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1Objective Sfirit 437 itself, — manifests a world articulated into separate areas. The substance is thus an ethical being split up into distinct elemental forms, a human and a divine law. In the same way, the self-consciousness appearing over against the substance assigns itself, in virtue of its inner nature, to one of these powers, and, qua involving knowledge, gets broken up into ignorance of what it is doing on the one hand, and knowledge of this on the other, a knowledge which for that reason proves a deception. It learns, therefore, through its own act at once the contradictory nature of those powers into which the imier substance divided itself, and their mutual overthrow, as well as the contradiction between its knowledge of the ethical character of its act and what is truly and essentially ethical, and so finds its own destruction. In point of fact, however, the ethical substance has by this process become actual concrete self-consciousness : in other words this particular self has become self-sufficient and self-dependent (An und FürsicJiseyenden), but precisely thereby the ethical order has been overthrown and destroyed.
2The Ethical World: Law Human and Divine: Man and Woman [The first step in the analysis of spirit is to take spirit as a realised actual social order, immediately given as a historical fact, and present directly to the minds of the individuals composing it. This is social life as an established routine of human adjustments, where the natural characteristics and constitution of its moral individuals are absorbed and built into the single substance of the living social whole. It is spirit as an objectively embodied whole of essentially spiritual individuals, without any consciousness of opposition to one another or to the whole, and with an absolute unbroken sense of their own security and fulfilment within the substance of social mind. It is spirit at the level of naive acquiescence in the law and order of conventional life. But such a self-complete type of experience has various levels of realisation. It cannot exist except through the union of opposing elements ; and the central principle of all experience, self-consciousness, which assumes here such a concrete form, has abundant material on which to exercise its function of creating and uniting distinctions. The first level is determined by the fact that the substance of social life is constituted out of the quasi-natural phenomena of human genus and species, of race and nationality, on the one hand, and the purely natural element of specialised individual sex on the other. These two aspects go together; the sex-relations of individuals maintain race and nationality, the nation lives in and through its sexually distinct individuals. The social order as an order is realised and maintained in the medium of these elements. The fact that this order is an order of universal mind gives it a permanence, an inviolability, an absoluteness, which are inseparable from it, so inseparable that the order is looked on as having its roots in the Absolute Mind, and as deriving its authority from it. The social order on this asj^ect consists of a divinely established and divinely sanctioned regime ; the gods are the guardians of the city, of the hearth and the home. On the other hand the expression of this order varies, and is enunciated from time to time in the history of a community. The order in this sense is made by man ; the law of the social order thus becomes a human law, determined by human conditions and human ends ; it is a round of conventions and customs. These two forms of order are inseparable in the life of a community, and they subsist together and side 438
3Objective Spirit 439 by side at this level of social consciousness. They may lead to conflict in the life of the individual in the community, and have to be reconciled by force or otherwise ; and they become associated and connected with the fundamental diflferences of individuality above referred to. The analysis of this level of social life constituted as above furnishes the argument of the following section.]
The source text as printed, transcribed diplomatically. Where the source language uses a non-Latin script that reaches us only through a Victorian romanisation, this layer is labelled transliteration, because that is what we hold.
1Objective Sfirit 437 itself, — manifests a world articulated into separate areas. The substance is thus an ethical being split up into distinct elemental forms, a human and a divine law. In the same way, the self-consciousness appearing over against the substance assigns itself, in virtue of its inner nature, to one of these powers, and, qua involving knowledge, gets broken up into ignorance of what it is doing on the one hand, and knowledge of this on the other, a knowledge which for that reason proves a deception. It learns, therefore, through its own act at once the contradictory nature of those powers into which the imier substance divided itself, and their mutual overthrow, as well as the contradiction between its knowledge of the ethical character of its act and what is truly and essentially ethical, and so finds its own destruction. In point of fact, however, the ethical substance has by this process become actual concrete self-consciousness : in other words this particular self has become self-sufficient and self-dependent (An und FürsicJiseyenden), but precisely thereby the ethical order has been overthrown and destroyed.
2The Ethical World: Law Human and Divine: Man and Woman [The first step in the analysis of spirit is to take spirit as a realised actual social order, immediately given as a historical fact, and present directly to the minds of the individuals composing it. This is social life as an established routine of human adjustments, where the natural characteristics and constitution of its moral individuals are absorbed and built into the single substance of the living social whole. It is spirit as an objectively embodied whole of essentially spiritual individuals, without any consciousness of opposition to one another or to the whole, and with an absolute unbroken sense of their own security and fulfilment within the substance of social mind. It is spirit at the level of naive acquiescence in the law and order of conventional life. But such a self-complete type of experience has various levels of realisation. It cannot exist except through the union of opposing elements ; and the central principle of all experience, self-consciousness, which assumes here such a concrete form, has abundant material on which to exercise its function of creating and uniting distinctions. The first level is determined by the fact that the substance of social life is constituted out of the quasi-natural phenomena of human genus and species, of race and nationality, on the one hand, and the purely natural element of specialised individual sex on the other. These two aspects go together; the sex-relations of individuals maintain race and nationality, the nation lives in and through its sexually distinct individuals. The social order as an order is realised and maintained in the medium of these elements. The fact that this order is an order of universal mind gives it a permanence, an inviolability, an absoluteness, which are inseparable from it, so inseparable that the order is looked on as having its roots in the Absolute Mind, and as deriving its authority from it. The social order on this asj^ect consists of a divinely established and divinely sanctioned regime ; the gods are the guardians of the city, of the hearth and the home. On the other hand the expression of this order varies, and is enunciated from time to time in the history of a community. The order in this sense is made by man ; the law of the social order thus becomes a human law, determined by human conditions and human ends ; it is a round of conventions and customs. These two forms of order are inseparable in the life of a community, and they subsist together and side 438
3Objective Spirit 439 by side at this level of social consciousness. They may lead to conflict in the life of the individual in the community, and have to be reconciled by force or otherwise ; and they become associated and connected with the fundamental diflferences of individuality above referred to. The analysis of this level of social life constituted as above furnishes the argument of the following section.]
The source text as printed, transcribed diplomatically. Where the source language uses a non-Latin script that reaches us only through a Victorian romanisation, this layer is labelled transliteration, because that is what we hold.
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