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VC—A Reading
I. Volitions and Reality: The Honest Consciousness in VCa
1. Paragraphs [397] to [410] introduce the Sache selbst for us. Only with [411] does the exposition
start of how the Sache selbst first makes its appearance as grasped by a phenomenal form of
consciousness. It appears as "an immediate consciousness", specifically one that understands the
complex unity of certainty and truth in action secured by the process of experience as a simple and
immediate identity. This form of phenomenal consciousness is called the "honest consciousness".
It contents itself with the immediacy of willing, in a way strictly analogous to how Sense Certainty,
on the side of inputs to thought, contents itself with the immediacy of appearing. Looking only at
willing, to the exclusion of achieving, it allows no disparity to creep into its conception of action.
For it, "whichever way things turn out, it has accomplished the 'matter in hand'..."[412]. Achieving
is immediately identified with willing, and what happens afterwards is not considered relevant to
the success of what was done. Of course, this conception turns out to make incomprehensible the
possession of determinate content by its willings, since as we have seen such content is conferred
only by the friction with reality manifested in the cycle of action and experience.
2. The parallel treatment of language exits and language entries extends to the consideration of the
role played by the concept of reality in relation to cognition and action. Reality exhibits itself as
independent of thought on the side of action in its stubborn resistance to purpose, the gap between
intent and achievement which the means employed may or may not bridge, but which in any case
requires the application of some means, the making of some attempt, in order to be traversed. The
certainty of action is not guaranteed of coinciding actively with its truth (i.e. conforming that truth
to its certainty). Reality exhibits itself as independent of thought on the side of cognition in its
capricious transcendence of belief, the gap between how things are for consciousness and how they
are in themselves. The certainty of cognition is not guaranteed of coinciding passively with its truth
(i.e. conforming its certainty to that truth). The priority accorded to action (understood in
normative terms of responsibility and commitment constituted by the perspectival difference
between performer and appraiser) as the basis of cognition (whose distinction of certainty from
truth merely reflects its original on the side of action) is the central doctrine of the way of
understanding the concept of reality which Hegel calls "genuine idealism". According to the
typology to which this rubric belongs, Realism is impressed by the priority manifested in reality's
constraint of thought in successful cognition, and asserts the ultimate independence of that reality
with respect to the activity of thought. One-sided idealism is impressed by the priority and
manifested in thought's constraint of reality in successful action, and asserts the ultimate
independence of the activity of thought with respect to reality. [To say that cognition or action is
successful is to say that is accords with its notion (Begriff). In each case that notion is, and is of, a
form of consciousness, that is its content is the coincidence of notion and reality, certainty and
truth.] Genuine idealism acknowledges that both entries and exits play essential roles in relating
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reality and thought, and thus embraces the positive insights of both one-sided approaches. But it
remains an idealism in that action is accorded an explanatory priority over cognition, and reality is
ultimately conceived in accordance with this priority.
3. For reality plays a special role in the social account of action, to which cognition has been
reduced. The essence of action as explained above consists in the significance arising when an exit
from the realm of thought, a performance or public undertaking, is at the same time an entrance
available for representation and appraisal. The movement begins in thought with the formulation
of a purpose, and returns to thought formulated as an attribution, via the medium of the actual.
That the essence of action is social is expressed in the requirement that in general the locus of
responsibility intending the action is a distinct individual from the locus of responsibility assigning
its significance. Explaining the action and relation to reality of individual selves is only the first
part of Hegel's project, though. For once we understand these things properly, he wants to use the
same set of concepts to describe the restless activity of the whole of Spirit as the action of a self.
