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The Actualization of Rational Self-Consciousness

Through Its Own Activity:

A Reading

1. To understand this middle section of the Reason chapter, VB, it is important to grasp its

structure and the role that it is envisaged as playing in the work as a whole. This is a more

complicated matter than it may at first appear to be. The section opens with a

straightforward characterization:

Just as Reason, in the role of observer, repeated, in the element of the category, the movement of consciousness, viz. sense-certainty, perception, and the Understanding, so will Reason again run through the double movement of self-consciousness, and pass over from independence into its freedom. [348]

We already saw how section VA, on Observing Reason, recapitulates some of the moves

of the Consciousness section. The new information is that VB corresponds to IVA, the

Independence of Self-Consciousness, while VC corresponds to IVB, the Freedom of Self-

Consciousness. The passage continues by offering us a clue as to what sort of parallel is

intended:

To begin with, this active Reason is aware of itself merely as an individual and as such must demand and produce its reality in an 'other'. Then, however, its consciousness having raised itself into universality, it becomes universal Reason. [348]

The forms of phenomenal consciousness considered here correspond to a conception of

the individual that one-sidedly identifies itself with the independence that the individual

displays in action. Action is conceived as mastery or domination of given circumstances,

the cancelling of their independence. In action what things are in themselves is supposed

to answer to what things are for consciousness--the opposite direction of fit from that

constitutive of consciousness. The moment of independence of the in-itself cannot be

cancelled wholesale, by an abstract negation, however, but only retail, by determinate

negation in the concrete cycle of action and experience. From the perspective of the

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whole chapter, what self-consciousness conceiving itself on the model of an active

individual must eventually reconcile is the two sorts of relations that it has to the

universal norms of the community in which it always already finds itself. On the one

hand, those norms, as embodied in communal practice (the "vivified ordinance" of [374]

or "the established living order" of [375]) provide the medium within which alone the

individual agent can form contentful intentions and act so as to carry them out. In this

sense the universal is given to or found by the individual who is constrained by or

dependent on it. It is the experience of this aspect that is reconstructed in the dialectic of

VB, whereby we come to see what is wrong with conceptions that attempt to ignore it.

On the other hand, those norms embodied in communal practice are also the product of

individual activity. In this sense they are made by the individual agent, and not just

found. For apart from the concrete activity of applying those norms to particular actions,

in practical deliberation and assessment, the universal is ideal rather than actual,

something merely for consciousness and not something in itself. The first aspect, of the

dependence of individuality on the universal, has been with us from the very beginning of

the work. What is distinctive of the stage of phenomenal consciousness being considered

here is the way in which it identifies its individuality with the second aspect, the

dependence of universality on individuality. Accordingly, what we find in the three

subsections of VB is a discussion of three forms of individualism: three ways in which

individuality seeks to conceive itself as independent relative to the universals that in

themselves (and so for us) in fact constrain it.

2. The structure of VB is architectonically overdetermined, however, and the most

enlightening way to think of it is not the one forwarded in the passage just cited. As just

pointed out, the first understandings of action considered here do indeed exhibit a

structure of Mastery, and as we shall see, in VC analogues to the stoic and sceptical

strategies of independence are presented as well. But the central lesson of VB is

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developed by means of a parallel to the stages of consciousness, not of self-

consciousness. The three sections of VB are a) Pleasure and Necessity, b) the Law of the

Heart and the Frenzy of Self-Conceit, and c) Virtue and the Way of the World. They

should be understood as corresponding to sense-certainty, perception, and understanding

respectively. The upshot is that the role that thought as the realm of purely inferentially

significant claims was there discovered to play in language entries here is rediscovered in

a strictly analogous fashion for language exits. Thus VBa discusses action conceived as

the immediate expression of immediate impulses, inclinations, or desires. VBb then

discusses those actions as the mediated, or universalized expressions of immediate

impulses. VBc then discusses actions as the mediated or universalized expression of

motivations that are themselves mediated or universal. The progression from immediate

sensuous inclinations, to universals of sensuous inclination, culminating in purely

theoretical motivation not traceable to immediate inclination accordingly corresponds on

the side of exits from thought to actuality in practical activity to the progression from

immediate sensuous appearance to classification according to universals of sense to

understanding according to purely theoretical concepts on the side of entries from

actuality to thought in empirical consciousness. It is this structural parallel that governs

the discussion below.

3. The three main sections, Pleasure and Necessity, the Law of the Heart and the Frenzy

of Self-Conceit, and Virtue and the Way of the World, are preceded by an overall

introduction. It will not be discussed in detail here, but some general comments are in

order, since that introduction can be positively misleading unless its expository relation to

the body of the section is understood. We who are following the order of exposition are

making the transition to considering a different sort of conception of the practical activity

by which both individuals and the communities they recognitively constitute actualize

themselves. In the discussion of Observing Reason we saw practical activity conceived

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as something objective and simply there--bodily motions, biological functions,

neurophysiological activity. We are now to consider conceptions of practical activity as

the expression of individuality, that whereby what an individual self-consciousness is

subjectively, ideally, or for itself takes a form that is objective, actual, and for others.1

Although in the course of the dialectically reconstructed experience of these conceptions,

along with those recounted in VC, an adequate understanding of action as expression will

become available to us, all of the phenomenal forms we considered under the heading of

Reason, like all of those considered under the headings of Consciousness and Self-

Consciousness, are alienated forms. Individuality is misunderstood in terms of one-sided

models of independence. This shows up in the difficulty of making explicit the

dependence on the universal involved in determinate contentfulness of what is expressed

while retaining categories independence regarding its expression. For us to know what to

look for in the conflict between determinate contentfulness and independence as it shows

up in the form of relations between the universal and the individual, it is useful for us to

know something about the universality whose role as constitutive of and constituted by

individuality is the ultimate explanatory target. For this purpose, rather than relying

entirely on the exposition of alienated conceptions of the universals that govern practical

activity by individuals, Hegel offers us a few remarks about the reality of which they are

appearances.

4. The fundamental thing to understand is, of course, the recognitive structure of both

social substance and individual self-consciousnesses that are its actuality. This much

Hegel takes it we have already learned2:

If we take this goal--and this is the Notion, which for us has already appeared on the scene--in its reality, viz. the self-consciousness that is recognized and

1 Being for others turns out to be the mediated form of what being in itself is the immediate form. The latter is a one-sided or alienated conception of what is eventually revealed to us as the former.2 Since this was not the lesson of either IVB or VA, he can only have in mind the discussion early in IVA, where we first hear about mutual recognition.

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acknowledged, and which has its own self-certainty in the other free self-consciousness, and possesses its truth precisely in that 'other'...then in this Notion there is disclosed the realm of ethical life [Reich der Sittlichkeit]. For this is nothing else than the absolute spiritual unity of the essence of individuals in their independent actual existence; it is an intrinsically [an sich] universal self-consciousness that takes itself to be actual in another consciousness...[349]

As constituted by its own and others recognitions, the individual self--

consciousness is said to be in itself and for itself3 universal. What are these

essentially social universals in terms of which we must understand individuals

and in terms of which they ideally understand themselves and each other? The

passage continues:

This ethical [sittliche] Substance, taken in its abstract universality, is only law in the form of thought; but it is no less immediately actual self-consciousness, or it is custom [Sitte]. [349]

The universals in question are norms, which can be expressed explicitly in laws (the form

of thought being conceptual and propositional), at the cost of abstractness, or may remain

implicit in customs or social practices, which have the benefit of concreteness. Norms in

the form of communal practice are norms actualized by individual self-consciousnesses.

This unity of being-for-another or making oneself a Thing, and of being-for-self, this universal Substance, speaks its universal language [redet ihre allgemeine Sprache] in the customs and laws of its nation. [351]

The determinately contentful norms that are the universal element both found and made

by the activity of recognitively self-conscious individuals are articulated in both the

implicit immediate form of practices and the explicit mediated form of laws. The social

nature of this universal element is not restricted to its normative form:

...in the universal Substance, the individual has this form of subsistence [in the universal medium] not only for his activity as such, but no less also for the content of that activity; what he does is the skill and customary practice of all. [351]

3 "Reason is present here as the fluid universal Substance, as unchangeable simple thinghood, which yet bursts asunder into many completely independent beings...which in their absolute being-for-self are dissolved, not merely implicitly, in the simple independent Substance, but explicitly for themselves." [350]

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5. What is potentially misleading about this introductory discussion is the way in which

it anticipates the fuller discussion in the chapter on Spirit. There we will encounter,

officially for the first time, the three stage structural development of Spirit, from

immediate implicit Sittlichkeit, in the first stage, through the middle stage in which that

Sittlichkeit is shattered by the eruption of individual self-consciousnesses whose

independence is explicit to them, to the eventual hoped-for stage of Sittlichkeit explicit to

itself as mediated by the activity of individual self-consciousnesses. We who are

following the exposition have not yet been educated out of the alienated conceptions

characteristic of the middle stage, which we brought with is to the work. So for

unalienated conceptions of the relation of individuals to the universal norms that both

constrain and make possible the determinately contentful activities of those individuals,

on the one hand, and are themselves constrained and made possible by those activities on

the other hand, we must accordingly be directed either forward or backward.

