The Philosophy of Spirit (Jena Lectures 1805-6)
PART I. Spirit according to its Concept
Volition [simply] wills, i.e., it wants to posit itself [assert itself], make itself, as itself, its own object. It is free, but this freedom is the empty, the formal – the evil. It is in itself determined (beschlossen) – it is the termination [Schluss: literally, “conclusion”] in itself. [It has these aspects:] (a) it is the universal, purpose; (b) it is the particular, the Self, activity, actuality; (c) it is the middle [term] of both these, the drive. The drive is two-sided: [there is] the side that has the content, the universal, which is purpose; and the side that is the active Self [that achieves it]. The one side is the ground, the other the form.
(a) Exactly which of these is the determinate content of the drive cannot be specified as yet, since this has not yet been determined. So far, it has none, since we have only got so far as positing the [mere] concept of the will. What impulses the I may have are first revealed in the content of its world; these are its drives.
(b) The determinate manner in which that termination [or “conclusion”] is posited in the I is such that all elements of it are enclosed in the Self as the universal, as global, [so that] it is now the totality, and its opposite is merely an empty form for self-consciousness. This also comprises the force of its “conclusion,” of its will – so that the will, insofar as it expresses an external aspect, is in this taken back into itself without exhibiting a determinate aspect by which it can be grasped: thus, what are velvet paws for one are claws for another; but no matter how we try to grasp the will we feel only smooth satin which we cannot hold on to. The will is thus a totality and therefore unassailable.
(c) This global termination, rounded in itself, is at the same time turned outward – it is actual consciousness, although it is here regarded as enclosed within the I. Namely, the will is being-for-self which has extinguished all foreign content within itself. But thus it is left without an other, without content – and it feels this lack. Nevertheless, it is a lack which is likewise positive. (It is purpose – the form by which it is mere purpose is the incomplete being. Being as such has thereby become form.)
The negative, exclusive [element] is thus in the will itself – so that it is therein concerned only with itself, and is thus that which is excluded from itself. [In this way] purpose stands juxtaposed to the Self; [it is] particularity, actuality for the universal. The feeling of lack is the above mentioned unity of both in the drive [uniting purpose (universal) and activity (particular)] as feeling, as lack of opposition. This “conclusion” is merely the first: the universal and the particular are locked together in the drive. The extremes have the form of equivalent being for one another – thus positing the primary reality, which is incomplete.
The second “conclusion” is the satisfaction of the drive. This is not the same as the satisfaction of a desire – which is animal, i.e., its object has the abstract form of actual being, externality. Only in this way is it for the Self. Thus the union is likewise the pure disappearance. But here, being is mere form: thus what is I in its totality is the drive. This the I separates [from itself] and makes its own object. This object is not empty satiety, the simple feeling of Self, which is lost in desire and restored in its satisfaction. Rather, what disappears is the pure form of equivalence of the drive’s extremes – the purpose, content, juxtaposed to particularity. And the disappearance of this equivalence is the disappearance of the contrast – [thus it is] being, but a fulfilled being.
It [the I] becomes regardful (anschauend), through immediacy, the overcoming (Aufheben) of contrast. (In general, the I always goes over into looking and feeling, in this way.) The main point is the content of the object. The object separates itself from its drive, thereby acquiring a different form – the quiescent drive, become itself, fulfilled in itself. The lack was in the looking of the empty I – for this was object to itself. It held the differences of the “conclusion” together; it comprised their equivalence, their subsistence, not being as such; it was the primary immediate I, but I as such. The drive having been separated from the I, it is released from the Self – the bare content held together by its being.
The work of the I: it knows its activity in this, i.e., knows itself as the I, heretofore [hidden] in the interior of being. [It knows itself] as activity (not as in memory), but rather so that the content as such is [revealed] through it; this is because the distinction as such was its own. The distinction makes up the content, and that alone is what is important here – that the I has posited the distinction out of itself and knows it as its own. (Name and thing are the former distinction – not the distinction, as such, of the I; the latter is simple.)
Determination of the object: it is thus the content, the distinction of the “conclusion”; it is particularity and universality, and their mediation. But [as] a being, immediate, its mediation is dead universality, thinghood, otherness; and its extremes are particularity, determinacy, and individuality. Insofar as it is the other, its activity is that of the I; it has no activity of its own; this extreme falls outside it. As thinghood, it is passivity, the [mere] communication of this activity – as fluid, but as having something alien in it. Its other extreme is the opposite: the particularity of its being and of its activity. It is passive, it is for another, touches it, something that can be worn away [in] communication with the other. This is its being, but it is at the same time the active form set against it. Converse relation: in one sense, the activity is merely something communicated, communication itself, purely receptive; in another sense, it is activity directed at another.
The gratified impulse is [thus] the transformed labor (aufgehobene Arbeit) of the I; this is the object working in its stead. Labor is one’s making oneself into a thing (sich zum Dinge machen). The division of the I beset by drives is this very same self-objectification (sich zum Gegenstande machen). Desire must always begin anew, never succeeding in ridding itself of its labor. The drive, however, is the unity of the I as objectified (als zum Dinge gemachten).