Once we see how individual selves develop, we will be able to see the whole developing
community as a self (cf. the slogan of the Preface that Self and Substance are identical). Further,
once the subject of action can be identified with this whole cycle of "thought returning to itself out
of otherness", a social substance essentially split into distinct but mutually recognizing individuals,
the dual transcendence by reality of each individual thinker becomes simply one aspect of the selfdevelopmental process of that social substance. The contingency, resistance to purpose and to
understanding that characterize reality as an element in this process, distinguishing achievement
from purpose and real achievement from its appearance to an appraiser, need not characterize the
self-developmental process which comprises that contingency. The ink particles within each letter
in a printed sentence may be jumbled in random and arbitrary tangles without the sentence being
jumbled or tangled. As the letters within which arbitrariness reigns must be maintained as distinct
individuals, so must the individual thinkers or agents with respect to which reality stands opposed
as contingent and stubborn. The social substance can achieve Absolute knowledge of itself and
achieve absolute power in achieving its self-directed purposes within the jumbled contingencies of
action and knowledge of its component individuals.
4. It is a story such as this that Hegel is at this point aiming to become entitled to tell. It is because
this story will become our understanding of the significance of action that the stage of Reason can
be described to us as expressing in its action and concern for action "the certainty of being all
reality", even though Reason does not yet know that this is what it is expressing. Reason is the
abstraction from Spirit (social substance) of the moment of action. The understanding of the social
and normative nature of action leads us to the higher kind of "doing" which is the self-directed
developmental activity, realizing explicitly a form which is developed and clarified in the very
process of realizing it, and to identification of ourselves with the social substance which is both the
subject and the object, the purpose and the achievement of that process. But Reason is still only
action as an abstract moment of this process. Nevertheless, as action it is the implicit expression of
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the concept of action. That concept dictates that reality shall conform to thought as purpose. This
is the ideal of independence of the individual purposer, and Reason misguidedly attempts to realize
that independence immediately (in abstraction from the social reflection of individual thought in
inference, appraisal, justification), just as Self-Consciousness had. The criticism of merely formal
theories of action with which the section on Reason ends is the culmination of an exposition of
intentionalism about normative appraisal generally as a doomed strategy of independence strictly
comparable concerning action to those of Stoicism and Skepticism concerning cognition.
Exclusive attention to the intentions with which an action is performed (the good will) appears as
one-sided. Hegel's social metaphysics of the normative requires attention to the larger whole
embracing both intention or purpose and the consequences or actual achievement of performances.
The detailed parallel between language exits and language entrances which stands behind this
indictment deserves some attention.
5. The concepts of both cognition and action require the coincidence of their certainty and their
truth, either passively or actively. On the face of it, each is prevented from being realized by the
stubbornness of reality. The Cartesian strategy for realizing the concept of knowledge had been to
stake out a realm of cognition unriven by any gap between appearance and reality. This was the
very realm of appearance itself. For while something could appear to be red and not really be red,
it could not appear to appear red and not really appear red. For this realm of certainty as subject
and object of knowledge, whatever appears to be so is so. The boundaries of the knowing self were
taken to coincide with what could be known in this special way realizing the concept of knowledge.
A similar Cartesian strategy exists for realizing the concept of action in the face of the stubborn
resistance of the real to remaking according to the purposes of thought. This is to stake out a realm
of action for which the gap between attempt and achievement does not exist, a domain of ends for
the achievement of which no means are required. As mistakes of perception and errors of belief are
banished from the privileged Cartesian realm of cognition, so failures of attempt and miscarriages
of intent are banished from the privileged Cartesian realm of action. This realm consists of
volitions or willings. They are conceived of as mental episodes that are minimal actions, as
appearances are mental episodes which are minimal knowings. The knowing is minimal in that no
inference is endorsed beyond the internal content which is the evidence. Without interpretation, no
error can arise. The actions are minimal in that no commitment is made to achieve anything other
than the framing of a purpose. Every attempt counts as an achieved success (as of appearances we
could say that their appearance counts as their reality), so the reach of intent cannot exceed its
grasp. In the Meditations Descartes invokes the existence of mental episodes which are neither
volitions nor caused by volitions (i.e. willed) as evidence of the existence of a not-self, identifying
himself with that over which he had the sort of indefeasible dominion which on the side of action
corresponds to the privileged incorrigible access on the side of cognition.