But from this happy state of having realized its essential character and of living in it, self-consciousness which at first is Spirit only immediately and in principle, has withdrawn, or else has not yet realized it; for both may equally well be said. [353]

The story that is recounted in the tripartite body of VB concerns the way in which

particular, immediate, sensuous inclinations come to be determinately contentful

expressions of individual self-consciousnesses (both for that self consciousness and in

themselves or for others) by being brought under universal, communally instituted

norms, that is, by being assessed in practice, or according to rules.

...what is superseded in the movement are the individual moments which for self-consciousness are valid in their isolation. They have the form of an immediate will or natural impulse which obtains its satisfaction which is itself the content of a fresh impulse....Taken in the former sense, those forms are the coming-to-be of the ethical substance, and precede it; in the latter, they succeed it and reveal to self-consciousness what its essential nature is. In the former case, the immediacy or rawness of the impulses gets lost in the process of getting to know what their truth is, and their content takes on a higher form. In the latter case, what is lost is the false idea of the consciousness which places its essential nature in those impulses. In the former case, the goal they attain is the ethical Substance, while, in the latter, it is the consciousness of that Substance... [357]

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The "former case" here is applying the story about the progressive mediation of the

immediate (on the side of the outputs, the aspect of purposive action, in which what

things are in themselves depends on what they are for consciousness) to the pre-

alienation stage of Spirit, while the "latter case" is applying that story to the post-

alienation stage. Our attempt to move beyond our alienated concepts, we will discover, is

always stereoscopic in this way. We are separated from the more primitive stage by the

fact that the Sittlichkeit that consists in individuals recognizing themselves in and

identifying with the universal immediately is achievable only by practice, not by

theoretical understanding. It is only by being recognized and recognizing oneself in

practice as a member of some particular community, by actually taking part in its

practices, that this sort of Sittlichkeit is available to us. Talk about it, the attempt to

understand it, is not an approach to the first stage from the second, but from the second to

the third, from which our alienation still separates us. [The view is that the portal to that

third stage can at least be found by theoretical activity such as the exposition that is the

Phenomenology, even if to enter it requires the practical activity of instituting the

community of trust based on the "words of reconciliation"--the constitutive linguistic and

practical structure of recognition as mutual confession and forgiveness.] The process

whereby the raw natural impulses or desires acquire the infusion of universality required

to institute Spirit in its immediate form was addressed already in the discussion of Self--

Consciousness. This was presented as a naturalistic story about how the primitive

consciousness associated with biological desire can achieve the form of desire for desire,

and so have the prerequisites for a concept of consciousness, and then be able to apply

that concept to itself in a community constituted by mutual recognition, that is, a spiritual

community. What we must come to understand from the present exposition is what it is

to lose "the false idea of the consciousness which places its essential nature in those

impulses," just as we have seen through the false idea of the consciousness which places

its essential nature in the immediacy of the deliverances of sense.

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6. The mark of our current alienated understanding of the purposive practical activity of

individuals is that

...consciousness appears split into this given actuality, and the End which it realizes by superseding that actuality, an End which in fact it makes an actuality in place of that with was given.

The target concept of action we want to achieve in the end, as we make the

transition to the third, unalienated stage of Sittlichkeit mediated by individual

self-consciousness is specified immediately afterwards:

Its primary End, however, is its immediate abstract being-for-self; in other words, seeing itself as this particular individual in another, or seeing another self-consciousness as itself. The experience of what the truth of this End is raises self-consciousness to a higher level, and from now on it is itself its own End, insofar as it is at the same time universal and has the law directly within it...What virtue learns from this experience can only be this, that its End is already attained in principle, that happiness is found directly in the action itself, and that action itself is the good...Having discovered this, self-consciousness thus knows itself to be reality in the form of an individuality that directly expresses itself, an individuality which no longer encounters resistance from an actual world, and whose aim and object are only this expressing of itself. [359]

There is a gap between intention and action. If the understanding of that gap begins with

a conception of failures of purposive action on the model of abstract negation, the

intention and the achievement are conceived of as mutually independent in the sense that

each can be just what it is entirely independently of the other, then a gap is opened up on

the side of practical activity that is comparable to the gap of intelligibility the

Introduction complains about on the side of cognitive activity. It becomes unintelligible

how we could achieve just what we intend ("What the deed is can be said of it" [322]).

Here Hegel announces (rather than explains) that the proper remedy for this

misconception of the "distinction that action implies" ([400]) between intention and

accomplishment lies in understanding action and the evaluation of its success in terms of

the expression of acting individual self-consciousnesses. Although we can as yet have

only a preliminary grasp of the point, we should already have a hold on the general

structure of the expressive model of individual self-consciousnesses in its dual parallel

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accounts of cognitive and practical empirical activity. Each involves a pole of certainty,

or what things are for an individual consciousness, and a pole of truth, or what things are

in themselves. In theoretical or cognitive activity, what things are for consciousness is

supposed to depend on and conform to what things are in themselves. In practical

activity what things are in themselves is supposed to depend on and conform to what

things are for consciousness. The key to getting beyond an alienated conception of these

dependences according to categories of self-standing independence and domination is to

concentrate on the cycle of action as essentially involving both the cognitive and the

practical movements. It can be seen as the concrete actualization of progress toward the

coincidence of the poles of certainty and truth in both directions. This evolution and

grooming of concepts, along with the thoughts and objective situations that display them,

this sort of progress is largely independent of the contingent details of the experience.

For happiness to be reconciled with virtue (which is one Kantian form in which Hegel

sees the problem of reconciling the individual with the universal), we must shift the way

we think of happiness, and so the way we think of the motivation of our individual action.

We must move from thinking of happiness in the formal Enlightenment utilitarian terms

of getting what we as particular individuals contingently want to thinking of it as a matter

of expressing the individual in universal terms, by actualizing it in a public arena where

determinate contents are acquired and altered, claimed and acknowledged. Determinate

mutual recognition by individuals, and their self-clarifying development through

experience can be achieved even where particular intention and achievement diverge.

I

VBa: Pleasure and Necessity

7. The first dialectically presented experience of phenomenal consciousness of practical

activity as the expression of its individuality bears the heading "Pleasure and Necessity"

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[Lust und Notwendigkeit], and occupies paragraphs [360] to [366]. This is the most

primitive of the conceptions of individuality as independent that are considered.

Instead of the heavenly-seeming Spirit of the universality of knowledge and action in which the feeling and enjoyment of individuality are stilled, there has entered into it the Spirit of the earth, for which true actuality is merely that being which is the actuality of the individual consciousness. [360]

The aspect of its individual activity that this first form of phenomenal self-consciousness

seizes on one-sidedly in order to get a grip on the sort of independence it displays in

purposive action is (as with sense certainty on the input side) immediacy.

It plunges therefore into life and indulges to the full the pure individuality in which it appears. It does not so much make [macht] its own happiness as immediately [unmittlebar] take [nimmt] it and enjoy it. [361]

Self-consciousness understanding itself as sensuously self-indulgent, what will be called

here voluptuous self-consciousness, seeks to actualize itself by taking pleasure, that is by

the immediate realization of its immediate impulses. In this way its strategy is the

immediate expression of immediate sensuous inclination [Kant's arch enemy, sinnliche

Neigungen]. The immediacy of the expression consists in its taking the form of

inarticulate feeling. The difficulty that we can see for this sort of understanding of action

is that it is another strategy whereby individuality applies to itself categories of

independence. The moment of dependence of individual action becomes practically

evident in the pursuit of pleasure, in the form of constraint by necessity. At this stage of

development in thinking about action, such constraint can only be experienced by the

acting self-consciousness as something alien. In fact, since it does not understand the way

in which its own impulses acquire determinate content and practical significance only by

virtue of their role as products and producers of the experience that characterizes the cycle

of action, this moment of concrete dependence can appear to voluptuous self-

consciousness only as the abstract form of negation without its determinate content.

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8. To begin with it may be asked how the voluptuous consciousness differs from the

merely desiring consciousness of animals. The short answer is that voluptuousness is a

form of self-consciousness, which cannot be identified with the immediate satisfaction of

desire. Voluptuous self-consciousness is in the first instance a way of conceiving or

understanding the actions of self-conscious individuals.

