Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

804 Phenomenology of Mind is self-existent ; sense-certainty, sense-experience, is announced as absolute truth; but this self-existence is itself declared to be a moment which merely disappears, and passes into its opposite, into a being at the mercy of an " other. But knowledge of the thing is not yet finished at this point.

The thing must become known as self not merely in regard to the immediateness of its being and as regards specific determinateness, but also in the sense of essence or inner reahty. This is found in the case of Moral Self-consciousness. This mode of experience ^ thinks of its knowledge as the absolute essential element, 'knows no other objective being than pure will or pure knowledge. It is nothing but merely this will and this knowledge.

Any other possesses merely non-essential being, i.e. being that has no inherent nature fer se, but only its empty husk. In so far as the moral consciousness, in its view of the world, lets existence drop out of the self, it just as truly reclaims and takes this existence back again into the self.

In the form of conscience, finally, it is no longer this incessant alternation between the " placing " and the "displacing"' [dissembling] of existence and self ; it knows that its existence as such is this pure certainty of its own self ; the objective element, into which qua acting it puts forth itself, is nothing else than pure knowledge of itself by itself.

These are the moments which compose the reconcihation of spirit with its own consciousness proper. By themselves they are particular and separate ; and it is their spiritual unity alone which furnishes the power for this reconciliation. The last of these moments is, however, necessarily this unity itself, and, as we see,

AbsoliUe Knowledge 805 binds them all in fact into itself. Spirit certain of itself in its objective existence takes as the element of its existence nothing else than this knowledge of self. The declaration that what it does it does in accordance with the convictions of duty — this statement is the warrant for its own action, and makes good its conduct.

5" y^p Action is the first inherent division of the simple unity of the notion, and the return out of this division. This first movement turns round into the second, since the element of recognition is put forward as simple knowledge of duty in contrast to the distinction and diremption that he in action as such and, in this way, form a rigid reality confronting action.

In pardon, however, we saw how this rigid fixity gave way and renounced its claims. Reahty has here, qua immediate existence, no other significance for self-consciousness than that of being pure knowledge ; similarly, qua determinate existence, or qua relation, what is self-opposed is a knowledge partly of this purely individual self, partly of knowledge qua universal.

Herein it is estabhshed, at the same time, that the third moment, universality, or the essence, means for each of the two opposite factors merely knowledge. Finally they also cancel the empty opposition that still remains, and are the knowledge of ego as identical with ego : — ^this individual self which is iromediately pure knowledge or universal.

This reconcihation of consciousness with self-consciousness thus proves to be brought about in a doublesided way ; in the one case, in the religious mind, in the other case, in consciousness itself as such. They are distinguished inter se by the fact that the one is this reconcihation in the form of imphcit immanence, the other in the form of exphcit self-existence. As

806 Phenomenology of Mind we have considered them, they at the beginning fall apart. In the order in which the modes or types of consciousness came before us, consciousness has reached the individual moments of that order, and also their unification, long before ever religion gave its object the shape and mould of actual self-consciousness.

The unification of both aspects is not yet brought to light ; it is this that winds up this series of embodiments of .-». spiritual life, for in it spirit gets to the point where it knows itself not only as it is inherently in itself, or in terms of its absolute content, nor only as it is objectively for itself in terms of its bare form devoid of content, or in terms of self-consciousness, but as it is in its self-completeness, as it is inherently and explicitly, in itself and for itself.

This unification has, however, already taken place by implication, and has done so in religion, in the return of the objective presentation (Vorstellung) into self-consciousness, but not according to the proper form, for the religious aspect is the aspect of the esset it:' ally independent [Ansich) and stands in contrast to the process of \ self-consciousness.

The unification therefore belongs to this other aspect, which by contrast is the aspect of reflection into self, is that side which contains its self and its opposite, and contains them not only implicitly [an sich) or in a general way, but explicitly {für sich) or expressly developed and distinguished.

The content, as well as the other aspect of self-conscious spirit, so far as it is the other aspect, have been brought to light and are here in their completeness : the unification still a-wanting is the simple unity of the notion. This notion is also already given with the aspect of selfconsciousness ; but as it previously came before us