6. The intentionalist restriction of the objects of moral appraisal (actions) to volitions is the attempt
to achieve the immediate realization of the concept of action, banishing the significance of reality
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by contracting action and thereby the self to the vanishing point of minimal attempts, whose aim is
only attempt. The strategy is described as immediate because in this understanding of action
thought does not return to itself out of otherness, but never ventures outside its own gates to begin
with.
If this [honest] consciousness does not convert its purpose into a reality, it has at least willed it, i.e.
it makes the purpose qua purpose, the mere doing which does nothing, the Sache selbst...[413]
The understanding of normative appraisal is purged of the contagion of causal contingency for Kant
only by restricting such appraisal to the will alone. Hegel's attitude toward this strategy could be
characterized in terms of the advantages of theft over honest toil, except that theft on occasion
succeeds, and the strategies of immediacy never can. Die Sache selbst is the unity of action as a
movement from thought as purpose to thought as appraisal of achievement, and the coincidence of
the actuality of action and its concept in that unity. It is misunderstood if it is treated as something
which in principle could be private, a metaphysical happening in a particular agent, without social
mediation by a reality resistant of individual purposes. To begin with, the social nature of action is
missed if actual achievement is not distinguished from both purpose and appraisal, and conceived
as their mediation. A performance is not an action because it is caused in a certain way or results
from a volition or other special antecedent state, but because of its place in the social mediation of
thought with thought.
7. The attempt to see the concept of action realized immediately in volition is a strategy of
independence with varieties analogous to the strategies of independence pursued by the stoic and
the sceptical consciousness. Where the cognitive stoic withdraws into his freedom to interpret as
appearance and hence in a certain sense assign the significance of experience and thus master it, the
volitional stoic withdraws into his freedom to attempt, which reality is powerless to interfere with.
The stoic admits other descriptions of his actions are possible, but insists that their true significance
is to be found only in the description under which they were purposed. The volitional sceptic, more
radically, would identify action with volition, treating willing as the only sort of action possible (as
the cognitive sceptic identifies knowledge with appearance). Intentionalism finds what is to be
appraised (that is, the achievement) in the purpose, and thus is to be understood as
committed to one or the other of these strategies of independence.
Now, the Sache selbst in being merely willed...has the meaning of an empty purpose and of a unity
of willing and achievement only in thought. [414]
In "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" Sellars offers an account of the perversity of the
Cartesian attempt to base all knowledge on that privileged knowledge of the mental for which no
mistake is possible. Ordinary claims to knowledge express an endorsement of a content by the
claimer. Error is possible insofar as that endorsement cannot be redeemed or vindicated
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justificatorily in the context of other claims which may come to be established. In the ordinary case
of a non-inferential report such as "that is red", the subject does two things: expresses a responsive
disposition to call the object red and endorses the claim that it is red. Appearance talk, as in "that
appears (looks, seems) red" is explained as secure from error only because in saying that something
looks red one expresses the same responsive disposition, but explicitly does not endorse the claim
one is responsively disposed to make. Since no claim is endorsed, no error is possible. [There are
subtleties arising from the extension of this account of looks talk from first person uses to third
person attributions, and the subsequent possibility of first person uses of third person forms in self
attributions, but we ignore these here.] Once this account of the source of the incorrigibility of
"looks"-talk is grasped, it can be seen how inappropriate this sort of secure cognition is for playing
the role of original or basic knowledge which can only be extended by inference beyond the realm
of appearance by incurring for the first time the risk of error. For appearance talk so understood
presupposes reality talk (the ability to use the safe "looks" presupposes the ability to use the risky
"is"). Claims about how things look secure their independence from error simply by withholding
the endorsements which could turn out to be inappropriate. But one must have mastered the
practice of making such endorsements before one can engage in a practice of withholding such
endorsements.
8. A similar diagnosis might be offered of volitions as that privileged form of action on the mental
for which no failure of achievement is possible. As language entries require both responsive
dispositions and resulting endorsements, so language exits require both dispositions to perform and
commitment to an achievement under the description expressing the purpose of the action.
Corresponding to "that is red", we have expressions of language exits such as "I shall start the car".
