Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

458 Phenomenology of Mind other. The one extreme, universal spirit conscious of itself, becomes, through the individuaHty of man, linked together with its other extreme, its force and its element, with unconscious spirit.

On the other hand, divine law is individuahsed, the unconscious spirit of the particular individual finds its existence, in woman, through the mediation of whom the spirit of the individual comes out of its unrealisedness into actuahty, out of the state of unknowing and unknown, and rises into the conscious realm of universal spirit.

The union of man with woman constitutes the operative mediating agency for the whole, and constitutes the element which, while separated into the extremes of divine and human law, is, at the same time, their immediate union.

This union, again, turns both those first mediate connections (Schlüsse) into one and the same synthesis, and unites into one process the twofold movement in opposite directions, — one from reality to unreahty, the downward movement of human law, organised into independent members, to the danger and trial of death, — the other, from unreahty to reahty, the upward movement of the law of the nether world to the daylight of conscious existence. Of these movements the former falls to man, the latter to woman.

Ethical Action. Knowledge, Human and Divine. Guilt and Destiny. [A fundamental condition of social order is that it is maintained byaction on the part of the individual members of a society ; action is a fundamental principle of distinction between individuals, is the way they make their contribution to social life, and is also the way by which the continuance of social life is ceaselessly broken and reconstituted.

In a comprehensive sense therefore action is the principle by which distinction in unity is carried out in social life. The consideration of its significance is thus an essential problem for the analysis of social mind. Action must be considered at once with reference to individuality and also with reference to those conceptions of social order as containing both " divine " and "human" law. In the following section, this analysis is undertaken.

The specific historical background of Hegel's thought in this section, and to some extent in the preceding section, is supplied by the social life of the Greek city state. The Greek city state has been taken as the type, so to say, of spiritual existence realised as a self-complete ethical order.

But the social life of Greece is here in large measure read and interpreted in the light of the dramatisation of Greek ethical conceptions by the great Greek tragedians, especially Sophocles. This accounts for the repeated reference to the purely dramatic conception of the " destiny" or the "pathic" element in the life of the individual whose spiritual existence is completely bound up with the established social order.

It is in Greece that we find most fully realised the all-sulficiency of the state for the individual, which Hegel has here in view, a sufficiency which was at once the strength and beauty, as well as the pathos and weakness of Greek social life. With this and the preceding section should be read Hegel's Philosophy of History, Part II, "The Greek World."]

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Ethical Action. Knowledge, Human and Divine. Guilt and Destiny. In the form presented by the opposition of elements in the realm just dealt with, self-consciousness has not yet come to its rights as a particular individuality. Individuality there has, on one side, the sense of merely universal will, on the other, of consanguinity of the family. This particular individual has merely the significance of shadowy unreality. There is as yet no performance of an act. The act, however, is the realised self. It breaks in upon the untroubled stable organisation and movement of the ethical world. What there appears as ordinance and harmony between both its constituent elements, each of which confirms and complements the other, becomes through the performing of an act a transition of opposites into one another, by which each proves to be the annihilation rather than the confirmation of its self and its opposite. It becomes the process of negation or destruction, the eternal necessity of awful destiny, which engulfs in the abyss of its bare identity divine and human law alike, as well as both the selfconscious factors in which these powers subsist ; and, to our view, passes over into the absolute selfexistence of mere particular self-consciousness. The basis from which this movement proceeds, and on which it takes effect, is the kingdom of the ethical order. But the activity at work in this process is selfconsciousness. Being ethical consciousness, it is the 460