C. SPIRIT IN THE CONDITION OF BEING CERTAIN OF ITSELF: MORALITY

[[Translator's comments: The following section deals with the final and highest stage in the life of finite spiritual experience as realized in the concrete form of a historical society. Here the substance of the social order is the real content of the self-conscious individual: that substance has become subjectified; we have therefore a self-contained spiritual subject. The discordance involved in the sphere of culture and enlightenment is overcome by the self knowing and realizing itself as a completely universal self-determining free will, its world within itself, and its self its own world. Each reflects the whole (the totality of social life) in itself so perfectly that what it does is transparently the doing of the whole as much as its own doing. Such a sphere of spiritual existence is Morality, the all-sufficient spiritual order of the finite spirit as an individual. The meaning assigned to "morality" here is that expressed by Kant when he says that morality is "the relation of actions to the autonomy of the will, i.e. to possible universal legislation through maxims of the will". In other words, all the universality constituting the interrelations of finite spirits in a society is epitomized in the soul of the acting individual, who can thus quite legitimately look upon itself as the self-regulating source of all universal conditions of action.

It is inevitable that such a concrete mode of experience should have and should pass through various stages in the process of various aspects fully realizing its nature. The individual may lay exclusive stress on the self-completeness which he possesses through being the source and origin of his own laws. His self-legislative function, just because it carries with it the sense of universality, may appear so supremely important that all the actual detail of his life comes to be treated as external, indifferent, and contingent. This detail no doubt is essential to give body and substance to his spiritual individuality, but the universality of his will so far transcends each and every detail of content as to seem by itself the sole and all-sufficient reality of his being. The content of his life only enters into consideration as an element to be regulated and made to conform to the universal: the relation so constituted between content and universal is found in the consciousness of Duty. Since the content is thus subordinate, though absolutely essential to give even meaning to the idea and the "fulfilment" of duty, and since the universal is the supremely important fact, not merely is duty to be fulfilled for duty's sake, but the duty in question is pure duty. The "good will" is the purely universal will, and is the only will in the world from this point of view.

In the first section (a) Hegel analyses this phase of the moral life.

The historical material the writer has in mind is a moral attitude which came into prominence at the time of the Romantic movement towards the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. It found its philosophical expression in the moral theories of Kant and Fichte; and Lessing may be taken as a typical representative in literature of the same attitude.]]