Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

512 Phenomenology of Mind inner withdrawn and separatist spiritual principle, the self as such, coming forward and abrogating itself, the state-power becomes if so facto raised into a proper self of its own ; without this aHenation of self the deeds of honour, the actions of the noble type of consciousness, and the counsels which its insight reveals, would continue to maintain the ambiguous character which, as 2,yo we saw, kept that secret reserve of private intention and self-will, in spite of its overt pretensions.

This estrangement, however, takes place in Language, in words alone, and language assumes here its peculiar role. Both in the sphere of the general social order {Sittlichkeit), where language conveys laws and commands, and in the sphere of actual life, where it appears as conveying advice, the content of what it expresses is the essential reality, and language is the form of that essential content.

Here, however, it takes the form in which qua language it exists to be its content, and possesses authority, qua spoken word ; it is the power of utterance qua utterance which, just in speaking, performs what has to be performed. For it is the existence of a pure self qua self ; in speech the particular self-existent self-consciousness comes as such into existence, so that its particular individuality is something for others.

Ego qua this particular pure ego is non-existent otherwise ; in every other mode of expression it is absorbed in some concrete actuality, and appears in a shape from which it can withdraw ; it turns reflectively back into itself, away from its act, as well as from its physiognomic expression, and leaves such an incomplete existence, (in which there is always at once too much as well as too little), lying soulless behind. Speech, however, contains this ego in its

Culture and its Sphere of Reality 513 purity ; it alone expresses I, qua self. Its existence in this case is, qua existence, a form of objectivity which has in it the true nature of existence. Ego is this particular ego, but at the same time universal ; its appearing is ipso facto and at once the alienation and disappearance of this particular ego, and in consequence its remaining all the while universal.

The I, that expresses itself, is apprehended as an ego ; it is a kind of infection, in virtue of which it establishes at once a unity with those who are aware of it, a spark that kindles a imiversal consciousness of self.

That it is perceived as a fact by others means eo ipso that its existence is itself dying away : this its otherness is taken back into itself ; and its existence hes just in this, that, qua self-conscious Now, as it exists, it has no subsistence and that it subsists just through its disappearance.

This disappearance is, therefore, itself ipso facto its continuance ; it is its own cognition of itself, and its knowing itself as something that has passed into another self that has been perceived and 37/ apprehended and is universal. Spirit maintains this form of reality here, because the extremes, too, whose unity spirit is, have directly the character of being reahties each on its own account.

Their unity is disintegrated into rigid aspects, each of which is an actual object for the other, and each is excluded from the other.

The unity, therefore, appears in the role of a mediating term, which is excluded and distinguished from the separated reahty of the two sides ; it has, therefore, itself the actual character of something objective, apart, and distinguished from its aspects, and objective for them, i.e. the unity is an existent objective fact. J~-ciJz.'^ie^ VOL. II.— H

514 Phenomenology of Mind The spiritual substance comes as such into existence only when it has been able to take as its aspects those selfconsciousnesses, which know this pure self to be a reality claiming immediate validity, and therein immediately know, too, that they are such reahties merely through the process of alienation.

Through that pure self the moments of substance get the transparency of a self-knowing category, and become clarified so far as to be moments of spirit ; through the mediating process spirit comes to exist in spiritual form.

Spirit in this way is the mediating term, presupposing those extremes and produced through their existence ; but it is also the spiritual whole breaking out between them, which sunders its self into them, and creates each solely in virtue of that contact with the whole which belongs to its very principle.

The fact that both extremes are from the start and in their very nature transcended and disintegrated brings out their unity; and this is the process which fuses both together, interchanges their characteristic features, and binds them together, and does so in each extreme. This mediating process consequently actuahses the principle of each of the two extremes, or makes what each is inherently in itself its controlling and moving spirit.

Both extremes, the state-authority and the noble type of consciousness, are disintegrated by this latter. In state-power, the two sides are the abstract universal which is obeyed, and the individual will existing on its own account, which, however, does not yet belong to the universal itself.

In nobility, the two sides are the obedience in giving up existence, or the inherent maintenance of self-respect and honour, and, on the other hand, a self which exists purely for its own sake