Corresponding to "that looks red", which withholds endorsement of the "is" claim, we have "I shall
try to start the car", which withholds commitment to achieving the intended result. One may if one
likes treat minimal "tryings" as a special kind of action, one that one cannot try to accomplish and
fail. But as on the side of cognition, one must not think of these as the original kind of actions,
which are only extended to extra-mental actions at risk of failure of achievement. For once again,
one must already have mastered the social practice of committing oneself to an accomplishment
before one can master the practice of occasionally expressing an intention while withholding such
commitment. "Trying" talk is parasitic on "doing" talk, and abstracts a derivative private (as in
"privation") and only apparently independent dimension from the social, essentially dually
perspectival practice of undertaking commitments and appraising achievements others have
undertaken commitment to. The picture of action as demarcated from other behavior by the causal
role played by volitions in bringing it about thus rests on the reification in the causal order of an
inversion in the order of explanation. The identification of the active self with its volitions as a
way of realizing the notion of action immediately, the strategy of the honest consciousness, is thus
a doomed strategy of independence. The notion of action can be realized only with the social
mediation of others, not by contracting the self to a circle of transparence to cognition and action,
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but by expanding it to include the whole cycle of social linguistic practice returning to itself out of
the mediation of reality in cognized action which is the real Sache selbst.
9. The deficiencies of this immediate conception the relation between the certainty and the truth of
action, what it is for the agent and what it is in itself, are manifested also in ways that do not have
analogues in the discussion of Sense Certainty. For Hegel the performance as achieved or
accomplished is the publicly accessible of a content whose private aspect is that performance as
intended. If this connection is denied, as the honest consciousness does, then the distinction that
action implies introduces systematic deception about the true nature of the action. For that true
nature is identified exclusively with the intention, which is publicly misrepresented by
achievements that diverge from intentions.
Since in the this alternation consciousness keeps, in its reflection one moment for itself and as
essential, while another is only externally present in it, or is for others, there thus enters a play of
individualities with one another in which each and all find themselves both deceiving and
deceived." [416]
The "play of individualities" who acknowledge and attribute determinately contentful commitments
and responsibilities is as essential to the expression by particular performances of determinate
contents as the corresponding "play of forces" is for understanding, or the system of properties for
perception". Indeed, these ought to be understood as abstractions from the social-perspectival cycle
of action and experience. So action cannot be adequately understood by seizing one-sidedly on one
of its aspects as independent and essential, and treating the public, external aspect as inessential.
Doing so turns acting into deceiving. Action is deception, if only the volition that lies hidden
within it matters. This is not in fact what action is. As we have learned
Actualization is, on the contrary, a display of what is one's own in the element of universality
whereby it becomes, and should become, the affair of everyone. [417]
As a result, the honest consciousness implicitly contradicts its explicit understanding of itself and
its action every time it acts.
...in doing something, and thus bringing themselves out into the light of day, they directly
contradict by their deed their pretence of wanting to exclude the glare of publicity and participation
of all and sundry. [417]
Deception thus goes deeper into the honest consciousness, which holds fast to what it (merely)
meant to do. In conceiving of itself and others as essentially and in principle deceivers about their
intent, it shows itself to us as deceived.
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It is then equally a deception of oneself and of others if it is pretended that what one is concerned
with is the 'matter in hand' alone. [418]
II. Normative Status made Explicit, but as Form Without Content: Lawgiving and Lawtesting
Reason in VCb and VCc
10. The honest consciousness, understanding its action as immediate achievement, did not
acknowledge the norms or universals in play in deliberation and assessment regarding its
intentional performances. But now the normative statuses and the determinate universals they
involve, which were always implicit in acknowledging and attributing actions become explicit in
the form of principles.
