Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

634 Phenomenology of Mind happiness as such should not have fallen to some who got it, i.e. the judgment is an expression of envy, which is assuming the covering cloak of morality. The reason, however, why we think good luck, as we call it, should fall to the lot of others is good friendship, which ungrudgingly grants and wishes them, and wishes itself too, this favour, this accident of good fortune.

Morality, then, in the moral consciousness, is not completed. This is what is now established. But its essence consists in being merely what is complete, and so pure morality : incomplete morality is, therefore, impure, in other words, is Immorality. Morality itself thus exists in another being than the actual concrete consciousness. This other is a holy moral legislator.

Morality which is not completed in consciousness, the morality which is the reason for making those postulates, means, in the first instance, that morality, when it is set up as actual in consciousness, stands in relation to something else, to an existence, and thus itself preserves and implies otherness or distinction, whence arises a manifold plurality of moral commands.

The moral self-consciousness at the same time, however, looks on these many duties as unessential ; for it is concerned with merely the one pure duty, and this plurality of duties, so far as they are determinate duties, have no true reahty for self-consciousness. They can thus have their real truth accepted only in another consciousness, and are (what they are not for the actual moral self-consciousness) sacred through a holy lawgiver. But this, too, is again merely a dissembling of the actual fact. For moral self -consciousness is to itself

Dissemblance 635 the absolute, and duty is simply and solely what if knows to be duty. It, however, recognises only pure duty as duty : what is not sacred in its view is not in itself sacred at all, and what is not per se sacred cannot be rendered so by some being that is sacred. Moral consciousness, further, is not really serious in allowing something to be made sacred by another consciousness than its own.

For, only that is without qualification sacred in its eyes which is made sacred through its own action, and is sacred within it. It is thus just as little in earnest in treating this other being as a holy being ; for this would mean that, within it, something was to attain an essential significance, which, for the moral consciousness, i.e. in itself, has none.

If the sacred being was postulated, in order that duty might have binding validity within the moral consciousness, not qua pure duty, but as a plurality of specific duties, then this must again be dissembled and the other being must be solely sacred in so far as only pure duty has binding validity within the moral consciousness. Pure duty has also, in point of fact, validity and bindingness only in another being, not in the moral consciousness.

Although, within the latter, pure morahty seems alone to hold good, still this must be put right in another form, for it is, at the same time, a natural consciousness. Morality is, in it, affected and conditioned by sensibihty, and thus is not by itself self-contained, but a contingent result of free will; in it, however, qua pure will, morality is a contingency of knowledge.

Taken by itself, therefore, morality is in another being, is self- complete only in another reality than the actual moral consciousness. This other being, then, is here absolutely complete

636 Phenomenology of Mind morality, because in its case morality does not stand in relation to nature and sensibility. Yet the reality of pure duty lies in its actualisation in nature and sensibility.

The moral consciousness accounts for its incompleteness by the fact that morality, in its case, has a positive relation to nature and sensibility, since it holds an essential moment of morality to be that morality should have simply and solely a negative relation towards nature and sensibility. The pure moral being, on the other hand, because far above the struggle with nature and sense, does not stand in a negative relation to them.

Thus, in point of fact, the positive relation to them alone remains in its case, i.e. there remains just what a moment ago passed for the incomplete, for what was not moral.

Pure morahty, however, entirely cut oft" from actual reality so as likewise to be even without positive relation to reality, would be a blank unreal abstraction, where the very notion of morality, which consists in thinking of pure duty and in willing and doing, would be absolutely done away with. This other being, so purely and entirely moral, is again, therefore, a mere dissemblance of the actual fact, and has to be given up.

In this purely moral being, however, the moments of the contradiction, in which this synthetic ideational process is carried on, come closer together. So, likewise, do the opposites taken up alternately, now this and also that, and also the other, opposites which are allowed to follow one after the other, with one opposite constantly set aside by another, yet without these ideas ever being brought together. So close do they come, that consciousness here has to give up its moral view of the world and retreat within itself.