Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel
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Culture and its Sphere of Reality 527 up that are meant to signify something real and to stand for actual members of the whole, and which at the same time plays with itself this game of self-dissolution. This judging and talking is, therefore, the .3,5 ; real truth, which cannot be got over, while it overpowers everything — it is that which in this real world is alone truly of importance.
Each part of this world comes to find there its spirit expressed, or gets to be spoken of with spirit and finds said of it what it is. The honest * soul takes each moment as a permanent and essential fact, and is an uncultivated unreflective condition, which does not think and does not know that it is just doing the very inverse.
The distraught and disintegrated soul is, however, aware of inversion; it is, in fact, a condition of absolute inversion : the conceptual principle predominates there, brings together into a single unity the thoughts that lie far apart in the case of the honest soul, and the language clothing its meaning is, therefore, full of esfrit and wit {geistreich).
The content uttered by spirit and uttered about itself is, then, the inversion and perversion of all conceptions and realities, a universal deception of itself and of others. The shamelessness manifested in stating this deceit is just on that account the greatest truth.
This style of speech is the madness of the musician " who piled and mixed up together some thirty airs, Itahan, French, tragic, comic, of all sorts and kinds ; now, in a deep undertone, he descended to the depths of hell, then, contracting his throat to a high, piping falsetto, he rent the vault of the skies, raving and soothing, haughtily * V. p. 402 ff.
528 Phenomenology of Mind imperious and mockingly j eering by turns.
" * The placid soult that in simple honesty of heart takes the music of the good and true to consist in harmony of sound and uniformity of tone, i.e. in a melodious chord, regards this style of expression as a " fickle fantasy of wisdom and folly, a melee of so much skill and low cunning, composed of ideas as likely to be right as wrong, with as complete a perversion of sentiment, with as much consummate shamefulness in it, as absolute frankness, candour, and truth.
It is not able to refrain from bringing out the sound of every note, and running up and down the whole gamut of feeling, from the depths of contempt and repudiation to the highest pitch of admiration and stirring emotion. 'isi.
A vein of the ridiculous will be diffused through the latter, which takes away from their nature " ; the former will find in their very candour a strain of atoning reconcilement, will find in their shuddering depths the all-powerful qualities which give spirit a self.
If we consider, by way of contrast to the mode of utterance indulged in by this self-transparent distracted type of mind, the language adopted by that simple, placid consciousness of the good and the true, we find that it can only speak in monosyllables when face to face with the frank and self-conscious eloquence of the mind developed under the influence of culture ; for it can say nothing to the latter that the latter does not know and say.
If it gets beyond speaking in monosyllables, then it says the same thing that the cultivated mind expresses, but in doing so commits, * Diderot, Rameau's Neffc. f The " philosopher " in Diderot's Dialogue.
Culture and its Sphere of Reality 529 in addition, the folly of imagining that it is saying something new, something different. Its very syllables, "disgraceful, " "base," are this folly already, for the other says them of itself. This latter type of mind perverts in its mode of utterance everything that sounds the same, because this self -sameness is merely an abstraction, but in its actual reality is intrinsically and inherently perversion.
On the other hand, again, the unsophisticated mind takes under its protection the good and the noble (i.e. what retains its identity of meaning in being objectively expressed), and takes care of it in the only way here possible — that is to say, the good must not lose its value because it may be linked with what is bad or mingled with it, for to be thus associated with badness is its condition and necessity, and the wisdom of nature lies in this fact.
Yet this unsophisticated mind, while it intended to contradict, has merely, in doing so, gathered into a trifling form the meaning of what spirit said, and put it in a manner which, by turning the opposite of noble and good into the necessary condition of noble and good, means, in an unthinking way, to state something else than that the so-called noble and good is by its very nature the reverse of itself, or that what is bad is, conversely, something excellent.
If the naive consciousness makes up for this barren, soulless idea by the concrete reahty of what is excellent, when it produces an example of what is excellent, whether in the form of a fictitious case or a true story, and thus shows it to be not an empty name, but an^^g 3 actual fact, then the universal reality of perverted action stands in sharp contrast to the entire real world, where that example constitutes merely something VOL. U.— I
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