Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

762 Phenomenology of Mind forward, as also with the vahdity of these claims in pure thought [in Stoicism]. It knows that a vindication of such claims means really being altogether lost ; it is just this loss become conscious of itself, and is the surrender and rehnquishment of its knowledge about itself. We see that this " unhappy consciousness " constitutes the counterpart and the complement of the perfectly happy consciousness, that of comedy.

All divine reahty goes back into this latter type of consciousness ; it means, in other words, the complete rehnquishment and emptying of substance. The former, on the contrary, is conversely the tragic fate that befalls certainty of self which aims at being absolute, at being selfsufficient.

It is consciousness of the loss of everything of significance in this certainty of itself, and of the loss even of this knowledge or certainty of self — the loss of tr^ [" its substance as well as of self ; it is the bitter pain which finds expression in the cruel words, " God is dead."* In the condition of right or law, then, the ethical world has vanished, and its type of rehgion has passed away in the mood of Comedy.

The " unhappy consciousness " the soul of despair, is just the knowledge of all this loss. It has lost both the worth and dignity it attached to its immediate personahty [as a legal person] as well as that attaching to its personality when reflected in the medium of thought [in the case of Stoicism]. Trust in the eternal laws of the Gods is silenced, just as the oracles are dumb, whose work it was to know what was right in particular cases.

The statues set up are now corpses in stone whence the animating soul has flown, while the hymns * From a hymn of Luther.

Revealed Religion 763 of praise are words from which all beUef has gone. The tables of the gods are bereft of spiritual food and drink, and from his games and festivals man no more receives the joyful sense of his unity with the divine Being. The works of the muse lack the force and energy of the spirit which derived the certainty and assurance of itself just from the crushing ruin of gods and men.

They are themselves now just what they are for us — beautiful fruit broken of! the tree ; a kindly fate has passed on those works to us, as a maiden might offer such fruit off a tree.

It is not their actual hfe as they exist, that is given us, not the tree that bore them, not the earth, and the elements, which constituted their substance, nor the climate that determined their constitutive character, nor the change of seasons which controlled the process of their growth.

So too it is not their living world that Fate preserves and gives us with those works of ancient art, not the spring and summer of that ethical hfe in which they bloomed and ripened, but the veiled remembrance alone of all this reahty.

Our action, therefore, when we enjoy them is not that of worship, through which our conscious hfe might attain its complete truth and be satisfied to the full : our action is external ; it consists in wiping off some drop of rain or speck of dust from these fruits, and in place of the inner elements composing the reahty of the ethical hfe, a reahty that environed, created and inspired these works, we erect in prohx detail the scaffolding of the dead elements of their outward existence, — language, historical circumstances, etc. All this we do, not in order to enter into their Si^. 4 very life, but only to represent them ideally or pictorially {vorstellen) within om"selves. But just as the

7G4 Phenomenology of Mind maiden who hands us the plucked fruits is more than the nature which presented them in the first instance — the nature which provided all their detailed conditions and elements, tree, air, hght and so on — since in a higher way she gathers all this together into the hght of her self-conscious eye, and her gesture in offering the gifts ; so too the spirit of the fate, which presents us with those works of art, is more than the ethical life reahsed in that nation.

For it is the inwardising in us, in the form of conscious memory {Er-innerung), of the spirit which in them was manifested in an outward external way ; — it is the spirit of the tragic fate which collects all those individual gods and attributes of the substance into the one Pantheon, into the spirit which is itself conscious of itself as spirit.

All the conditions for its production are present, and this totahty of its conditions constitutes the development of it, its notion, or the inherent production of it. The cycle of the creations of art embraces in its scope all forms in which the absolute substance rehnqiiishes itself.

The absolute substance is in the form of individuahty as a thing ; as an object existing for sense experience ; as mere language, or the process of that form whose existence does not get away from the self, and is a purely evanescent object ; as immediate imity with universal self-consciousness when inspired with enthusiasm ; as mediated unity when performing the acts of the cult ; as corporeal embodiment of the self in a form of beauty ; and jânally as existence lifted into ideal representation {Vorstellung) and the expansion of this existence into a world which at length gathers its content together into universahty, a universal which