Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

The Spiritual Work of Art 753 notion {Begriff) and dispersed in the form of ideal presentation {Vorstellung), moments which the chorus permits to hold good one after the other, are, on the other hand, not the " pathos " of the hero ; they sink to the level of passions in the hero — to the level of accidental, insubstantial moments, which the impersonal chorus no doubt praises, but which are not capable of constituting the character of heroes, nor of being expressed and regarded by them as their real nature.

But, further, the persons of the divine Being itself, as well as the characters of its substance, coalesce into the simphcity of what is devoid of consciousness. This necessity has, in contrast to self-consciousness, the characteristic of being the negative power of all the forms that appear, a power in which they do not recognise themselves, but perish therein.

The self appears as merely allotted amongst the different characters, and not as the mediating factor of the process. But self -consciousness, the simple certainty of self, is in point of fact the negative power, the unity of Zeus, the unity of the substantial essence and abstract necessity ; it is the spiritual unity into which everything returns.

Because actual self-consciousness is still distinguished from the substance and Fate, it is partly the chorus, or rather the crowd looking on, whom this movement of the divine Ufe fills with fear as being something ahen and strange, or in whom this movement, as something closely touching themselves, produces merely the emotion of passive pity.

Partly again, so far as consciousness co-operates and belongs to the various characters, this alhance is of an external kind, is a hypocrisy — because the true union, that of self, fate, and substance, is not yet present. The hero, who appears before the VOL. IL— z

754 Phenomenology of Mind onlookers, breaks up into his mask and the actor, into the person of the play and the actual self. The self-consciousness of the heroes must step forth from its mask and be represented as knowing itself to be the fate both of the gods of the chorus and of the absolute powers themselves, and as being no longer separated from the chorus, the universal consciousness.

Comedy has, then, first of all, the aspect that actual self-consciousness represents itself as the Fate of the gods. These elemental Beings are, qua universal moments, no definite self, and are not actual. They are, indeed, endowed with the form of individuahty, but this is in their case merely put on, and does not really and truly suit them. The actual self has no such abstract moment as its substance and content.

The subject, therefore, is raised above such a moment, as it would be above a particular property, and when clothed with this mask gives utterance to the irony of such a property trying to be something on its own account. The pretentious claims of the universal abstract nature are shown up and discovered in the actual self ; it is seen to be caught and held in a concrete reahty, and lets the mask drop, just when it wants to be something right.

The self, appearing here in its significance as something actual, plays with the mask which it once puts on, in order to be its own person; but it breaks away from this seeming and pretence just as quickly again, and comes out in its own nakedness and usual character, which it shows not to be distinct from the proper self, the actor, nor again from the onlooker, i" 1^ ^ This general dissolution, which the formally embodied essential nature as a whole undergoes when it

The Spiritual Work of Art 755 assumes individuaKty, becomes in its content more serious, and hence more petulant and bitter, in so far as the content possesses its more serious and necessarymeaning. The divine substance combines the meaning of natural and ethical essentiahty.

As regards the natural element, actual self-consciousness shows, in the very fact of applying elements of nature for its adornment, for its abode and so on, and again in feasting on its own offering, that itself is the Fate to which the secret is disclosed, no matter what its position with regard to the independent substantiaHty of nature.

In the mystery of the bread and wine it makes its very own this self-subsistence of nature together with the significance of inner reaUty ; and in Comedy it is conscious of the irony lurking in this meaning.

So far, again, as this meaning contains the essence of ethical reahty, it is partly the nation in its two aspects of the state, or Demos proper, and individual family hfe ; partly, however, it is self-conscious pure knowledge, or rational thought of the universal.

Demos, the general mass, which knows itself as master and governor, and is also aware of being the insight and intelhgence which demand respect, exerts compulsion and is befooled through the particularity of its actual hfe, and exhibits the ludicrous contrast between its own opinion of itself and its immediate existence, between its necessity and contingency, its universahty and its vulgarity.

If the principle of its individual existence, cut off from the universal, breaks out in the proper form of actual reahty and openly usurps and administers the commonwealth, to which it is a secret harm and detriment, then immediately there