a knowing of these circumstances which is conscious of not embracing them, or of not being conscientious therein. The truly universal and pure relation of knowing would be a relation to something not opposed, to itself; but acting, through the opposition which is essential in it, relates itself to a negative of consciousness, to an actuality which is in itself. Over against the simplicity of pure consciousness, the absolutely other or the manifoldness in itself, that actuality is an absolute multiplicity of circumstances which divides and spreads out infinitely backwards into its conditions, sideways in their juxtaposition, forwards in their consequences. — The conscientious consciousness is conscious of this nature of the matter and of its own relation to it, and knows that it does not know the case in which it acts according to this demanded universality, and that its pretence of such a conscientious consideration of all circumstances is null. But this acquaintance with and consideration of all circumstances is not altogether absent; only, it is there merely as a moment, as something which is only for others; and its incomplete knowing counts to it as sufficient, perfect knowing because it is its own knowing.
It is the same with the universality of the essence, or with the determination of the content by pure consciousness. — Conscience, in proceeding to action, relates itself to the many sides of the case. The case breaks apart, and so does the relation of pure consciousness to it, whereby the manifoldness of the case is a manifoldness of duties. — Conscience knows that it has to choose and decide among them; for none is absolute in its determinateness or in its content, but only pure duty. But this abstraction has in its reality attained the significance of the self-conscious I. The spirit certain of itself rests, as conscience, within itself, and its real universality or its duty lies in its pure conviction of duty. This pure conviction is as such as empty as pure duty, pure in the sense that nothing in it, no determinate content, is duty. But action is to be taken, something must be determined by the individual; and the spirit certain of itself, in which the in-itself has attained the significance of the self-conscious I, knows that it has this determination and content in the immediate certainty of itself. This certainty, as determination and content, is the natural consciousness, that is, the impulses and inclinations. — Conscience recognizes no content as absolute for it, for it is the absolute negativity of everything determinate. It determines out of itself; but the circle of the self into which determinateness as such falls is so-called sensibility; for having a content out of the immediate certainty of itself, nothing is at hand but sensibility. — Everything which in earlier shapes presented itself as good or bad, as law and right, is an other than the immediate certainty of itself; it is a universal which is now a being for another; or, considered otherwise, an object which, mediating consciousness with itself, steps between it and its own truth, and which rather separates consciousness from itself than that it would be its immediacy. — But to conscience the certainty of itself is the pure immediate truth; and this truth is therefore its immediate certainty of itself represented as content, that is, in general the caprice of the single individual and the contingency of its unconscious natural being.
This content counts at the same time as moral essentiality or as duty. For pure duty, as already emerged in the examining of laws, is simply indifferent towards every content and tolerates every content. Here it has at the same time the essential form of being-for-self, and this form of individual conviction is nothing other than the consciousness of the emptiness of pure duty, and of the fact that pure duty is only a moment, that its substantiality is a predicate which has its subject in the individual, whose caprice gives it the content, can tie any content to this form and can attach its conscientiousness to it. — An individual increases its property in a certain manner; it is a duty that everyone take care for the preservation of oneself as well as of one’s family, no less for the possibility of becoming useful to one’s fellow human beings and of doing good to those in need of help. The individual is conscious that this is a duty, for this content is immediately contained in the certainty of itself; it further sees that it fulfils this duty in this case. Others perhaps hold this certain manner to be fraud; they hold to other sides of the concrete case, but it holds fast to this side by being conscious of the increase of property as pure duty. — Thus what others call violence and wrong fulfils the duty of asserting one’s self-subsistence against others; what they call cowardice fulfils the duty of preserving one’s life and the possibility of being useful to one’s fellow human beings; but what they call bravery rather violates both duties. Cowardice, however, must not be so inept as not to know that the preservation of life and of the possibility of being useful to others are duties, not to be convinced of the dutifulness of its acting, and not to know that what is in accordance with duty consists in the knowing; otherwise it would commit the ineptitude of being immoral. Since morality lies in the consciousness of having fulfilled duty, this will be lacking as little to the acting which is called cowardice as to that which is called bravery; the abstraction called duty is capable of this content as it is of any other — it therefore knows what it does as duty, and since it knows this, and the conviction of duty is what is in accordance with duty itself, it is recognized by the others; the action thereby counts and has actual existence.