Its action is only in one respect an action of Desire...The element in which desire and its object subsist as mutually indifferent and independent is animate existence [lebendige Dasein]; the enjoyment of desire puts an end to this existence so far as it belongs to the object of desire. But here this element which gives to both a separate actuality is rather the category, a being which is essentially in the form of thought. [362]

As self-consciousness in the form of thought, voluptuous consciousness is itself thoroughly

mediated and determinately contentful. But it understands its activity purely in terms of

categories of immediacy. Accordingly, we can see that it does not bring to bear the

theoretical resources it needs to understand itself.4 It is our job as phenomenological

observers to distinguish in each form of phenomenal consciousness that is rehearsed for us

what is expressively progressive, revealing explicitly for acting, knowing phenomenal self-

consciousness something of what it is implicitly or in itself, from what remains for it

obscure and inadequately expressed. Self-consciousness that misconceives its individual

practical activity on the model of immediate expression in the form of voluptuousness is a

kind of determinately contentful thought. We want to see how what is presupposed by that

determinate contentfulness makes itself manifest actually to us, and potentially to the

phenomenal self-consciousness under consideration, in spite of the latter's defining refusal

to acknowledge the sorts of mediation and dependence essential to the determinate

contentfulness of individual practical activity. Voluptuous self-consciousness thinks; its

activity is thoughtful; what it does can be said of it. What self-conscious individuals who

understand themselves as voluptuaries in fact are trying to encompass under the concept of

immediate expression of feeling is determinately contentful, deliberate, purposeful action

4 Compare the intricately counterfactual slogan neurophysiologists use to console themselves: "If the brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't."

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and the assessment of its success. The manifestation in experience of the mediation,

dependence, and "the distinction that action implies" (between the perspective of

deliberation and the perspective of assessment) is what appears to the self-consciousness

that understands itself as voluptuous in the abstract form of necessity.

9. The voluptuous self-consciousness is not wholly or merely wrong about the activity by

which it actualizes its individuality, however. It is determinately wrong, and so presents us

with specific positive lessons as well as negative ones. In particular, this form of self-

consciousness is an attempt to conceive individual action as consisting in the essential

unity of purpose and achievement. When we can correctly grasp this unity as mediated by,

among other things, the "distinction that action implies", we will have overcome our

alienated self-conception. Consciousness that identifies with its individual self as falling

under the concept of action motivated and assessed by pleasure has not achieved this

mediated understanding of the unity of action, since its conception of that unity is precisely

as immediate. Nonetheless, it is that unity that it endorses and addresses, albeit with an

inadequate model. Its understanding of the unity of purpose and achievement is immediate

in that it is, according to the model, a unity in the form of a single feeling. The feeling of

pleasure is both the sole motivator of action, and the sole measure for assessing its success.

The kind of thing that plays the role of inner, of purpose, is taken simply to coincide with

the kind of thing that plays the role of outer, of accomplishment or achievement. The

model of expression is immediate in that implicit and explicit are identified with each

other. This is the immediate expressive unity of motivation and satisfaction in feeling.

10. Another positive lesson exhibited for us by the conception of action characteristic of

the voluptuous self-consciousness consists in the way in which the officially and explicitly

immediate feeling of pleasure is implicitly and in fact the feeling of a relation to oneself

that is mediated by relation to an independent other. Accordingly, it glimpses darkly the

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way in which the unity of action mediated by the difference it implies is properly to be

understood, what we will understand eventually as the expressive unity of content between

what a performance is for the agent whose performance it is and what is for other

independent self-consciousnesses, the unity of being for self and being for others. For the

hedonic paradigm of Hegel's discussion of what is in German Lust is sexual pleasure.

Identifying one's individual self with what is expressed in the pursuit and achievement of

sexual pleasure includes an implicit acknowledgment of the role of independent other in

constituting my individuality. The social nature of sexual pleasure provides the immediate

sensuous image, the mere representation that does duty, crudely, in picture-thinking, for

actively contentful concepts of the mutual recognition on which the true, mediated, unity

of action is based.

It attains therefore to the enjoyment of pleasure, to the consciousness of its actualization in a consciousness which appears as independent, or to the vision of the unity of the two independent self-consciousnesses. It attains its End, but only to learn there the truth of what its End is. It comprehends itself as this particular individual who exists for himself, but the realization of this End is itself the setting-aside of the latter. For it is not as this particular individual that it becomes an object to itself, but rather as the unity of itself and the other self-consciousness, hence as an individual that is only a moment or universal. [362]

Further, the independence of the other will manifest itself, in a way ultimately

incompatible with the claims of independence made by consciousness that conceives itself

as voluptuous. Here what is independent, the world confronted by the individual self-

consciousness, is not only or primarily the world of nature, but also and fundamentally a

social world.

It is, however, as yet the poorest form of self-realizing Spirit; for it is aware of itself at first only as the abstraction of Reason, or is the immediacy of the unity of being-for-itself and being-in-itself...Nevertheless it no longer has the form of immediate simple being, as it has for Reason in its observational role where it is abstract being or, posited in the form of an alien being, is thinghood in general. Here in this thinghood there has entered being-for-self and mediation...[363]

Communal norms or universals, whether implicit in practice or explicit as rules (in the

form of custom or of law) provide resistance to the immediate gratification of sensuous

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inclination. Other acting individual self-consciousnesses may prove uncooperative. The

picture of motivation, its expression, and its satisfaction as immediately identified with one

another in the feeling of pleasure, conceived as independent and immediate, cannot

properly present the role of social and natural recalcitrance in the constitution of the

contents of intentions and perceived performances. The moment of independence appears

instead as the simple and contentless negation of action (that is, pleasure).

The realization attained by this individuality consists therefore in nothing more than this, viz. that it has cast for this circle of abstractions from its confinement within simple self-consciousness, into the element where they are for self-consciousness, in other words, are expanded into an objective existence. The object, then, that is for self-consciousness as it takes its pleasure its essence...has no content. It is what is called necessity...whose work is the nothingness of individuality. [363]

As we will see, the conceptual scheme of the voluptuous consciousness, by leaving no

room for the moment of independence that corresponds to being (determinately)

recognized, cuts itself off from the possibility of understanding both determinately

contentful purposes and (what is for Hegel the same thing) the development to fruition in

public actuality of determinately contentful projects.

11. Why is "the work of necessity the nothingness of individuality", according to the sort

of self-consciousness that identifies with its individual activity under the concept of

gratification of immediate sensuous impulse? Individuality is understood to be just the

particularity of this impulse, as the unity in feeling of motive and satisfaction. But the

content of this impulse is like the content of this now. Sensuous inclination bloweth as it

listeth. To identify with it is not to identify with some developing content, but with

something flickering and evanescent. (It is to focus on the swirl of shades made by the ink

particles rather than the sentences they express.) This explanatory strategy is committed to

identifying the content of individuality with the content of the inclination whose

satisfaction is pleasure. How is content to be associated with some episode in the play of

inclination? It is either immediately satisfied or it is not. If it is, it vanishes, as proto-

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consciousness as desire vanishes in its satisfaction. Individuality, so conceived, disappears

in the very performance that is its actualization. Immediately successful expression cancels

what is expressed. Within the structure of pure immediacy there is no way to hold the

content of such an impulse fixed, to render it repeatable, and so assailable, defensible,

something that can be appealed to, in short, something thinkable. In any case, sensuous

inclination is never merely satisfied. The feeling of pleasure is never the only achievement

or accomplishment of a performance. Any actualization of an intention, inclination, or

impulse, any purposeful performance has consequences beyond the pleasure it provides for

the agent. These consequences, what the performance is in itself or for others, indeed what

it is for the agent in addition to being pleasure, appear to the voluptuous self-consciousness

in the guise of abstract constraint or necessity. All the more does necessity appear in the

recalcitrance of the world to the immediate achievement of pleasure. Always too much or

too little is in fact accomplished or actualized, and every difference violates the immediacy

of self-expression that is the hallmark of the voluptuous or hedonistic self-conception.

The transition is made from the form of the one or unit into that of universality, from one absolute abstraction into the other, from the purpose of pure being-for-self which has thrown off all community with others, into the sheer opposite which is thus equally abstract being-in-itself. Consequently, the form in which this appears is that the individual has simply perished, and the absolute unyieldingness of individual existence is pulverized in the equally unrelenting but continuous world of actuality. [364]

Individuality conceived as the particularity of current unrepeatable impulse vanishes like

the 'Now', in the absence of some universal to hold it fast as determinately contentful. As

it is, the experience voluptuous consciousness has of its action is forced by its deformed

self-conception into the alienated mold of an abstract and barren disjunction between what

things are for the acting self-consciousness and what they are in themselves or for others.

