Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

Conscience 643 It takes itself to be absolutely valid in its contingency, to be that which knows its immediate particular existence as pure knowledge and action, as the true objective reality and harmony. This self of Conscience, the phase of spiritual Hfe immediately certain of itself as absolute truth and objective being, is the third type of spiritual self.

It is the outcome of the third sphere of the spiritual world,* and may be shortly contrasted with the two former types of self. The totality or actuality which is revealed as the final result of the ethical world, the world of the social order, is the self of a Person, ethical personality : its existence hes in its being recognised and acknowledged. As the person is the self devoid of substance, its existence is abstract reahty too.

The person has a definite standing, and that directly and unconditionally : its self is the point in the sphere of its existence which is immediately at rest. That point is not torn away from its universality ; the two [the particular focus and its universaHty] are therefore not in a relational process with regard to one another : the universal is in it without distinction, and is neither the content of the self, nor is the self filled by itself.

The second self is the final truth and outcome of a world of culture, is spirit that has recovered itself after and through disruption, is absolute freedom. In this self, the former immediate unity of individual existence and universaHty finds its elements separated from one another. The universal, which remains at the same time a purely spiritual entity, the state of recognition or * Viz. Morality, the first being the Ethical Order of .Society, the secoud the sphere of Culture.

644 Phenomenology of Mind universal will and universal knowledge — the universal is object and content of the self, and its universal actuality. But the universal has not there the form of existence detached from the self : in this mode of self it therefore gets no filling, no positive content, no world.

Moral self-consciousness, indeed, lets its universal aspect get detached, so that this aspect becomes a nature of its own ; and at the same time it retains this universality within itself in a superseded form. But it is merely a game of dissembling ; it constantly interchanges these two characteristics.

In the form of Conscience, with its certainty of itself, it first finds the content to fill the former emptiness of duty as well as the emptiness of right and the empty universal will. And because this certainty of self is at the same time immediacy, it finds in conscience definite existence.

Having reached this level of its truth, moral selfconsciousness then leaves, or rather supersedes, this state of internal division and self-separation, whence arose dissimulation — the separation of its inherent being from the self, of pure duty, qua pure purpose, from reality qua a nature and a sensibility opposed to mere purpose.

It is, when thus returned into itself, concrete moral spirit, which does not make for itself a bare abstract standard out of the consciousness of pure duty, a standard to be set up against actual conscious life ; on the contrary, pure duty, as also the sensuous nature opposed to pure duty, are superseded moments.

This mode of spirit, in its immediate unity, is a moral being making itself actual, and an act is immediately a concrete embodiment of morality. Given a case of action ; it is an objective reality for the knowing mind. The latter, qua conscience, knows

Conscience 645 it in a direct concrete manner ; and at the same time it is merely as conscience knows it to be. When knowledge is something other than its object, it is contingent in character. Spirit, however, which is sure of its self, is not at all an accidental knowledge of that kind, is not a way of producing inside its own being ideas from which reahty is divorced.

On the contrary ; since the separation between what is essential or inherent and self has been given up, a case of moral action falls, just as it is fer se, directly within immediate conscious certainty, the sensible [feeling] form of knowledge, and it merely is per se as it is in this form of knowledge.

Action, then, qua realisation, is in this way the pm'e form of will — the bare conversion of reahty, in the sense of a given case, into a reahty that is performed and done, the conversion of the bare state of objective knowledge into one of knowledge about reahty as something produced and brought about by consciousness.

Just as sensuous certainty is directly taken up, or rather converted, into the essential hfe and substance of spirit, this other transformation is also simple and unmediated, a transition made thi'ough pure conception without changing the content, the content being conditioned by some interest on the part of the consciousness knowing it. Further, conscience does not break up the circumstances of the case into a variety of duties.

It does not operate as the positive general medium, in which the manifold duties, each for itself, would keep their substantial existence imdisturbed. If it did so, either no action could take place at all, because of each concrete case in general containing opposition, and, in the specific case of morality, opposition of duties, — and hence there would