Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

Ethical Action 467 which plants an "other" in opposition to it, something foreign to the decision, which is clear knowledge. Actual reahty, therefore, keeps concealed within itself this other aspect ahen to clear knowledge, and does not show itself to consciousness as it fully and truly is {an und für sich).

In the story of OEdipus the son does not see his own father in the person of the man who has insulted him and whom he strikes to death, nor his mother in the queen whom he makes his wife. In this way a hidden power shunning the light of day, waylays the ethical self-consciousness, a power which bursts forth after the deed is done, and seizes the doer in the act.

For the completed deed is the removal of the opposition between the knowing self and the reality over against it. The ethical consciousness cannot disclaim the crime and its guilt. The deed consists in setting in motion what was unmoved, and in bringing out what in the first instance lay shut up as a mere possibiUty, and thereby finking on the unconscious to the conscious, the non-existent to the existent.

In this truth, therefore, the deed comes to the fight ; — it is something in which a conscious element is bound up with what is unconscious, what is pecufiarly one's own with what is alien and external : — it is an essential reality divided in sunder, whose other aspect consciousness discovers and also finds to be its own aspect, but as a power violated by its doing, and roused to hostifity against it.

It may well be that the right, which kept itself in reserve, is not in its pecufiar form present to the consciousness of the doer, but is merely impficit, present in the subjective inward guilt of the decision and the action. But the ethical consciousness is more complete, its guilt purer, if it knows beforehand the

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468 Phenomenology of Mind law and the power which it opposes, if it takes them to be sheer violence and wrong, to be a contingency in the ethical hfe, and wittingly, Hke Antigone, commits the crime. The deed when accomplished transforms its point of view : the very performance of it eo if so expresses that what is ethical has to be actual ; for the reahsation of the purpose is the very purpose of acting. Acting expresses precisely the unity of reaHty and the substance ; it expresses the fact that actuality is not an accident for the essential element, but that, in union with that element, is given to no right which is not true right. On account of this actuahty and on account of its deed ethical consciousness must acknowledge its opposite as its own actuality; it must acknowledge its guilt. Because of our sufferings we acknowledge we have erred.* To acknowledge this, is expressly to indicate that the severance between ethical purpose and actuahty has been done away ; it means the return to the ethical frame of mind, which knows that nothing counts but right. Thereby, however, the agent surrenders his character and the reality of his self, and has utterly collapsed. His being lies in belonging to his ethical law, as his substance ; in acknowledging an opposite, however, he has ceased to find his substance in this law; and instead of reaUty this has become an unreality, a mere sentiment, a frame of mind. The substance no doubt appears as the "pathic " elementt in the individuahty, and the individuahty * An adaptation from Antigone, 926. t The element that so permeates his being as to constitute his controlling necessity and destiny.

Guilt and Destiny 469 appears as the factor which animates the substance, and hence stands above it. But the substance is a " pathic '' element which is at the same time his character; the ethical individuahty is directly and inherently one with this its universal, exists in it alone, and is incapable of surviving the destruction which this ethical power suffers at the hands of its opposite.

This individuality, however, has all the same the certainty, that that individuahty, whose "pathic" element is this opposite power [the substance], suffers no more harm than it has inflicted. The opposition of the ethical powers to one another, and the process of the individuahties setting up these powers in life and action, have reached their true end merely in the fact that both sides undergo the same destruction.

For neither of the powers has any advantage over the other that it should be a more essential moment of the substance common to both.

The fact of their being equally and to the same degree essential, and subsisting 3z>.3 independently beside each other means their having no separate self ; in the act they have a self-nature, but a different self, — which contradicts the unity of the self and cancels their claim to independent right, and thus brings about their necessary destruction.

Character, too, in part, looking at its " pathic " element, the substance, belongs to one alone ; in part, when we look at the aspect of knowledge, the one character Hke the other is divided into a conscious element and an unconscious : and since each itself calls forth this opposition, and the want of knowledge is by the act also its doing, each falls into the guilt which consumes it. The victory of one power and its character, and the defeat of the other side, would thus be merely the