Far from being immediately unified, impulse and satisfaction are rent asunder into

independent sorts of things, confronting one another contingently across a conceptual

chasm.

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This transition of its living being into lifeless necessity therefore appears to it as an inversion which is not mediated by anything at all. The mediating agency would have to be that in which both sides would be one, where, therefore consciousness recognized one moment in the other: its purpose and action in fate, and its fate in its purpose and action, that is would recognize its own essence in this necessity. [365]

To do so, however, requires acknowledging that one's own individual identity is not

something constituted and possessed independently and immediately, but something one

has or is only in virtue of the mediation of and so relation to relatively independent others,

whom one must acknowledge as such and be acknowledged by. This is precluded by the

model of independence, here considered in its most primitive form, as immediacy. As a

result, self-consciousness understanding its individualizing and actualizing practical

activity on the model of voluptuousness cannot comprehend the sort of unity that purpose

and accomplishment have (determinately contentful precisely because of the ultimately

social "distinction that action implies"). For:

...these moments are not contained and linked together in feeling, but only in the pure self, which is a universal or thought.[365]

Voluptuous consciousness, of course, does not think of itself this way.

12. The result is that the experience of this form of phenomenal consciousness shows us

(and could show such a consciousness) the inadequacy of its conception of itself as an

acting individual. The voluptuous consciousness can't recognize itself in what it does,

whether its inclination is satisfied or thwarted, whether the world is recalcitrant or

compliant to the demands of its pleasure.

Consciousness, therefore, through its experience in which it should have found its truth, has really become a riddle to itself, the consequences of its deed are for it not the deeds themselves. What befalls it is, for it, not the experience of what it is in itself, the transition is not a mere alteration of the form of the same content and essence, presented now as the content and essence, and again as the object or [outwardly] beheld essence of itself. [365]

Here we are offered, albeit in a backhanded fashion, a characterization of the unalienated

conception of action we are striving to attain. Self-consciousness conceiving its practical

activity on the model of voluptuousness, like self-consciousness conceiving its cognitive

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activity on the model of sense certainty, applies the model of independence in the form of

immediacy, and accordingly precludes itself from understanding the determinate

contentfulness of action ("what the deed is can be said of it") and, respectively, cognition.

The content that escapes these strategies of immediacy is precisely the unity that is

conferred by the experience of the difference that action implies, as an aspect of the cycle

of action, of the concrete practical activity of a community of individuals acting and

assessing actions. On the expressive model of action, which is to replace our current

alienated conceptions, the distinction between content and form is precisely the distinction

between what is preserved in action, as the inner is translated in to the outer,

...action simply translates an initially implicit being into a being that is made explicit...[401]

the content, and what is distinguished, the form as implicit or explicit. Both the

distinction, the moment of difference, and the unity, the moment of identity, depend upon

relations to (and so are mediated by) other relatively independent self-consciousnesses, and

their determinate acknowledgments of performances (taking them to be the actualization of

determinately contentful commitments) or assessments of actions.5

13. A third positive lesson of which voluptuous consciousness provides us with a confused

but recognizable expression concerns the relation between the feeling of pleasure and the

metaphysical significance of individuality expressing itself in the realm of actuality by its

practical activity. One of the Kantian dualisms that Hegel's conceptual scheme seeks to

overcome is that between happiness and virtue. Of course he does not immediately

identify them with each other, but unites them by means of a middle term. Each is to be

understood in terms of the expression of individuality in actual practical performance.

Happiness is for Hegel in the first instance a metaphysical status, consisting in recognizing

oneself in one's deeds. The feeling of pleasure is merely the immediate aspect of

5 The significance of this sort of identity-in-difference for the overall explanatory project of the Phenomenology has already been alluded to, in the discussion of VA.

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happiness. But identifying one's individuality with what is immediately expressed in the

attainment of the feeling of pleasure, that is, one-sidedly with only an aspect of happiness,

is nonetheless identifying with individuality conceived as what succeeds in expressing

itself in action. This is a decidedly alienated conception of happiness, one that can be

contrasted backwards with the immediate unalienated conception of the universal self as

expressed in each individual action characteristic of the original simple ethical substance,

and forwards to the fully mediated version we are prepared for by this chapter.

The pleasure enjoyed has indeed the positive significance that self-consciousness has become objective to itself; but equally it has the negative one of having reduced itself to a moment. [363]

II

VBb: Law of the Heart & the Frenzy of Self Conceit

14. Section VBb, The Law of the Heart and the Frenzy of Self-Conceit [Das Gesetz des

Herzens und der Wahnsinn des Eigendünkels] occupies paragraphs [367] to [380]. The

transition to this section corresponds on the output side to the transition from Sense

Certainty to Perception on the input side. In each case the phenomenal consciousness in

question begins to be entitled to attribute determinate contents to the sensuous states it

had previously misunderstood as independently authoritative simply in virtue of their

immediacy. Perception acknowledges the importance of universality to contentfulness by

conceiving its knowledge in terms of immediate universals of sense, that is empirically

applicable concepts or observable properties. The Law of the Heart acknowledges the

importance of universality to contentfulness by conceiving its activity in terms of

immediate universals of sensuous inclination, that is empirically felt motivations. The

way in which consciousness understanding itself as voluptuous works out the mistaken

strategy of independence, of identifying itself only with (recognizing itself only in) the

moment of independence, is to insist on the authority of its immediate impulses as

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consisting simply in their particular immediacy. However, in a dialectically

reconstructed experience whose structure is familiar to us already from the opening

discussion of 'Now' and 'This', it has emerged for us that no determinate content can be

associated with authority that does not point beyond the merely immediate. The authority

of particular sensuous impulse turns out to be contentless, and totally abstract. The

moment of constraining dependence confronting those impulses and exercising authority

over them, which has been suppressed and ignored, can only then be experience as the

equally abstract negation or denial of that authority. With the Law of the Heart

universality is acknowledged as essential to the authority of immediate sensuous

inclination, and so it becomes possible to associate determinate content with that sort of

authority.

What necessity truly is in self-consciousness, it is for this new form of self-consciousness, in which it knows its own self to be the principle of necessity. It knows that it has the universal law immediately within itself, and because the law is immediately present in the being-for-self of consciousness, it is called the law of the heart. This form takes itself to be, qua individuality, essence like the previous form; but the new form is richer because its being-for-self has for it the character of necessity or universality. [367]

Remember that the Kantian sense of 'necessary' is just 'according to a rule', a broadly

normative matter. The great advance of this form of phenomenal consciousness is that it

has incorporated necessity, dependence in the form of constraint by the universal, into its

own self-conception as an aspect of what is its own in action, rather than as something

other that is merely opposed to that what is its own in action. Like consciousness that

understands itself as perceiving, however, "this consciousness at first knows universality

only as immediate..." [374]. From pleasure as the immediate unity of impulse and

satisfaction in feeling confronted by necessity as the pure abstraction of their difference,

we move to the law of the heart as encompassing both pleasure and necessity:

To it the two of them are undivided; its pleasure is what conforms to the law...For within its own self, individuality and the necessary are immediately one...[370]

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15. How ought we to understand what it means to acknowledge universals of sensuous

inclination on the output side by analogy to the acknowledgment of sense universals by

perceiving consciousness on the input side? Instead of understanding individual action in

terms of raw impulses (cf. [357]), merely immediate Neigungen, it is to be understood in

terms of articulated, mediated motives that have the form of reasons. The Ends or

purposes that are the certainty of action or what it is for the acting consciousness are now

conceived as including universality, and so as determinately contentful in a way that

inclinations conceived as merely immediate proved to be incapable of. Such motives retain

their immediacy, as do the universals of sense, but are mediated as well in that they are

caught up in relations of inference and incompatibility. In VBc we will consider what

happens when motives are acknowledged that are in no sense immediate, when actions are

taken to be motivatable by purely mediated motives, reasons that do not express immediate

impulses but are purely theoretical. This move corresponds to that from Perception, with

its concern with sense universals, to Understanding, which admits as well purely

inferentially accessible claims. The central concept to focus on in approaching the sort of

phenomenal consciousness that understands itself according to the Law of the Heart is that

of expressing an impulse in the form of a reason, expressing immediate inclination in the

mediated form of thought. It is only insofar as we understand this transformation that we

can understand what it means to associate determinate content with immediate inclination

at all.

