a. The Luminous Essence

Spirit, as the essence that is self-consciousness – or as the self-conscious essence, which is all truth and knows all actuality as itself – is, in contrast to the reality which it gives itself in the movement of its consciousness, initially only its concept, and this concept, in contrast to the daytime of the development, is the night of its essence and, in contrast to the existence of its moments as self-sufficient shapes, it is the creative secret of its birth. This secret has its revelation within itself, for existence has its necessity in this concept because this concept is spirit knowing itself and thus has within its essence the moment of being consciousness and of representing itself objectively. – It is the pure I, which in its relinquishing¹⁸ has the certainty of itself in itself as the universal object, or this object is for the I the permeation of all thinking and all actuality.

In the first, immediate estrangement of self-knowing absolute spirit, its shape has the determination that corresponds to immediate consciousness, or to sensuous-certainty. It intuits itself in the form of being, but not that of the spiritless being suffused with contingent determinations of sensation; rather, it is the being suffused with spirit. It likewise includes within itself the form which was to be found in immediate self-consciousness, the form of the master in contrast to the self-consciousness of spirit retreating from its object. – This being suffused with the concept of spirit, is therefore the shape of the simple relation of spirit to itself, or the shape of shapelessness. In virtue of this determination, this shape is the pure, all-containing, luminous essence of the sunrise, which suffuses everything and which preserves itself in its formless substantiality. Its otherness is the equally simple negative, darkness; the movements of its own self-relinquishing, its creations in the unresisting elements of its otherness, are all effusions of light, and in their simplicity they are at the same time both its coming-to-be-for-itself and its return out of its existence, or the shapes of consuming streams of fire. The difference that it gives itself no doubt thrives and proliferates in the substance of existence, and it shapes itself into the forms of nature; however, the essential simplicity of its thinking wanders here and there without any constancy, sometimes enlarging its boundaries to a measureless extent, and then, in its own sublimity, it brings its own beauty, which it has heightened into splendor, into dissolution.

The content, which this pure being develops, or its perceiving, is thus an essenceless byplay in this substance, which only rises without setting into itself, without becoming a subject and securing its differences through the self. Its determinations are only attributes that do not flourish into self-sufficiency; rather, they remain only names of the many-named One. This One is clothed with the manifold forces of existence and with the shapes of actuality as if they were selfless ornaments. They are only heralds of its power, and they lack any will of their own, any intuitions of its glory, and any voices in its praise.

However, this life in revel must determine itself into being-for-itself and must give stable existence to its vanishing shapes. Immediate being, in which it places itself over and against its consciousness, is itself the negative power that dissolves its differences. It is therefore in truth the self, and spirit therefore passes over into it in order to know itself in the form of the self. Pure light scatters its simplicity as an infinity of forms and exhibits itself as a sacrifice to being-for-itself so that the singular individual may wed himself to the stable existence in its substance.

b. Plants and Animals

Self-conscious spirit, which has taken an inward turn from out of the shapeless essence, or which has elevated its immediacy to that of the self as such, determines its simplicity as a manifoldness of being-for-itself and is the religion of spiritual perception, within which it falls apart into an innumerable plurality of weaker and stronger, richer and poorer spirits. This pantheism, which is initially the motionless stable existence of these spiritual atoms, becomes a hostile movement within itself. The innocence of the flower religion, which is only a representation of the self void of any self, passes over into the seriousness of warring life, into the guilt of animal religion; the motionless being and the impotence of intuiting individuality passes over into destructive being-for-itself. – It does not help to have taken the death of abstraction away from the things of perception and to have elevated them into the essence of spiritual perception; the ensouling of this spiritual realm has that death through the determinateness and the negativity in it which make it encroach on the innocent indifference of that religion. It is through this determinateness and negativity that the dispersal into the manifoldness of the motionless shapes of plants becomes a hostile movement in which the hatred of their being-for-itself gradually wears itself out. – The actual self-consciousness within this dispersed spirit is a multitude of thinned-out and unsociable spirits of different peoples, who, in their hatred, battle with each other to the death and become conscious of determinate shapes of animals as their essence, for they themselves are nothing more than animal spirits, segregating themselves from their conscious animal life, bereft of universality.

However, in this hatred, the determinateness of purely negative being-for-itself gradually wears itself out, and through this movement of the concept, spirit enters into another shape. The sublated being-for-itself is the form of the object, a form which is brought forth by the self, or which is the engendered self instead wearing itself out, i.e., the self as it becomes a thing. Hence, the laborer retains the upper hand over these animal spirits which are only tearing each other apart, the very laborer whose doing is not only negative but rather is a steady hand and is positive. Therefore, the consciousness of spirit is henceforth the movement that is above and beyond immediate being-in-itself as well as abstract being-for-itself. While the in-itself is, through opposition, debased into a determinateness, it is no longer absolute spirit's own form; rather, the in-itself is an actuality which finds its consciousness opposed to itself as a common existence, and it then sublates that actuality; it is likewise not only this sublating consciousness but also its representation, which engenders being-for-itself laid out in the form of an object. Nonetheless, this bringing forth is not yet a consummate activity; rather, it is a conditioned activity and is the forming of what is present at hand.

c. The Artisan

Spirit therefore here appears as the artisan, and his doing, whereby he brings forth himself as object, although not yet having taken hold of the thought of himself, is an instinctive kind of working, much like bees building their cells.

The first form, because it is the immediate one, is the abstract form of the understanding, and the work is not yet in its own self suffused by spirit. The crystals of the pyramids and of the obelisks, simple combinations of straight lines with even surfaces and equal relations of parts in which the incommensurability of roundness is abolished, are the works of this artisan of rigorous form. On account of the bare intelligibility of the form, the form is not its meaning in its own self, not the spiritual self. Those works therefore either only receive spirit into themselves as an alien, departed spirit which has abandoned its living permeation with actuality, and which, being itself dead, comes to reside in these lifeless crystals: – Or they relate themselves externally to spirit as something which is there¹⁹ externally and not as spirit itself – to spirit as the light rising in the east, which casts its meaning on them.

The separation from which the laboring spirit originates, the separation between being-in-itself, which becomes the material which it processes, and being-for-itself, which is the aspect of the laboring self-consciousness, has, to itself, become objective in its work. Its further endeavor has to set itself to sublating this separation of soul and body, to clothing and shaping the soul in its own self and ensouling the body. Both aspects, while they are brought closer to each other, thereby retain with regard to each other the determinateness of represented spirit and its enveloping shell; spirit's oneness with itself contains this opposition of singular individuality and universality. While in its aspects the work brings itself closer to itself, something else happens at the same time, namely, the work comes closer to the laboring self-consciousness, and, in the work, the latter arrives at knowing itself as it is in and for itself. However, in this way the work initially only constitutes the abstract aspect of the activity of spirit, which does not yet know its content within itself; rather, it knows this content in its work, which is a thing. The artisan himself, the whole spirit, has not yet appeared; rather, the artisan is still the inner, hidden essence, which as a whole is present only as broken apart into the active self-consciousness and the object it has brought out.