The bare activity is pure mediation, movement; the bare satisfaction of desire is the pure extinction of the object. The labor itself as such is not only activity – the acid [which dissolves passivity] – but it is also reflected in itself, a bringing forth: the one-sided form of the content [as] particular element. But here the drive brings itself forth; it brings forth the labor itself – [so that] the drive satisfies itself, [while] the other elements fall into external consciousness.
The bringing forth is the content also insofar as it is what is willed, and the means of [fulfilling] desire, its determinate possibility. In the tool and in the ploughed and cultivated field, I possess a possibility, a content as something universal. Thus the tool [as] means is of greater value than the goal of desire, which goal is particular; the tool encompasses all such particularities.
But a tool does not yet have the activity within it. It is an inert thing; it does not turn back into itself. I still must work with it. Between myself and the external [world of] thinghood, I have inserted my cunning – in order to spare myself, to hide my determinacy and allow it to be made use of. What I spare myself is merely quantitative; I still get calluses. My being made a thing is yet a necessary element – [since] the drive’s own activity is not yet in the thing. The tool’s activity must be placed in the tool itself, so that it is made self-acting. This happens (a) in such a way that its [own] thread is interlaced with it and its two-sidedness is utilized, in order to make it go back on itself in this opposition. In general, its passivity is transformed into activity, in persistent collaboration. Above all, it happens also (b) in order that nature’s own activity be employed – the elasticity of the watchspring, [the power of] water, wind – so that, in their sensory existence, these do something other than what they [ordinarily] would do. Their blind doing is made purposeful, in opposition to themselves. [This is the] rational control of natural laws in their external existence. Nothing happens to nature itself; the particular purposes of natural being become a universal purpose. The bird flies thither....
Here the drive withdraws entirely from labor. The drive lets nature consume itself, watches quietly and guides it all with only the slightest effort. [This is] cunning. [Consider] the honor of cunning against power – to grasp blind power from one side so that it turns against itself; to comprehend it, to grasp it as something determinate, to be active against it – to make it return into itself as movement, so that it negates itself.
Thus the destiny of the individual thing is [in the hands of] Man. Through cunning, the will becomes feminine. – The outgoing drive, as cunning, is a theoretical contemplation, the unknowing a drive to knowing. There are two powers, two characters, here. This contemplation – of how the being, in itself, negates itself (sich aufhebt) – is different from the drive; it is the I that has left it and gone back into itself, the I that knows the nullity (Nichtigkeit) of this being, while the drive is tensed within it.
The will has [thereby] become doubled, split in two. It is determined, it is character. One sort of character involves this tension, the power in the confrontation of beings. This power, however, is blind, has no consciousness of the nature of this being. It is fully open, straightforward, driving and being driven. The other sort of character is evil, [enclosed] in itself, subterranean, knowing what is there in the light of day, and watching something accomplish its own destruction by its own efforts, or else turning actively against the thing, thereby introducing a negative element into its being, indeed into its self-preservation.
The first of these [operates] as a being confronting another being. The second [operates] by using reason, as a being [against] something it does not take with full seriousness – as when a cape is offered to the bull which runs against it and, hitting nothing, is hit nonetheless. The will has divided itself into these two extremes, in one of which it is whole and universal, while in the other it is particular.
These extremes are to posit themselves in one, the knowledge of the latter going over into cognition (Erkennen). This movement of the “conclusion” is thereby posited, so that each is in itself what the other is. The one, the universal, is particularity, the knowing Self. Concomitantly, the particular is the universal, since it is self-relatedness. But this must become something for them [something they are aware of], so that this equality becomes a knowledge of this equality.
(a) The drive comes to look at itself – it returns to itself in that satisfaction. In the same manner, it has become knowledge of what it is. The simple return to itself, the knowledge, is likewise the mediation for the division of the “conclusion.” The drive is outside itself, in the other simple Self, and knows the Self as an independent extreme. At the same time this knowledge knows its essence in the other. There is tension in the drive, the independence of both extremes.
(b) In itself there is the supersession (Aufheben) of both: each [of the two “selves”] is identical to the other precisely in that wherein it opposes it; the other, that whereby it is the “other” to it, is it itself. In the very fact that each knows itself in the other, each has renounced itself – love.
Knowledge is precisely this ambiguity: each is identical to the other in that wherein it has opposed itself to the other. The self-differentiation of each from the other is therefore a self-positing of each as the other’s equal. And this knowledge is cognition in the very fact that it is itself this knowledge of the fact that for it itself its opposition goes over into identity; or this, that it knows itself as it looks upon itself in the other. Cognition means one’s knowing what is objective, in its objectivity, as knowledge of one’s Self: i.e., a [subjectively] conceptualized content, in the sense of a concept that is object.
This cognition is merely a cognition of characters – since neither one has as yet determined itself as a Self vis-à-vis the other. Only the one is knowledge in itself, the other is knowledge as outward activity; and the one is the universal substance directed outward, the rounded substance, [while] the other [is] directed inward. Thus they are only opposed characters, not knowing themselves – but either knowing themselves in one another, or else knowing themselves only in themselves.