16. The overall parallel that governs the lining up of Consciousness and Reason generally

is something like this. Becoming a competent empirical perceiver or noninferential

reporter is acquiring the practical capacity to respond to some features of the environment

by acknowledging commitments that are propositionally contentful in virtue of the

inferential and incompatibility relations they stand in to others. Hegel says that what has

this sort of content has "the form of thought". Thus perception is a process whereby what

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is immediate comes to be expressed in the mediated form of thought (hence "entries" or

"inputs" to thought). Dually, becoming a competent empirical agent is acquiring the

practical capacity to respond to one's acknowledging of commitments that are

propositionally contentful in virtue of the inferential and incompatibility relations they

stand in to others by altering some features of the environment. Thus action is a process

whereby what is in the mediated form of thought comes to be expressed immediately in an

actual performance that has a content not only for the acting consciousness but for others

(hence "exits" or "output" from thought). In the cycle of action and perception of the

consequences of action, both the contents of our individual purposes and the universal

concepts we have available develop and are clarified by being expressed and applied. This

process is what is concrete and actual and provides the standard to which we must always

revert in assessing our use of concepts corresponding to aspects we have abstracted from it.

It is in terms of that cycle that we must understand the two complementary sorts of

expression that correspond to expressing the immediate in the form of thought in

perception and expressing thought in the form of the immediate in action. Perceivings and

intendings are kinds of determinately contentful thoughts that express and are expressed in

the immediate, respectively. It is important to see that the sort of expression introduced at

the end of the previous paragraph is different from either of these. For what is at issue

there is the expression of an immediate impulse in the mediated form of an intention. The

general duality between perception and action addresses the relation between intention and

immediately actual public performance, not that between immediately actual inclination

and contentful intention. Putting perception and cognition and their role in the cycle of

action to one side for the moment, within the aspect of purposive activity itself there is a

dual expressive relation of mediate thought to the immediate. Immediate inclination is

expressed in the form of thought as contentful intention, and thought as contentful purpose

is expressed in the form of immediacy in actual purposeful performance. Our central

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source for understanding the second of these is VC. The first of them is raised as a topic in

the transition from VBa to VBb.

17. One of the main hurdles that we face in overcoming our alienated conceptions of

action concerns the contingency of expression. We one-sidedly emphasize the distinction

that action implies (between purpose and achievement) without appropriately

acknowledging the necessity or the identity that it also implies. On the cognitive side we

saw in the Introduction the strategy for overcoming the one-sided emphasis on the

distinction between certainty and truth, what things are for consciousness and what they

are in themselves, is broadly speaking to locate the distinction within the concrete process

of experience. This same phenomenal strategy is to be applied on the active side, to

overcome the alienated conception of action by locating the distinction between the

certainty and truth of action within the social cycle of action. In that context the role of

determinately contentful distinctions between the purpose and the consequences associated

with a performance, and so of contingency, can be properly appreciated. This sort of

worry about the contingency of the connection between what is expressed and its

expression has to do with the expression of the mediated contentful purpose in the realm of

immediacy, since the arena of actuality in which the purpose is to be enacted always

already comes fully furnished with given conditions, means, abilities, and so on. There is a

corresponding sort of worry about the contingency of the connection between what is

expressed and its expression that has to do with the complementary expression of

immediate inclination in the articulated form of a determinately contentful purpose. For

what specific content is associated with a given felt impulse depends on what concepts are

available to express it. It is tempting to suppose that the same impulse might be articulated

as a purpose differently in two cases that differed only in what conceptual contents were

available for that purpose at the particular stage in the conceptual development of the

communities in question. The expression of an inclination in the form of a reason for

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action would then be contingent on the particular population of concepts that happened to

be in play for the individual who is inclined. The general form of the way in which the

master-concept of expression is to be used to situate these different but related sorts of

contingency is the same for both, and its treatment is best postponed until the discussion of

VC. It can be noted here, though, that at least with regard to this issue the ability to

express immediate impulses in the articulate form of determinately contentful purposes or

intentions can be treated as just another perceptual ability. It is a kind of seeing-as, the

capacity to perceive (be able to tell) what you want. Developing this sort of perceptual

ability is a prerequisite of being able to pursue a project, that is to develop the content of a

purpose by a process of clarifying expression that is the actualizing of the intention.

18. The reason that there is no determinate content to the impulses as conceived by the

voluptuous consciousness is that it does not conceive itself as undergoing any experience.

Experience shapes the contents of concepts by confronting the moment of independence in

their actual application with the moment of dependence of such application on the

applicability of other concepts whose contents stand in determinate inferential or

incompatibility to them. Voluptuous consciousness does not take its immediate impulses to

have these determinate dependencies, and so can't associate this sort of content with them.

As a result, this form of consciousness can only experience dependence as abstract

negation--necessity as the pure empty form of being constrained. We saw that as long as

the individual self is identified with the currently felt impulses, any actualization of the

individual, any attempt to realize the what is taken to be the individual by satisfying the

impulse can appear only as the loss of the individual, whether the attempt is successful or

not. Buffeted by the play of sensuous inclination, voluptuous consciousness does not

permit itself the resources to pick up an unrepeatable impulse and appeal to it in later

motivation as a reason. Here again it is useful to compare the play of unrepeatable 'Nows'

that Sense Certainty could not hold fixed, its need for universals expressed in the

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presupposition of anaphora by deixis. Voluptuous consciousness cannot secure its impulse

in the form of a project or plan, an intention that can be progressively carried out.

Individual self-consciousnesses understanding themselves and their motivation as

voluptuous will in fact carry out projects of pleasure that survive the only intermittently

felt inclinations that motivate them, of course, but insofar as this becomes explicit to them

it forms part of the experience of the untruth of this form of self-understanding. This is

again parallel to consciousness understanding itself as sensuously certain, which in fact

always already finds itself applying universals, making inferences, and so on, though these

activities don't find a place in its theory of itself.

19. To be determinately contentful, an impulse or inclination must prompt an endorsement

that exhibits the form of thought in being mediated, in that its content depends on its

inferential relations to other contents that it entails or that entail it, by determinate negation

of other contents with which it is incompatible, and in being universal in that it is

repeatable--a content that can be endorsed, a reason that can be offered, a consideration

that can be appealed to on a variety of occasions. Consciousness understanding itself

according to the model of the law of the heart does not comprehend any of these

adequately, but has versions of all of them in play. It determinately recognizes itself as

committed to various different contents, and identifies with its individual activity as the

process whereby its own content is clarified, defined, and developed. The capacity to fix

an inclination in the form of a repeatable reason for action, intention, or contentful

commitment to act makes projects possible. In a project one identifies with one

commitment to the exclusion of those incompatible with it, while acknowledging further

commitments that it instrumentally entails (commitments to subgoals, employment of

specific means). "The individual then carries out the law of his heart," [372]. Carrying

out the law of the heart is acting according to an inclination that has assumed the form of a

determinately contentful reason. The experience (in the sense of the Introduction) of

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carrying out the law as a practical project is what determines the content of the

commitment that inclination has become. That content is determined not only by what

other commitments are incompatible with the projected one in general, but also which

incompatible commitments the agent explicitly finds himself with, and how those

incompatibilities are resolved when they arise in experience. The structure of self-

definition we saw already in the discussion of Pride is exhibited here, but in determinate

rather than abstract form. Individuals attain the sorts of status characteristic of spirit by

identifying something they are for themselves as essential, by being willing to sacrifice for

them other aspects, which are thereby practically classified as accidental an inessential.

The experience of pursuing an enduring project consists in the sacrifice of some

commitments in favor of others. In this way one is forced to clarify, express, and develop

just what one takes oneself to be, just what commitments one acknowledges as more

important. The content of an individual's identity can be seen to consist in part in the

determinate ways in which dependence is acknowledged in clarifying an articulate

commitment by carrying it out. According to this picture of how boundaries around an

individual specifying what is that individual's own, doing so is a process worked out in

actual practical experience, mediated by and dependent upon relatively independent natural

and social others. This model contrasts with a cartesian one according to which the

identity of an individual is secured immediately--it simply is what is its own, quite

independently of any relation to anything else. What is mine immediately is knowledge

and action that is direct, and so infallible. Represented and representing can't diverge

because they are identical. All the rest of knowledge and action is a two-stage affair, a

matter of directly knowing or doing one of these mental things, which then is somehow

connected with what is not mine (and in that sense outside of me). The direct, minimal,

safe knowings and doings are appearings and willings (projected by a bad theory of the

significance of the non-iterability of 'seems' and 'tries'). Hegel opposes to this one-sided

conception of immediate taking and making of self a view according to which we find and

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make ourselves through what we do, in detailed co-operation with other things and

individuals. Consciousness conceiving its individuating activity as the expression of the

law of the heart, a sensuous inclination in universal form, offers us a glimpse of this self-

identification as a concrete process of expression, clarification, and development that is not

available in the conceptions of the voluptuous consciousness. Immediate impulse must be

fixed in the universal medium of thought in order to take part in the determinate

acknowledgment of dependence that is the experience of carrying out a purpose.