694. Therefore, the surrounding habitation, or the external reality, which has initially been elevated only to the abstract form of the understanding, is worked up by the artisan into a more ensouled form. The artisan employs plant life for this purpose, which, unlike the way it had been in that previous, powerless pantheism, is itself no longer holy. Instead, it is taken up by the artisan, who grasps himself as the essence existing-for-itself, as something to be used, and he repositions it back to being an external aspect, an ornament. However, it is not put to such use without alteration; at the same time, the laborer of that self-conscious form destroys the transience of this life which the immediate existence of this life has in itself, and he brings its organic forms nearer to the more rigorous and universal forms of thought. The organic form, which, if left to itself, thrives in its particularity, is on the one hand subjugated by the form of thought, and, on the other hand, the artisan elevates these straight-lined and level shapes into a more ensouled curvature that becomes the root of free architecture.

This dwelling, the aspect of the universal element, or the aspect of the inorganic nature of spirit, also now includes within itself a shape of singular individuality that brings nearer to actuality the spirit which had formerly been either external or internal to existence but which had been isolated from existence. By doing so, he makes the work more equal to active self-consciousness. The worker at first resorts to the form of being-for-itself per se, to the shapes of animal life. He proves that he is no longer immediately conscious of himself in animal life by constituting himself as the productive force versus animal life and, in that life, by knowing himself as his own work. The result is that the animal shape is at the same time both sublated and becomes the hieroglyph of another meaning, the hieroglyph of thought. Hence, this shape is also no longer solely and entirely used by the worker; rather, it becomes blended with the shape of thought, with the human shape. Still, the work lacks the shape and existence in which the self exists as self. – It also still lacks in its own self the pronouncement of itself as locking within itself an inner meaning; it lacks language, the element in which the diffusing sense itself is present. Hence, the work, even when it is wholly purified of what is animalistic and even when it bears in it the shape of self-consciousness alone, is still the soundless shape that needs the rays of the rising sun in order to have a sound, which, although brought out by the light, is also only sound and not language, and which only points to an external self, not to the inner self.

Standing over and against this external self is the other shape, which announces that it has in it an inner. Nature, returning back into its essence, deposes its living, isolating, self-disorienting manifoldness in all its movement, and it lowers it into an inessential casing which is the covering of the inner. This inner is at first still the simple darkness, the unmoved, the black formless stone.

Both illustrations contain inwardness and existence – the two moments of spirit; and both illustrations contain both moments at the same time in opposed relationships, the self as inner as well as outer. Both are to be united. – The soul of the humanly formed statuary column does not yet come out of the inner, is not yet language, the existence that is inner in its own self– and the inner of multiform existence is still without sound, still undifferentiated within itself, still separated from its outer to which all differences belong. – The artisan thus combines both of them in his blending of the natural and self-conscious shapes. These ambiguous essences are riddles to themselves, are the conscious wrestling with the unconscious, the simple inner with the multiply shaped outer, the darkness of thought paired with the clarity of expression. Now these ambiguous essences burst out into the language of a deeper, but scarcely comprehensible, wisdom.

Within this work, instinctual labor ceases, namely, the labor which, in opposition to self-consciousness, brought forth the unconscious work, for within it, the activity of the artisan, which constitutes self-consciousness, encounters an equally self-conscious, self-expressing inner. Within that activity, the artisan has worked his way up to the estrangement of his consciousness, an estrangement in which spirit encounters spirit. In this unity of self-conscious spirit with itself, to the extent that it is, to spirit, the shape and object of its consciousness, its blending with the unconscious mode of the immediate natural shapes purify themselves. These monstrosities in shape, speech, and deed dissolve into a spiritual shape – into an outer which has taken an inward turn – and into an inner that in itself expresses itself from out of itself, is a thought that begets itself, preserves the shape appropriate to itself, and is itself a lucid existence. Spirit is artist.

a. The Abstract Work of Art

The first work of art exists as immediate, abstract, and singular. For its own part, it has to move itself from this immediate and objective mode into the contrary mode of self-consciousness, just as, on the other hand, self-consciousness, which is for itself in the cult, aims at sublating the difference which it initially gives itself contrary to its own spirit, and it thereby engenders a work of art enlivening itself in its own self.

The first manner in which the artistic spirit keeps its shape and its active consciousness at furthest remove from each other is the immediate shape, so that the shape is there²² as a thing as such. – In itself, the shape falls apart into the difference between singular individuality, which has the shape of the self in it, and universality, which, with reference to the shape, exhibits the inorganic essence as its environs and dwelling. Through the elevation of the whole into the pure concept, this shape attains its pure form, which belongs to spirit. It is neither the crystal, which belonged to the understanding and which houses the dead or which is illuminated by the soul external to it, nor is it the mingling of the forms of nature and of thought initially arising out of plants, whose activity is in here still an imitation. Rather, the concept strips off the root, branches, and leaves still clinging to those forms and purifies them into structures in which the crystal's straight lines and surfaces are elevated into incommensurable relationships in such a way that the ensouling of the organic is incorporated into the abstract form of understanding and, at the same time, its essence – incommensurability – is preserved for the understanding.

However, the indwelling god is the black stone drawn out of its animal encasing which is penetrated with the light of consciousness. The human shape strips off the animal shape with which it was intermingled. For the god, the animal is only a contingent disguise; the animal walks alongside its true shape and no longer counts for itself as valid. Its meaning has degenerated into that of something other, into a mere sign. As a result, the shape of the god in its own self strips off even the neediness of the natural conditions of animal existence, and it hints at those internal preparations of organic life which are merged into its surface and which belong only to this surface. – However, the essence of the god is the unity of the universal existence of nature and of self-conscious spirit, which, in its actuality, appears as confronting nature. At the same time, being at first a singular shape, its existence is one of the elements of nature just as its self-conscious actuality is a singular spirit of a people. However, in this unity, the former is the element which is reflected into spirit; it is nature transfigured by thought and united with self-conscious life. For that reason, the shape of the gods has its natural element as that which is sublated, as an obscure memory within itself. The desolated essence and convoluted strife among the free-standing, existing elements, the unethical realm of the Titans, is conquered and banished to the fringes of the actuality that has become clear to itself, to the muddy boundaries of the becalmed world which is to be found in spirit. These ancient gods, in which the luminous essence mates with the darkness and particularizes itself initially as heaven, earth, the ocean, the sun, the blind typhonic fire of the earth, etc., are replaced with shapes which in themselves only have the dark reminiscent echo of those earlier Titans and which are no longer natural beings²³ but rather the clear ethical spirits of self-conscious peoples.

This simple shape has thus eliminated in itself the unrest of infinite isolation – the unrest of its own as well as that of the element of nature, which only conducts itself necessarily as the universal essence, but which in its existence and in its movement conducts itself contingently. It is also the unrest of a people, which, dispersed into the doings belonging to particular social estates and into individual points of self-consciousness, has an existence composed of manifold meanings and doings – and has gathered itself up into a motionless individuality. Hence, the moment of unrest stands over and against this individuality – the essence over and against self-consciousness, which, as the birthplace of that unrest, reserves nothing for itself other than to be pure activity. The artist gave entirely to his works what belonged to the substance, but in his own works he gave no actuality to himself as a determinate individuality; he could as a result only confer perfection on the work by relinquishing himself²⁴ of his particularity, disembodying himself and rising to the abstraction of a pure doing. – In this first immediate creation, the work and his self-conscious activity that were separated have not yet been reunified. The work is thus not what is actually ensouled; rather, it is a whole only in combination with its coming-to-be. What is common to works of art, namely, that a work of art is created in consciousness and is made by human hands, is the moment of the concept existing as concept, which stands over and against the work. And if this concept, taken as the artist or the spectator, is unselfish enough to declare the work of art to be in its own self absolutely ensouled, and if he forgets himself doing or viewing [the work], then in opposition to this, the concept of spirit must be firmly kept in our grasp; it is the concept which cannot dispense with the moment of being conscious of itself. But this moment stands over and against the work because the concept in this, its first estrangement, gives the two aspects, in regard to and in opposition with each other, their abstract determinations of doings and thing-beings.²⁵ Their return into the unity from which they originated has not yet come about.

