Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

Culture and its Sphere of Reality 497 tially inherent (AnsicJi) becomes something explicitly acknowledged, and assumes definite objective existence. The process in which an individuahty cultivates itself is, therefore, ipso facto, the development of individuahty qua universal objective being; that is to say, it is the development of the actual world.

This world, although it has come into being by means of individuahty, is in the eyes of self-consciousness something that is directly alienated and estranged, and, for self-consciousness, takes on the form of a fijxed, undisturbed reality. But at the same time self-consciousness is sure this is its own substance, and proceeds to take it under control.

This power over its substance it acquires by culture, which, looked at from this aspect, appears as self-consciousness making itself conform to reahty, and doing so to the extent permitted by the energy of its original character and talents. What seems here to be the individual's power and force, bringing the substance under it, and thereby doing away with that substance, is the same thing as the actuahsation of the substance.

For the power of the individual consists in conforming itself to that substance, i.e. in emptying itself of its own self, and thus establishing itself as the objectively existing substance. Its culture and its own reality are, therefore, the process of making the substance itself actual and concrete.

The self is conscious of being actual only as transcended, as cancelled.* The self does not here constitute the unity of consciousness of self and object ; rather this object is negative as regards the self. By means of the self qua inner soul of the process, the substance is so moulded and worked up in its various moments, * Cp. Hume's view of " personal identity," Treatise, pt. IV, c. 6. VOL. II. — G

498 Phenomenology of Mind that one opposite puts life into the other, each opposite, by its aHenation from the other, gives the other stabiUty, and similarly gets stabihty from the other. At the same time, each moment has its own definite natm:e, in the sense of having an insuperable worth and significance ; and has a fixed reality as against the other.

The process of thought fixes this distinction in the most general manner possible, by means of the absolute opposition of " good " and " bad,'' which are poles asunder, and can in no way become one and the same.

3£,^ But the very soul of what is thus fixed consists in its immediate transition to its opposite ; its existence lies really in transmuting each determinate element into its opposite ; and it is only this alienation that constitutes the essential nature and the preservation of the whole.

We must now consider this process by which the moments are thus made actual and give each other life ; the alienation will be found to alienate itself, and the whole thereby will take all its contents back into the ultimate principle it implies {seinen Begriff). At the outset we must deal with the substance pure and simple in its immediate aspect as an organisation of its moments ; they exist there, but are inactive, their soul is wanting.

We have here something like what we find in nature. Nature, we find, is resolved and spread out into separate and separable elements — air, water, fire, earth.

Of these air is the unchanging factor, purely universal and transparent ; water, the reaUty that is for ever being dissolved and given up ; fire, its pervading active unity which is ever dissolving opposition into unity, as well as breaking up simple unity into opposite constituents: earth is the tightly compact knot of these separated factors, the subject

Culture and its Sphere of Reality 499 in which these reahties are, where their processes take effect, that which they start from and to which they return. In the same way the inner essential nature, the simple life of spirit that pervades self-conscious reality, is resolved, spread out into similar general areas or masses, spiritual masses in this case, and appears as a whole organised world.

In the first area or mass it is the inherently universal spiritual being, self-identical ; in the second it is self-existent being, it has become inherently self-discordant, sacrificing itself, abandoning itself ; the third which takes the form of selfconsciousness is subject, and possesses in its very nature the fiery force of dissolution.

In the first case it is conscious of itself, as immanent and implicit, as existing per se ; in the second it finds independence, self-existence {Fürsichseyn) developed and carried out by means of the sacrifice of what is universal.

But spirit itself is the self - containedness and self -completeness of the whole, which splits up into substance qua constantly enduring and substance engaged in selfsacrifice, and which at the same time resumes substance again into its own unity ; a whole which is at once a flame of fire bursting out and consuming the substance, as well as the abiding form of the substance consumed.

We can see that the areas of spiritual reahty here referred to correspond to the Community and the Family in the ethical world, without, however, possessing the native familiarity of spirit which the latter have. On the other hand, if destiny is ahen to this spirit, self-consciousness is and knows itself here to be the real power underlying them. We have now to consider these separate members