Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

p. 478

The Condition or Right or Legal Status The general comprehensive unity, into which the living immediate unity of individuality and the ethical substance falls back, is the soulless (geistlos) community, which has ceased to be the un-selfconscious * substance of individuals, and in which they now, each in his separate individual existence, count as selves and substances with a being of their own. The universal being thus spht up into the atomic units of a sheer plurahty of individuals, this inoperative, hfeless spirit is a principle of equahty in which all count for as much as each, i.e. have the significance of Persons. What in the realm of the ethical life was called the hidden divine law has in fact come out of concealment to the light of actuahty. In the former the individual was, and was counted, actual merely as a blood relation, merely as sharing in the general -^Hi hfe of the family. Qua particular individual, he was the selfless departed spirit ; now, however, he has come out of his unreahty. Because tlie ethical substance is only objective, "true," spirit, only imphes spirit, the individual on that account turns back to the immediate certainty of his own self ; he is that substance qua positive universal, but his actuality consists in being a negative universal self. We saw the powers and forms of the ethical world sink in the bare necessity of mere Destiny. This * Reading " selbstbewusstlose " (1st ed.). 479

480 Phenomenology of Mind power of the ethical world is the substance turning itself back into its ultimate and simple nature. But that absolute being turning back into itself, that verynecessity of characterless Destiny, is nothing else than the Ego of self-consciousness. This is taken henceforth as what is absolutely real, as the ultimate self-contained reaUty.

To be so acknowledged is its substantiality ; but this is abstract universahty, because its content is this rigid self, not the self dissolved in the substance. Personahty, then, has here risen out of the hfe and activity of the ethical substance. It is the condition in which the independence of consciousness has actual concrete validity.

The unrealised abstract thought of such independence, which arises through renouncing actuality, was at an earlier stage before our notice in the form of " Stoical self-consciousness.'* Just as the latter was the outcome of "Lordship and Bondage,"* the mode in which self-consciousness exists immediately, — so personality is the outgrowth of the immediate life of spirit which is the universal controlHng will of all, as well as their dutiful obedience and submissive service.

What in Stoicism was imphcit merely in an abstract way, is now an explicit concrete world. Stoicism is nothing else than the mood of consciousness which reduces to its abstract form the principle of legal status, the principle of the sphere of right, — an independence devoid of the quahties of spirit {geistlos).

By its flight from actuahty it attained merely the idea of independence : it is absolutely subjective, exists solely for itself, in that it does not hnk its being to anything that exists, but rather wants to * V. p. 175 ff.

Legal Status 481 give up every kind of existence, and places its essential meaning in the unity of mere thinking. In the same manner, the " right " of a " person " is not linked on to a richer or more powerful existence of the individual qua -.^'i* individual, nor again connected with a universal living spirit, but, rather, is attached to the mere unit of its abstract reahty, or to that unit qua self-consciousness in general.

Now just as the abstract independence of Stoicism set forth the stages of its actuahsation, so, too, this last form of independence [Personahty] will recapitulate the process of the former mode.

The former [Stoicism] passes over into the state of sceptical confusion, into a fickle instabihty of negation, which without adopting any permanent form strays from one contingent mode of being and thinking to another, dissipates them indeed in absolute independence, but just as readily creates their independence once more. In fact, it is simply the contradiction of consciousness claiming to be at once independent and yet devoid of independence.

In hke manner, the personal independence characteristic of the sphere of right is really a similar universal confusion and reciprocal dissolution of this kind. For what passes for the absolute essential reahty is self-consciousness in the sense of the bare empty unit of the person.

As against this empty universahty, the substance has the form of what supphes the filhng and the content ; and this content is now left completely detached and disconnected ; for the spirit, which kept it in subjection and held it in its unity, is no longer present. The empty unit of the person is, therefore, as regards its reahty, an accidental existence, a contingent insubstantial process and activity that comes to no durable VOL, II. — F