Chapter 33 (b) Ethical conduct; human knowledge and divine knowledge; sin and fate

Ⅰ.The Contradiction Between Ethical Essence and Individuality But in this ethical realm mentioned above, self-consciousness has not yet acquired its right to appear in the form of individual individuality, since there are still opposites.In this kingdom individuality appears only as the general will on the one hand, and the blood of the family on the other; such individual persons are but shadows of unreality. —There is no action here; only action is the actual self. - Behavior (Tat) destroys the stable organization and smooth movement of the ethical world.What appears in this ethical world as a harmony between two mutually confirming and complementary essences of the ethical world becomes, thanks to the act, a transition between two opposing essences, In this transition, each essence manifests itself not so much as affirming itself and the other, as in annihilating itself and the other;—for the sake of action, and agreement is becomes the negative movement or eternal necessity of tragic fate, and this negative movement swallows up in destiny the law of God, the law of man, and the two self-consciousnesses for which the two powers have their specific existence. In the bottomless abyss of the simplicity of the human being—and this seems to us to be the transitional movement to the absolute being-for-itself of purely individual self-consciousness. ①

①In this paragraph, Hegel outlines the general idea of ​​the whole section of "Ethical Behavior".In the harmonious ethical world of ancient Greece, the family and the city-state society were mutually reinforcing, but the ethical behavior (the ethical behavior here should be understood from the plot of Sophocles’ tragedy) disrupted this ethical order, and God The laws of man and man are in conflict with each other, and the family and the city-state are opposed to each other.Both laws yield to fate.However, the embodiment of the truth of fate is man, who emerges from his latent state in tragedy as the real self, so that the original shadow rises to reality, and becomes an individual for himself; thus, The Greek family was replaced by the individual, the city-state by the Roman Empire. - translator

The ground from which this movement emanates and to which it rests is the realm of ethics; but the activity (Tatigkeit) in this movement is self-consciousness.Self-consciousness as ethical consciousness is the single, pure orientation toward the essence of ethics, in other words, this self-consciousness is duty.In it there is no arbitrariness, no conflict, no hesitation, for it has renounced the enactment and examination of laws; Nothing contradictory.Here, therefore, there is neither the tragic (dasschlechte Schauspiel) scene of the conflict between feeling and duty, nor the comic scene of duty conflicting with duty—in fact, in content, the conflict of duty and duty It is the same thing as the conflict between emotion and duty; for emotion can likewise be conceived as duty, for duty becomes a universal of form when consciousness is withdrawn into itself, detached from the immediate, substantial essence of duty. , which can be applied equally to any content, as we saw earlier.However, the conflict between duty and duty is comic because the contradiction it expresses is the contradiction between a pair of opposite absolutes, that is to say, one of the contradictions is an absolute, and the other is directly This falsehood (Nichtigkeit) of the so-called absolute or obligation. — But the ethical consciousness knows what it ought to do; and it is determined, either of divine law or of human law.The immediacy of its determination is a being-in-itself, and thus implies a natural being, as we have seen; for assigning one sex to a law, and the other It is nature and not accident of circumstance or choice that assigns to the other law—or, conversely, it is the two ethical forces that themselves acquire their individual specific existence in each of the two sexes. and achieved.

Now, since, on the one hand, essentially ethics consists in this immediate determination, only one law is essential to consciousness, and, on the other hand, both ethical forces are actual in the self of consciousness, therefore , the two forces acquire this meaning: mutual exclusion and mutual hostility;—they were both in themselves in the realm of ethics, and now they are both for themselves in self-consciousness.The ethical consciousness, being firmly subordinated to one of the two laws, is essentially individuality; to it not both laws are equally essential; the opposition is therefore only between duty and reality without justice. an unfortunate conflict.

In this opposition, ethical consciousness appears as self-consciousness which either seeks to subdue this hostile reality by violence to the laws to which it belongs, or to confuse it by tricks.Since it recognizes only one party as just, and the other as always unjust, the one of the two parties, which belongs to the divine law, regards the other as an accidental and violent coercion of the world; The arrogance of being for itself; Because the orders of the government are the general general will which is open to the day, and the will of the other law is the private will hidden in the heart underground, so far as the specific existence of the latter is concerned, it is an individual will. When it contradicts the former, it is lawlessness.

