Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

604 Phenomenology of Mind government or anarchy struggling to establish an anarchical constitution, nor itself as a centre of this faction or the opposite : the universal will is its pure knowing and willing, and it is universal will qua this pure knowledge and volition. It does not lose itself there, for pure knowledge and volition is it qua atomic point of consciousness.

It is thus the interaction of pure knowledge with itself ; pure knowledge qua essential reahty is universal will, while this essence is simply and solely pure knowledge. Self-consciousness is thus pure knowledge of essential reality in the sense of piu:e knowledge. Fiu:thermore, qua particular self it is merely the form of the subject or concrete real action, a form which by it is known as form.

In the same way objective reality, " being," is for it absolutely self-less form ; for that objective reality would be what is not known : this knowledge, however, knows knowledge to be the essential fact. Absolute freedom has thus squared and balanced the opposition of universal and particular will with its own nature.

The self-alienated type of mind, driven to the acme of its opposition, where pure volition and the purely vohtional agent are still kept distinct, reduces that opposition to a transparent form, and therein finds itself.

Just as the realm of the real and actual world passes over into that of belief and insight, absolute freedom leaves its self-destructive sphere of reality, and passes over into another land of self-conscious spirit, where in this unreality freedom is taken to be and is accepted as the truth. In the thought of this truth spirit refreshes and revives itself (so far as spirit is thought and remains so), and knows this being which self-

Absolute Freedom and Terror 605 consciousness involves [viz. thought] to be the complete and entire essence of everything. The new form and mode of experience that now arises is that of the Moral Life of Spirit.

G Spirit in the Condition of being Certain of Itself : Morality [The following section deals with the final and highest stage in the life of finite spiritual experience as realised in the concrete form of a historical society. Here the substance of the social order is the real content of the self-conscious individual : that substance has become subjectified ; we have therefore a -self-contained spiritual subject.

The discordance involved in the sphere of culture and enlightenment is overcome by the self knowing and realising itself as a completely universal self-determining free will, its world within itself, and its self its own world. Each reflects the whole (the totality of social life) in itself so perfectly that what it does is transparently the doing of the whole as much as its own doing.

Such a sphere of spiritual existence is Morality, the all-sufficient spiritual order of the finite spirit as an individual. The meaning assigned to " morality " here is that expressed by Kant when he says that morality is "the relation of actions to the autonomy of the will, i.e. to possible universal legislation through maxims of the will.

In other words, all the universality constituting the interrelations of finite spirits in a society are epitomised in the soul of the acting individual, who can thus quite legitimately, look upon itself as the self-regulating source of all universal conditions of action. It is inevitable that such a concrete mode of experience should have various aspects and should pass through various stages in the process of fully realising its nature.

The individual may lay exclusive stress on the self-completeness which he possesses through being the source and origin of his own laws. His self -legislative function, just because it carries with it the sense of universality, may appear so supremely important that all the actual detail of his life comes to be treated as external, indifferent, and contingent.

This detail no doubt is essential to give body and substance to his spiritual individuality, but the universality of his will so far transcends each and every detail of content as to seem by itself the sole and all-sufficient reality of his being. The content of his life only enters into consideration as an element to be regulated and made to conform to the universal : the relation so constituted between content and universal is 606