Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

Religion in the Form of Art 713 of a completed whole, where, however, the universal freedom of the individuals concerned is wanting. Rather this spirit is a free nation, in which custom and order constitute the common substance of all, whose reahty and existence each and every one knows to be his own will and his own deed.

The rehgion of the ethical spirit, however, raises it above its actual reahsation, and is the return from its objectivity into pure knowledge of itself. Since an ethically constituted nation hves in direct unity with its own substance, and does not contain the principle of pure individuahsm of self-consciousness, the rehgion characteristic of its sphere first appears in complete form in severance from its stable security.

For the reahty of the ethical substance rests partly on its quiet unchangeableness as contrasted with the absolute process of self-consciousness ; and consequently on the fact that this self-consciousness has not yet left its serene hfe of customary convention and its confident security therein, and gone into itself.

Partly, again, that reahty rests on its organisation into a plurahty of rights and duties, as also on its organised distribution into groups of stations and classes, each with its particular way of acting which co-operates to form the whole ; and hence rests on the fact that the individual is contented with the hmitation of his existence, and has not yet grasped the unrestricted thought of his free self.

But that serene immediate confidence in the substance of this ethical Hfe returns to trust in self and to certainty of self ; and the plurahty of rights and duties, as well as the restricted particular Sji action this involves, is the same dialectic process in the sphere of the ethical hfe as the plurahty of " things "

714 Phenomenology of Mind and their various " qualities " — a process which only comes to rest and stabihty in the simphcity of spirit certain of self.

The complete fulfilment of the ethical Hfe in free self-consciousness, and the destined consummation (Schicksal) of the ethical world, are therefore found when individuality has entered into itself ; the condition is one of absolute levity on the part of the ethical spirit ; it has dissipated and resolved into itself all the firmly estabhshed distinctions constituting its own stabihty, and the separate components of its own articulated organisation, and, being perfectly sure of itself, has attained to boundless cheerfulness of heart and the freest enjoyment of itself.

This simple certainty of spirit within itself has a double meaning ; it is quiet stabihty and solid truth, as well as absolute unrest, and the disappearance of the ethical order.

It turns round, however, into the latter ; for the truth of the ethical spirit hes primarily just in this substantial objectivity and trust, in which the self does not think of itself as free individual, and where the self, therefore, in this inner subjectivity, in becoming a free self, falls to the ground.

Since then its trust is broken, and the substance of the nation cracked, spirit, which was the connecting medium of the unstable extremes, has now come forward as an extreme — that of self-consciousness taking itself to be essential and ultimate. This is spirit certain within itself, which mourns over the loss of its world, and now produces out of the abstraction of self its own essential being, raised far above actual reaHty.

At such an epoch art in absolute form* comes on the scene. At the earher stage it is instinctive in its * The religion of pure beauty.

Religion in the Form of Art 715 operation ; being absorbed and steeped in existence, it works out of and works into this element ; it does not find its substance in the free Hfe of an ethical order, and hence, too, the self operating does not consist of free spiritual activity.

Later on, spirit goes beyond art in order to gain its higher manifestation, viz. that of being not merely the substance born and produced out of the self, but of being in its manifestation object of this self ; it seeks at that higher level not merely to bring forth itself out of its own notion, but to have its very notion as its form, so that the notion and the work of art pro- s'12. duced may know each other reciprocally as one and the same.* Since, then, the ethical substance has withdrawn from its objective existence into its bare self -consciousness, this is the aspect of the notion, or the activity with which spirit brings itself forward as object.

It is pure form, because the individual in ethical obedience and service has so worked off every unconscious existence and every fixed determination, as the substance has itseK become this fluid and undifferentiated entity. This form is the night in which the substance was betrayed, and made itself subject.

It is out of this night of pure certainty of self that the ethical spirit rises again in a shape freed from nature and its own immediate existence. The existence of the pure notion into which spirit has fled from its bodily shape, is an individual, which spirit selects as the vessel for its sorrow.

Spirit acts in this individual as his universal and his power, from which he suffers violence, as his element of " Pathos," * This paragraph may be regarded as an interpolated note.