Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

The Living Worh of Art 737 linquishing all this for complete corporeal embodiment, spirit has laid aside the particular impressions, the special tones and chords of that nature which it, as the actual spirit of the nation, includes. Its nation, therefore, is no longer conscious in this spirit of its special particular character, but rather of having laid this aside, and of the universahty of its human existence.

VOL. II.

The Spiritual Work of Art The national spirits, which find their being in the form of some particular animal, coalesce into one single spirit.* Thus it is that the separate artistically beautiful national spirits combine to form a Pantheon, the element and habitation of which is Language. Pure intuition of self in the sense of universal human nature takes, when the national or tribal spirit is actuahsed, this form : the national spirit combines with the others (which together with it constitute, through nature and natural conditions, one people), in a common undertaking, and for this task builds up a collective nation, and, with that, a collective heaven. This universahty, to which spirit attains in its existence, is, nevertheless, merely this first imiversaUty, which, to begin with, starts from the individuahty of ethical life, has not yet overcome its immediacy, has not yet built up a single state out of these separate national elements. The ethical life of an actual national spirit rests partly on the simple confiding trust of individuals in the whole of their nation, partly in the direct share which all, in spite of differences of position, take in the decisions and acts of its government. In the union, not in the first instance to secure a permanent order but merely for a common act, that freedom of participation * V. sup., A., b. 738

The Spiritual Work of Art 739 on the part of each and all is for the nonce set aside. This first community of hfe is, therefore, an assemblage of individuahties rather than the dominion and control of abstract thought, which would rob the individuals of their self-conscious share in the will and act of the whole.

The assembly of national spirits constitutes a circle of forms and shapes, which now embraces the whole of natm'e, as well as the whole ethical world. They are too under the supreme command rather than the supreme Szs dominion of one. By themselves, they are the universal substances embodying what the self-conscious essential reahty inherently is and does.

This, however, constitutes the moving force, and, in the first instance, at least the centre, with which those universal entities are concerned, and which, to begin with, seems to unite in a merely accidental way all that they variously accomphsh.

But it is the return of the divine Being to self-consciousness which already contains the reason that self-consciousness forms the centre for those divine forces, and conceals their essential unity in the first instance under the guise of a friendly external relation between both worlds. The same universahty, which belongs to this content, has necessarily also that form of consciousness in which the content appears.

It is no longer the concrete acts and deeds of the cult; it is an action which is not indeed raised as yet to the level of the notion, but only to that of ideas, the synthetic connection of selfconscious and external existence. The element in which these presented ideas exist, language, is the earHest language, the Epic as such, which contains the universal content, at any rate universal in the sense

740 Phenomenology of Mind of completeness of the world presented, though not in the sense of universahty of thought. The Minstrel is the individual and actual spirit from whom, as a subject of this world, it is produced, and by whom it is borne. His " pathos " is not the deafening powers of nature, but Mnemosyne, Recollection, a gradually evolved inwardness, the memory of an essential mode of being once directly present.

He is the organ and instrument whose content is passing away ; it is not his own self which is of any account, but his muse, his universal song. What, however, is present in fact, has the form of an inferential process, where the one extreme of universality, the world of gods, is connected with individuahty, the minstrel, through the middle term of particularity.

The middle term is the nation in its heroes, who are individual men like the minstrel, but only ideally presented, and thereby at the same time universal hke the free extreme of universahty, the gods. In this Epic, then, what is inherently established in the cult, the relation of the divine to the human, is set forth and displayed as a whole to consciousness. The content is an ''act"* of the essential Being conscious of itself.

Acting disturbs the peace of the substance, and awakens the essential Being ; and by so doing its simple unity is divided into parts, and opened up into the manifold world of natural powers and ethical forces.

The act is the violation of the peaceful earth; it is the trench which, vivified by the blood of the hving, calls forth the spirits of the departed, who are thirsting for Hfe, and who receive it in the action of self-consciousness.t There are two * A " drama.'' t The Epic exorcises the dead past ; v. Odyssey, XI.