Thus there arises in consciousness the opposition of the known and the unknown, as in substance there was the opposition of the conscious and the unconscious; conflict of divine rights.For self-consciousness as consciousness objective reality itself has an essence; but in its substance this self-consciousness is the unity of itself with this opposite; ethical self-consciousness is the consciousness of substance; therefore the object, As something opposed to self-consciousness, it completely loses its essential meaning for itself.Just as the spheres [of conscious life] in which the object was only a thing have long since disappeared, so now are the spheres in which consciousness fixes something from itself and takes an individual moment as its essence, also disappeared.Against such one-sidedness, reality has its own strength; it opposes consciousness in unity with truth, presenting to consciousness only that which corresponds to truth.But the ethical consciousness has drunk itself out of the cup of absolute reality, has forgotten all the one-sidedness of its own existence, its own purpose, and its own conception, and has therefore at the same time lost all true essence and all independent meaning of objective reality. drowned in the currents of the river Styx.Its absolute right is thus that, acting in conformity with an ethical law, it considers that in doing so it is nothing but the fulfillment of this law itself, and that such an act signifies nothing but the ethical. action. — Ethics, since it is at the same time both absolute essence and absolute power, suffers no perversion of its content.If it is only an absolute essence and not an absolute force at the same time, it may still be reversed by individuality; but as an ethical consciousness, individuality has given up one-sided existence for itself and thus refuses any reversal; on the contrary, if it is only a force , and force is still such an existence for itself, it may be reversed by essence (but it is the unity of force and essence).

Because of this unity, individuality is the purely unified form of substance, that is, of content, and action is the transition from thought to reality; but this is only a transitional movement of opposites without essence, since the two opposite moments have no mutual difference. Same content and essentiality.The absolute right of ethical consciousness is thus nothing but this: that it acts, its actual shape, that it knows. Ⅱ.Antagonisms in Ethical Behavior But the essence of ethics has split itself into two laws, and consciousness, as a single-minded attitude that obeys laws, obeys only one law.This single consciousness asserts its absolute right to the essence which appears before it, the ethical consciousness, as the essence in itself, whereas this essence asserts its actual right to its duality.But this right of essence is at the same time not opposed to self-consciousness, it does not seem to exist outside self-consciousness, it is in fact the essence of self-consciousness itself; it has its specific existence and its existence only in self-consciousness. The power of self, and its opposite is the doings of self-consciousness.For self-consciousness, being itself both self and acting, rises above its own simple immediacy and splits itself in two.Self-consciousness, by virtue of its ethical determination, is the mere certainty of immediate truth, and by what it does it relinquishes this ethical determination and splits itself into an active ego and The opposite of the negative reality.Self-consciousness then becomes faulty by what it does.For everything is done out of its action (Tun), and action is its truest essence.And negligence also acquires the meaning of crime, since self-consciousness, as purely ethical consciousness, obeys one law against another and, by its actions, actually violates this other law. —A fault is not an indifferent and ambiguous thing (Wesen), that is to say, the act of a publicly realized reality is not an action that can or cannot arise from the fault itself , as if action could be entangled with something external and accidental which does not belong to the action itself, and from the aspect of this accidental external, the action itself seems to be innocuous.On the contrary, action itself is divided in two: it establishes itself and confronts itself with an alien, external reality; it is the action itself, its own reality, that it has such a reality. the result of.Therefore, only inaction is without fault, just as the existence of a stone, or even the existence of a child, cannot be said to be without fault. ——However, according to its content, the ethical behavior (Handlung) itself has the link of crime, because it does not abolish the natural distribution of the two laws belonging to the two sexes, but instead serves as a single direction of obeying the law [ One-sided attitude] remains within the immediacy of nature, and as an act it makes this one-sidedness such a fault that it favors only one aspect of essence and negates the other, that is, it destroys Its another aspect.What place faults and crimes, actions and behaviors, will take in the general ethical life, we will elaborate on later, but now it is shown that it is not the [individual] individual who acts and commits faults. ; for as this (individual) self it is only a shadow of the unreality, or rather he is really only a universal self, and individuality is merely the general formal moment of action, which is governed by law and custom. The content, if it is true, is that for the individual it is the law and the customs of the personal identity; species while retaining the generality of the class.Within the sphere of national life, self-consciousness descends only from the universal to the particular (Besonderheit), and not all the way down to the individual individuality (Individuali Btat), since individuality always establishes by its actions an exclusive self , a reality that denies itself; self-consciousness, on the contrary, bases its actions on an unshakable confidence in the whole, in which nothing foreign is mixed, neither fear nor hate.