A movement corresponding to that from sense certainty to perception will run its course here. [410]
Just as, on the side of inputs to thought, Perception retains the immediacy of Sense Certainty's
conception of knowledge, while acknowledging the necessary element of universality, so
Lawgiving Reason retains the immediacy of the honest consciousness' conception of action, while
acknowledging the necessary element of universality. Each of these conceptions treats its
universals as immediate and independent. Given the greater sophistication we have acquired in the
course of the exposition of the Phenomenology since the discussion of Consciousness, we are in a
position to see that the determinate contentfulness of universals cannot adequately be conceived as
independent of the social context in which they are applied. The phenomenal consciousness being
considered, however, treats the universals it acknowledges as immediately authoritative (cf. [420]).
We know that the social cycle of action and experience, the concrete communal coping with the
distinction that action implies, is what infuses universals with determinate content. We now see
that point arise explicitly out of the experience of phenomenal consciousness in the form of
lawtesting reason. As now explicitly concerned with the normative or universal element in action,
it addresses itself to the "determinate laws of the absolute essence," ([420]) which Hegel
(anticipating the discussion of Spirit) calls "masses". By analogy to the immediacy of authority of
the sense universals Perception understands its cognition in terms of
These laws or 'masses' of the ethical substance are immediately acknowledged [recognized,
anerkannt]; We cannot ask for their origin or justification, nor can we look for any other
warrant...[420]
Progress is represented by the explicit acknowledgment of the determinately contentful norms or
universals, but in the conception of the authority of those norms as immediate, which it retains, we
can see the remnants of more primitive conceptions that still must be gotten over.
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Just as in the case of sense-certainty we had to examine the nature of what it immediately expressed
as being, so here, too, we have to seen how the being expressed by this immediate ethical certainty,
or by the immediately existing masses of the ethical substance, is constituted. [423]
11. The discussion that ensues depends on the interplay of four different commitments that the
form of self-consciousness Hegel calls Lawgiving Reason has undertaken: to action as
fundamentally normative in involving the applicability of norms or universals by which it is
assessed, to those norms being what is made explicit in propositional form in laws (cf. [424]), to
those norms in the form of laws standing in an immediate relation both to the one who applies them
in assessment and to whom they are applied in assessment, and to the determinate contentfulness of
those norms-as-laws.
Sound Reason knows immediately what is right and good. Just as it knows the law immediately, so
too the law is valid for it immediately, and it says directly: 'this is right and good'--and, moreover,
this particular law. The laws are determinate; the law is the 'matter in hand' itself filled with
significant content. [422]
The law is determinately contentful in distinguishing, in the assessments it authorizes, between
particular performances that meet its standard and those that do not qualify. That distinguishing is
done by saying explicitly, in propositional form, what qualifies and what does not. Both the
understanding of what is said by the one applying the law and the bindingness of its application are
immediate. This latter is the remnant of the honest consciousness' insistence that the Sache selbst,
its true deed, toward which any assessment of the agent would have to be addressed, extends no
farther than what is immediately available to the agent. (Unfortunately, as the experience of the
honest consciousness showed, under such a conception the distinction that action implies appears in
the form of universal deception, which precludes assessment at all.) Consciousness understanding
its own action as governed by given laws cuts itself off from the possibility of properly
understanding determinately contentful norms and their relation to the laws that make them explicit
by this residual commitment to the immediacy of those laws.
12. The difficulty is that laws don't define or apply themselves. Their possession of determinate
content depends on their being caught up in the practices of an actual community, which applies
and misapplies them in a concretely developing social cycle of action and experience of action.
Hegel considers two examples, 'Everyone ought to speak the truth,' in [424], and 'Love thy
neighbor as thyself,' in [425]. The point of the examples is not that you can't say what you mean,
for instance "Speak the truth," but that you can't do so autonomously or independently. You need
the audience to help by applying what you say, by understanding it in practice. What in a particular
instance counts as "loving thy neighbor", what particular performances would help and which
harm, depends on contingencies of circumstance that stretch both beyond the certain ken of those
who would apply the rule in deliberation and assessment and beyond what can explicitly be
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specified in the rule. The commandment stops short of telling us what to do in particular cases,
according to the understanding of "telling us what to do" that is available on the model of
immediacy and independence. Add the sort of practical understanding that is mediated by the
experience and activity of the community whose concepts are employed in stating the law, and one
can understand how the commandment can tell us what to do. But this is not available to the
consciousness that understands its action in terms of the applicability of given laws. Hegel's
conclusion from the examples of provisos that turn out to be implicit in the explicit statements of
norms or universals in the form of laws is that
It is evident from the nature of the case that we must give up all idea of a universal, absolute
content." [426]
We must give up the idea of a rule that does not need us to apply it, one that says what is right or
when a given concept applies in a way conceivable independently of the practical activity and
experience of the community whose concepts are employed in stating the law.