In his work the artist therefore experiences that he has brought forth no essence equal to himself. To be sure, there is a consciousness which comes back to him from his work, in the sense that an admiring multitude honors it as the spirit which is their essence. However, this ensouling, as it only returns his self-consciousness to him as admiration, is really a confession to the artist that the ensouled work is not equal to him. While his work comes back to him in general as enthusiasm, he does not therein find the ache of his own cultural formation and creation, the strenuousness of his work. The multitude may also still render judgment on the work, or they may bring it offerings, or, in whatever way they can, endow it with their own consciousness – if they, in their acquaintance with the work, place themselves above it, then the artist knows how much greater his deed is than their understanding and talk. If they place themselves beneath it and recognize in it an essence which dominates them, he knows himself as the master craftsman²⁶ of that essence.

The work of art thus demands another element of its existence; it demands that the god have another way of coming to light other than that in which, in the depths of his creative night, the god falls down into the very opposite, into externality, into the determination of a thing lacking self-consciousness. This higher element is language – an existence which is immediately self-conscious existence.²⁷ Just as the singular individual self-consciousness is there²⁸ in language, it likewise immediately is there as a universal contagion. Complete particularization of being-for-itself is at the same time the fluidity and the universally communicated unity of the multiple selves; it is the soul existing as soul. The god which therefore has language as an element of his shape is the work of art ensouled in its own self, which immediately has pure activity in its existence, which, as a thing, had existed over and against it.²⁹ Or, self-consciousness remains immediately at one with itself³⁰ in its essence becoming objective. As thus being at one with itself³¹ within its essence, it is pure thinking, or it is the devotion whose inwardness at the same time has existence in the hymn. The hymn contains within itself the singular individuality of self-consciousness, and, in being heard, this singular individuality is there at the same time as universal singular individuality. Devotion, kindled in every individual, is the spiritual stream which in the multiplicity of self-consciousnesses is conscious of itself as the same doing in each and all, and as simple being. As this universal self-consciousness of each and all, spirit has in one unity its pure inwardness as well as the being for others and the being-for-itself of the singular individuals.

This language is distinguished from another language of the god, which is not that of universal self-consciousness. The oracle, both in the case of the god of the art-religion as well as those of the preceding religions, is the necessarily first language of the god, for it lies within the god's concept that the god is the essence of nature as well as spirit and thus does not have only natural but also spiritual existence as well. To the extent that as this moment first lies in the god's concept and is not yet realized in religion, language is for religious self-consciousness the language of an alien self-consciousness. The self-consciousness which still remains alien to its own religious community³²is not yet there in the way its concept requires. The self is the simple and, as a result, utterly universal being-for-itself, but that self, which is separated from the self-consciousness of the religious community, is only at first a singular individual self. – The content of this, its own singular language, results from the universal determinateness within which absolute spirit as such is posited in its religion. – The universal spirit of the sunrise, which does not yet have its existence particularized, pronounces the essence in the equally simple and universal propositions whose substantial content is sublime in its simple truth, but which, on account of this universality, appears at the same time trivial to the self-consciousness which is pressing further in its cultural formation.

The further cultured self, which raises itself to being-for-itself, stands above the pure pathos of substance, is the master craftsman³³ above the objectivity of the rising sun of the luminous essence, and knows that simplicity of truth, as existing-in-itself, which does not possess the form of contingent existence through an alien language, but instead is as the sure and unwritten law of the gods, a law which lives eternally, and of which nobody knows whence it came. – Just as the universal truth revealed by the luminous essence has here returned into the inner, or the lower, and it has thereby been absolved from the form of contingent appearance, so in contrast in the art-religion, because the shape of the god has assumed consciousness and therewith singular individuality per se, the god's own language, which is the spirit of an ethical people, is the oracle, who knows the particular affairs of the people and who makes known [to them] what is useful for those affairs. However, the universal truths, because they are known as existing-in-themselves, vindicate knowingly thinking,³⁴ and the language of the universal truths is no longer alien but is its very own. Just as that wise man of antiquity searched within his own thinking for what was supposed to be good and beautiful but then left it to his daemon to know about the petty contingent content of what he wanted to know, for example, whether it was good for him to keep company with this or that person, or good for one of his acquaintances to go on a journey, and other such insignificant things, so too the universal consciousness takes its knowing about the contingent from birds or trees or the fermenting earth, whose vapor takes away from self-consciousness all its level-headedness. For what is contingent is the impulsive, the alien, and ethical consciousness thus also lets itself, for example, with a roll of the dice, determine itself in an impulsive and alien manner concerning these things. However much the singular individual through his intellect determines himself and however much he selects what is advantageous for him through deliberation, still it is the determinateness of his particular character which is the ground of this self-determination; this determinateness is itself contingent, and that knowing supplied by his intellect about what is advantageous for the singular individual is therefore precisely the same kind of knowing as that gained from the oracle or the casting of lots. The only difference is that the person who queries the oracle or who casts lots thereby expresses the ethical disposition of indifference towards the contingent, whereas, in contrast, the former person treats what is in itself contingent as an essential interest of his thinking and knowing. However, what is higher than both is to make deliberation into the oracle itself for a contingent doing; it is also to know that this deliberate action itself is contingent on account of its relation to the particular and to what is advantageousness.

The true self-conscious existence, which is spirit in the language that is not that of an alien and thus accidental, non-universal self-consciousness, is itself the work of art which we previously saw. The work of art stands in contrast to the thing-like character of the statuary column. Just as the statuary column is motionless existence, language is disappearing existence; just as with the statuary column, objectivity is set free and lacks its own immediate self, by contrast, in language, objectivity remains too much embedded into the self, reaches too meager a shape, and, like time, it is, as it is there, no longer immediately there.

The movement of both sides constitutes the cult. In that movement, the divine shape which moved in the purely sentient elements of self-consciousness and the divine shape which was motionless in the elements of thinghood have each mutually abandoned their distinctive determination, and the unity, which is the concept of their essence, comes into existence. In the cult, the self gives itself the consciousness of the divine essence descending from out of its otherworldliness towards it, and this divine essence, which previously was not actual and is only objective, as a result receives the genuine actuality of self-consciousness.

This concept of the cult is in itself already contained and is present in the flow of the hymnal song. This hymnal devotion is the immediate and pure satisfaction of the self through itself and within itself. It is the purified soul, which, in this purity is immediately only essence and is at one with the essence. On account of its abstraction, the soul is not consciousness distinguishing its object from itself; it is thus only the night of its existence and the site prepared for its shape. The abstract cult consequently elevates the self up to the point where it is to be this pure divine element. The soul consciously completes this purification; nonetheless, the soul is not yet the self that has descended into its depths and knows itself to be evil; rather it is an existent self, a soul that cleanses its externality by washing it, which dons white clothing, and whose inwardness passes through the imagined³⁵ path of labor, punishment, and reward, or through the very path itself of cultural formation which empties itself of its particularity, the very path by which it arrives at the dwellings and the community of the blessed.