Ethical self-consciousness, whether it obeys divine or human laws, now experiences in its own doing the full nature of actual action.The law that appears before self-consciousness is combined in essence with the opposite law; essence is the unity of the two opposite laws; However, doing only realizes one of them, but since the two are combined in nature, the realization of the one law leads to the other law, and because of the doing, the other law it brings about The law becomes something that is injured, enmityed, and thus vengeful.When deciding to act, what is obvious to the actor is generally only one aspect of the decision; but the decision itself is a negative thing, because although it itself has clear knowledge, it has an unknown, alien, and strange aspect. What is opposed to itself.Therefore reality always conceals an unknowing side beyond knowledge, does not present itself to consciousness as it is in itself,—and does not let the son realize that the offender he has killed is his father, —to keep him from knowing that the queen he married was his mother. ①Behind the ethical self-consciousness lies a power that fears the light, and it does not jump out of the ambush until after the action has taken place, grabbing the ethical self-consciousness that has completed the action.

For the fulfillment of the act is the sublation of the opposition between the knowing self and its opposite reality.The actor cannot deny his crime and fault;— Action is that which sets into motion what is not in motion, brings to reality what was at first closed only in possibility, and thus unites the unknown with the known, the non-existent with the present.Therefore, in this truth, the realized behavior is revealed, and the truth is revealed;—it turns out that it is such a thing: the known and the unrecognized, the self and the foreign are united in it; It turns out that it is a two-faced thing: consciousness finds that it has another side, and that this other side is also its own power, but it is a power that it has damaged and is therefore hostile.

① refers to Oedipus, the king of Thebes in Greek mythology. - translator It may well be that the lurking justice never reveals its own unique shape to the consciousness of action, but exists at its own pace only in the faults inherent in [the agent's] resolutions and actions.However, if the ethical consciousness has recognized in advance the law and force it opposes, which it regards as violence and injustice, as an ethical accident, and commits crimes knowingly and knowingly like Antigone , then the ethical consciousness is more complete, and its faults are purer.The completed act changes the view of the ethical consciousness; the completion of the act itself shows that what is ethical must be real; for the realization of the end is the purpose of the act.The act consists precisely in showing the unity of reality and substance, that reality is not accidental to the essence, but rather related to it: nothing that is not truly just is related to it.For the sake of this reality, but also for the sake of its own action, ethical consciousness must recognize its opposite as its own reality, it must admit its fault;

