Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

Absolute Freedom and Terror 601 its reality. The universal will, qua absolutely positive concrete self-consciousness — because it is this self-conscious actuality raised to the level of pure thought or abstract matter — turns round into the negative entity, and shows itself at the same time to be what cancels and does away with self- thinking or self - consciousness.

Absolute freedom qua pure self-identity of universal will thus carries with it negation; but in doing so contains distinction in general, and develops this again as concrete actual difference.

For pure negativity finds Z^3 ^ in the self-identical universal will the element of subsistence, or the substance in which its moments get their reahsation ; it has the matter which it can turn into the specific nature of the substance ; and in so far as this substance has manifested itself to be the negative element for the individual consciousness, the organisation of the spiritual groups or " masses" of the substance, to which the plurality of conscious individuals is assigned, thus takes shape and form once more.

These individuals, who felt the fear of death, their absolute lord and master, submit to negation and distinction once more, arrange themselves into groups, and return to a restricted and apportioned task, but thereby to their substantial reality.

Out of this tumult spirit would be thrown back upon its starting-point, the ethical world and the real world of spiritual culture, which would thus have been merely refreshed and rejuvenated by the fear of the lord, that has again entered their hearts. Spirit would have anew to traverse and continually repeat this cycle of necessity, if only complete interpenetration of self-consciousness and the substance were

602 Phenomenology of Mind the final result. In such an interpenetration self-consciousness might seek to experience the force of its universal nature operating negatively upon it, would try to know and find itself not as this particular selfconsciousness but only as universal, and hence, too, would be able to endure the objective reahty of universal spirit, a reality, excluding self-consciousness qua particular.

But this is not the form the final result assumes. For in absolute freedom there was no reciprocal interaction either between an external world and consciousness, which is absorbed in manifold existence or sets itself determinate purposes and ideas, or between consciousness and an external objective world, be it a world of reality or of thought.

What that freedom contained was the world absolutely in the form of consciousness, as a universal will, and, along with that, self-consciousness gathered out of all the dispersion and manifoldness of existence or all the manifold ends and judgments of mind, and concentrated into the bare and simple self.

The form of culture, which it attains in interaction with that essential nature, is, therefore, the grandest and the last, is that of seeing its pure and simple reality immediately disappear and pass away into empty nothingness.* In the sphere of culture itself it does not get the length of viewing its negation or ahenation in this form of pure abstraction ; its negation is negation with a filling and a content — either honour and wealth, which it gains in the place of the self that it has alienated from itself ; or the language of esfrit and insight, which the distraught consciousness acquires ; or, again, the negation is the heaven of belief or the element * Kant's "thing in itself" t

Absolute Freedom and Terror 603 of utility belonging to the stage of enlightenment. All these determinate elements disappear with the disaster and ruin that overtake the self in the state of absolute freedom ; * its negation is meaningless death, sheer horror of the negative which has nothing positive in it, nothing that gives a filling. At the same time, however, this negation in its actual manifestation is not something ahen and external.

It is neither that universal background of necessity in which the moral world is swamped, nor the particular accident of private possession, the whims and humours of the owner, on which the distraught consciousness finds itself dependent ; it is universal will, which in this its last abstraction has nothing positive, and hence can give nothing in return for the sacrifice.

But just on that account this will is in unmediated oneness with self-consciousness, it is the pure positive because it is the pure negative ; and that meaningless death, the insubstantial, vacuous negativity of self, in its inner constitutive principle, turns round into absolute positivity.

For consciousness, the immediate unity of itself with universal will, its demand to see and find itself as a determinate particular focus in the universal will, is changed and converted into the absolutely opposite experience.

What it loses there, is abstract being, the immediate existence of that insubstantial focus ; and this vanished immediacy is the universal will as such which it now, knows itself to be, so far as it is superseded and cancelled immediacy, so far as it is pure knowledge or pure will.

By this means it knows that will to be itself, and knows itself to be essential reality ; but not as the immediate essence, not will as revolutionary * In the sense of abstract autonomy.