20. Motivation by momentary felt inclination rather than by commitment to an articulable

purpose ("What the deed is can be said of it") is lightmindedness of a sort that

consciousness understanding itself in terms of the law of the heart has gotten beyond.

And so it is no longer characterized by the levity [Leichtsinn] of the previous form of self-consciousness, which only wanted the particular pleasure of the individual; on the contrary it is the earnestness [Ernsthaftigkeit] of a high purpose... [370]

Consciousness that understands its individual action as the actualizing expression of a

heartfelt law conceives of immediately felt inclinations expressed in the form of reasons

for action as public. Motivation that has taken the form of a reason is understood as

transcending the impulses it expresses not only temporally within the agent, but also

socially, across the community of agents. At the beginning of the dialectically

reconstructed experience of this sort of phenomenal self-consciousness, the bindingness of

the reasons or laws that make explicit what is implicit in sensuous inclination is conceived

abstractly, as bindingness in general. In this way, in spite of its having been given specific

content by consciousness acting according to the law of its heart, in a way that was not

open to the voluptuous consciousness, necessity, being governed by or subject to law, is

nonetheless conceived as having the same indifferently universal form. So the law that

expresses my impulses is not taken to apply to me only, but simply to apply.

...the immediate unity of the individual heart with universality is the thought, elevated into a supposedly valid law, that, in what is law, every heart must

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recognize its own self...the particular content of the heart as such is supposed to have the status of a universal. [373]

We can see that this is an overgeneralization, both of the aspect of independence of the

individual and of universality. The independence (authority) of the individual does not in

fact reach far enough to establish a universal with this scope. The unfettered generality of

this conception of universality is a consequence of its abstractness, inherited (as yet

uncorrected) from the expositorily earlier (and conceptually more primitive) stage of

pleasure and necessity. Understanding individual activity on the model of the law of the

heart is one form of the alienated strategy of independence. Recall the architectonic

blueprint of [348] discussed at the opening of this essay, which lines the whole of VB up

with IVA, The Independence of Consciousness. The conception the law of the heart has of

itself exhibits the structure of mastery or domination, of the moment of independence or

recognizing being taken one-sidedly, without a corresponding moment of dependence.

This form of phenomenal self-consciousness understands its individual activity as

constitutive of what is correct and incorrect, of what norms are in force. There is of course

a seed of truth in this attitude. We are rehearsing various ways in which pieces can appear

of the truth that the activity of individual self-consciousnesses is not only constrained and

thereby rendered contentful by norms or universals, but also that those universals are

themselves dependent on the activity of self-conscious individuals, are actualized and

rendered contentful by it. The law of the heart represents progress towards correctly

grasping the relation between individuals and universals, for it represents one way in which

the dependence of norms on individual activity can be understood. (The proper way to

understand that relation is in terms of mutual recognition. The exposition has advanced our

initial abstract understanding of that structure by discussing determinate recognition or

acknowledgment. This is acknowledging or attributing a determinately contentful

commitment, classifying the individual under a norm or universal that can be expressed in

the form of a law.) Though in this way it has a genuine hold on the topic of the

contribution of individual activity to the constitution of universals, the law of the heart

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misunderstands it. A self-conscious individual understanding itself this way takes its own

particular activity immediately to establish universals. In this way it takes itself to be a

constitutive consciousness, a constitutive maker of universals.

21. The experience of such a self-consciousness, which is rationally reconstructed in the

dialectic of the Law of the Heart and the Frenzy of Self-Conceit, must take the form of the

eruption of the unacknowledged moment of dependence.6 That implicit moment becomes

partially explicit in the experience of the law of the heart in two fundamental ways. First,

this form of consciousness expresses its individual inclinations in the form of laws, and

then takes this expression as independently and immediately constitutive of their force as

binding. But as this universal binding, the law is indifferent to the particularity of this

individual.

Consequently, what the individual brings into being through the realization of his law is not his law...The individual who wants to recognize universality only in the form of his immediate being-for-self does not therefore recognize himself in this free universality, while at the same time he belongs to it, for it is his doing. This doing, therefore, has the reverse significance...For the individual's act is supposed to be the act of his particular heart, not a free universal reality...[372]

It is not possible coherently to conceive universality as binding on individuality generally

while conceiving of ones own individual self-consciousness as a constitutive maker and

taker. The law of the heart does not provide a good strategy for achieving recognition of

one's own individuality in the norms one acknowledges, for its model of its role in

instituting them undercuts its comprehension of what it is to acknowledge them. Second,

like the original masterful self-consciousness that is our model for this phenomenal form,

self-consciousness that understands its individual activity as independently and

immediately constitutive of the laws that are in force is precluded from acknowledging

other individuals as having the same status. According to it, these laws of its heart are

6 This is why all the subsections in VB have two parts, corresponding to the moment of independence and of dependence--though the structure is much more complicated than this crude division suggests. See the discussion below of the summary from [381] of the substructure of these dyadic oppositions.

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binding as the laws of all hearts. But they are not in fact so acknowledged by others, as

they must be to complete this conception. The certainty of this conception, the moment of

acknowledging by the heart that establishes a law, does not coincide in content with its

truth, the moment of being acknowledged as law by other hearts.

Thus, just as the individual at first finds only the rigid law, now he finds the hearts of men themselves, opposed to his excellent intentions and detestable. [373]

This opposition or incompatibility, this collision of individualities is not something the

heartfelt law-constituting self-consciousness can conceive in terms of a concrete process of

experience by which both universal concepts and acting individuals are clarified, refined,

and educated [Bildung], a process in which determinately contentful commitments are

confronted with incompatible ones so that some must be sacrificed and other identified

with, some universals treated as correctly applicable and others not. In place of this messy

sorting out of determinately contentful recognitions, that is, acknowledgments and

attributions of determinately contentful commitments, which is how universals and

individuals are in fact constituted, self-consciousness in the form of the law of the heart

can acknowledge only bare abstract opposition or negation.

22. This restriction to the abstract is just the consequence of its retaining the model of

immediacy and independence in conceiving the universal, the same formal commitments

that showed themselves to us as the source of the inadequacy of the conception of

empirical consciousness discussed under the heading of Perception. For the actual process

by which individuality contributes to drawing the distinction between correct and incorrect

application that a determinately contentful norm (of the sort that can be made explicit in

the form of a law) consists in is thoroughly mediated by, and so dependent upon, the

activity of other individualities, and the application of other norms. Recall that perceiving

consciousness is not able to reconcile the mutual independence, which it associates with

sense universals because of a mistaken appreciation of the significance of their immediacy,

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with their determinate contentfulness. For this latter essentially involves incompatibilities

and inferential relations to other contentful universals. Perceiving consciousness even has

trouble understanding what it means for two universals to have incompatible contents.

One of the important moves in the dialectic that presents its experience to us takes the form

of making the notion of incompatible properties coherent by distinguishing different

possible centers (particular objects as 'Also's) that exhibit properties. Incompatible

properties are then comprehended as those that cannot be exhibited simultaneously by one

such object. Similarly, for consciousness that understands itself as immediately expressing

its inclinations in the form of laws, appreciating the determinate contentfulness of the laws

that result is not simply a matter of being able to distinguish the inclinations that give rise

to them. It must be able to understand incompatibility as well. As we have seen, that is

part of the point of fixing an inclination by expressing it in the form of a repeatable reason.

Thinking this notion of incompatibility through will require distinguishing different

possible centers of individual inclination expressed as law. The possibility of distinct,

differently inclined individuals, expressing themselves through commitment to different

and incompatible principles is essential to the determinate contentfulness of those

expressions. But to acknowledge this possibility is to acknowledge the possibility of other

legislators such as oneself. To do that requires moving beyond the conception of one's

own activity as immediately and independently legislative. Doing that will be

acknowledging the possibility of a distinction between something seeming or appearing to

me as a reason for action (the side of certainty) and its actually being a reason for action

(the side of truth), which this form of consciousness treats as immediately identical.

23. The experience of voluptuous self-consciousness is the experience of the mere form of

opposition between contentless individual inclination and its abstract denial and constraint

by the universal, the brutely existing normative order (in fact constituted by what things

are for others). The law of the heart incorporates both sides of this opposition into itself.