Because we suffer, we admit we made mistakes. ① This acknowledgment means that the split between ethical purpose and reality has been sublated; it means a return to the ethical mood ② which knows that nothing but justice counts.But in doing so the actor abandons his character (Charakter) and his own reality, and is completely destroyed.For the reason why the actor is this actor is that he is subject to his ethical law, which is his substance; but since he now recognizes the opposite law, the law to which he was originally subject is no longer his. and what he acquires is no longer his reality, but a non-reality, a (negative, ethical) artistic conception. —It is true that in individuality the entity appears as the pathos of individuality, and the individuality appears as the life-giving agent of the entity, and thus stands above the entity; but the pathos of the entity The element is at the same time the character of the actor; the ethical individuality is immediately and in itself one and the same with the universality of his character, and exists only in the universality of character, where the ethical force is created by the opposite force. When it is destroyed, it must die with it. ① Sophocles: "Antigone", line 926. ——Original Editor ② Artistic conception, Gesinnung, is a kind of thought and feeling, a kind of view.What is expressed here is a passive ethical attitude in which no action takes place. - translator ③ pathos, (Pathos), is different from the modern meaning of Passion.In Hegel's aesthetic works, it refers to an emotional factor that permeates the entire existence of an individual and determines his inevitable destiny. - translator But this individuality derives from it the certainty that it now knows that all the misfortunes that befell that individuality, that is, the individuality whose emotional factor is this opposite force, are all its own wedded.The reciprocal movement between the two ethical forces, and between the two individualities that animate them and make them act, comes to a real cessation only at this point, that is, only when both come to an end.For neither of the two powers is superior to the other, and can become a more essential link of substance.The equality of their essential degrees and their mutual indifference mean that they are all beings without self; In the realized act (Tat) they are both things with a self, but each has a different self; this contradicts the unity of the self, and renders them illegitimate and bound to perish.The same is true of character, which, on the one hand, belongs to only one of the two ethical powers in terms of its pathos or substance, but on the other hand, in terms of knowing or not knowing, belongs to whichever one it belongs to. The character of the ethical force itself splits again into a conscious and an unconscious: at the same time, since each character itself brings about this opposition, and because it has acted, it regards that which it does not know as the result of its actions. , one's own business, so it falls into fault and is finally swallowed up by fault.The victory of one power and character, and the defeat of another, is therefore only a part of the unfinished business which marches on irresistibly until the two sides are evenly matched.Absolute justice is accomplished only after both parties submit equally, and the ethical entity appears as a negative force devouring both parties, or as an all-powerful and just fate. Ⅲ.The demise of the ethical essence The conflict between these two forces, if viewed in terms of their specific content and the individuation of their content, presents a picture of an individualized conflict.In its form, this conflict is a conflict between ethics [principles] and self-consciousness on the one hand, and unconscious nature and the contingencies that this nature expresses, on the other, the latter having every right to oppose the former, since the former is only true spirit [ objective spirit] is only an immediate unity with its substance; and in its content this conflict is the conflict between the laws of God and the laws of man. —A young man leaves the essence of the unconscious, the spirit of the family, and becomes individuality in the community, but he retains the very nature from which he escapes; this is shown by the fact that he enters into the spirit of the community Time is still contingent, for he happens to be one of two brothers who have an equal right to rule the community, so that the difference of their births is of little importance to the two brothers who have entered into the ethical essence of the community. Yes, because that is a natural difference.But government, as the single soul or self (i.e., subject) of the national spirit, cannot tolerate such a duality of individuality; and nature, as the contingency embodied in the multitude, opposes the ethical necessity required by this unity. with.The two brothers were thus at odds, and their equal right in the power of the state was destructive to both, for both were wrong and lawless.If the matter is viewed from the human side, then the one of the two brothers who does not actually own the community and therefore attacks the community headed by the other is breaking the law. It is lawful to persecute an individual who is an individual in a community, and persecutes him in such a capacity that he is considered to have no power; because what he offends is only the individual itself, not the community, nor the essence of human legal rights. .The community is attacked and defended by the empty individuality, the community itself is preserved, and the two brothers are both defeated by attacking each other; When the community is endangered, it actually excludes itself from the community and destroys itself in itself.But one of the two brothers, the one who stands on the side of the community, will be honored by the community, and the other, the one who threatens to bring down the walls, will be honored by the government, that is, by the re-established community. He who dares to offend the highest spirit of consciousness, the community, must be deprived of the honor due to his whole and complete essence, deprived of the death The honor that should be enjoyed by the spirit. ② ①Eteocles and Polynices, see "Odibus in Columnus". - translator ② See "Antigone" tragedy. - translator But if the universal has indeed triumphed by knocking off the top of its pyramid with such ease and overcoming the rebellious individual principle of the family, it would be better to say that the universal follows the divine law, the conscious The real struggle begins between the spirit of the soul and the spirit of the unconscious; for the latter, the unconscious spirit, is another essential force which is only insulted by the former but not destroyed by the latter.However, the unconscious spirit, under the oppression of the powerful laws of the day, can only achieve reality by means of shadows without blood and flesh.Therefore, as the weak and night law, it is at first subject to the day and the strong law, because its power can only be effective in the underground and not in the earth.However, since the actual side deprives the inner side of its honor and power, its own essence is thereby depleted.The open spirit has power because the source of its power lies in the underworld: The unquestionable certainty of a people about its own strength and security, that its oath will unite it as one, is true only because all its members have the unspoken Unconscious entities, all because they are soaked in the well of forgetfulness.So the open spirit, realized, is transformed into its own opposite; it