Against this freedom, which inserts any content whatever into the universal passive medium of pure duty and knowing just as readily as any other, it is of no help to assert that another content ought to be inserted; for whichever it may be, each has upon it the blemish of determinateness, from which pure knowing is free, and which it can spurn just as it can take up any content. All content, in being a determinate content, stands on the same line with any other, even if it seems to have precisely the character that in it the particular is sublated. It may seem that, since in the actual case duty in general divides itself into opposition, and thereby into that of singularity and universality, that duty whose content is the universal itself thereby immediately has at it the nature of pure duty, and that form and content thus become wholly conformable to one another; so that, for example, the action for the universal best would be preferable to that for the individual best. Only, this universal duty is in general that which is at hand as substance being in and for itself, as right and law, and which counts independently of the knowing and the conviction as well as of the immediate interest of the single individual; it is therefore precisely that against whose form morality in general is directed. But as regards its content, this too is a determinate one, in so far as the universal best is opposed to the single individual; hence its law is one from which conscience knows itself to be simply free, and gives itself the absolute authority to add to it and to take from it, to omit it as well as to fulfil it. — Then, furthermore, that distinction of duty towards the single and towards the universal is, according to the nature of the opposition in general, nothing fixed. Rather, what the single individual does for itself also benefits the universal; the more it has cared for itself, the greater is not only its possibility of being useful to others; rather its actuality itself is only this, to be and to live in connection with others; its single enjoyment has essentially the significance of thereby giving up what is its own to others and of helping them to the acquisition of their enjoyment. In the fulfilment of duty towards the single individual, that is, towards oneself, duty towards the universal is therefore also fulfilled. — The consideration and comparison of duties which would come in here would amount to the calculation of the advantage which the universal would have from an action; but partly morality thereby falls prey to the necessary contingency of insight, and partly it is precisely the essence of conscience to cut off this calculating and considering and to decide out of itself without such grounds.
In this manner, then, conscience acts and maintains itself in the unity of being-in-itself and being-for-self, in the unity of pure thinking and individuality, and is the spirit certain of itself, which has its truth in its own self, in its self, in its knowing, and therein as the knowing of duty. It maintains itself therein precisely by the fact that what is positive in the action — the content as well as the form of duty and the knowing of duty — belongs to the self, to the certainty of itself; whereas what wants to confront the self as its own in-itself counts as nothing true, only as something sublated, only as a moment. It is therefore not universal knowing in general that counts, but its own acquaintance with the circumstances. Into duty, as the universal being-in-itself, it inserts the content which it takes from its natural individuality; for this content is the one present at its own self; through the universal medium in which it is, this content becomes the duty which conscience exercises, and empty pure duty is precisely thereby posited as something sublated or as a moment; this content is its sublated emptiness or its fulfilment. — But conscience is just as much free of every content whatever; it absolves itself from every determinate duty which is supposed to count as law; in the strength of the certainty of itself it has the majesty of absolute autarky, to bind and to loose. — This self-determination is therefore immediately what is simply in accordance with duty; duty is the knowing itself; but this simple selfhood is the in-itself, for the in-itself is pure self-equality, and this is in this consciousness.
This pure knowing is immediately being for another; for as pure self-equality it is immediacy or being. But this being is at the same time the pure universal, the selfhood of all; or the acting is recognized and therefore actual. This being is the element through which conscience stands immediately in the relation of equality with all self-consciousnesses; and the significance of this relation is not the selfless law but the self of conscience.
But in the fact that this right which conscience does is at the same time being for another, an inequality seems to come upon it. The duty which it accomplishes is a determinate content; that content is indeed the self of consciousness and therein its knowing of itself, its equality with itself. But once accomplished, placed in the universal medium of being, this equality is no longer knowing, no longer this distinguishing which just as immediately sublates its distinctions; rather in being the distinction is posited as subsisting, and the action is a determinate one, unequal to the element of the self-consciousness of all, hence not necessarily recognized. Both sides, the acting conscience and the universal consciousness which recognizes this action as duty, are equally free from the determinateness of this doing. On account of this freedom the relation in the communal medium of connection is rather a relationship of complete inequality, whereby the consciousness for which the action is finds itself in complete uncertainty about the acting spirit certain of itself. It acts, it posits a determinateness as existing; to this being as to its truth the others hold, and therein they are certain of it; it has therein declared what counts to it as duty. Only, it is free of any determinate duty; it is out of the place where they suppose it actually to be; and this medium of being itself, and duty as being in itself, counts to it only as a moment. What it therefore sets before them, it also dissembles again, or rather has immediately dissembled. For its actuality is to it not this duty and determination set out before them, but the one which it has in the absolute certainty of itself.