This cult is only at first a secret completion, i.e., is only a represented³⁶ completion and not an actual one; it must be actual action, for an non-actual action is self-contradictory. Authentic consciousness elevates itself as a result into its pure self-consciousness. The essence has within itself the significance of a free object, and through the actual cult, the object reverts back into the self – and to the extent that the object has in pure consciousness the significance of the pure essence dwelling in an other-worldly realm beyond actuality, this essence descends through this mediation from its universality into singular individuality, and it thus merges itself with actuality.

How both sides enter into action is determined in the following way. For the self-conscious aspect, to the extent that it is actual consciousness, the essence exhibits itself as actual nature; on the one hand, nature belongs to the essence as its possession and property, and it counts as existence not existing-in-itself. – On the other hand, nature is essence's own immediate actuality and singular individuality, which essence just as well regards as non-essence and as sublated. At the same time, for its pure consciousness, that external nature signifies the opposite, namely, the essence existing-in-itself, with regard to which the self sacrifices its inessentiality just as, conversely, the inessential aspect of nature sacrifices itself. As a result, the action is a spiritual movement because it is this double-sidedness, that is, it is to sublate the abstraction of essence just as devotion determines the object, and it is the actual just as it is the actor who determines the object and himself, raising both up to and into universality.

The action of the cult itself thus begins with the pure sacrificial dedication of a possession, which the owner, without any apparent advantage to himself, pours out or lets rise up in smoke. Standing before the essence of his pure consciousness, he thereby renounces all possession and right of property and consumption, renounces personality and the reversion of his doing into his self, and instead reflects the action off into the universal, or into the essence, rather than into himself. – But conversely the existing essence equally perishes therein. The animal offered up is the sign of a god; the fruits consumed are the living Ceres and Bacchus themselves – in the former, the powers of the higher law, which have blood and actual life, die, but in the latter, what perishes are the powers of the lower law, which bloodlessly are in possession of the secret, cunning power. – The sacrifice of the divine substance, insofar as it is a doing, belongs to the side of self-consciousness, and for this actual doing to be possible, the essence must have already in itself sacrificed itself. It has therein done this in that it has given itself existence and made itself into a singular animal and into the fruit of the earth. This renunciation, which the essence has already in itself completed, the acting self presents in existence and for its consciousness, and it replaces that former immediate actuality with the higher actuality, namely, that of himself. The unity which has arisen, which is the result of sublated singular individuality and of the separation of both sides, is not that of only negative fate; rather, it has a positive meaning. What was sacrificed to the abstract essence of the netherworld is just given away, and what that meant was that the reflection of possession and being-for-itself into the universal is differentiated from the self as such. However, at the same time this is only a trifling part, and the other act of sacrifice is only the destruction of what cannot be used and is instead the preparation of the offering for a meal, the feast that cheats the action out of its negative significance. The person making the offering reserves for his consumption the greatest share from that first offering and what is useful from the latter offering. This consumption is the negative power that sublates the essence as well as singular individuality, and this consumption is at the same time the positive actuality in which the objective existence of the essence is transformed into self-conscious existence, and the self has consciousness of its unity with the essence.

Incidentally, this cult is indeed an actual action, but its significance lies for the most part only in devotion. What belongs to this devotion is not objectively brought out, just as the result in consumption robs itself of its existence. As a result, the cult goes further and, as a result, initially replaces this defect by giving its devotion an objective stable existence, as the cult is the common work, or the work of each and every singular individual, which produces a dwelling and adornment for the honor of the god. – As a result, the objectivity of the statuary column is in part sublated, for it is through this consecration of his gifts and his labors that the laborer disposes the god to favor him, and he intuits his self as belonging to the god. In part, this doing is also not the artist's singular labor, but rather this particularity is dissolved in universality. However, it is not only the honor of the god which comes about, and the blessing of his favor does not flow only in representational thought³⁷ onto the worker. Rather, the meaning of the work is also the converse of the first meaning, which was that of self-relinquishing and of the honor rendered to that which is alien. The dwellings and halls of the god are for the use of man, the treasures preserved there are his own in times of need; the honor that the god enjoys in his ornamentation is the honor of a magnanimous people rich in the arts. At the festivals, the people equally adorn both their own dwellings and garments as well as their own accomplishments with graceful items. In this manner, they receive from a grateful god a reciprocation for their gifts, and they receive the proofs of his favor, in which the people bound themselves to the god through their labors, not in the hope and then in a belated actuality, but rather in attestation of the god's honor; and in the offering of gifts, the people immediately have the enjoyment of their own wealth and finery.

b. The Living Work of Art

The people who approach their god in the cult of the art-religion are an ethical people, who know their state and its actions as the will and accomplishment of their own self. This spirit, confronting this self-conscious people, is thus not the luminous essence, which, being selfless, does not contain the certainty of the singular individual within itself but is instead only their universal essence and the dominating power in which they disappear. What the religious cult of this simple shapeless essence therefore gives back to those who belong to it is generally only that they are the people of their god; the cult secures for them only their stable existence and their simple substance as such, but not their actual self, which is instead repudiated, for they revere their god as empty depth but not as spirit. However, the cult of the art-religion does without that former abstract simplicity of essence, and it thus also does without its depth. But the essence which is immediately at one with the self is in itself spirit and the knowing truth,³⁸ although not yet the known truth, or the truth knowing itself in its own depth. Because here the essence thus has the self in it, its appearance is friendly towards consciousness, and in the cult, this consciousness receives not only the universal authorization of its stable existence but also its self-conscious existence in the cult, just as, conversely, the essence does not have the self-less actuality in an outcast people whose substance is only recognized, having only self-less actuality, but rather, it has actuality within the people whose self is recognized³⁹ in its substance.

Satisfied in its essence, self-consciousness thus leaves the cult, and the god takes up residence in self-consciousness as its site. This site is for itself the night of substance, or its pure individuality, but is no longer the tension-filled individuality of the artist, which has not yet reconciled itself with its essence, which itself is objectively coming to be. Rather, it is the satisfied night which has its pathos in itself, free of need, because it has returned from out of intuition, from out of the sublated objectivity. – This pathos is for itself the essence of the sunrise, but which has henceforth within itself turned inward and become the sunset; self-consciousness and thereby existence and actuality has its sunset, its downfall, in its own self. – Here it has run its course through the movement of its actualization. Depreciating itself from its pure essentiality into an objective force of nature and into the expressions of this force, it is an existence for the other, for the self by which it is consumed. The silent essence of self-less nature attains in its fruits the level where it, nature, in preparing itself and in being digested, offers itself up to self-like life; it is in its utility, or in its being able to serve as food and drink, that it attains its highest perfection. This is so because in that kind of utility, it has the possibility of a higher existence, and it comes into contact with spiritual existence. – In its metamorphosis, the spirit of the earth has in part developed into a silently powerful substance, and in part into spiritual ferment. There it flourishes as the feminine principle of nurturance, and here as the masculine principle of the self-impelling force of self-conscious existence.

