Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

Conscience: the "Beautiful Soul": Evil and THE Forgiveness of it [The oiie-sidedness of each of the preceding stages is removed when the moral consciousness assumes the attitude of Conscience. Here the individual is at once self-legislating and yet sure of the unity and selfcompleteness of its own will in the midst of all diversity of moral content.

The immediacy involved in the idea of a "self-legislating" will appears in the perceptual directness of the action of conscience : it " sees " what is right and does the right without hesitation. But it is not an abstract *' faculty " of willing independent of the varied content of the individual's moral experience.

The universality of the individual permeates and pervades all the content of his being, and makes him a concrete moral individuality, at home with himself in the smallest detail as well as in the larger issues of his self-complete sj^iritual existence. Conscience, as Butler Bays, is a ' system ' or ' constitution,' analogous in the case of the individual to the objectified system of the state and its institutions.

The self-deception of the second one-sided phase of moral experience seems also to have no place in Conscience, for Conscience is the transparent and selfrevealing unity in all the content of moral individuality. Only on this condition can it be absolutely confident and certain of itself in all its functions, and this certainty of itself is the inalienable characteristic of conscience.

It thinks it cannot be deceived about itself, can neither delude itself nor others, but freely realises all that it professes to be and professes to be all that it realises. It is thus the supreme achievement of finite spiritual existence ; but it has no meaning apart from the existence of finite spirit in the form of society. Its very conditions, however, give rise to delusion and deception of another kind.

For, so complete is its world and its life that it may attempt to cut itself off from the concrete substance of actual society which alone makes possible the existence of conscience. It then tries to cultivate goodness in solitary isolation from the actual social whole. This is the attitude of the " beautiful soul," a type of spiritual life cultivated by the " Moravians," and familiar during the Romantic movement. Novalis is the best-known example ; the classical interpretation of the mood was 640

Conscience 641 given in Goethe's Meisters Lehrjahre, Bk. 6. It has the self-confidence and individual inspiration of Conscience, but frankly rejects the concrete objectivity which secures for Conscience liberation from mere subjectivity. The very rejection of objectivity is the only achievement of the " beautiful soul," and is held to be the greatest triumph of its selfconscious freedom. It flees from concrete moral action, and luxuriates in a state of self-hypnotised inactivity. Still it takes up this attitude in the interests of " pure goodness," and hence in withdrawing from the lowly deeds of the daily moral life it indulges all the more in the self- cloistered cult of the beauty of holiness. It is moral individualism turned into mystic self-absorption. Hegel's analysis brings out that this type of spirit is in principle as it was in fact the direct ally of moral evil. For (1) its refusal to act means indift'erence to all action, good and bad alike, and the rejection of the demands of duty is precisely immorality : (2) its self-closed isolation destroys the very principle of true morality, universality of will, recognition and acknowledgment by others of the claims of the individual will. But this extremity of finite spiritual experience is the opportunity of Absolute Spirit. The attitude of this mystical moral individuality is indirectly an indication of the finitude of the moral point of view and therefore of its failure to supply the absolute self-completeness which spirit requires. The very consciousness by finite spirit of its inherent incompleteness is implicitly a consciousness of the Absolute Spirit. The consciousness of Absolute Spirit is the attitude of experience known as Religion.]

VOL. II.

Conscience : the " Beautiful Soul '' : Evil and THE Forgiveness of it The antinomy in the moral view of the world — viz. that there is a moral consciousness and that there is none, or that the validity, the bindingness, of duty has its ground beyond consciousness, and conversely only takes effect in consciousness — these contradictory elements had been combined in the idea, in which the non-moral consciousness is to pass for moral, its contingent knowledge and will to be accepted as fully sufficing, and happiness to be its lot as a matter of grace.

Moral selfconsciousness took this self-contradictory idea not upon itself, but transferred it to another being. But this putting outside itself of what it must think as necessary is as much a contradiction in form as the other was in content.

But that which appears as contradictory, and that in the division and again dissolution of which hes the round of activity peculiar to the moral attitude, are inherently the same : for pure duty qua pure knowledge is nothing else than the self of consciousness, and the self of consciousness is existence and actuahty ; and, in the same way, what is to be beyond actual consciousness is nothing else than pure thought, is, in fact, the self.

Because this is so, selfconsciousness, for us or fer se, passes back into itself, and becomes aware that that being is its self, in which the actual is at once pure knowledge and pure duty. 642