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objectivity. The content of this figurative thought is Absolute Spirit. All that remains to be done now is to
cancel and transcend this bare form; or better, because the form appertains to consciousness as such, its true
meaning must have already come out in the shapes or modes consciousness has assumed.
The surmounting of the object of consciousness in this way is not to be taken one-sidedly as meaning that the
object showed itself returning into the self. It has a more definite meaning: it means that the object as such
presented itself to the self as a vanishing factor; and, furthermore, that the emptying of self-consciousness
itself establishes thinghood, and that this externalization of self-consciousness has not merely negative, but
positive significance, a significance not merely for us or per se, but for self-consciousness itself. The
negative of the object, its cancelling its own existence, gets, for self-consciousness, a positive significance;
or, self-consciousness knows this nothingness of the object because on the one hand self-consciousness
itself externalizes itself; for in doing so it establishes itself as object, or, by reason of the indivisible unity
characterizing its self-existence, sets up the object as its self. On the other hand, there is also this other
moment in the process, that self-consciousness has just as really cancelled and superseded this
self-relinquishment and objectification, and has resumed them into itself, and is thus at home with itself in its
otherness as such. This is the movement of consciousness, and in this process consciousness is the totality of
its moments.
Consciousness, at the same time, must have taken up a relation to the object in all its aspects and phases, and
have grasped its meaning from the point of view of each of them. This totality of its determinate
characteristics makes the object per se or inherently a spiritual reality; and it becomes so in truth for
consciousness, when the latter apprehends every individual one of them as self, i.e. when it takes up towards
them the spiritual relationship just spoken of.
The object is, then, partly immediate existence, a thing in general--corresponding to immediate
consciousness; partly an alteration of itself, its relatedness, (or existence-for-another and
existence-for-self), determinatenesss--corresponding to perception; partly essential being or in the form of
a universal-corresponding to understanding. The object as a whole is the mediated result [the syllogism] or
the passing of universality into individuality through specification, as also the reverse process from individual
to universal through cancelled individuality or specific determination.
These three specific aspects, then, determine the ways in which consciousness must know the object as itself.
This knowledge of which we are spearing is, however, not knowledge in the sense of pure conceptual
comprehension of the object; here this knowledge is to be taken only in its development, has to be taken in its
various moments and set forth in the manner appropriate to consciousness as such; and the moments of the
notion proper, of pure knowledge, assume the form of shapes or modes of consciousness. For that reason the
object does not yet, when present in con- sciousness as such, appear as the inner essence of Spirit in the way
this has just been expressed. The attitude consciousness adopts in regard to the object is not that of
considering it either in this totality as such or in the pure conceptual form; it is partly that of a mode or shape
of consciousness in general, partly a multitude of such modes which we [who analyze the process] gather
together, and in which the totality of the moments of the object and of the process of consciousness can be
shown merely resolved into their moments.
To understand this method of grasping the object, where apprehension is a shape or mode of consciousness,
we have here only to recall the previous shapes of consciousness which came before us earlier in the
VIII. ABSOLUTE KNOWLEDGE(1) 288
THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND
argument.
As regards the object, then, so far as it is immediate, an indifferent objective entity, we saw Reason, at the
stage of "Observation", seeking and finding itself in this indifferent thing--i.e. we saw it conscious that its
activity is there of an external sort, and at the same time conscious of the object merely as an immediate
object. We saw, too, its specific character take expression at its highest stage in the infinite judgment: "the
being of the ego is a thing". And, further, the ego is an immediate thing of sense. When ego is called a soul, it
is indeed represented also as a thing, but a thing in the sense of something invisible, impalpable, etc., i.e. in
fact not as an immediate entity and not as that which is generally understood by a thing. That judgment, then,
"ego is a thing", taken at first glance, has no spiritual content, or rather, is just the absence of spirituality. In
its conception, however, it is in fact the most luminous and illuminating judgment; and this, its inner
significance, which is not yet made evident, is what the two other moments to be considered express.
The thing is ego. In point of fact, thing is transcended in this infinite judgment. The thing is nothing in itself;
it only has significance in relation, only through the ego and its reference to the ego. This moment came
before consciousness in pure insight and enlightenment. Things are simply and solely useful, and only to be
considered from the point of view of their utility. The trained and cultivated self-consciousness, which has
traversed the region of spirit in self-alienation, has, by giving up itself, produced the thing as its self; it
retains itself, therefore, still in the thing, and knows the thing to have no independence, in other words knows
that the thing has essentially and solely a relative existence. Or again--to give complete expression to the
relationship, i.e. to what here alone constitutes the nature of the object--the thing stands for something that is
self-existent; sense-certainty (sense-experience) is announced as absolute truth; but this self-existence is
itself declared to be a moment which merely disappears, and passes into its opposite, into a being at the
mercy of an "other".
But knowledge of the thing is not vet finished at this point. The thing must become known as self not merely
in regard to the immediateness of its being and as regards its determinateness, but also in the sense of essence
or inner reality. This is found in the case of Moral Self-consciousness. This mode of experience knows its
knowledge as the absolute essential element, knows no other objective being than pure will or pure
knowledge. It is nothing but merely this will and this knowledge. Any other possesses merely non-essential
being, i.e. being that has no inherent nature per se, but only its empty husk. In so far as the moral
consciousness, in its view of the world, lets existence drop out of the self, it just as truly takes this existence
back again into its self. In the form of conscience, finally, it is no longer this incessant alternation between
the placing" and the "displacing" [dissembling] of existence and self; it knows that its existence as such is this
pure certainty of its own self; the objective element, into which qua acting it puts forth itself, is nothing else
than pure knowledge of itself by itself.
These are the moments which compose the reconciliation of spirit with its own consciousness proper. By
themselves they are single and isolated; and it is their spiritual unity alone which furnishes the power for this
reconciliation. The last of these moments is, however, necessarily this unity itself, and, as we see, binds them
all in fact into itself. Spirit certain of itself in its objective existence takes as the element of its existence
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