Chapter 31 1. The true spirit; ethics
Spirit, which in its simple truth is consciousness, now breaks apart its own moments.Behavior resolves it into substance and consciousness of substance; and both substance and consciousness.Substance, as universal essence and purpose, and as individuated reality, sets itself against itself;
The middle term of its infinity is self-consciousness, which in itself is the unity of itself and substance, and is now for itself its unity; it unifies the universal essence and its individualized reality, making The latter ascends to the former, to fulfill the ethical action, and descends the former to the latter, for the fulfillment of the thought-only substance, the end; it creates the unity of its self and substance, making it Its performance [or work] thus becomes a reality.In this splitting of consciousness, the mere substance acquires on the one hand its antithesis to self-consciousness, and on the other hand it thus manifests in itself the same nature of consciousness splitting itself in itself, making itself A world divided into spheres.
Substance thus becomes an ethical essence splitting itself into different aspects, into a human law and a divine law.Likewise self-consciousness, which is opposed to substance, will by its nature be assigned to one of these two powers, and will divide itself as knowledge into ignorance of its actions and knowledge of its actions, and this Knowledge is therefore of course a deceptive knowledge.Thus self-consciousness recognizes in its actions the contradiction of the two forces into which the entity is divided, its mutual destruction, its knowledge of the ethical nature of its actions and the ethics of being for itself. conflict between itself and feels its own destruction because of it.But in fact, through this movement, the ethical substance has become actual self-consciousness, in other words, this (individual) self (or individual) has become something in itself and for itself; but precisely because of this, Ethics has sunk and disappeared.
①Derwahre Geist, which means "objective spirit". - translator