They therefore do not know whether this conscience is morally good or whether it is evil; or rather they not only cannot know it, but must also take it for evil. For as it is free from the determinateness of duty and from duty as being in itself, so are they likewise. What it sets before them they themselves know how to dissemble; it is something whereby only the self of another is expressed, not their own; they not only know themselves to be free of it, but must dissolve it in their own consciousness, must annihilate it by judging and explaining, in order to preserve their own self.
Only, the action of conscience is not merely this determination of being abandoned by the pure self. What is to count and be recognized as duty is so solely through the knowing and the conviction of it as duty, through the knowing of one’s self in the deed. When the deed ceases to have this self at it, it ceases to be that which alone is its essence. Its existence, abandoned by this consciousness, would be a common actuality, and the action would appear to us as an accomplishing of one’s pleasure and desire. What is to be there is here essentiality solely through being known as individuality uttering itself; and this being known is what is recognized and what, as such, is to have existence.
The self steps into existence as self; the spirit certain of itself exists as such for others; its immediate action is not what counts and is actual; not the determinate, not what is in itself, is what is recognized, but solely the self-knowing self as such. The element of subsistence is universal self-consciousness; what enters into this element cannot be the effect of the action; the effect does not endure therein and gains no permanence; rather only self-consciousness is what is recognized and gains actuality.
We see here again language as the existence of spirit. It is self-consciousness existing for others, which is immediately at hand as such and which as this self-consciousness is universal. It is the self separating itself from itself, which as pure I = I becomes objective to itself, in this objectivity maintains itself just as much as this self as it immediately flows together with the others and is their self-consciousness; it hears itself just as it is heard by the others, and this hearing is precisely existence become self.
The content which language has here gained is no longer the inverted and inverting and disrupted self of the world of culture, but spirit returned into itself, certain of itself and, in its self, certain of its truth or of its being recognized, and recognized as this knowing. The language of ethical spirit is the law and the simple command and the lament, which is more a tear over necessity; moral consciousness, by contrast, is still mute, shut up within itself in its inwardness, for in it the self does not yet have existence; rather existence and the self stand as yet only in an external relation to one another. But language comes forward only as the middle term of self-subsistent and recognized self-consciousnesses, and the existing self is immediately universal, manifold, and in this multiplicity simple, being recognized. The content of the language of conscience is the self knowing itself as essence. This alone it utters, and this uttering is the true actuality of the doing and the validity of the action. Consciousness utters its conviction; it is this conviction in which alone the action is duty; and the action counts as duty solely through the conviction’s being uttered. For universal self-consciousness is free of the merely existing determinate action; the action as existence counts to it as nothing, but rather the conviction that it is duty; and this conviction is actual in language. — To realize the action here does not mean to translate its content from the form of purpose or being-for-self into the form of abstract actuality, but from the form of the immediate certainty of itself, which knows its knowing or its being-for-self as the essence, into the form of the assurance that consciousness is convinced of duty and, as conscience, knows duty out of itself; this assurance therefore assures that consciousness is convinced that its conviction is the essence.
