Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

Evil and Forgiveness 679 stubborn insistence on its own isolated self-existence, but only to bring forth the soulless, spiritless unity of abstract being. The true, that is to say the self-conscious and actual, balance or adjustment of the two sides is necessitated by, and already contained in the foregoing.

Breaking the hard heart and raising it to the level of universality is the same process which appeared in the case of the consciousness that expressly made its confession. The wounds of the spirit heal and leave no scars behind.

The deed is not something imperishable ; the spirit takes it back into itself ; and the aspect of particularity present in it, whether in the form of an intention or of an existential negativity and limitation, immediately passes away.

The process of actually reahsing self, the form of its act, is merely a moment of the whole ; and the same is true of the knowledge fimctioning through judgment, and estabhshing and maintaining the distinction between the particular and universal aspects of action.

The evil consciousness, spoken of, definitely yields up and rehnquishes itself, or sets itself down as a moment, being drawn into the way of express confession by seeing itself in another. This other, however, must have its onesided, unaccepted, and unacknowledged judgment broken down, just as the former has to abandon its onesided unacknowledged existence in a state of particularity and isolation.

And as the former displays the power of spirit over its reality, so this other must manifest the power of spirit over its constitutive and determinate notion. The latter, however, renounces thought that divides and separates, and the rigid imperviousness of uncom-

680 Phenomenology of Mind municative self-existence, for the reason that, in point of fact, it sees itself in the first. That which, in this way, abandons its reality and makes itself into a superseded particular "this" {Diesen), shows itself thereby to be, in fact, universal. It turns away from its external reality back into itself as inner essence ; and there the universal consciousness thus knows and finds itself.

The forgiveness it extends to the first is the renunciation of self, of its unreal being, since it identifies this j^qcj unreal nature and that other element of real action, and recognises what was called bad — a determination assigned to action by thought — to be good ; or rather it lets go and gives up this distinction of determinate thought with its self -determining isolated judgment, just as the other foregoes determining the act in isolation and for its own private behoof.

The word of reconciliation is the objectively existent spirit, which sees and immediately apprehends the pure knowledge of itself qua universal being in its opposite, in the pure knowledge of itself qua absolutely self-confined single individual — a reciprocal recognition which is Absolute Spirit.

Absolute Spirit enters existence merely at the culminating point at which its pure knowledge about itself is the opposition and interchange" with itself. Knowing that its pure knowledge is the abstract essential reality, Absolute Spirit is this knowing duty in absolute opposition to the knowledge which knows itself, qua absolute singleness of self, to be the essentially real.

The former is the pure continuity of the universal, which knows the individuality, that thinks itself the real, to be inherently null and naught, to be evil. The latter, again, is absolute discreteness, which thinks

Evil and Forgiveness 681 itself absolute in its pure oneness, and thinks the universal is the unreal which exists only for others.

Both aspects are refined and clarified to this degree of purity, where there is no self-less existence left, no negative of consciousness in either of them, where, instead, the one element of " duty " is the self -identical character of its self-knowledge, and the other element of "evil" equally has its purpose in its own inner being and its reality in its own mode of utterance.

The content of this utterance is the substance that gives it subsistence ; the utterance is the assurance and asseveration of the certainty of spirit within its own self. These spirits, both certain of themselves, have each no other purpose than its own pure self, and no other reality and existence than just this pure self. But they are still different, and the difference is absolute, because holding within this element of the pure notion.

The difference is absolute, too, not merely for us [tracing the experience], but for the notions themselves which stand in this opposition.

For while these notions are indeed 1/ determinate and specific relatively to one another, they are at the same time in themselves universal, so that they compass the whole range of the self ; and this self can have no other content than this its own determinate constitution* which neither transcends the self nor is more restricted than it.

For the one aspect, the absolutely universal, is pure self-knowledge as well as the other, the absolute discreteness of single individuality, and both are merely this pure self-knowledge. Both determinate aspects, then, are cognitive pure notions which know qua notions, whose very constitution consists in immediately knowing, or, in other words, whose relationship and opposition is the Ego. Because of this