The movement of knowing is thus in the inner realm itself, not in the objective realm. In their first interrelation, the two poles of the tension already fall asunder. To be sure, they approach one another with uncertainty and timidity, yet with trust, for each knows itself immediately in the other, and the movement is merely the inversion whereby each realizes that the other knows itself likewise in its other. This reversal also rests in the fact that each gives up its independence. The stimulus is itself an excitation, i.e., it is the condition of not being satisfied in oneself, but rather having one’s essence in another – because one knows oneself in the other, negating oneself as being-for-oneself, as different. This self-negation is one’s being for another, into which one’s immediate being is transformed. Each one’s self-negation becomes, for each, the other’s being for the other. Thus the other is for me, i.e., it knows itself in me. There is only being for another, i.e., the other is outside itself.
This cognition is love. It is the movement of the “conclusion”, so that each pole, fulfilled by the I, is thus immediately in the other, and only this being in the other separates itself from the I and becomes its object. It is the element of [custom or morality], the totality of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) – though not yet it itself, but only the suggestion of it. Each one [here exists] only as determinate will, character, as the natural individual whose uncultivated natural Self is recognized.
High chivalric love falls within mystic consciousness, which lives in a spiritual world regarded as the true one, a world which now approaches its actuality, and in this world such consciousness glimpses the other world as present. Friendship is only in shared work, and [the emphasis on it] occurs in the period of moral development: e.g., the moderation of Herculean virtue, Theseus and Pirithous, Orestes and Pylades.
Love thereby becomes immediately objective for itself. Movement enters into it. Satisfied, it is the unity of poles, the unity which had previously been the drive – this satisfied love. Distinct from the [two] characters is the third, the engendered. The unity divides itself into poles which are equivalent toward the middle. They are different beings.
The satisfied love at first becomes so objective for itself that this third is something other than the two poles [i.e., other than the two individuals involved]; this is the love that is a being-other (Andersseyn), immediate thinghood, wherein the love does not know itself immediately, but rather exists for the sake of an other (just as the tool does not have its activity [inhering] in it itself). Thus both parties realize their mutual love through their mutual service, mediated in a third which is a thing. It is the mean and the means of love. And indeed, just as the tool is the ongoing [objectified] labor, so this third element is a universal as well; it is the permanent, ongoing possibility of their existence. As equivalent poles, they are, This being, since it is a being of the polar extremes, is transitory. As middle, as unity, it is universal. It is a family possession – as movement [it is] acquisition.
It is from here onward that there is the interest in acquisition and permanent possession, and in the general possibility of existence. It is from here onward, actually, that the desire itself enters in as such, namely, as rational, sanctified (if one so wishes). The desire is satisfied in shared labor. The labor does not occur to satisfy desires as individual but as general. The one who works on a given object does not necessarily consume it. Rather, it becomes a part of the common store, and all are supported by it. Like the tool, it [constitutes] the general possibility of enjoyment and also the general actuality of it. It is an immediate [non-mediated] spiritual possession.
Family property has in it the element of activity, higher than the element of instrumentality – so that both the polar parties are self-consciously active. But this object does not yet have the element of love in it. Rather, the love is in the polar parties. The cognition on the part of both characters is itself not yet a [fully] cognizant cognition (erkennendes Erkennen). The love itself is not yet the object. The I of love, however, withdraws from love, pushes itself away from itself and becomes its own object. The unity of both characters is only the love, but it does not know itself as the love. It knows itself in the child, in whom the two see their love – their self-conscious unity as self-conscious.
The unity is the immediate object, a particular entity – and the unity of love is at the same time a movement to transcend (aufzuheben) this particularity. On one side this movement means the transcendence of immediate existence: e.g., the death of parents; they are a disappearing process, the self-annulling (sich aufhebend) source. Against the [concept of the] procreated individual there is this movement, as conscious, the becoming of his being-for-himself, education. According to his essence, however, there is the transcendence of love as such.
The [idea of the] family is decided in these elements: (a) love, as natural, begetting children; (b) self-conscious love, conscious feeling, sentiment and language of the same; (e) shared labor and acquisition, mutual service and care; (d) education [of offspring]. No single function can be made the entire purpose [of the family].
Love has become its own object, and this a being-for-itself. It is no longer [a function of] character, but has the whole simple essence in it itself. Each [member] is the spiritual recognition itself, which knows itself. The family, as a totality, has confronted another self-enclosed totality, comprising individuals who are complete, free individualities for one another. Only here, then, do we find the actual being for the Spirit, in that it is a self-conscious being-for-itself.
At the same time they are related to one another and are in a state of tension in regard to one another. Their immediate existence is exclusive. One [family member] has, say, taken possession of a piece of land – not of a particular thing, e.g., a tool, but [a part] of the permanent general existence [freely available]. Through his labor he has designated it [as his], giving to the sign his own content as existent: a negative and exclusive significance. Another party is thereby excluded from something which he is. Thus the existence is no longer “general” [i.e., things are now defined as “belonging” to individuals].