Whether the assurance of acting out of conviction of duty is true, whether what is done actually is duty — these questions or doubts have no sense against conscience. — In that question, whether the assurance is true, it would be presupposed that the inner intention is different from the one given out, that is, that the willing of the single self could separate itself from duty, from the will of the universal and pure consciousness; the latter would be laid into the speech, but the former would properly be the true mainspring of the action. Only, this very difference of the universal consciousness and of the single self is the one which has sublated itself, and whose sublating is conscience. The immediate knowing of the self certain of itself is law and duty; its intention is, through the fact that it is its intention, the right; it is only required that it know this, and that it say that it is convinced that its knowing and willing is the right. The uttering of this assurance sublates in its own self the form of its particularity; it recognizes therein the necessary universality of the self; in calling itself conscience, it calls itself pure self-knowing and pure abstract willing, that is, it calls itself a universal knowing and willing which recognizes the others and is equal to them, for they are precisely this pure self-knowing and willing, and which is therefore also recognized by them. In the willing of the self certain of itself, in this knowing that the self is the essence, lies the essence of the right. — Whoever therefore says that he acts thus out of conscience speaks the truth, for his conscience is the knowing and willing self. But he must essentially say this, for this self must at the same time be a universal self. It is not this in the content of the action, for this content is on account of its determinateness in itself indifferent; rather universality lies in the form of the action; it is this form which is to be posited as actual; it is the self which as such is actual in language, declares itself as the true, and precisely therein recognizes all selves and is recognized by them.
Conscience, then, in the majesty of its elevation above determinate law and every content of duty, lays whatever content it pleases into its knowing and willing; it is the moral genius which knows the inner voice of its immediate knowing as a divine voice, and which, since in this knowing it just as immediately knows existence, is the divine creative power which has liveliness in its concept. It is likewise the worship of God within itself; for its acting is the intuiting of this its own divinity.
This solitary worship is at the same time essentially the worship of a community, and the pure inner knowing and hearing of oneself advances to the moment of consciousness. The intuiting of itself is its objective existence, and this objective element is the uttering of its knowing and willing as a universal. Through this uttering the self becomes what counts, and the action becomes an executed deed. The actuality and subsistence of its doing is universal self-consciousness; but the uttering of conscience posits the certainty of itself as a pure and thereby universal self; the others let the action count for the sake of this speech, in which the self is expressed and recognized as the essence. The spirit and the substance of their union is therefore the mutual assurance of their conscientiousness, of their good intentions, the rejoicing over this reciprocal purity and the refreshment in the glory of knowing and uttering, of cherishing and nurturing such excellence. — In so far as this conscience still distinguishes its abstract consciousness from its self-consciousness, it has its life only hidden in God; God is indeed immediately present to its spirit and heart, to its self; but what is manifest, its actual consciousness and the mediating movement of that consciousness, is to it an other than that hidden inwardness and the immediacy of the present essence. Only, in the completion of conscience the difference of its abstract consciousness and its self-consciousness sublates itself. It knows that the abstract consciousness is precisely this self, this being-for-self certain of itself, that in the immediacy of the relation of the self to the in-itself, which, posited outside the self, is the abstract essence and what is hidden from it, precisely the difference is sublated. For a relation is a mediating one in which the things related are not one and the same but an other for one another and are one only in a third; the immediate relation, however, in fact means nothing other than the unity. Consciousness, elevated above the thoughtlessness of still taking these differences, which are none, for differences, knows the immediacy of the presence of the essence in it as the unity of the essence and of its self, knows its self therefore as the living in-itself, and this its knowing as religion, which as intuited or existing knowing is the community’s speech about its spirit.
We see here, then, self-consciousness withdrawn into its innermost being, for which all externality as such vanishes — into the intuition of I = I, in which this I is all essentiality and existence. It sinks away in this concept of itself, for it has been driven to the extremity of its extremes, and in such a way that the distinguished moments through which it is real, or is still consciousness, are not merely for us these pure extremes; rather what it is for itself, and what is to it in itself, and what is to it existence, evaporates into abstractions which have no hold, no substance, any longer for this consciousness itself; and everything which hitherto was essence for consciousness has withdrawn into these abstractions. — Purified to this purity, consciousness is its poorest shape, and the poverty which constitutes its sole possession is itself a vanishing; this absolute certainty into which substance has dissolved itself is the absolute untruth, which collapses within itself; it is the absolute self-consciousness in which consciousness sinks away.