In this consumption, that sunrise of the luminous essence is disclosed for what it is; it is the mystery of such consumption. This is so because the mystical is neither the concealment of a secret, nor is it ignorance. Rather, it consists in the self knowing itself to be at one with the essence and the essence therefore being revealed. Only the self is revealed to itself, or what is revealed is revealed only in the immediate certainty of itself. However, it is in such certainty that the simple essence was posited by the cult. As a useful thing, it not only has existence that is seen, felt, smelt, and tasted; it is also the object of desire, and, by actually being consumed, it becomes one with the self and as a result is completely given over to this self and revealed to it. – That which is said to be obvious to reason or to the heart is in fact still secret, for it still lacks the actual certainty of immediate existence, as well as the certainty regarding what is objective and the certainty of consumption, which in religion is not only an unthinkingly immediate certainty but rather at the same time is the certainty of the self which knows itself purely.

Through the cult what has hereby been revealed to self-conscious spirit within itself is the simple essence, as the movement in part of the essence's departing from its nocturnal concealment upward into consciousness, in part to be its silently nurturing substance, in part as the movement of its likewise disappearing again into the night of the netherworld, into the self, and that of lingering above that netherworld only with silent maternal yearning. – However, the radiant impulse is the multiply named⁴⁰ luminous essence of the sunrise and its reveling life, which, having equally been drained of its abstract being, has at first entered into the objective existence of the fruits of the earth, and then, surrendering itself to self-consciousness, has arrived at its genuine actuality – it now roams about as a throng of madly rapturous women, the unrestrained revel of nature in a self-conscious shape.

724. But what has been betrayed to consciousness is still only absolute spirit, the spirit of this simple essence and not the spirit in its own self as spirit; or, what has been betrayed is only immediate spirit, the spirit of nature. Its self-conscious life is thus only the mystery of bread and wine, of Ceres and Bacchus, not that of the other genuinely higher gods, whose individuality encompasses within itself self-consciousness as such as an essential moment. Spirit as self-conscious spirit has not yet sacrificed itself to it, and the mystery of bread and wine is not yet the mystery of flesh and blood.

This unstable revel of the gods must bring itself to rest as an object, and the enthusiasm that did not make it to consciousness must produce a work that confronts it, just as the statuary column previously confronted the enthusiasm of the artist, a work which was indeed perfected, however, not as a lifeless self in its own self but rather as a living self. – One such cult is the festival which man gives in his own honor but which does not yet place into the cult the meaning of the absolute essence, for it is the essence, not yet spirit that is first revealed to it. The essence is revealed to him not as the sort of essence which essentially assumes human shape. However, this cult lays the ground for this revelation, and it lays out its moments one by one. So what is here is the abstract moment of the living embodiment of essence just as formerly there was the unity of both in an unconscious enthusiastic rapture. In place of the statuary column, man thus places himself as the shape educated and elaborated for perfectly free movement, just as the statue is the perfectly free state of motionless being. However much every singular individual knows at least how to play the part of a torchbearer, still one of them stands out from the rest, he who is the shaped movement itself, the smooth elaboration and fluent force of all the members. – He is an ensouled, living work of art, who pairs his beauty with strength, and to whom, as the prize for his power, is accorded the adornment with which the statuary column was honored; moreover, instead of the honor due to the god set in stone, he is accorded the honor of being among his people the highest bodily representation of their essence.

In the two portrayals that have just come before us, the unity of self-consciousness and spiritual essence are both present. What is still lacking in them is any equilibrium. In bacchanalian enthusiasm, the self is external to itself,⁴¹ but in beautiful embodiment, it is the spiritual essence. That former dullness of consciousness together with its furious stammering must be incorporated into the clear existence of the latter embodiment, and the spiritless clarity of the latter embodiment must be incorporated into the inwardness of the former bacchanalian enthusiasm. The completed element within which inwardness is external just as externality is likewise inward is, again, language; however, it is neither the language of the oracle, which is entirely contingent and singular in its content, nor is it the hymn of feeling sung only in praise of a singular god; nor is it the contentless stammer of the bacchanalian frenzy. Rather, it has attained its clear and universal content. It has attained its clear content, for the artist has worked himself out of his initial, entirely substantial enthusiasm into a definite shape, into his own existence which is permeated and given over in all its emotional stirrings by the self-conscious soul. – It has attained its universal content, for in this festival, which is to the honor of man, the one-sidedness of the statuary columns vanishes, those statues which only contained a single national spirit, a determinate character of divinity. The beautiful fencer is indeed the honor of his particular people, but he is an embodied singular individual in which the comprehensiveness and seriousness of meaning, along with the inner character of the spirit which underlies the particular life, interests, needs, and mores of his people, has met its downfall. In this self-relinquishing into complete embodiment, spirit has cast off the particular impressions and echoes of nature, which, as the actual spirit of the people, it encompassed within itself. Its people thus are, to themselves, no longer conscious of their particularity in that spirit, but rather, are instead conscious of casting off this particularity and of the universality of their human existence.

c. The Spiritual Work of Art

The spirits of [different] peoples, which become conscious of the shape of their essence in a particular animal, merge into one spirit; in that way, the particular beautiful spirits of a people combine themselves into one pantheon whose element and abode is language. The pure intuition of itself as universal humanity in the actuality of the spirit of a people, has the form that it combines itself with other spirits of a people, with whom it constitutes through nature one nation, combining into a common undertaking, and for this work, it fashions an entire people and thereby an entire heaven. This universality which spirit arrives at in its existence is, though, only this first universality which initially originates from the individuality of ethical life, not yet having overcome its immediacy, not having fashioned one state out of these separate tribes. The ethical life of the actual spirit of a people rests partly on the immediate trust of the singular individuals in the whole of their people, partly in the immediate participation which all, irrespective of differences of estate, take in the resolutions and business of their government. Within the union, initially not that of a lasting order but rather only for a common action, that freedom of participation of each and all is temporarily set aside. This first communal endeavor is thus more of an assembly of individualities than it is the dominion of abstract thought, which would rob singular individuals of their self-conscious participation in the willing and acts of the whole.

The assembly of the spirits of different peoples constitutes a circle of shapes, which now deals with the whole of nature as well as with the whole ethical world. They too are under the supreme command of one of them rather than under his sovereign rule.⁴² For themselves, they are the universal substances of what the self-conscious essence is in itself and what it does. This, however, constitutes both the force and at least initially the focal point for the sake of which those universal essences endeavor and which initially seems to link their dealings only in an accidental fashion. However, the return of the divine essence into self-consciousness already contains the ground which fashions the focal point for those divine forces; it initially conceals their essential unity under the form of a friendly, external relation between both worlds.

The same universality that corresponds to this content also necessarily has the form of consciousness, and it is in this form that it comes on the scene. It is no longer the actual doing of the cult; rather, it is a doing which has not yet been elevated to the concept but instead only to that of representational thought, to the synthetic linkage of self-conscious and external existence. This representational thought's existence, language, is the first language, the epic as such, which contains universal content, or universal at least in the sense of the completeness of the world even though not in the sense of the universality of thought. The bard is the singular and the actual, and from whom, as the subject of this world, the world is created and by whom it is borne. His pathos is not the anesthetic power of nature; rather, it is Mnemosyne, the reflection and inwardness which has come to be, the memory of an earlier immediate essence. He is the organ vanishing within its content; what counts is not his own self but his muse, his universal song. But what in fact is present here is the syllogism, in which the extreme of universality, the world of the gods, is combined with that of singularity, the bard, by the mediating middle of particularity. The mediating middle is the people in its heroes, who, like the bard, are singular people but only as representationally thought,⁴³ and they are as a result universal, like the free extreme of universality itself, namely, the gods.

