Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

Absolute Freedom and Terror 595 ness itself, or conceives it to be absolutely the notion. What made the notion an existential object was the distinguishing it into separate and separately subsisting areas or groups ; when, however, the object becomes a notion there is nothing fixedly subsisting left in it; negativity permeates and pervades all its moments.

It exists in such a way that each individual consciousness rises out of the sphere assigned to it, finds no longer its inmost natiu-e and function in this isolated area, but grasps itself as the notion of will, grasps all the various groupings as the essential expression of this will, and is in consequence only able to realise itself in a work which is a work of the whole.

In this absolute freedom all social ranks or classes, which are the component spiritual factors into which the whole is difierentiated, are effaced and annulled ; the individual consciousness that belonged to any such group and exercised its will and found its fulfilment there, has removed the barriers confining it ; its purpose is the universal purpose, its language universal law, its work universal achievement.

The object and the element distinguished have here lost the meaning of utility, of profitableness, which was a predicate of all real being; consciousness does not commence its process with the object as a sort of ahen element after dealing with which it then and only then returns into itself ; the object it is aware of is consciousness itself. The opposition thus consists solely in the distinction of individual and imiversal consciousness.

But the individual itself is directly on its own view that which had merely the semblance of opposition ; it is universal consciousness and will. The ulterior beyond that lies remote from this its actual reaHty,

596 Phenomenology of Mind hovers over the corpse of the vanished and departed independence of what is real or beheved to be, and hovers there merely as an exhalation of stale gas, of the empty etre supreme.

By doing away with the various distinct spiritual groups, and the restricted and confined fife of individuals, as well as both its worlds, there thus remains merely the process of the universal self-consciousness within itself as an interaction of its content, a reciprocal interaction between its universal form and personal consciousness.

43./^ The universal will goes into itself, is subjecti vised, and becomes individual will, to which the universal law and universal work stand opposed.

But this individual consciousness is equally and immediately conscious of itself as universal will; it is fully aware that its own objective content is a law given by that will, a work performed by that will ; in exercising and carrying out its activity, in creating objectivity, it is thus doing nothing individual, but executing laws and functions of the state.

This process is consequently the interaction of consciousness with itself, in which it lets nothing break away and assume the shape of a detached object standing over against it.

It follows from this, that it cannot arrive at a positive accomplishment of anything, either in the way of universal operations in language or in actual reahty, either in the shape of laws and universal regulations of conscious freedom, or of deeds and works of active freedom.

The accomplished result at which this freedom, that gives itself consciousness, might manage to arrive, would consist in the fact that such freedom qua universal substance made itself into an object and an abiding

Absolute Freedom and Terror 59*7 existence. This objective otherness would there be the differentiation which enabled it to divide itself into stable spiritual groups and into separate fragments or members.

These wholes or spheres would partly be the thought-constituted factors of a power that is differentiated into legislative, judicial and executive ; but partly they would be the substantial elements we found in the real world of spiritual culture; and, since the content of universal action would be more closely taken note of, they would be the particular areas or spheres of labour, which are further distinguished as specific social ranks or classes.

Universal freedom, which would have differentiated itself in this manner into its various parts, and by the very fact of doing so would have made itself an existing substance, would thereby be free from particular individualities, and could apportion the plurality of individuals to its several parts.

The activity and being of personahty would, however, find itself by this process confined to a branch of the whole, to one kind of action and existence ; when placed in the element of existence, personality would bear the j^9>/ meaning of a determinate personality ; it would cease to be in reality universal self-consciousness.

Neither by the idea of submission to self-imposed laws, addressed in part to universal self-consciousness, nor by its being represented when legislation and universal action take place, does self-consciousness here let itself be mistaken about the actual truth, that itself lays down the law and itself accomplishes a universal and not a particular task.

For in the case where the self is merely represented and ideally presented (vorgestellt), there it is not actual : where it is by proxy, it is not. * * The essential principle of anarchy.