Considering this sinking within itself, the substance which is in itself is for consciousness the knowing which is its own knowing. As consciousness it is divided into the opposition of itself and of the object which is for it the essence; but this object is precisely the completely transparent, it is its own self, and its consciousness is only the knowing of itself. All life and all spiritual essentiality has withdrawn into this self and has lost its difference from the I-self. The moments of consciousness are therefore these extreme abstractions, none of which stands, but each loses itself in the other and generates it. It is the alternation of the unhappy consciousness with itself, but one which here goes on for that consciousness itself within itself and which is conscious of being the concept of reason, which the former is only in itself. The absolute certainty of itself therefore turns round for it, as consciousness, immediately into a dying away of sound, into the objectivity of its being-for-self; but this created world is its own speech, which it has just as immediately heard, and whose echo only comes back to it. This return therefore does not have the significance that it is therein in and for itself; for the essence is to it no in-itself, but itself; just as little does it have existence, for the objective does not come to be a negative of the actual self, just as this self does not come to actuality. It lacks the strength of externalization, the strength to make itself into a thing and to endure being. It lives in dread of staining the glory of its inwardness through action and existence; and in order to preserve the purity of its heart it flees the contact of actuality and persists in a self-willed powerlessness to renounce its self, sharpened to the last abstraction, and to give itself substantiality, or to transform its thinking into being and to entrust itself to the absolute difference. The hollow object which it generates for itself now fills it with the consciousness of emptiness; its doing is a yearning which in the becoming of itself into an essenceless object only loses itself and, falling beyond this loss and back to itself, finds itself only as lost; — in this transparent purity of its moments an unhappy so-called beautiful soul, it burns out within itself and vanishes as a shapeless vapour that dissolves into air.
But this silent flowing together of the marrowless essentialities of the evaporated life is still to be taken in the other significance of the actuality of conscience and in the appearance of its movement, and conscience is to be considered as acting. — The objective moment in this consciousness has determined itself above as universal consciousness; the self-knowing knowing is as this self distinguished from other selves; the language in which all mutually recognize one another as acting conscientiously, this universal equality, falls apart into the inequality of the single being-for-self; every consciousness is just as simply reflected out of its universality into itself; thereby the opposition of singularity to the other single individuals and to the universal necessarily enters, and this relationship and its movement are to be considered. — Or this universality and duty has the simply opposite significance of the determinate singularity which excepts itself from the universal, and for which pure duty is only the universality which has come to the surface and been turned outwards; duty lies only in words and counts as a being for another. Conscience, at first directed only negatively against duty as this determinate duty at hand, knows itself free of it; but since it fills empty duty with a determinate content out of itself, it has the positive consciousness that it is as this self that it makes the content; its pure self, as empty knowing, is without content and without determination; the content which it gives to that knowing is taken from its self as this determinate one, from itself as natural individuality; and in speaking of the conscientiousness of its acting it is indeed conscious of its pure self, but, in the purpose of its acting as an actual content, conscious of itself as this particular single individual and of the opposition between what it is for itself and what it is for others, of the opposition of universality or duty and of its being reflected out of it.
If the opposition into which conscience enters as acting thus expresses itself in its inwardness, it is at the same time the inequality outwards in the element of existence, the inequality of its particular singularity over against other single individuals. — Its particularity consists in the fact that the two moments constituting its consciousness, the self and the in-itself, count with unequal value, and indeed with the determination in it that the certainty of itself is the essence over against the in-itself or the universal, which counts only as a moment. Over against this inward determination stands the element of existence or the universal consciousness, to which, rather, universality, duty, is the essence, whereas singularity, which is for itself over against the universal, counts only as a sublated moment. To this holding fast to duty, the first consciousness counts as evil, because it is the inequality of its being-within-itself with the universal; and since it at the same time declares its doing to be equality with itself, to be duty and conscientiousness, it counts as hypocrisy.
The movement of this opposition is at first the formal production of the equality between what the evil is in itself and what it utters; it must come to light that it is evil, and thus that its existence is equal to its essence; the hypocrisy must be unmasked. — This return of the inequality present in hypocrisy into equality has not already come about through the consideration that hypocrisy, as one is wont to say, precisely thereby proves its respect for duty and virtue, that it assumes their semblance and uses it as a mask for its own consciousness no less than for that of others, and that in this recognition of the opposite there is in itself contained equality and agreement. — Only, hypocrisy is at the same time just as much out of this recognition of language and reflected into itself, and in its using what is in itself only as a being for another there is rather contained its own contempt for it and the presentation of its essencelessness for all. For what lets itself be used as an external instrument shows itself to be a thing that has no weight of its own within it.
