Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

Ethical Action 461 pure and simple direction of activity towards the essential principle of the ethical Hfe — it is Duty. There is no caprice, and Hkewise no struggle, no indecision in it, since it has given up legislating and testing laws : the essential ethical principle is, for it, something immediate, unwavering, without contradiction.

There is therefore neither the painful spectacle of finding itself in a colhsion between passion and duty, nor the comic spectacle of a collision between duty and duty — a colhsion, which so far as content goes is the same as that between passion and duty ; for passion can also be presented as a duty, because duty, when consciousness withdraws into itself and leaves its immediate essential substance {Wesenheit), comes to be the formal universal, into which one content fits equally well with another, as we found before.

The colhsion of duties is, however, comical, because it brings out the contradiction inherent in the idea of an absolute standing opposed to another absolute, expresses something absolute and then directly the annihilation of this so-called absolute or duty. The ethical consciousness, however, knows what it has to do ; and is decided, whether it is to belong to divine or human law.

This directness which characterises its decision is something immanent and inherent (Ansichseyn), and hence has at the same time the significance of a natural condition 33>' of being, as we saw. Nature, not the accident of circumstances or choice, assigns one sex to one law, the other to the other law ; or conversely both the ethical powers themselves estabhsh their individual existence and actualisation in the two sexes. Thus, then, because on the one side the ethical order consists essentially in this immediate directness

462 PJienomenology of Mind of decision, and therefore only the one law is for consciousness the essential reality ; while, on the other side, the powers of the ethical order are actual in the self of conscious life, — in this way these forces acquire the significance of excluding one another and of being fU opposed to one another. They are explicit in self- ^j.^^, consciousness just as they were merely impHcit in the realm of the ethical order.

The ethical consciousness, because it is decisively on the side of one of them, is essentially Character. There is not for it equal essentiality in both. The opposition therefore appears as an unfortunate collision of duty merely with reality, on which right has no hold.

The ethical consciousness is qua self-consciousness in this opposition, and being so, it at once proceeds either to subdue by force this reahty opposing it to the law which it accepts, or to get round this reality by craft.

Since it sees right only on its own side, and wrong on the other, so, of these two, that which belongs to divine law detects, on the other side, mere arbitrary fortuitous human violence, while what appertains to human law, finds in the other the obstinacy and disobedience of subjective self-sufficiency.

For the commands of teiA^ government have a universal sense and meaning open to the light of day ; the will of the other law, however, is the inner concealed meaning of the realm of darkness {unterirdisch), a meaning which appears expressed as the will of a particular being, and in contradicting the first is malicious offence.

There arises in this way in consciousness the opposition between what is known and what is not known, just as, in the case of substance, there was an opposition between the conscious and the unconscious ; and the

Ethical Action 463 absolute right of ethical self-consciousness comes into 3$ 8 conflict with the divine right of the essential reahty. Self -consciousness, qua consciousness, takes the objective actuality, as such, to have essential being.

Looking at its substance, however, it is the unity of itself and this opposite, and the ethical self-consciousness is consciousness of that substance : the object, qua opposed to self-consciousness, has, therefore, entirely lost the characteristic of having essential being by itself.

Just as the spheres [of conscious life] where the object is merely a "thing" are long past and gone, so, too, are these spheres, where consciousness sets up and estabhshes something from out itself, and turns a particular moment into the essential reahty (Wesen). Against such one-sidedness actual concrete reahty has a power of its own ; it takes the side of truth against consciousness and shows consciousness itself what the truth is.

The ethical consciousness, however, has drunk from the cup of the absolute substance, forgotten all the one-sidedness of isolating self-existence, all its purposes and pecuUar notions, and has, therefore, at the same time drowned in this Stygian stream all essentiality of nature and all the independence claimed by the objective reality.

Its absolute right, therefore, when it acts in accordance with ethical law, is to find in this actuahsation nothing else than the fulfilment and performance of this law itself: and that the deed should manifest nothing but ethical action. The ethical, being absolute essence and absolute power at once, cannot endure any perversion of its content. If it were merely absolute essence without power, it might undergo perversion at the hands of