Hegel The Phemenology of Mind

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necessity as necessity of the heart, the nature of actualization and effective activity is to it unknown. This
consciousness is unaware that effective realization involves objective existence, and is in its truth the
inherently universal in which the particular life of consciousness, which commits itself to it in order to have
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being in the sense of this immediate individual life, is really submerged. Instead of obtaining this particular
life of its own in that objective existence, it thus becomes estranged from itself. But that in which it does not
know itself is no longer dead necessity, but necessity animated by universal individuality. It took this divine
and human ordinance, which it found authoritative, to be a dead reality, wherein not only its own
self--which claims the position of a particular individual, insists on being a particular "heart" with a life of
its own and opposed to the universal--but those as well who were subject to this reality had no
consciousness of themselves. Now, however, it finds that reality animated by the consciousness of all, and a
law for all hearts. It learns through experience that the reality in question is an ordinance infused and
endowed with life, and learns this, indeed, just by the fact that it actualizes the law of its own heart. For this
means nothing else than that individuality becomes its own object in the form of universality, without
however recognizing itself therein.
Thus, then, what the experience of this mode of self-consciousness reveals as the truth, contradicts what this
mode takes itself to be. What, however, it takes itself to be has for it the form of absolute universality; and
what is immediately one with consciousness of self is the law of the heart. At the same time the stable living
ordinance is likewise its own true nature and work; it produces nothing else but that; the latter is in equally
immediate union with self-consciousness. In this way self-consciousness here has the characteristic of
belonging to a twofold antithetic essence; it is inherently contradictory and torn to distraction in its inmost
being. The law of "this individual heart" is alone that wherein self-consciousness recognizes itself; but the
universal and accepted ordinance has by actualizing that law become for self-consciousness likewise its own
essential nature and its own reality. What thus contradicts itself within its consciousness has for it in both
cases the character of essence, and of being its own reality.
In that it gives expression to this moment of its own conscious destruction, and thereby expresses the result of
its experience, it shows itself to be this inner perversion of itself, to be consciousness gone crazy, its own
essence being immediately not essence, its reality immediately unreality.
The madness here cannot be taken to mean that in general something unessential is regarded as essential,
something unreal as real, so that what for one is essential or actual might not be so for another, and thus the
consciousness of real and of unreal, or of essential and unessential, would fall apart. If something in point of
fact is real and essential for consciousness in general, but for me is not so, then, in being conscious of its
nothingness, I have, since I am consciousness in general, at the same time the consciousness of its reality; and
since they both are fixed and rooted within me, this is a union which is madness in general. In this state,
however, there is only an object deranged for consciousness--not consciousness as such within itself and for
itself. But in the result of the process of experience, which has here come about, consciousness is in its law
aware of its self as this individual reality; and at the same time, since precisely this same essential facts this
same reality, is estranged from it, it is qua self-consciousness, qua absolute realty--aware of its unreality. In
other words, both aspects are held by it in their contradiction to be directly its essence, which is thus in its
utmost being distracted.
The heartthrob for the welfare of mankind passes therefore into the rage of frantic self-conceit, into the fury
of consciousness to preserve itself from destruction; and to do so by casting out of its life the perversion
which it really is, and by straining to regard and to express that perversion as something else. The universal
ordinance and law it, therefore, now speaks of as an utter distortion of the law of its heart and of its
happiness, a perversion invented by fanatical priests, by riotous, revelling despots and their minions, who
seek to indemnify themselves for their own degradation by degrading and oppressing in their turn--a
distortion practised to the nameless misery of deluded mankind.
Consciousness in this its frenzy proclaims individuality to be deranging, mad, and perverted, but this is an
alien and accidental individuality. It is the heart, however, or the particular consciousness immediately
seeking to be universal, that is thus raving and perverted, and the outcome of its action is merely that this
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contradiction comes to its consciousness. For the truth in its view is the law of its heart, something merely
intended, which has not stood the test of time as the permanent ordinance has done, but rather is overthrown,
as time indeed discloses. This its law ought to have reality: herein the law qua reality, qua valid ordinance, is
for it purpose and essential nature; but that reality, that very law as valid ordinance, is at once and at the same
time for it nothingness and void.
Similarly its own reality, itself as individual consciousness, is in its view the essential truth. Its purpose,
however, is to establish that particularity as existent. It thus in the first instance rather takes its self qua
not--individual to be the truly real; or its self is purpose in the sense of law, and hence precisely a
universality, which its self is held to be as object for its consciousness. This its notion comes by its own act to
be its object. Its (individual) self is thus discovered to be unreal, and unreality it finds out to be its reality. It is
thus not an accidental and alien individuality, but just this particular "heart", which is in every respect
inherently perverted and perverting.
Since, however, the directly universal individuality is that which is perverted and perverting, this universal
ordinance, being the law of all hearts, and so of the perverted consciousness, is no less itself in its very nature
the perverted element, as indeed raging frenzy declared. On the one hand this ordinance proves itself to be a
law for all hearts, by the resistance which the law of one heart meets with from other individuals. The
accepted and established laws are defended against the law of a single individual because they are not empty
necessity, unconscious and dead, but are spiritual substance and universality, in which those in whom this
spiritual substance is realized live as individuals, and are conscious of their own selves. Hence, even when
they complain of this ordinance, as if it went contrary to their own inmost law, and maintain in opposition to
it the claims of the "heart", in point of fact they inwardly cling to it as being their essential nature; and if they
are deprived of this ordinance, or put themselves outside the range of its influence, they lose everything.
Since, then, it is precisely in this that the reality and power of public ordinance consist, the latter appears as
the essence, self-identical and everywhere alive, and individuality appears as its form.
On the other hand, however, this ordinance is the sphere of perversion. For in that this ordinance is the law of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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