Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

676 Phenomenology of Mind the agent on whom it passes judgment, it is recognised by the latter as the same as himself. This latter does not merely find himself apprehended as something alien or external to, and unlike or discordant with that other : but rather finds the other in its peculiar constitutive }^^', character identical with himself.

Seeing this similarity and giving this expression, he openly declares himself to the other, and expects in like manner that the other, having in point of fact put itself on the same level, will respond in the same terms on its side, will give voice to the likeness found within it, and that thus the state of mutual recognition will be brought about.

His confession is not an attitude of abasement or humiliation before the other, is not flinging himself away. For to give the matter expression in this way has not the one-sided character which would fix and establish his disparity with the other : on the contrary, it is solely because of seeing the likeness of the other to him that he gives himself utterance.

In making his confession he announces, from his side, their common likeness, and does so for the reason that language is the existence of spirit as an immediate self. He thus expects that the other will make its own contribution to this manner of existence. But the admission on the part of the one who is wicked, " I am so,'' is not followed by a reply making a similar confession. This was not what that way of judging meant at all: far from it!

It repels this community of nature, and is the " hardheartedness," which keeps to itself and rejects all continuity with the other. By so doing the scene is changed. The one who made the confession sees himself thrust off, and takes the other to be in the wrong when he refuses to

Evil and Forgiveness 677 let his own inner nature go forth in the objective shape of an express utterance, opposes and contrasts the beauty of his own soul with the wicked individual, and opposes to the confession of the penitent the stiffnecked attitude of the self-consistent equable character, and the rigid silence of one who keeps himself to himself and refuses to throw himself away for some one else.

Here we find asserted the highest pitch of revolt to which a spirit certain of itself can reach. For it beholds itself, qua this bare self-knowledge, in another conscious being, and in such a way that the external form of this other is not an unessential " thing," as in the case of an object of wealth, but thought ; knowledge itself is what is opposed to it.

It is this absolutely unbroken continuity of pure knowledge which refuses to estabUsh communication with an other, which had, ipso facto, by making its confession, ^/S^P renounced separate isolated self-existence, had affirmed its particularity to be cancelled, and thereby established itself as continuous with the other, i.e. established itself as universal.

The other, however, retains in its own case and reserves to itself its uncommimicative, isolated independence : in the case of the individual making the confession it retains just the very thing which that individual has already cast away.

It thereby proves itself to be a form of consciousness which has forsaken and denies the very nature of spirit ; for it does not understand that spirit, in the absolute certainty of itself, is master and lord over every deed, and over all reality, and can reject and cast them off and make them as if they had never been. At the same time, it does not see the contradiction it is committing in not allowing a rejection, which has been

678 Phenomenology of Mind made in express language, to pass for genuine rejection, while itself has the certainty of its own spiritual life, not in a concrete real act, but in its inner nature, and finds the objective existence of this inner being in the mere utterance of its own judgment.

It is thus its own self which checks that other's return from the act to the spiritual objectivity of spoken utterance, and to spiritual identity and agreement, and by its stiffness produces the discordance and dissimilarity which still remain.

Now, so far as the spirit which is certain of itself, in the form of a " beautiful soul," does not possess the faculty of relinquishing the self-absorbed uncommunicative knowledge of itself, it cannot attain to any identity with the consciousness that is repulsed, and so cannot succeed in seeing the unity of its self in another Hfe, cannot reach objective existence.

The equality comes about, therefore, merely in a negative way, as a state of being devoid of spiritual character.

The "beautiful soul," then, has no concrete reality ; it subsists in the contradiction between its pure self and the necessity felt by this self to externalise itself and turn into something actual; it exists in the immediacy of this rooted and fixed opposition, an immediacy which alone is the middle term mediating and reconciling an opposition which has arisen to its pure abstraction, and is pure being or empty nothingness.

Thus the " beautiful soul," being conscious of this contradiction in its unreconciled immediacy, is unhinged, disordered, and runs to madness, passes away in yearning, and is consumed in pining inanition.* Thereby it gives up, as a fact, its * This was the actual fate of Novalis, the " 8t. John of Romanticism " (d. 1801, jBt. 29). Cp. Hegel's remarks on Novalis WW X., 1, p. 201 : XVI., p. 500.