In this epic, what thus comes about in itself in the cult, the relation of the divine to the human, presents itself as such to consciousness. The content is an action of the essence conscious of itself. Acting disturbs the rest of the substance and arouses it; it thereby divides its simplicity and opens it up to the diverse world of natural and ethical forces. The action is the violation of the peaceful earth; it is the trench ensouled through blood, which provokes the departed spirits, who, thirsting for life, receive it in the doings of self-consciousness. The dealings, which are at issue in the universal endeavor, acquire two aspects, the self-like⁴⁴ aspect, accomplished by the totality of actual peoples along with the individualities who are the heads, and the universal aspect accomplished by their substantial powers. However, the relation between the two was previously determined so that it is the synthetic combination of the universal and the singular, or is representational thinking. It is on this determinateness that the assessment of this world hangs. – The relationship between the two is, as a result, an intermingling of both of them, a relationship which inconsistently divides the unity of the doing and which needlessly tosses the action from one side to the other. The universal powers have the shape of individuality and thereby have in them the principle of acting; their having an effect hence appears as a doing which originates wholly from out of them, an activity which is equally as free as those originating from the people. Hence, one and the same thing has been done by the gods as well as having been done by men. The seriousness of those former powers is a farcical superfluity, since this latter is in fact the force of the acting individuality – whereas the effort and labor of the latter is again a useless effort, since it is the former who direct everything. – The ephemeral mortals, who are nothing, are at the same time the powerful self which brings into subjection the universal essence, offends the gods, provides actuality for them, and provides the gods with an interest in doing something; just as, conversely, these powerless universalities, which nourish themselves on their gifts from mankind and only get something to do through people, are the natural essence and the basic material of all events and are equally the matter of ethical life and the pathos of doing. However much their elemental natures are initially brought into actuality and into an activated relationship through the free self of individuality, still they are equally as much the universal that withdraws itself from this bond, which remains unrestricted in its destiny, and which through the invincible elasticity of its unity extinguishes the point-like singleness of the actor and his figurations, preserves itself in its purity, and dissolves all that is individual in its fluidity.

Just as the gods fall into this contradictory relation with the self-like nature confronting them, their universality just as much comes into conflict with their own determination and its relations to others. They are the eternal beautiful individuals, motionless in their own existence, removed from all transience and from alien power. – However, they are at the same time determinate elements, particular gods, who stand in relation to others. However, according to the opposition it involves, that relationship to others is a battle with those others, a comic self-forgetfulness about their own eternal nature. – That determinateness is rooted in the stable existence of the divine, and in its limitation it has the self-sufficiency of the whole individuality, through which their characters at the same time lose the sharpness of their very distinctiveness, and in their multiple meanings, they blend together with each other. – One purpose of activity, and their activity itself, since their activities are directed against an other and, as a result, against an unconquerable divine force, is a contingent and empty bravado, which itself likewise dissipates into nothing and transforms the apparent seriousness of action into a harmless, self-assured game without result and with no success. However much in the nature of their divinity, the negative, or determinateness, only appears as the inconsistency of their activity and as the contradiction between purpose and success, and however much that former self-sufficient self-assurance outweighs that determinateness, as a result the pure force of the negative confronts them as their final power, namely, as that against which they are without recourse. They are the universal and the positive with regard to the singular self of mortals, which cannot hold out against their power, but for that reason, the universal self, as the conceptless void of necessity, hovers over them and over this whole world of representational thought to which the entire content belongs – an event to which they relate selflessly and in sorrow, for these determinate natures are not to be found within this purity.

However, this necessity is the unity of the concept, which subjugates the contradictory substantiality of the singular moments; it is that in which the inconsistency and contingency of their acts is brought into order, and the game which is made up of their actions receives its seriousness and value in the actions themselves. The content of the world of representational thought plays its game unbound and on its own⁴⁵ within the mediating middle of its movement; it gathers round the individuality of a hero, who in his strength and beauty feels his life broken and who mourns the early death he sees ahead of him. For the singular individuality which is firm and actual within itself is expelled into an extremity, estranged in its moments which have not yet been found and are not yet united. The one singular individual, the abstract non-actual, is the necessity which does not participate in the life of the mediating middle, any more than does the other, the actual singular individual, the bard, who keeps himself outside of the mediating middle and who, in his performance,⁴⁶ comes to his end. Both extremes must converge on the content; the one extreme, necessity, has to suffuse itself with the content, and the other, the language of the bard, must have a share in it; and the content which was formerly left to itself must preserve in its own self the certainty and the fixed determination of the negative.

This higher language, that of tragedy, combines more closely the dispersal of the moments of the essential world and the world of action. According to the nature of the concept, the substance of the divine comes undone into its shapes, and their movement is likewise in conformity with the concept. With regard to form, language here ceases to be that of narrative since it has entered into the content just as the content has ceased to be that of representational thought. The hero is himself the speaker, and the performance⁴⁷ shows the listener, who is at the same time also an onlooker, self-conscious people who know their own rights and purposes, the power and the will of their determinateness, and who know how to state those things. They are artists who do not express unconsciously, naively, and naturally what is external to their decisions and commencements, as is the case in the language which accompanies ordinary doings in actual life. Rather, they express the inner essence, they demonstrate the right of their action, and the pathos to which they belong is reflectively asserted and determinately expressed in its universal individuality, free from contingent circumstances and the particularities of personalities. Finally, these characters exist as actual people who take on the personae of the heroes and exhibit it to them in actual speech, not as a narrative, but in their own words. Just as it is essential for a statuary column to be made by human hands, the actor is likewise essential to his mask – not as an external condition, from which artistic considerations must abstract; or, to the extent that such an abstraction has to be made, it amounts to saying that art does not yet contain within itself the true, genuine self.

The universal basis upon which the movement of these shapes proceeds, a movement which the concept itself has brought out, is the consciousness of the initial representational language and its self-less, sundered contents. It is the common people per se whose wisdom finds utterance in the chorus of the elders, and it is in the powerlessness of the chorus that the common people find their representatives, because they themselves constitute only the positive and passive material for the individuality of the government confronting them. Lacking the power of the negative, the chorus is unable to hold together and to restrain the wealth and the colorful fullness of the divine life; instead, it allows that life to come undone, and in its hymns of honor it praises each singular moment as a self-sufficient god, now praising this one, now that one, then now again another. However, where it feels the seriousness of the concept as the concept proceeds through these shapes and leaves them all in rubble as it does so, and where it comes to see how badly things go for its praised gods when they venture out on the ground where the concept rules, then it is not itself the negative power which actively intervenes there. Rather, it restricts itself to the self-less thought of such power, to the consciousness of an alien destiny, and it surrounds itself with the empty wish for reassurance and with feeble talk about appeasement. In its fear of the higher powers which are the immediate arms of the substance, in its fear of their struggles with each other and of necessity's simple self, something which crushes those powers as well as the living beings bound up with them – in its compassion for the living, whom it knows at the same time to be the same as itself, there is for it only the idle terror of this movement, the equally helpless regret, and, in the end, the empty calm of resignation to necessity, whose work is grasped neither as the necessary action of the character nor as the activity of the absolute essence within itself.

