Chapter 43 3. The spirit and morality with certainty to itself

The ethical world has shown that the spirit in which it has to die, that is to say, the individual self, is its destiny and its truth.But the individual of this right is outside itself in substance and content.The movement of civilizing and believing in the world sublates this abstraction of the (legal) individual, and through complete alienation, through the highest abstraction, the spiritual ego or subject finds that the substance becomes first the general will and finally the becomes its own property or property.Knowledge now at last appears to be in complete agreement with its truth; for its truth is this knowledge itself, and all opposition between the two parties has vanished; The earth is gone, and for self-consciousness itself it is gone.That is to say, self-consciousness has become master over the opposite of consciousness itself.

Consciousness is founded on the opposition of its own certainty to the object; but now, for it, the object is its own certainty, knowledge—its own certainty itself now no longer has an end of its own, Therefore, it is no longer prescriptive, so it is rather pure knowledge. Self-consciousness thus now regards its own knowledge as the entity itself.From the point of view of self-consciousness, this substance is both immediate and absolutely mediated in an undivided unity.This substance is immediate because self-consciousness, like ethical consciousness, itself knows the duty, fulfills it, and belongs to it as its own nature; Is a character (Charakter), ethical consciousness, because of its immediacy, is a specific spirit, belonging to only one of the ethical essences, which contains in itself the aspect of knowledge without consciousness. . —This substantive consciousness is an absolute medium because, like cultural consciousness and belief consciousness, it is essentially that which sublates the abstraction of its immediate presence and makes itself universal. a movement; but it has this movement not because it undergoes a pure alienation and separation of its self and reality, nor because it escapes from reality; on the contrary, it rather carries its It presents itself directly before itself as substance, since substance is its knowledge, substance is its intuited pure self-certainty; and precisely this immediacy of its own reality is all reality, because, What is immediate is being itself, and immediacy as pure, purified through absolute negativity, is pure being, being in general or all being.

The Absolute Essence, therefore, is not, as far as its definition is concerned, limited to the simple Essence of Thinking, it is rather all reality, and reality that exists only as knowledge.Anything that is unknown to consciousness has no meaning and no power for consciousness; all objectivity and the whole world have retreated into the knowing will of consciousness.Consciousness is absolutely free because it knows its freedom, and this knowledge of its freedom is its substance, its purpose, its only content.