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It is the immediate unity of individual inclination and universal necessity. But for the

reasons indicated above, this conception is unstable. Experience constantly unmasks that

immediate identity of individual and universal as a unity only for consciousness, as the

mistaken appearance of what is in itself diversity. So long as this form of self-

consciousness remains committed to understanding its activity on the model of immediacy,

the only form in which this moment of difference can appear is as immediate difference.

The frenzy of self-conceit (Hyppolite and his translator render "der Wahnsinn des

Eigendünkels" as "the ravings of presumption") sees the origin of universality in

individuality not as the immediate confirmation of its authority, but as immediately

perverting that authority. Previously

It took this divine and human ordinance which it found as an accepted authority to be a dead authority in which not only its own self...but also those subject to that ordinance would have no consciousness of themselves; but it finds that his ordinance is really animated by the consciousness of all...that the reality is a vivified ordinance [Ordnung]...[374]

The individual self-consciousness appreciates that "the established living order is equally

its own essential being and work," [375] as an individuality. In the form being considered

now, however, that it derives its content from the inclinations and activity of individuals is

seen as contradicting its form as universal ordinance. This is inevitable as long as one is

committed to understanding universals as immediate and independent (due to a

misunderstanding of the significance of universals of sensuous inclination, exactly parallel

to the misunderstanding of sense universals by consciousness that understands itself as

perceiving). Self-consciousness exhibiting the frenzy of self-conceit in effect identifies

itself with the form of universality rather than content of individuality.

Thus it is rather its self as not a particular individual...or its purpose has the form of law, hence the form of a universality, which it is for its own consciousness. [377]

Individuality, which it also identifies with, is conceived as immediately opposed to that

universal form. Insofar as the effects of individual activity and purpose can be discerned

within the law and within concepts, it appears as a perversion. This form of self-

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consciousness accordingly identifies itself with what it takes to be an abstract

contradiction.

In this its derangement, consciousness declares individuality to be the source of this derangement and perversion. [377]

The self-conceit is for an individual self-consciousness to set itself up as a judge assessing

the bindingness of law that is living and concrete in the form of the customs and practices

of a community, and find them one and all invalid (its all right to do this piecemeal, but not

wholesale) in virtue of the signs they bear of their origin in individual inclination. This is

the point of the example of dismissing law as the product of self-interested priests and

despots.7 In adopting this attitude the frenzied self-consciousness fails to understand that

The established laws are defended against the law of an individual, because they are not an unconscious, empty, and dead necessity, but a spiritual universality and Substance, in which those in whom this spiritual substance has its actuality live as individuals and are conscious of themselves; so that even when they complain about this ordinance as if it went against their own inner law, and maintain against it the opinions of the heart, they cling to it with their hearts, as being their essential being. [378]

The conceited self-consciousness is committed to a contradictory strategy for the assertion

of its individuality. For it asserts its individuality precisely by denying the validity of

universals insofar as they are expressions of individuality. That a universal expresses

individual inclination is taken to impugn its status as universal. Yet it is precisely an

individual who in this way sets himself up above the universal and assesses it. Its reliance

on the categories of immediacy conceived as independence preclude this consciousness

from putting together the two sorts of relations of dependence between individuals and

universals: the sense in which individuals are dependent on, bound and constituted by,

universals, and the sense in which universals are actualized and constituted by individuals.

Because this consciousness at first knows universality only as immediate...the nature of the realization and the activity is unknown to it; it does not know that this realization as what affirmatively is, is in truth rather the implicit universal in which the individuality of consciousness, which entrusts itself to it in order to be

7 Hegel has after all lived through the bloodthirsty turn that the Enlightenment takes in the French Revolution, where there is more than mere rhetoric in the attitude of those who will not be happy "until the last king is strangled with the guts of the last priest".

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this particular immediate individuality, really perishes...But that in which it does not recognize itself is no longer a dead necessity, but a necessity animated by the universal individuality. [374]

III

VBc: Virtue and the Way of the World

24. Section VBc, Virtue and the Way of the World [die Tugend und der Weltlauf]

occupies paragraphs [381] to [393]. It opens with a summary of the structure of the three

sections of VB.

In the first shape of active Reason, self-consciousness took itself to be pure individuality, and it was confronted by empty universality. In the second, the two sides of the antithesis each had both moments within them, law and individuality; but one side, the heart, was their immediate unity, the other their antithesis. Here, in the relationship of virtue and the 'way of the world', the two members are each severally the unity and antithesis of these moments, or are each a movement of law and individuality towards one another, but a movement of opposition. [381]

This sort of passage tends to induce architectonic vertigo, but we should at least be in a

position to construe and appreciate the justice of the characterizations of Pleasure and

Necessity and of the Law of the Heart and the Frenzy of Self-Conceit. The conceptions of

individuality and universality are presented as progressive in that mediation of each by the

other is gradually becoming more explicit to the phenomenal consciousnesses being

considered, as we move through these stages. We are told about the third stage as the

passage continues:

For the virtuous consciousness law is the essential moment, and individuality the one to be nullified...True discipline requires nothing less than the sacrifice of the entire personality as proof that individual peculiarities are in fact no longer insisted upon.In the 'way of the world', individuality behaves in a way which is the reverse of its behaviour in the virtuous consciousness, viz. it makes itself the essential moment... [381]

The sacrifice of individuality that virtue makes is its practically identifying itself with a

universal self-conception. Such transformation of what self-consciousness is in itself by

practical identification with some elements of what it is for itself is progressive in its

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recognition of itself in the universal, but it is coupled with an inadequate understanding

of that universal, and so of itself. Virtuous self-consciousness conceives its own

individual activity as the expression and actualization of the universal. Identifying itself

in this way is understanding its motivation as ideal or purely theoretical, in the sense of

motivation purely by reasons that do not express impulses or desires felt by the

individual. The requirement that the universals appealed to in deliberation and in

assessment of performances (both ones own and those of others) be universals of

sensuous inclination is dropped, as Understanding dropped the requirement that the

universals it classifies particulars under be sense universals. Consciousness conceiving

its empirical knowledge as Perception tries to understand the determinately contentful

authority of its cognition, the validity or bindingness of the universals applied there, in

terms of the immediacy of their origin and application. Consciousness conceiving its

empirical knowledge as Understanding, by contrast, takes the essence of universality to

lie in mediation rather than immediacy, and focuses on what is expressed by the use of

universals corresponding to unobservables, purely theoretical concepts. Self-

consciousness conceiving its individual empirical activity in terms of the Law of the

Heart tries to understand the determinately contentful authority of its activity, the validity

or bindingness of the universals applied there, in terms of the immediacy of their origin

and application. Self-consciousness conceiving its individual empirical activity in terms

of Virtue, by contrast, takes the authority of reasons for action to involve mediation

essentially, and focuses on what is expressed by the use of universals corresponding to

unobservables, purely theoretical concepts, in deliberation and assessment.

25. As the virtuous consciousness identifies itself with universality in its various aspects,

the way of the world combines the two forms of individuality that have already been

rehearsed:

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The general content of the actual 'way of the world'...is nothing else but the two preceding movements of self-consciousness...The 'way of the world' is thus, on the one hand, the single individuality which seeks its [own] pleasure and enjoyment...The other moment of the 'way of the world' is the individuality which claims to be law in its own right, and in its own conceit disturbs the existing order. [382]

This content, it is claimed, is a practical self-conception that takes two forms, an

immediate, implicit one and a mediated, explicit one. In the first, or voluptuous form of

individualism, it is self-consciousness that takes its individuality to express itself in the

immediate unity of its certainty of itself in felt inclination and its truth in felt satisfaction,

and to be warped and shattered by brute nay-saying necessity in the form of

uncooperative others. In its mediated form, this conception of the constitutive role

played by individual acknowledging (determinate recognizing) concerns the institution of

norms or universals that are explicit in the form of laws. In this form too it is the

experience both of the unity of immediate individuality and universality as conscious of

itself as heartfelt in its law-giving, and the disparity between them in the confrontation

between its presumption in conceiving itself as independently and immediately

constitutive of the universals and the other uncooperative individuals who do not

acknowledge the universals as so constituted. This is a practical self-conception of

oneself and others as pursuing selfish, merely particular interests8, and as seeking to

impose those interests on others.

26. Virtue is committed to a conception of the universal that does not tie it to what

expresses and so fixes and publishes the immediate inclinations of particular individuals.

Its account of the role of reasons in motivation focuses on explicit principles that cannot

be arrived at by noninferentially finding oneself inclined to endorse them. To the

virtuous self-consciousness, the way of the world accordingly has a conception of the

universal that is perverted. It is, in particular, a reductive view that interprets all reasons

8 Interests are desires and inclinations expressed in the form of repeatable universals or reasons for action, which can be held onto and pursued as projects. See the account of interests in [401], and its relation to individuality in [405].

