Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

744 Phenomenology of Minä round tlie individuality of some hero, who, however, feels the strength and splendour of his life broken, and mourns the early death he sees ahead of him. For the actual individuality, firmly fixed in itself, is isolated and excluded to the utmost point, and severed into its elements, which have not yet found each other and united.

The one individual element, the abstract unreal moment, is necessity which takes no share in the hfe of the mediating term just as httle as does the other, the concrete real individual element, the minstrel, who keeps himself outside it, and disappears in what he ideally presents. Both extremes must get nearer the content ; the one, necessity, has to get filled with it, the other, the language of the minstrel, must have a share in it.

And the content formerly left to itself must preserve in it the certainty and the fixed character of the negative. This higher language, that of Tragedy, gathers and keeps more closely together the dispersed and disintegrated moments of the inner essential world and the world of action.

The substance of the divine falls apart, in accordance with the nature of the notion, into its shapes and forms, and their movement is hkewise in conformity with that notion. In regard to form, the language here ceases to be narrative, in virtue of the fact that it enters into the content, just as the content ceases to be merely one that is ideally presented.

The hero is himself the spokesman, and the representation given brings before the audience — who are also spectators— self-conscious human beings, who know their own rights and purposes, the power and the will belonging to their specific nature, and who know how to state them. They are artists who do not express with

The Spiritual Work of Art 745 unconscious naivete and naturalness the merely external aspect of what they begin and what they decide upon, as is the case in the language accompanying ordinary action in actual hfe ; they make the very inner being external, they prove the righteousness of their action, and the "pathos" controlling them is soberly asserted and definitely expressed in its universal individuahty, free from all accident of circumstance and the particular pecuHarities of personahties.

Lastly, it is in actual human beings that these characters get existence, human beings who impersonate heroes, and represent them in actual speech, not in the form of a narrative, but speaking in their own person.

Just as it is essential for a statue to be made by human hands, so is the actor essential to his mask — not as an external condition, from which, artistically considered, we have to abstract ; or so far as abstraction must certainly be made, we thereby state just that art does not yet contain in it the true and proper self.

The general ground, on which the movement of these shapes produced from the notion takes place, is the consciousness of the first form of language, where the content is ideally presented, and its detail spread out without reference to self.

It is the commonalty in general, whose wisdom finds utterance in the Chorus of the Elders ; in the powerlessness of this chorus the generahty finds its representative, because the common people itself compose merely the positive and passive material for the individuahty of the government confronting it.

Lacking the power to negate and oppose, it is unable to hold together and keep within boimds the riches and varied fullness of divine life; it allows each individual moment to go ofi its own v/ay.

*746 Phenomenology of Mind and in its hymns of honour and reverence praises each individual moment as an independent god, now this god and now again another.

Where, however, it detects the seriousness of the notion, and perceives how the notion proceeds to deal with these forms, shattering them as it goes along; and where it comes to see how badly its praised and honoured gods come off when they venture on the ground where the notion holds sway; — there it is not itself the negative power actively setting to work, but keeps itself within the abstract selfless thought of such power, confines itself to the consciousness of alien and external destiny, and produces the empty wish to tranquillize, and feeble ineffective talk intended to appease.

In its terror before the higher powers, which are the immediate arms of the substance ; in its terror before their struggle with one another, and before the simple and uniform action of that necessity, which crushes them as well as the living beings bound up with them ; in its compassion for these living beings, whom it knows at once to be the same with itself — it is conscious of nothing but ineffective horror of this whole process, conscious of equally helpless pity, and, in fine, the mere empty peace of surrender to necessity, whose work is apprehended neither as the necessary act of character, nor as the action of the absolute Being within itself.

Spirit does not appear in its dissociated multiplicity on the plane of this spectacular consciousness, the indifferent ground, as it were, of presentation; it comes on the scene in the simple diremption of the notion. Its substance manifests itself, therefore, merely torn asunder into its two extreme powers. These elementary universal beings are, at the same time, self-conscious individu-