On the basis of this spectatorial consciousness as the indifferent soil of representational thinking, spirit does not come on the scene in its dispersed multiplicity but rather in the simple estrangement of the concept. Its substance thus shows itself only as ripped asunder into its two extreme powers. These elemental universal essences are at the same time self-conscious individualities – heroes who put their conscious life into one of these powers, who have in these powers their determinateness of character, and who constitute the activity and actuality of these powers. – This universal individualization descends again, as will be remembered, to the immediate actuality of real existence and presents itself before a crowd of spectators, who have in the chorus their counterpart, or instead have in it their own performance⁴⁸ giving voice to itself.

The content and movement of spirit, which is here an object to itself, has been already examined as the nature and realization of the ethical substance. In its religion, spirit attains a consciousness about itself, or it puts itself before its consciousness in its purer form and its simpler figuration. However much therefore the ethical substance, through its concept and according to its content, has estranged itself into two powers, which were determined as divine and human law, or the law of the netherworld and the law of the higher world – the former was that of family, the latter was that of state power – the first was the feminine, the other the masculine character – still the previously multiply formed circle of gods, wherein each wavered in their determinations, limits itself to these powers, which through this determination are brought nearer to genuine individuality. This is so because the previous dispersal of the whole into multiple and abstract forces, which appear substantialized, is the dissolution of the subject that comprehends them only as moments within its own self, and individuality is thus only the superficial form of that essence. Conversely, a further difference of characters than that just mentioned is to be attributed to the contingent and, in itself, external personality.

At the same time, the essence divides itself according to its form or its knowing. As consciousness, acting spirit faces up to the object on which it is active, and which is thereby determined as the negative of the knowing subject. As a result, the knowing subject is situated in the opposition between knowing and not knowing. He takes his purpose from his character and knows it as the ethical essentiality; however, through the determinateness of his character, he knows only the one power of substance, and, for him, the other power is concealed. The current actuality is thus both an other in itself and an other for consciousness. In this relation, what the higher and lower law continue to mean are the power which knows and which reveals itself to consciousness and the power which conceals itself and lies in ambush. The one is the aspect of light, the god of the oracle, which, according to its natural moment, has sprung forth from the all-illuminating sun, who knows all and reveals all – Phoebus and Zeus, who is his father. However, the commands of this truth-speaking god, along with his proclamations about what is, are instead deceptive, for within its concept, this knowing is immediately not-knowing, because in acting, consciousness is in itself this opposition. He who had the power to unlock the riddle of the sphinx itself, trustingly, as with childlike confidence, is sent to ruin through what the god reveals to him. This priestess through whom the beautiful god speaks is none other than the ambiguous⁴⁹ sisters of fate, who, by their promises, drive the one who trusted them into crime, and who, by the two-faced character of what they gave out as a certainty, deceive the one who had relied on the obvious meaning of what they said. The consciousness which is purer than the latter, which believes the witches and is more reflectively prudent and more thorough than the former, which puts its trust in the priestess and the beautiful god, thus delays taking any revenge based on the revelation of the crime, a revelation made by his father's spirit, that the father had been murdered; it contrives to bring about still other proofs – for the reason that the spirit making the revelation might possibly be the devil.

This mistrust is well grounded for the reason that the knowing consciousness places itself into an opposition between the certainty of itself and the objective essence. The right of the ethical, namely, that actuality is nothing in itself in opposition to the absolute law, learns from experience that its knowing is one-sided, that its law⁵⁰ is only a law of its character, and that it has grasped only the one power of substance. Action itself is this inversion of what was known into its contrary, into being; it turns the law of character and knowing into the law of their opposite, with which the former is bound up in the essence of the substance – it turns it into the Erinyes of that other power and character which was aroused into hostility. This lower law sits with Zeus on the throne and enjoys equal standing with the revealed law and the knowing god.⁵¹

The divine world of the chorus is restricted to these three essences by the acting individuality. The one is the substance, which is the power presiding over both the hearth and home and the spirit of familial piety as much as it is the universal power of the state and of the government. While this difference belongs to the substance as such, in representational thought the difference is not individualized into two distinct shapes but rather has in actuality the two persons of its characters, whereas the difference between knowing and not-knowing falls in each and every one of the actual self-consciousnesses – and it is only in abstraction, in the element of universality, that it portions itself out into two individual shapes. For the self of the hero only has existence as a whole consciousness and hence is essentially the whole difference which belongs to the form, but the hero's substance is determinate, and only one side of the difference of content belongs to him. Hence, of the two aspects of consciousness, which in actuality have no separate individuality belonging to each on its own, each receives in representational thought its own particular shape – the one is that of the revealed god, the other is that of the self-concealing Erinyes. In part, both enjoy equal honor, but in part, the shape of the substance, Zeus, is the necessity of the relation of both to each other. The substance is the relation, that knowing is for itself, but it has its truth in the simple; and that the difference, through which actual consciousness is, has its ground in the inner essence which is erasing it; and because the self-clear conscious assurance of certainty has its confirmation in forgetfulness.

Consciousness unlocked this opposition by acting. In acting according to revealed knowing, it experiences the deceptiveness of that knowing, according to the content; in submitting to one of the attributes of substance, it violates the other, and as a result gives the latter a right against itself. Following the god that knows, it has on the contrary seized hold of what is not revealed, and it did penance for having trusted that knowing whose double-sided ambiguity, for this is its very nature, must have been also available for it and must have been a warning to it. The fury of the priestess, the inhuman shape of the witches, the voices of trees and birds, the dream, and so on, are not the ways in which truth appears; rather, they are warning signs of deception, of not being reflectively prudent, of the singularity and the contingency of knowing. Or, what amounts to the same thing, the opposite power, which consciousness has violated, is present as declared law and the legality validly in force, whether it be the law of the family or that of the state; consciousness, on the other hand, pursued its own knowing and hid from itself what was revealed. However, the truth of those powers emerging into opposition with each other is the result of each having an equal right, and for that reason, in their opposition which acting brings forth, of their being equally wrong. The movement of acting itself demonstrates their unity in the mutual downfall of both powers and of the self-conscious characters. The reconciliation of the opposition with itself is the Lethe of the netherworld in death – that is, the Lethe of the upper world in the form of absolution not from guilt, for consciousness cannot deny that it acted, but rather absolution from the crime itself and the absolution's atoning appeasement. Both are forgetfulness, the disappearance of actuality and of the doings on the part of the powers of substance, of their individualities and of the powers of the abstract thought of good and evil, for none of them is for itself the essence. Rather, the essence is the motionlessness of the whole within itself, the unmoved unity of Fate, motionless existence, and thereby the inactivity and lack of liveliness of the family and government; and it is the equal honor and thereby the indifferent irreality⁵² of Apollo and the Erinyes, and the reversion of their spiritualization⁵³ and activity into simple Zeus.