Nor does this equality come about either through the one-sided persistence of the evil consciousness in itself or through the judgement of the universal. — If the former disavows itself against the consciousness of duty, and asserts what the latter declares to be wickedness, to be absolute inequality with the universal, to be an acting according to the inner law and conscience, then in this one-sided assurance of equality its inequality with the other remains, since the other does not believe and does not recognize that assurance. — Or, since the one-sided persistence in one extreme dissolves itself, evil would indeed thereby confess itself as evil, but would therein immediately sublate itself and would not be hypocrisy, nor unmask itself as such. It in fact confesses itself as evil through the assertion that, in opposition to the recognized universal, it acts according to its inner law and conscience. For if this law and conscience were not the law of its singularity and caprice, it would not be something inner, something of its own, but the universally recognized. Whoever therefore says that he acts against the others according to his law and conscience, says in fact that he mistreats them. But actual conscience is not this persistence in the knowing and willing which opposes itself to the universal; rather the universal is the element of its existence, and its language declares its doing to be the recognized duty.
Just as little is the persistence of the universal consciousness in its judgement an unmasking and dissolution of hypocrisy. — In crying out against it “base”, “mean” and so on, it appeals in such a judgement to its law, as the evil consciousness appeals to its own. For the former comes forward in opposition to the latter and thereby as a particular law. It therefore has no advantage over the other, but rather legitimates it; and this zeal does precisely the opposite of what it means to do — namely, it shows what it calls true duty, and what is supposed to be universally recognized, to be something not recognized, and thereby concedes to the other the equal right of being-for-self.
But this judgement has at the same time another side, from which it becomes the introduction to the dissolution of the opposition at hand. — The consciousness of the universal does not conduct itself towards the first as something actual and acting — for the first is rather the actual one — but stands opposed to it as that which is not caught up in the opposition of singularity and universality which enters in acting. It remains in the universality of thought, conducts itself as something apprehending, and its first action is only the judgement. — Through this judgement it now places itself, as was just remarked, beside the first, and the first comes through this equality to the intuition of itself in this other consciousness. For the consciousness of duty conducts itself apprehendingly, passively; but thereby it is in contradiction with itself as the absolute will of duty, with itself as that which determines simply out of itself. It may well preserve itself in purity, for it does not act; it is the hypocrisy which wants judging to be taken for an actual deed, and which proves its uprightness not through action but through the uttering of excellent convictions. It is thus constituted exactly like that which is reproached for putting duty only into its speech. In both, the side of actuality is equally distinguished from the speech: in the one through the self-interested purpose of the action, in the other through the absence of acting altogether, whose necessity lies in the very speaking of duty, for duty has no significance at all without the deed.
But judging is also to be considered as a positive action of thought and has a positive content; through this side the contradiction present in the apprehending consciousness, and its equality with the first, become still more complete. — The acting consciousness declares this its determinate doing to be duty, and the judging consciousness cannot deny this to it; for duty itself is the contentless form capable of every content — or the concrete action, differentiated in its own self in its many-sidedness, has the universal side, which is the one taken as duty, just as much at it as the particular side, which constitutes the share and the interest of the individual. The judging consciousness now does not stop at that side of duty and at the acting one’s knowing that this is its duty, the relationship and the station of its actuality. Rather it holds to the other side, plays the action over into the inwardness, and explains it out of an intention different from the action itself and out of a self-interested mainspring. As every action is capable of the consideration of its conformity to duty, so it is capable of this other consideration of particularity; for as action it is the actuality of the individual. — This judging therefore takes the action out of its existence and reflects it into the inwardness or into the form of its own particularity. — If the action is accompanied by fame, then judging knows this inwardness as craving for fame; — if it is appropriate to the individual’s station in general, without going beyond it, and so constituted that individuality does not have the station hanging upon it as an external determination but fills out this universality through itself and precisely thereby shows itself capable of something higher, then the judgement knows its inwardness as a craving for honour, and so forth. Since in action in general the acting one attains the intuition of itself in objectivity, or the feeling of itself in its existence, and thus enjoyment, judging knows the inwardness as an impulse towards its own happiness, even if this happiness consisted only in inner moral vanity, in the enjoyment of the consciousness of its own excellence and in the foretaste of the hope of a future happiness. — No action can withdraw itself from such judging, for duty for duty’s sake, this pure purpose, is the unactual; it has its actuality in the doing of individuality, and the action thereby has the side of particularity at it. — There is no hero for his valet; not, however, because the former is not a hero, but because the latter is — the valet, with whom the former has to do not as a hero but as one eating, drinking, clothing himself, in general in the singularity of need and of representation. So for judging there is no action in which it could not oppose the side of the singularity of individuality to the universal side of the action, and play the valet of morality towards the acting one.