13. Paragraph [429] provides a summary of VCb:
A distinction within the simple ethical substance [BB: the distinction that action implies] is for it
an accident which appeared, as we saw in specific commandments, as the contingency of the
knowledge [of the circumstances], or the circumstances themselves, and of the action.
So it is possible to lay down a rule to perform an action of type A in circumstances of type C, but:
i) One does not necessarily know when its conditions of application are satisfied; ii) the conditions
to apply the rule may never be satisfied (so it is potentially vacuous); and iii) the attempt to do A
may fail. These are all contingencies that are not explicitly addressed by the rule itself, and in the
nature of the case they could not be. They mean that one cannot immediately know what is right
and do it, even given the rule. "Knowing the content as something determinate" is incompatible
with the purely "formal universality", which is the only sort acknowledged. What is required is that
the Sache selbst as it appears to individual consciousness "is no longer the inert unthinking genus",
the merely formal universal, "but is related to the particular and regarded as power over it and as its
truth". The point is that the content in not something independent, over and above the communal
practice of applying it, of grappling with contingencies of types (i), (ii), and (iii) above, and trying
to make the law mean something in spite of an in the midst of them. This sort of understanding of
laws and the concepts in terms of which they are expressed is anything but immediate. It includes
dealing with the law's incompatibility with other demands and laws, as the working out of the
examples of specific commandments in [424] and [425] shows. We have seen that this sort of
clarification by application in experience is the matrix within which determinate contents arise.
The next form of phenomenal consciousness considered, Lawtesting Reason, preserves its
commitment to the immediacy and purely formal nature of the authority of the explicit laws in
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terms of which it understands its own action by treating the determinate contents of laws too as
something given and immediate, something that can be taken for granted without explanation.
It takes up their content simply as it is, without concerning itself, as we did, with the particularity
and contingency inherent in its reality. [429]
14. Lawtesting Reason treats the contents of proposed laws as given to it, and inquires only into
the formal adequacy of those laws. Thus it limits itself to concern with consistency. But any actual
concept, when inquired into carefully, will exhibit a moment of individuality, by which it is
distinguished from other concepts, and a moment of universality, by which it is identified as one
among that system of concepts. The identity of any concept accordingly points beyond that
concept to others that are incompatible with it. To an eye prepared only for formal or abstract
negation, the content-constituting determinate negations implicit in the content of any concept
appear as internal contradictions. Paragraph [430] rehearses arguments (these are one-sided
arguments, not ones that Hegel himself endorses) to the effect that the concept of non-property, or
the absence of property is self-contradictory. These take the form of arguing that, depending on
how that concept is combined with other concepts, it could entail that what otherwise would be
property is distributed either equally, or by need. But these are incompatible in many cases, and
there is no purely formal reason to prefer one to the other. Paragraph [431] rehearses arguments to
the effect that the concept of property has an inconsistent content. This is because property is in its
essence exclusive of the use of others, but as consisting in being universally recognized, it is
inclusive of others.
Consequently, property is just as much an all-round contradiction as non-property; each contains
within it these two opposed, self-contradictory moments of individuality and universality. [431].
