Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

The Moral View of the World 619 owing to the nature of concrete action which is something specific and definite, is all the same necessary, its necessity falls outside that consciousness and holds inside another consciousness, which thus mediates or connects determinate and pure duty, and is the reason why that specific duty also has validity.

In the concrete act, however, consciousness proceeds to work as this particular self, as completely individual : it directs its activity on actual reality as such, and takes this as its pm^pose, for it wants to perform something definite. " Duty in general " thus falls outside it and within another being, which is the consciousness and sacred lawgiver of pure duty.

The consciousness which acts, just because it acts, accepts the other consciousness, that of bare duty, and admits its validity immediately ; this pure duty is thus a content of another consciousness, and is only indirectly or in a mediate way sacred for the active consciousness, viz. in virtue of this other consciousness.

Because it is established in this manner that the validity, the bindingness, of duty as something wholly and absolutely sacred, falls outside the actual consciousness, this latter thereby stands altogether on one side as the incomplete moral consciousness.

Just as, in regard to its knowledge, it is aware of itself as that whose knowledge and conviction are incomplete and contingent ; in the same way, as regards its willing, it feels itself to be that whose purposes are affected with sensibihty. On account of its " un worthiness," therefore, it cannot look on happiness as something necessary, but as a something contingent, and can only expect happiness as the result of " grace. But though its actuahty is incomplete, duty is still, so

620 Phenomenology of Mind far as its pure will and knowledge are concerned, held If-ii. k to be the essential truth. In principle, therefore, so far as the notion is opposed to actual reality, in other words, in thought, it is perfect. The absolute truth [duty] is, however, just this object of thought, and is something postulated beyond the actual.

It is therefore the thought in which the morally imperfect knowledge and will are held to be perfect, and — since it takes this imperfection to have full weight — in which, consequently, happiness is meted out according to "worthiness," i.e. according to the "merit" ascribed. This completes the meaning of the moral attitude.

For in the conception of moral self-consciousness the two aspects, pure duty and actual reahty, are affirmed of a single unity, and thereby the one, like the other, is put forward, not as something self-complete, but as a moment, or as cancelled and transcended. This becomes consciously explicit in the last phase of the moral attitude or point of view.

Consciousness, we there saw, places pure duty in another form of being than its own consciousness, i.e. it regards pure duty partly as something ideally presented, partly as what does not by itself hold good — indeed, the non-moral is rather what is held to be perfect.

In the same way it affirms itself to be that whose actuality, not being in conformity with duty, is transcended, and, qua transcended, or in the presented idea of what is absolute [pure duty], no longer contradicts morality. For the moral consciousness itself, however, its moral attitude does not mean that consciousness therein develops its own proper notion and makes this its object. It has no consciousness of this opposition either as regards the form or the content thereof ; the elements

The Moral View of the World 621 composing this opposition it does not relate and compare with one another, but goes forward on its own com'se of development, without being the connecting principle of those moments. For it is only aware of the essence pure and simple, i.e. the object so far as this is duty, so far as this is an abstract object of its pure consciousness qua pure knowledge — in other words, it is only aware of this object as itself.

Its procedure is thus merely that of thinking, not conceiving, is by way of thoughts not notions. Consequently it does not yet find the object of its actual consciousness transparently clear to itself ; it is not the absolute notion, which alone grasps otherness as such, its absolute opposite, as its very self.

Its own reality, as well as all objective reality, no doubt is held to be something unessential ; but its freedom is that of pure thought, in opposition to which, therefore, nature has likewise arisen as something equally free.

Because both are found in like manner within it — both the freedom which belongs to [external] being and the inclusion of this existence within consciousness— its object conies to be an existing object, which is at the same time merely a thought-product.

In the last phase of its attitude or point of view, the content is essentially so constituted that its being has the character of something presented, an idea, and this union of being and thinking is expressed as what in fact it is, viz. — Presentation.

When we look at the moral view of the world in such a way that this objective result is nothing else than the very principle or notion of moral self-consciousness which it makes objective to itself, there arises through this consciousness concerning the form of its origin another mode of exhibiting this view of the world.