This judging consciousness is hereby itself mean, because it divides the action and brings forth and holds fast the action’s inequality with itself. It is further hypocrisy, because it gives out such judging not as another manner of being evil but as the right consciousness of the action, in this its unactuality and vanity of knowing better and best sets itself up above the deeds it has run down, and wants its deedless talk to be taken for an excellent actuality. — Thereby, then, making itself equal to the acting one which it judges, it is recognized by the latter as the same as itself. The acting one finds itself not only apprehended by the other as something alien and unequal to it, but rather finds the other, according to the other’s own constitution, equal to itself. Intuiting this equality and uttering it, it confesses itself to the other and likewise expects that the other, having in fact placed itself on an equal footing with it, will also answer its speech, will utter in that speech its equality, and that the existence of recognition will thereby enter. Its confession is not a debasement, a humiliation, a throwing away of itself in relation to the other; for this uttering is not the one-sided uttering through which it would posit its inequality with the other; rather it speaks solely on account of the intuition of the other’s equality with itself; it utters their equality from its side in its confession, and utters it because language is the existence of spirit as immediate self; it therefore expects that the other will contribute its part to this existence.
Only, upon the evil one’s confession, I am he, there does not follow this answering of the same confession. That judging did not mean it so; on the contrary! It repels this community from itself and is the hard heart which is for itself and rejects continuity with the other. — Thereby the scene is reversed. The one which confessed itself sees itself repelled and sees the other in the wrong, the other which refuses to let its inwardness step out into the existence of speech, and which opposes to the evil one the beauty of its soul, and to the confession the stiff neck of the character which remains equal to itself, and the muteness of keeping itself within itself and of not throwing itself away to another. Here the highest revolt of the spirit certain of itself is posited; for it intuits itself as this simple knowing of the self in the other, and indeed in such a way that the external shape of this other is not, as in wealth, the essenceless, not a thing; rather it is thought, knowing itself, that is held out against it; it is this absolutely fluid continuity of pure knowing which refuses to posit its communication with the one which in its confession had already renounced separated being-for-self and posited itself as sublated particularity and thereby as continuity with the other, as universal. But the other reserves to its own self its uncommunicating being-for-self; it retains in the confessing one precisely that same thing which the latter has already cast off. It thereby shows itself to be the consciousness forsaken by spirit and denying spirit, for it does not recognize that spirit, in the absolute certainty of itself, is master over every deed and actuality and can cast them off and make them undone. At the same time it does not recognize the contradiction it commits in not letting the casting-off which has occurred in speech count as the true casting-off, while it itself has the certainty of its spirit not in an actual action but in its inwardness, and that inwardness’s existence in the speech of its judgement. It is therefore itself what hinders the other’s return from the deed into the spiritual existence of speech and into the equality of spirit, and through this hardness brings forth the inequality which is still at hand.
Now in so far as the spirit certain of itself, as beautiful soul, does not possess the strength to externalize the knowing of itself which holds itself within, it cannot attain equality with the repelled consciousness and thus not the intuited unity of itself in the other, not existence; the equality therefore comes about only negatively, as a spiritless being. The beautiful soul without actuality, in the contradiction of its pure self and the necessity of that self to externalize itself into being and to turn round into actuality, in the immediacy of this opposition held fast — an immediacy which alone is the middle term and reconciliation of the opposition heightened to its pure abstraction, and which is pure being or empty nothing — is therefore, as the consciousness of this contradiction in its unreconciled immediacy, deranged into madness and melts away in yearning consumption. It thereby in fact gives up the hard holding fast to its being-for-self, but brings forth only the spiritless unity of being.