finds its greatest injustice, its ultimate injustice, its victories its defeats.The murdered dead man, whose right [to life] has been violated, knows how to take revenge by using as his instrument the same forces as real and as powerful as those that killed him.These powers are other communities in which the corpses of the dead are devoured by dogs or pecked by birds, their altars are defiled, but the corpses are not exalted into unconscious universals by this natural reduction to the basic individual , on the contrary, it remains in the realm of reality on earth, and, as the force of divine law, it now acquires instead a universality of reality with self-consciousness.These powers then rise up and attack, destroying the community that has insulted the piety of the family and undermined its own strength. In such formulations, the laws of man and of God express the necessity of their motion through the individuals: in the individuals the universal [community] appears as a pathos, the activity of motion as an individual action, and because it appears as an individual action, this makes its necessity appear as accidental; but individuality and action constitute the general principle of individuality, which, in pure universality, form, what was once called the inner divine law.The law of God, now as a constituent link of the public community, not only has the same underground validity as before, or not only has an external validity in its own objective existence, but also has a national validity. There is equally public, concrete, actual existence and movement in the reality of the human body.In this form, what was at first represented as a single movement of individualized emotional elements acquires a different aspect; And so on, the real form of their objective existence is obtained. ——As for the law of man, as far as its universal objective existence is concerned, it is the community, as far as its general activities are concerned, it is male, and as far as its actual activities are concerned, it is the government; The movement survives only because it eliminates or dissolves in itself the tendency to disintegration and disintegration of the patron saint of the family, or, because it eliminates, dissolves in its in its own fluid continuity.But the family in general is at the same time its element, and the individual consciousness the basis of its general activity.Since the community survives only by the fact that it destroys domestic happiness and dissolves self-consciousness in the universal, it creates for itself an inner enemy, that is to say, it suppresses what it suppresses while at the same time What is subordinate to its essence, the female in general, is made its own inner enemy. Woman,--and this is the perpetual irony of the community--by artifice transforms the public purpose of government into a private one, the public activity of the community into the enterprise of a particular individual, the state The public property is transformed into a family's private wealth.Usually, adults, because of their prudent and serious considerations, no longer value the individuality of joy, enjoyment, and practical activities, and are more absorbed in the universality of public nature; women laugh at this sophistication of adults and appreciate it. The dissoluteness of the young, the despise of the deliberation of the grown-ups and the admiration of the passions of the young, the strength of the young, and the greatness of the young: they praise the son as the master his mother gave him, they praise the brother, say The brother is the man the sisters can find to be their own equality, and the young man is praised as the figure upon which the daughter breaks her natal dependence for the enjoyment and status of a wife. —But the community can only maintain itself by suppressing this individual spirit, and since the individual spirit is the essential moment of the community, the community actually produces the individual spirit at the same time, because it by itself. The high-handed attitude adopted makes the spirit of individuality a hostile principle.However, since this hostile principle is nothing but evil and nothingness apart from the public purpose, if the community itself does not recognize the power of youth, that is, the power of the immature male who is still within the scope of individuality, it [hostile Principle] if you don’t make a difference, you will get nothing done.Because the whole, the community, is a nation, it is itself an individuality; and it is individuality and is for itself because other individualities exist for it in essence, because it To exclude other individualities from oneself and to feel independent of them.The community, or the public essence, has its negative aspect, that is, it suppresses the individuation tendency of the individual internally, but it can act independently externally; and it uses individuality as its weapon to realize this negative aspect.War is a spirit and a form in which the essential moment of the ethical substance, the ethical subject (Selbstwesen), whose absolute freedom from all specific existence is a reality, reveals its true nature only in war. value.Because, on the one hand, due to the war, the individual property system and individual independence and freedom, as well as the individual personality itself, are intimately aware of the negative power; The defender; the brave, the young, the woman's favorite, that is to say, the destructive principle hitherto suppressed, now proud and proud. Now, what determines the specific existence and spiritual necessity of the ethical essence?It is chance of nature [physical strength] and luck.Since the specific existence of the ethical essence is based on strength and luck, this already dooms its destruction. —As before, only the guardian gods of the family were destroyed in the national spirit, now, because of their individuality, the living national spirits are also destroyed in a universal community; this universal community In its simple universality, the body is soulless and lifeless, but when it is an individual thing, when it is an individual individual, it is alive and alive.In this way, the spiritual form of ethics disappears, and another form takes its place. Therefore, the reason why the ethical entity is doomed or stipulated to perish in this way, and to transition into another form in this way is because the ethical consciousness in essence tends to develop directly towards law or legal power.And here the determination of immediacy means that nature generally enters into ethical conduct.The realization of ethical behavior only exposes the contradictions and destructive germs of the beautiful harmony and stable balance of the ethical spirit precisely because of its beauty and stability; because immediacy contains contradictory meanings, it is both the stability of nature and the unconscious It is the conscious instability of the mind. —Because of this naturalness, such an ethical nation is an individuality determined by nature and therefore limited, and which thus finds itself being superseded by another individuality.However, this stipulation is indeed a limitation set in objective existence, but at the same time it is a general negation and an individual subject. Then when this stipulation disappears, spiritual life and This substance, conscious of itself in all its constituent individuals, is lost.This substance, the universality of a form of all its constituent individuals, has separated out of them, and no longer resides in them as a living spirit; What was solidly united is now rather disintegrated and broken into points.