Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

524 Phenomenology of Mind out to be the essential reality, it knows to be a reality without an inherent nature of its own, to be something at the mercy of another. The language of flattery, however, as already remarked, is that of a one-sided spirit.

To be sure its constituent elements are, on the one hand, a self moulded by service into a shape where 3//^ it is reduced to bare existence, and, on the other, the inherent reahty of the power dominating the self.

Yet the bare principle, the pure conception, in which the mere self and the inherent reality (Ansich), that pure ego and this pure reality or thought, are one and the same thing — this conceptual unity of the two aspects between which the reciprocity takes effect, is not consciously felt when this language is used.

The object is consciously still the inherent reality in opposition to the self; in other words, the object is not for consciousness at the same time its own proper self as such.

The language expressing the condition of disintegration, wherein spiritual life is rent asunder, is, however, the perfect form of utterance for this entire stage of spiritual culture and development, the formative process of moulding self-consciousness (Bildung), and expresses the spirit in which it most truly exists.

This self-consciousness, which finds befitting the rebelhon that repudiates its own repudiation, is eo ipso absolute selfidentity in absolute disintegration, the pure activity of mediating pure self-consciousness with itself. It is the oneness expressed in the identical judgment, where one and the same personality is subject as well as predicate.

But this identical judgment is at the same time the infinite judgment ; for this personality is absolutely split in two, and subject and predicate

Culture and its Sphere of Reality 525 are entities utterly indifferent one to the other, which have nothing to do with each other, with no necessary unity, so much so that each has the power of an independent personahty of its own.

What exists as a self on its own account has for its object its own self- existence, which is object in the sense of an absolute other, and yet at the same time directly in the form of itself — itself in the sense of an other, not as if this had an other content, for the content is the same self in the form of an absolute opposite, with an existence completely all its own and indifferent.

We have, then, here the spirit of this real world of formative culture, conscious of its own nature as it truly is, and conscious of its ultimate and essential principle [Begriff'). This type of spiritual life is the absolute and universal inversion of reality and thought, their entire estrangement the one from the other ; it is pure cultm'e.

What is found out in this sphere is that neither the concrete reahties, state-power and wealth, nor their determinate conceptions, good and bad, nor the consciousness of good and bad (the consciousness that is noble and the consciousness that is base) possess real truth ; it -So is found that all these moments are inverted and transmuted the one into the other, and each is the opposite of itself.

The universal power, which is the substance, since it gains a spiritual nature pecuHarly its own through the principle of individuality, accepts the possession of a self of its own merely as a name by which it is described, and, even in being actual power, is really so powerless as to have to sacrifice itself. But this self-less reahty given over to another, this

526 Phenomenology of Mind self that is turned into a thing, is in fact the return of the reahty into itself ; it is a self- existence that is there for its own sake, the existential form of spirit. The principles belonging to these reahties, the thoughts of good and bad, are similarly transmuted and reversed in this process; what is characterised as good is bad, and vice versa.

The consciousness of each of these moments by itself, the conscious types judged as noble and base — these are rather in their real truth similarly the reverse of what these specific forms should be ; nobility is base and repudiated, just as what is repudiated as base turns round into the nobleness that characterises the most highly developed form of free self-consciousness.

Looked at formally, everji^hing is Hkewise in its external aspects the reverse of what it is internally for itself ; and again it is not really and in truth what it is for itself, but something else than it wants to be; self-existence on its own account is, strictly speaking, the loss of self, and ahenation of self is really selfpreservation.

The state of things brought about here, then, is that all moments execute justice on one another all round, each is just as much in a condition of inherent alienation as it fancies itself in its opposite, and in this way reverses its nature.

Spirit truly objective, however, is just this unity of absolutely separate moments, and in fact comes into existence as the common ground, the mediating agency, just through the independent reality of these self-less extremes. Its very existence hes in universal talk and depreciatory judgment rending and tearing everything, before which all those moments are broken