What are we to make of these arguments? The point is not that they are good arguments, but that
as long as we remain only at the level of form we can't tell that they are not good arguments. If we
think only of the formal opposition of exclusive/inclusive, the concept of property indeed seems to
exhibit both. The determinate way in which it combines these, its identity in difference, is its actual
content, and this is what Lawtesting Reason resolutely refuses to delve into. The distinction
between the sense in which property is exclusive of use by others, but inclusive in its reference to
their recognition, and the precise way these relate to one another is part of the matter of the
concept, not its form, and so not something Lawtesting Reason is permitted to acknowledge as
decisive for its evaluation. There is always a level of abstraction at which a concept can be shown
to exhibit formally contradictory properties, precisely because the distinction reconciling them
resides in the content rather than the form that has been abstracted. Thus any law, any norm, can be
found wanting. This result should be filed away for future reference when we consider the way in
which any action can be shown to be based on self-interest or other low motives by the resentfully
assessing attitude of the Kammerdiener (in VIC). The problem of the incompatibility of
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immediacy and determinateness of explicit norm cannot be solved by relinquishing the immediate
authority of content and retreating to the immediate authority of form.
...the process of placing immediate determinateness in the ethical substance, and then getting to
know whether the results are laws, has been eliminated." [432]
15. In [433] we are told that Lawgiving and Lawtesting Reason are "forms of the honest
consciousness". Given the way the honest consciousness has been interpreted in Part IV above,
why? They both understand "that which gives force and validity to commandments" to be
something immediate. The honest consciousness also pursues a strategy of immediacy, restricting
ethical action, the object to which the attitudes of deliberation and assessment that Lawgiving and
Lawtesting Reason are directed, to what can be done immediately (without being subject to the
distinction that action implies). We have seen that in fact the identity of both the contents of what
is done and the contents of the concepts in terms of which those performances are assessed and
deliberated about are thoroughly mediated by their relations to the concepts, commitments,
community, and circumstances in which they are developing in the cycle of action and experience.
Immediacy itself must be understood only in terms of its role in this cycle. The following
paragraph sets up the parallel between consciousness understanding itself as immediately giving
and following laws and Stoicism as a kind of voluntarism.
"...to legislate immediately is tyrannical insolence which makes caprice into law..." [434]
Consciousness understanding itself as formally testing given laws and concepts, and finding them
wanting, is similarly seen as a pursuing a strategy parallel to that of Scepticism, in its stubborn
misunderstanding of all negation as abstract negation.
"...the insolence of a knowledge which argues itself into a freedom from absolute laws, treating
them as alien caprice."
In this way, the universal substance is not understood as concretely contentful and binding in virtue
of its mediation by the acknowledgment of others, but as both merely formal and contentful only
insofar as it is filled up arbitrarily by immediacy.
16. The section ends with a discussion of how we should think of things, in particular of how we
should think of the role and contentfulness of the commandments and concepts that have been used
as examples along the way. All of these forms of consciousness are alike in mistakenly thinking
that they can determine the applicability of various concepts in assessment of action immediately
by their activity. They are right that the applicability of norms is a matter of their activity, but
wrong in thinking they can establish norms as contentful and binding immediately. The activity of
individual self-consciousness does define and establish those norms as binding, but only as
mediated by everything else that participates in the concrete development of the community
through the cycle of action and experience. Thinking of the establishment of norms as something
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that I can do immediately is incompatible with conceiving of them as determinately binding. For
that requires taking it that
...whether this or the opposite determination is the right, that is determined in and for itself. [437]
Compare the similar argument made on the cognitive side, to the effect that the applicability of
universals must be conceived as something we answer to, else we are not considering them as
applicable to an objective world, and so not as corresponding to properties at all. I must
acknowledge the ethical substance in order to be applying its determinately contentful concepts at
all.
By acknowledging the absoluteness of the right, I am within the ethical substance; and this
substance is thus the essence of self-consciousness. But this self-consciousness is the actuality and
existence of the substance, its self and will.
We have gone as far as we can go with alienated conceptions of norms, which cannot coherently
conceive those norms as both binding on the activity of our individual self-consciousnesses and as
instituted by that activity. Accordingly the exposition now passes from consideration of alienated
conceptions of aspects of developing spiritual substance, to the consideration of that development
itself, beginning with its fall into alienation.
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