Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

464 Phenomenology of Mind individuality. But this latter, being ethical consciousness, has renounced all perverting when it gave up its one-sided subjectivity (Fürsichseyn). Conversely, again, mere power might be perverted by the essential reality, if power were still a subjectivity of that kind.

On account of this unity, individuahty is a pure form of the substance which is the content, and action consists in transition from thought over into reahty, merely as the process of an unreal opposition, whose moments have no special and particular content distinct from one another, and no essential nature of their own.

The absolute right of ethical consciousness is, therefore, that the deed, the mode and form of its realisation, should be nothing else than it knows it to be. But the essential ethical reahty has spht asunder into two laws, and consciousness, taking up an undivided single attitude towards law, is assigned only to one.

Just as this simple consciousness takes its stand on the absolute right that the essential reahty has appeared to it qua ethical as that reality inherently is, so, too, this essence insists on the right belonging to its reahty, i.e. the right of having a double form.* This right of the essential reahty does not, however, at the same time stand over against and opposed to selfconsciousness, as if it were to be found anywhere else ; rather it is the essential nature of self-consciousness.

Only there has it its existence and its power ; and its opposition is the act of self- consciousness itself. For the latter, just because it is a self to itself, and proceeds to act, lifts itself out of the state of simple immediacy, and itself sets up the division into two. By the act it gives up the specific character of the ethical hfe, that of * viz. divine and human law.

Ethical Action 465 being pure and simple certainty of immediate truth, and sets up the division of itself into self as active and reahty over against it, and for it, therefore, negative. By the act it thus becomes Guilt. For the deed is its doing, and doing is its inmost nature.

And the guilt acquires also the meaning of Crime ; for as simple ethical consciousness it has turned to and conformed itself to the one law, but turned away from the other, and thus has broken the latter by its deed.

Guilt is not an external indifferent entity {Wesen) with the double meaning, that the deed, as actually manifested to the light of day, may be an action of the guilty self, or may not be so, as if with the doing of it there could be connected something external and accidental that did not belong to it, from which point of view, therefore, the action would be innocent.

Rather the act is itself this diremption, this affirming itself for itself, and estabhshing over against this an ahen external reahty. That such a result takes place is due to the deed itself, and is the ■si^c outcome of it. Hence, innocence is an attribute merely of the want of action {NicJit-thun), a state like the mere being of a stone, and one which is not even true of a child.

Looking at the content, however, the ethical act contains the element of wrongdoing, because it does not cancel and transcend the natural allotment of the two laws to the two sexes ; but rather, being an undivided attitude towards the law, keeps within the sphere of natural immediacy, and, qua acting, turns this one-sidedness into guilt, by merely laying hold of one side of the essential reahty and taking up a negative relation towards the other, i.e. violating it. Where, in the general ethical life, guilt and crime, deeds and actions, VOL. II.— E

466 Phenomenology of Mind come in, will be more definitely brought out later. Meantime, so much is at once clear, that it is not this particular individual who acts and becomes guilty.

For he, qua this particular self, is merely a shadowy reality ; he is merely qua universal self, and individuality is purely the formal aspect of doing anything at all, while its content is the laws and customs which are determined for the individual, the laws and customs of his class or station.

He is the substance qua genus, which by its determinateness becomes, no doubt, a species, but the specific form remains at the same time the generic universal. Self-consciousness within the life of a nation descends from the universal only down as far as specific particularity, but not as far as the single individuality, which sets up an exclusive self, estabhshes in its action a reality negative to itself.

On the contrary, the action of that self-consciousness rests on secure confidence in the whole, into which there enters nothing alien or foreign, neither fear nor hostility. Ethical self-consciousness now comes to find in its deed the full explicit meaning of concrete real action as much when it followed divine law as when it followed human.

The law manifest to it is, in the essential reality, bound up with its opposite ; the essential reality is the unity of both ; but the deed has merely carried out one as against the other. But being bound up with this other in the inner reality, the fulfil- 3i I ment of the one calls forth the other, in the shape of something which, having been violated and now become hostile, demands revenge — an attitude which the deed has made it take up.

In the case of action, only one phase of the decision is in general in evidence. The decision, however, is inherently something negative,