The true, namely the self-conscious and existing, equalization is according to its necessity already contained in what precedes. The breaking of the hard heart and its elevation to universality is the same movement which was expressed in the consciousness which confessed itself. The wounds of spirit heal without leaving scars; the deed is not the imperishable, but is taken back by spirit into itself, and the side of singularity which is present at it, whether as intention or as existing negativity and limit of the deed, is what immediately vanishes. The realizing self, the form of its action, is only a moment of the whole, and so too is the knowing which determines through judgement and fixes the difference of the single and the universal side of acting. That evil one posits this externalization of itself, or posits itself as a moment, drawn out into confessing existence through the intuition of itself in the other. But this other must have its one-sided, unrecognized judgement broken, as the former had its one-sided, unrecognized existence of particular being-for-self; and as the former presents the power of spirit over its actuality, so this presents the power over its determinate concept.
But the latter renounces the dividing thought and the hardness of the being-for-self which holds fast to that thought, because it in fact intuits itself in the first. This one, which throws away its actuality and makes itself into a sublated this, thereby in fact presents itself as universal; it returns out of its external actuality into itself as essence; the universal consciousness therefore recognizes itself in it. — The forgiveness which it extends to the first is the renunciation of itself, of its unactual essence, to which it makes that other, which was actual acting, equal, and recognizes as good that which, from the determination which acting received in thought, was called evil; or rather it lets go this difference of determinate thought and its determining judgement which is for itself, as the other lets go its determining of the action which is for itself. — The word of reconciliation is the existing spirit, which intuits the pure knowing of itself as universal essence in its opposite, in the pure knowing of itself as the singularity which is absolutely within itself — a mutual recognition which is absolute spirit.
It steps into existence only at the summit at which its pure knowing of itself is the opposition and alternation with itself. Knowing that its pure knowing is the abstract essence, it is this knowing duty in absolute opposition to the knowing which knows itself, as the absolute singularity of the self, to be the essence. The former is the pure continuity of the universal, which knows the singularity that knows itself as essence to be what is in itself null, to be evil. The latter, however, is absolute discreteness, which knows itself absolute in its pure One and knows that universal as the unactual which is only for others. Both sides are purified to this purity in which there is no longer any selfless existence at them, no negative of consciousness; rather that duty is the self-equal character of its self-knowing, and this evil likewise has its purpose in its being-within-itself and its actuality in its speech; the content of this speech is the substance of its subsistence; it is the assurance of the certainty of spirit within itself. — Both spirits certain of themselves have no other purpose than their pure self, and no other reality and existence than precisely this pure self. But they are still different, and the difference is the absolute one, because it is posited in this element of the pure concept. Nor is it so only for us, but for the concepts themselves which stand in this opposition. For these concepts are indeed determinate over against one another, but at the same time in themselves universal, so that they fill out the whole extent of the self, and this self has no other content than this its determinateness, which neither goes beyond it nor is more limited than it; for the one, the absolutely universal, is just as much the pure self-knowing as the other, the absolute discreteness of singularity, and both are only this pure self-knowing. Both determinatenesses are therefore the knowing pure concepts, whose determinateness is itself immediately knowing, or whose relationship and opposition is the I. Thereby they are for one another these simply opposed ones; it is the completely inner which has thus come to stand over against itself and has stepped into existence; they constitute the pure knowing which is posited through this opposition as consciousness. But it is not yet self-consciousness. It has this realization in the movement of this opposition. For this opposition is rather itself the undiscrete continuity and equality of I = I; and each for itself, precisely through the contradiction of its pure universality, which at the same time still resists its equality with the other and separates itself from it, sublates itself in its own self. Through this externalization this knowing, disunited in its existence, returns into the unity of the self; it is the actual I, the universal self-knowing in its absolute opposite, in the knowing which is within itself and which, on account of the purity of its separated being-within-itself, is itself the completely universal. The reconciling yes, in which both I’s let go their opposed existence, is the existence of the I extended into twoness, which therein remains equal to itself and has the certainty of itself in its complete externalization and opposite; — it is God appearing in the midst of those who know themselves as pure knowing.