Phenomenology of Spirit by Hegel G W F

Author:Hegel, G W F [Hegel, G W F]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780198245971
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2014-06-06T17:00:00+00:00

c. Legal status

477. The universal unity into which the living immediate unity of individuality and substance withdraws is the soulless community which has ceased to be the substance—itself unconscious—of individuals, and in which they now have the value of selves and substances, possessing a separate being-for-self. The universal being thus split up into a mere multiplicity of individuals, this lifeless Spirit is an equality, in which all count the same, i.e. as persons. What in the world of the ethical order was called the hidden divine law, has in fact emerged from its inward state into actuality; in the former state the individual was actual, and counted as such, merely as a blood-relation of the family. As this particular individual, he was the departed spirit devoid of a self; now, however, he has emerged from his unreal existence. Because the ethical substance is only the true Spirit, the individual therefore withdraws into the certainty of his own self; he is that substance as the positive universal, but his actuality consists in his being a negative universal self. We saw the powers and shapes of the ethical world swallowed up in the simple necessity of a blank Destiny. This power of the ethical world is the substance reflected into its simple unitary nature; but that being which is reflected back into itself, that very necessity of blank Destiny, is nothing else but the ‘I’ of self-consciousness.

478. This, therefore, counts henceforth as a being that is in and for itself. To be so acknowledged is its substantiality. But it is an abstract universality because its content is this rigid unyielding self, not the self that is dissolved in the substance.

479. Personality, then, has stepped out of the life of the ethical substance. It is the independence of consciousness, an independence which has actual validity. The non-actual thought of it which came from renouncing the actual world appeared earlier as the Stoical self-consciousness. Just as this proceeded from lordship and bondage, as the immediate existence of self-consciousness, so personality has proceeded from the immediate life of Spirit, which is the universal dominating will of all, and equally their service of obedience. What was for Stoicism only the abstraction of an intrinsic reality is now an actual world. Stoicism is nothing else but the consciousness which reduces to its abstract form the principle of legal status, an independence that lacks the life of Spirit. By its flight from the actual world it attained only to the thought of independence; it is absolutely for itself, in that it does not attach its being to anything that exists, but claims to give up everything that exists and places its essence solely in the unity of pure thought. In the same way, the right of a person is not tied to a richer or more powerful existence of the individual as such, nor again to a universal living Spirit, but rather to the pure One of its abstract actuality, or to that One qua self-consciousness in general.

480.

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