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individuality is itself only realized as a part of a concrete whole of individuals: its life is drawn from common
life in and with others. To attempt to enunciate laws from itself as if it could create the conditions of its own
inherent universality can only issue in one result: laws are furnished without the content which gives those
laws any meaning, or else the laws and the content remain from first to last external to one another. But if
laws are purely formal, they cease to be i.e. constitutive conditions of individuality. Hence the attempt above
described is sure to break down by its own futility. What is wanted to give the laws meaning is the concrete
substance of social life: and when this concrete substance is provided ipso facto the attempt of individuality
to create laws disappears, for these laws are already found in operation in social life. Only such laws have
reality. But this involves the further step that individuality is only realized, only finds its true universal
content, in and with the order of a society. Here alone is individuality what it is in truth, at once a particular
focus of self-consciousness, and a realization of universal mind. This condition where individuality is
conscious of itself only in and with others, and conscious of the common life as its own, is the stage of
spiritual existence. Spiritual existence and social life thus go together. The following section begins the
analysis of this phase of experience, which extends from the simplest form of sociality--the Family--up to
the highest experience of universal mind--Religion.
The immediately succeeding section may be taken as the keystone of the whole arch of experience traversed
in the Phenomenology. Here it is pointed out that all the preceding phases of experience have not merely been
preparing the way f or what is to follow, but that the various aspects, hitherto treated as separate moments of
experience, are in reality abstractions from the life of concrete spirit now to be discussed and analysed.
It is noteworthy that from this point onwards the argument is less negative in its result either directly or
indirectly, and is more systematic and constructive. This is no doubt largely because hitherto individual mind
as such has been under review, and this is an abstraction from social mind or spiritual existence.]]
SPIRIT
REASON is spirit, when its certainty of being all reality has been raised to the level of truth, and reason is
consciously aware of itself as its own world, and of the world as itself. The development of spirit was
indicated in the immediately preceding movement of mind, where the object of consciousness, the category
pure and simple, rose to be the notion of reason. When reason "observes", this pure unity of ego and
existence, the unity of subjectivity and objectivity, of for-itself-ness and in-itself-ness-this unity is
immanent, has the character of implicitness or of being; and consciousness of reason finds itself. But the true
nature of "observation" is rather the transcendence of this instinct of finding its object lying directly at hand,
VI. SPIRIT(1) 155
 THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND
and passing beyond this unconscious state of its existence. The directly perceived (angeshcaut) category, the
thing simply "found", enters consciousness as the self-existence of the ego-ego, which now knows itself in
the objective reality, and knows itself there as the self. But this feature of the category, viz. of being for-itself
as opposed to being--immanent--within--itself, is equally one-sided, and a moment that cancels itself. The
category therefore gets for consciousness the character which it possesses in its universal truth--it is
self-contained essential reality (an und fer sich seyendes Wesen). This character, still abstract, which
constitutes the nature of absolute fact, of "fact itself", is the beginnings of "spiritual reality" (das geistige
Wesen); and its mode of consciousness is here a formal knowledge of that reality, a knowledge which is
occupied with the varied and manifold content thereof. This consciousness is still, in point of fact, a particular
individual distinct from the general substance, and either prescribes arbitrary laws or thinks it possesses
within its own knowledge as such the laws as they absolutely are (an und fer sich), and takes itself to be the
power that passes judgment on them. Or again, looked at from the side of the substance, this is seen to be the
self-contained and self-sufficient spiritual reality, which is not yet a consciousness of its own self. The
self-contained and self-sufficient reality, however, which is at once aware of being actual in the form of
consciousness and presents itself to itself, is Spirit.
Its essential spiritual being (Wesen) has been above designated as the ethical substance; spirit, however, is
concrete ethical actuality (Wirklichkeit). Spirit is the self of the actual consciousness, to which spirit stands
opposed, or rather which appears over against itself, as an objective actual world that has lost, however, all
sense of strangeness for the self, just as the self has lost all sense of having a dependent or independent
existence by itself, cut off and separated from that world. Being substance and universal self-identical
permanent essence (Wesen), spirit is the immovable irreducible basis and the starting point for the action of
all and every one; it is their purpose and their goal, because the ideally implicit nature (Ansich) of all
self-consciousnesses. This substance is likewise the universal product, wrought and created by the action of
each and all, and constituting their unity and likeness and identity of meaning; for it is self-existence
(Fersichseyn), the self, action. Qua substance, spirit is unbending righteous selfsameness, self-identity; but
qua for-itself, self-existent and self-determined (Fersichseyn), its continuity is resolved into discrete
elements, it is the self-sacrificing soul of goodness, the benevolent essential nature in which each fulfils his
own special work, rends the continuum of the universal substance, and takes his own share of it. This
resolution of the essence into individual forms is just the aspect of the separate action and the separate self of
all the several individuals; it is the moving soul of the ethical substance, the resultant universal spiritual
being. Just because this substance is a being resolved in the self, it is not a lifeless essence, but actual and
alive.
Spirit is thus the self-supporting absolutely real ultimate being (Wesen). All the previous modes of
consciousness are abstractions from it: they are constituted by the fact that spirit analyses itself, distinguishes
its moments, and halts at each individual mode in turn. The isolating of such moments presupposes spirit
itself and requires spirit for its subsistence, in other words, this isolation of modes only exists within spirit,
which is existence. Taken in isolation they appear as if they existed as they stand. But their advance and
return upon their real ground and essential being showed that they are merely moments or vanishing
quantities; and this essential being is precisely this movement and resolution of these moments. Here, where
spirit, the reflexion of these moments into itself, has become established, our reflexion may briefly recall
them in this connexion: they were consciousness, self-consciousness, and reason. Spirit is thus
Consciousness in general, which contains sense-certainty, perception and understanding, so far as in
analysing its own self it holds fast by the moment of being a reality objective to itself, and by abstraction
eliminates the fact that this reality is its own self objectified, its own self-existence. When again it holds fast
by the other abstract moment produced by analysis, the fact that its object is its own self become objective to [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]