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as expressions of selfish interest. It is a motivational or practical instrumentalism

analogous to cognitive instrumentalism about theories, in that it treats all reasons for

action as immediately observable, noninferential entries from inclination.

It is from virtue now that the universal is to receive its true reality by nullifying individuality, the principle of perversion [Verkehrung]. Virtue's purpose is, by so doing, to reverse again the perverted 'way of the world' and to make manifest its true essence. [383]

Virtuous consciousness is to act from pure reasons, reasons that do not derive from

individual inclination, and so to show in practice the inadequacy of the conception of the

concepts, norms, universals, reasons that bind individuals in deliberations about and

assessments of action. The passage continues:

This true essence is at first only implicit in the 'way of the world', only its in-itself; it is not yet actual and consequently virtue only believes it. This faith virtue proceeds to raise to sight, without, however, enjoying the fruits of its labor and sacrifice. For in so far as it is an individuality, it is the activity of the conflict it wages with the 'way of the world'; but its aim and true nature is to conquer the reality of the 'way of the world'. The bringing into existence of the good thus effected is thus the cessation of its activity or of the consciousness of individuality. [383]

The self-conception of virtuous consciousness is still a form in which individuality

conceives itself as independent. It demonstrates this independence by identifying itself

with the universal, rather than by opposing itself to it. In this it consolidates the progress

made by the conception of the law of the heart over that of pleasure. The individual

activity that it identifies itself with is precisely the sacrifice of its individual interests. In

this way it makes the universal as reasons for action more than a matter of the expression

of selfish individual interests in universal form, precisely by taking it to be more. The

mechanism is just that we first saw in the form of the project of Pride, whereby one shows

oneself to be more than merely natural by being prepared to sacrifice one's natural interests

for some spiritual ones. Making a conception of the bindingness of the universal on the

individual by practically (to the point of actual sacrifice) taking it to be is constitutive

acknowledgment or recognition. Thus even the virtuous consciousness will be revealed as

a form of self-consciousness as mastery, an alienated strategy of individual independence,

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albeit one in which the seeds of an unalienated conception can be seen to be germinating.

For this reason, its attempt to realize its individuality (as the moment of independence in

constitutively acknowledging the universal) by refusing to acknowledge the independence

of the individual, by treating the individual as completely dependent upon and obliged to

acknowledge the universal, contains an implicit conflict. Its project, like the immediate

achievement of desire for desire, is in principle not a project that can succeed. Success

would be failure. As identifying action purely with the universal aspect of reasons (a

misunderstanding of the mediation of motivation), virtue spurns the individual in spurning

immediacy. The conflict that this causes is due to the fact that

...to bring into existence is, qua action, a consciousness of individuality...[381]

The universal is actualized only by individuals.

27. According to virtue, the true nature of the way of the world lies outside of it, in a

supersensible beyond of universals in the form of principles. To understand the actions

of individuals, from the point of view of deliberation or the point of view of assessment,

one must classify them under the universals that bind them. These universals have only

an ideal existence; the are creatures of thought in that they are something merely for

consciousness. They must be actualized by the activity of virtuous consciousness, which

identifies itself with the activity of actualizing them, securing for them acknowledgment

like its own from the uncooperative way of the world. The perverted way of the world is

the "verkehrte Weltlauf". The inverted world discussed under the heading of Force and

Understanding is the "verkehrte Welt". The initial misunderstanding of the inverted

world was to think of theoretical claims, claims about unobservables, as describing a

separate ontological realm, a supersensible beyond. The recommended way to rectify

this misconception of the relation of what is expressed by exclusively inferentially

accessible claims to what is expressed by noninferentially accessible claims is to see the

former not as describing the reality that the latter is the mere appearance of, but rather as

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making explicit in the form of claims what is implicit in the equally essential inferential

practices of using the noninferentially accessible claims, as conferring their determinate

universal content. Insofar as one persists in the alienated idiom of appearance and reality,

the reality made explicit in the form of laws is something implicit in appearance, not

something opposed to it. Analogously, the dialectical Erinnerung of the experience of

virtue will make explicit for us that pure principles, motivating claims, reasons, or

universals that are not the expression of immediately felt sensuous inclinations, do

express what is implicit in the determinate contentful expression of those inclinations, not

something beyond or apart from them. It is because of their role in making explicit what

is implicit in felt motivations that universals that are not universals of sensuous

inclination but only make explicit the inferential relations between such universals

exhibit a determinate content at all. As with Understanding the laws that the virtuous

consciousness identifies with make explicit the contents that have evolved in the cycle of

action and experience, thick universals whose determinate content is conferred by their

actual history of application in the course of the evolution of a particular population of

other contentful universals.

Therefore, wherever virtue comes to grip with the 'way of the world', it always hits upon places which are the actual existence of the good itself which, as the in-itself of the 'way of the world', is inextricably interwoven in every manifestation of the 'way of the world'. [386]

The good is implicit in the Weltlauf, not something that dwells in an ideal supersensible

realm beyond it. Reasons for action in the form of principles that are not themselves

expressions of immediate inclination do not for that reason make explicit universals or a

conception of the good that is wholly independent of the actualization of individuality by

practical projects in pursuit of individuating interests. The good is manifested precisely in

the pursuit of the actualization of individuality in published action. It is an aspect of the

concrete social process that is the cycle of action and experience. If it were not, the

universal would not be determinately contentful or actual. Just as the determinate

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contentfulness of noninferentially accessible reports and immediate inclinations depends

on inferential relations to other contents, so determinate contentfulness of purely

inferential claims and principles depends on relations to noninferentially accessible reports

and immediate inclinations.

28. Virtue understands its individual activity as the attempt to bring about the good, a

specific conception of which is articulated by the mediated structure of determinate

universal whose classifications govern deliberation and assessment. That the good needs

to be realized by individual action is an implicit acknowledgment of its dependence

precisely on the individuality that the virtuous consciousness takes itself to be

relinquishing.

Virtue, therefore, is conquered by the 'way of the world'...It wanted to consist in bringing the good into actual existence by the sacrifice of individuality, but the side of reality is itself nothing else but the side of individuality. [389]

Actualizing the universal and renouncing individuality as inessential and superseded are

accordingly incompatible.

The 'way of the world' was supposed to be the perversion of the good because it had individuality for its principle; only individuality is the principle of the real world; for it is precisely individuality that is consciousness, whereby what exists in itself exists equally for an other; it does pervert the Unchangeable, but it perverts it in fact from the nothing of an abstraction into the being of reality. [389]

Clearly what is at fault here is the understanding of perversion, according to which

individuality is the perversion of the universal. The virtuous self-consciousness is right

that the way of the world has not correctly appreciated the sense in which its individuality

is constituted by and dependent on the universal. But it has itself failed to appreciate the

dependence of the universal on the interested individuality whose busyness is the way of

the world.

In its conflict it has learnt by experience that the 'way of the world' is not as bad as it looked; for its reality is the reality of the universal. With this lesson in mind, the idea of bringing the good into existence by means of the sacrifice of

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individuality is abandoned; for individuality is precisely the actualizing of what exists only in principle, and the perversion ceases to be regarded as a perversion of the good, for it is in fact really the conversion of the good, as a mere End, into an actual existence; the movement of individuality is the reality of the universal. [391]

29. The lesson is that we must rethink our conception of the relation between

understanding action as the pursuit of individual ends, of which immediately felt

inclinations form a distinguished subset, and understanding it as essentially constituted by

the applicability to it of universal norms, in deliberation and justification, and in

assessment and criticism.

The individuality of the 'way of the world'...is better than it thinks, for its action is at the same time an implicitly universal action. When it acts in its own interest, it simply does not know what it is doing; and when it avers that everyone acts in his own interest, it is merely asserting that no one knows what action is. [392]

The correct view with which to replace this alienated understanding is not presented here.

It is the theme of the final sections of the chapter on Spirit. There we will see the full

critique of conceptions of practical activity that treat motivational rootedness in interest

and inclination as incompatible with virtue. The dark side of intentionalism of the sort

Kant develops is seen in the hypocrisy that is obliged to deny the dependence of its own

attitudes (in deliberation and assessment) on its own interests, and to condemn the attitudes

of others (in their deliberations and assessments) on grounds of dependence on interests.

This is the ethics of the Kammerdiener. At the end of VB, however, we are merely enticed

with the prospect of a transformation of the virtuous consciousness in which

...also its fine-spun explanations which know how to demonstrate the presence of self-interest in every action--all these have vanished...[392]

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