This fate completes the depopulation of heaven, of that intermingling of individuality and essence which is devoid of thought – an intermingling through which this essence's doing appears as inconsistent, contingent, and unworthy of itself. For individuality, when it adheres itself only superficially to essence, is inessential individuality. The expulsion of such essenceless representational thoughts, something demanded by the philosophers of antiquity, thus already begins in tragedy itself because the division of the substance is dominated by the concept, individuality is thereby essential individuality, and the determinations are the absolute characters. The self-consciousness represented in tragedy knows and recognizes on that account only one highest power. This Zeus is known and recognized only as the power of the state or of the hearth and home, and, in the opposition of knowing, only as the father of the knowing of the particular, a knowing that is coming to assume a shape – and as the Zeus of the oath and of the Erinyes, the Zeus of the universal, of the inner which dwells in concealment. The further moments are dispersed into representational thought from out of the concept, and the chorus permits them one after the other to be validly in force; those moments are, however, not the pathos of the hero, but rather, to him, they decline into passions – that is, they have declined into accidental essenceless moments, which the self-less chorus indeed praises but which are neither capable of constituting the character of heroes, nor of being enunciated and revered by the chorus as their essence.

However, the persons of the divine essence itself, as well as the characters of its substance, merge into the simplicity of the unconscious. As opposed to self-consciousness, this necessity has the determination of being the negative power of all the shapes coming on the scene, of those shapes then not cognizing themselves in it but rather instead meeting their downfall. The self enters the scene only distributed among the characters, not as the mediating middle of the movement. However, self-consciousness, the simple certainty of itself, is in fact the negative power, the unity of Zeus, the unity of the substantial essence and abstract necessity; it is the spiritual unity into which everything returns. Because actual self-consciousness is still distinguished both from substance and from fate, it is in part the chorus, or rather is instead the crowd looking on, which this movement of the divine life as something alien suffuses with fear, or in which this movement, as something close to them, as touching them, brings forth an inactive compassion. Partly to the extent that consciousness acts in unison with the characters and belongs to them, is this union an external one, because the true union, namely, that of self, fate, and substance, is not yet present and available. This union is thus hypocrisy, and the hero who appears before the spectators fragments into both his mask and into the actor, into the persona⁵⁴ and the actual self.

The self-consciousness of the heroes must set aside its mask and show itself as knowing itself to be the fate of the gods of the chorus, as well as that of the absolute powers themselves, and as no longer separated from the chorus, from the universal consciousness.

For the moment, it is comedy that has the aspect of actual self-consciousness exhibiting itself as the fate of the gods. These elemental essences, as universal moments, are not selves and are not actual. They are, to be sure, outfitted with the form of individuality, but in their case this is only imagined⁵⁵ and does not belong in and for itself to them; the actual self does not have that sort of abstract moment for its substance and content. It, the subject, is thus elevated above that sort of moment as it would be elevated above a singular property, and, wearing this mask, the subject expresses the irony of something that wants to be something for itself. The posturing of the universal essentiality is revealed in the self; it shows itself to be trapped in an actuality, and it lets the mask drop exactly as it wants to be something rightful. The self, coming on the scene here with the sense that it is actual, plays with the mask which it once put on in order to be its persona. – However, it just as quickly makes itself come out from this illusion and again come forward in its own nakedness and ordinariness, which it shows not to be distinct from the authentic self, from the actor, nor even from the spectator.

This universal dissolution of shaped essentiality itself in its individuality becomes more serious in its content and as a result more wanton and more bitter to the extent that the content has its more serious and more necessary significance. The divine substance unifies within itself the meaning of natural and ethical essentiality. As regards what is natural, actual self-consciousness, in employing what is natural for its adornment, its dwellings, etc., and in feasting on its own sacrificial offerings, shows itself to be the fate to which the secret is betrayed, namely, the explanation of what self-consciousness has to with the self-essentiality⁵⁶ of nature. In the mystery of bread and wine, it makes this self-essentiality of nature, together with the meaning of the inner essence, its own, and in comedy it is particularly conscious of the irony of this meaning itself. – Now, to the extent that this meaning incorporates the ethical essentiality, it in part means “the people” in both of its aspects, that of the state, or the genuine demos, and that of the singularity of family life. However, in part the meaning is that of self-conscious, pure knowing, or the rational thinking of the universal. – That demos, the universal social estate, which knows itself to be master and regent as well as being the understanding and insight which are to be respected, compels and bewitches itself through the particularity of its actuality, and it exhibits the laughable contrast between its own opinion of itself and its immediate existence, between its necessity and contingency, its universality and its ordinariness. However much the principle of its singular individuality, when separated from the universal, makes itself stand out in the genuine shape of actuality, and however much it openly appropriates the polity whose secret harm it is, still what is immediately revealed is the contrast between the universal as a theory and that with which practice is concerned, the contrast between the total emancipation of the immediate singular individuality's purposes from the universal order altogether and the scorn which that singular individuality shows for such order.

Rational thinking removes the contingency of shape from the divine essence. It takes the wisdom of the conceptless chorus, which produces all sorts of ethical adages and which allows for the validity of a multitude of laws and determinate concepts of duty and right, and it elevates them into the simple ideas of the beautiful and the good. – The movement of this abstraction is the consciousness of the dialectic which these maxims and laws have in themselves and is thereby the consciousness of the disappearance of the absolute validity in which they had previously appeared. While the contingent determination and the superficial individuality which representational thought lent to the divine essentialities now vanishes, those essentialities still have according to their natural aspect only the nakedness of their immediate existence; they are clouds, a disappearing vapor, exactly like those representational thoughts themselves. According to their conceived⁵⁷ essentiality, they have come to be the simple thoughts of the beautiful and the good, thoughts which are suited to being filled out with any kind of content at all. The force of dialectical knowing gives the determinate laws and maxims of action to the pleasure and exuberance of the youth which was – thereby – seduced by such knowing, and it puts weapons of deception into the hands of preoccupied and anxiety-ridden old age, itself restricted to the singularities of life. Through the emancipation from common opinion, which contains their determinateness as content as well as their absolute determinateness, the fixity⁵⁸ of consciousness, the pure thoughts of the beautiful and the good, thus show the comical spectacle to be empty and, as a result, as becoming the game of opinionating and of the arbitrary choices of contingent individuality.

Here therefore is the former unconscious fate, which consists in an empty motionlessness and forgetfulness and which is separated from self-consciousness, now united with self-consciousness. The singular self is the negative force through which and in which the gods, as well as their moments, those of existing nature and the thoughts of their determinations, disappear. At the same time, the singular self is not the mere emptiness of disappearance, but rather preserves itself in this nothingness itself, is at one with itself,⁵⁹ and is the sole actuality. The art-religion has completed itself in it and is completely inwardly returned into itself. As a result, singular consciousness, in the certainty of itself, is that which exhibits itself as this absolute power, so has this absolute power lost the form of being something represented, something separated from consciousness per se and thus alien to it, as was the case with the statuary column and also the living embodiment of beauty, or as was the case with the content of the epic and the powers and persons of tragedy. – The unity is also not the unconscious unity of the cult and the mysteries. Rather, the genuine self of the actor coincides with the persona he plays, just as the spectator is perfectly at home with what is represented to him and sees himself playing a role therein. What this self-consciousness intuits is that within itself, whatever assumes the form of essentiality opposed to self-consciousness is instead dissolved in the thinking, existence, and doings of self-consciousness, and it is then abandoned. It is the return of all that is universal into the certainty of itself, and this certainty is thus the complete absence of fear, the essencelessness of all that is alien; it is a healthy well-being as well as a consciousness permitting itself to be so, a well-being that outside of this comedy is not to be found.