1.  What necessity is in truth in self-consciousness, it is also that for its new pattern in which self-consciousness is what is necessary as such, knowing immediately that it has the universal, law, in itself.  This law is immediate in the being for itself of consciousness, so it is called the law of the heart [V.B. Self-realization §13.4 M].  ²For itself as singularity, this pattern is essence, just like the previous one, only now the richer for taking this being for itself as something necessary, universal.

2.  The law that is thus immediately self-consciousness' own law, or a heart that yet has a law within it, this is the goal which it sets about realizing.  ²We have to look at whether that realization corresponds to this concept and whether it really experiences this its law as its essence within that realization.

3.  A reality confronts this heart, for in the heart the law is initially only for itself, not yet realized and thus also something other than the concept.  ²This other determines itself here as an actual reality that is antithetical to what is to be realized.  Here we have the contradiction between law and singularity.  ³It is thus on the one hand a law pressurizing single individuality, a powerful order of the world contradicting the law of the heart.  On the other hand, there is a humanity suffering under it that does not follow the law of the heart, but is oppressed by an alien necessity.

– ⁴This actual reality appearing over against the current pattern of consciousness is clearly nothing other than the previous split relation of individuality and its truth, the relation of a cruel necessity by which the former is crushed.  ⁵For us, the previous motion opposes the new pattern because this one essentially issued from it; the moment from which it emerged is clearly necessary for it.  In fact, lacking any consciousness of its origin, that moment appears to this pattern as something pre-existing, its own essence, something for itself, the negative opposed to this positive in itself.

4.  This individuality must therefore focus on overcoming the necessity contradicting the law of the heart, along with the suffering it causes.  ²It is thus no longer the frivolity of the previous pattern that only sought its own pleasure [V.B.a. Pleasure and necessity §3.5 ff. M].  Now it is the seriousness of a high purpose that seeks its joy in the demonstration of its own excellent essence and in bringing about the well-being of mankind.  ³What it realizes is just the law and its pleasure is then also the universal joy of all hearts.  ⁴The two are inseparable for it; its pleasure is lawful as such and implementing the universal law of mankind ensures its own joy.  ⁵For within its self individuality and necessity are immediately one and law is the law of the heart.  ⁶Individuality has still not moved from its position and the unity of the two has not emerged from their mediating motion, not yet through discipline [V.B.c. Virtue and the way of the world §1.5 M].  ⁷The realization of raw, undisciplined nature amounts to the demonstration of something excellent and to securing the well-being of mankind.

5.  In fact, of course, the law confronting the law of the heart is quite separate from the heart and free, for itself.  ²A people subject to it does not live in the happy unity of law and heart, but, on the contrary, in cruel separation and suffering or at least missing the enjoyment of the self in obeying law and lacking a consciousness of its own excellence when it goes beyond the law.  ³Because the divine and human order in power is separated from the heart, it is a mask for the heart, a mask that should lose what is still associated with it, namely commanding power and actual reality.  ⁴In its content that order may happen to agree with the law of the heart, which can then put up with it.  However, pure lawfulness as such is not the essence for the law of the heart, but a clear awareness of its self therein, so that the heart satisfies itself in it.  ⁵Where, however, the content of universal necessity does not agree with the heart, that necessity is, even in terms of its content, nothing in itself and has to bow to the law of the heart.

6.  The individual thus implements the law of his heart, which becomes universal order and the joy in a reality that is in and for itself lawful.  ²Unfortunately, it vanishes in the realization.  All that's left is the scenario that should have been overcome.  ³Paradoxically, implementation is what destroys the law of the heart.  ⁴What goes wrong is that it acquires the form of being, becoming a universal power indifferent to this heart and, once again, when the individual sets up his own order, all he finds in it is nothing other than his own order.  ⁵Implenting his law does not produce his law, but rather, since in itself the implementation is his own but an alien one for the law, all he does is get himself tangled up in the actual, existing order.  Indeed, what he gets himself tangled up in is not only alien to him, but an enemy, an oppressor.

– ⁶His action establishes him in, or rather as the universal element of given, actual reality; his act should, even in terms of his own intention, have the value of a universal order.  ⁷But with that his individuality has set itself free from him.  It grows and spreads as universality for itself and purges itself of singularity.  The individual who only wants to know universality in the form of his immediate being for itself thus does not recognize itself in this free universality, even as he remains subject to it as his own act.  ⁸The action thus does the reverse, contradicting the general order, for his action is supposed to be the act of his own particular heart, not free universal reality.  In this, however, he has indeed recognized it, for the action has the significance of asserting his essence as free actual reality and that means acknowledging the given reality as his essence.

7.  The concept of his action enables the individual to determine more closely how the actual universality, to which he has made himself subject, turns against him.  ²As actual reality, his act belongs to the universal  The content of that act, however, is his own individuality, which seeks to maintain itself as this individual act opposed to the universal.  ³We're not talking about just any law here.  It's about the immediate unity of the individual heart with universality.  Elevated into what should be effective as law, the thinking here is that every heart must find itself in whatever is set up as law.  ⁴But only the heart of this individual has set its actual reality in his action expressing his own being for itself, his joy.  ⁵His act should count immediately as universal, i.e. it is in truth something particular and only has the form of universality; it's the particular content that has to be taken as universal.  ⁶This is why the others don't find in this content the law of their heart.  They're more likely to find someone else's law implemented and then, precisely according to the universal law that everyone should find their heart in law, they turn against the reality that set up that law even as the law turns against their reality.  ⁷At first the individual found the fixed, rigid law opposed to his good intentions and contemptuous of them, now he gets that from the hearts of the people.

8.  The nature of realization and effectiveness as such is that as given, existing being, in its truth it is inherently universal.  The consciousness we have here, however, knows nothing of that because initially it knows universality only as immediate universality and necessity only as the necessity of the heart.  Realization and effectiveness are the universal in which the singularity of consciousness that entrusts itself to it in order to exist as this immediate singularity in fact suffers its downfall.  Instead of finding this - its own - being, it only ends up in being with the alienation of its self.  ²It does not recognize itself here [V. B. a. Pleasure and necessity §4.9-12 M], but at least this is no longer dead necessity.  Now it is necessity animated by universal individuality.  ³It took this divine and human order, which it found in force, as a dead reality in which it, having fixed itself as the heart existing for itself against the universal, and those subject to that order would not have any consciousness of their selves.  In fact it finds the order animated by the consciousness of all, the law of all hearts.  ⁴Actual reality is animated order.  This is the experience in which it realizes the law of its own heart.  For this means nothing other than that individuality becomes an object to itself as a universal, in which, however, it does not recognize itself.

9.  What emerges to this pattern of self-consciousness as the truth of its experience contradicts what it is for itself.  ²That takes the form of absolute universality for it; as such it is the law of the heart that is immediately one with self-consciousness.  ³At the same time the existing and living order is self-consciousness' own essence and its own work.  It produces nothing other than this order, which stands likewise in immediate unity with self-consciousness.  ⁴Tied in this way to a split, antithetical essence, this self-consciousness is inherently, in itself contradictory, shattered to its innermost depths.  ⁵The law of this heart is just that in which self-consciousness recognizes itself; but it is precisely the realization of this law that has made the general order in force just as much self-consciousness' own essence and its vital reality.  Thus the contradiction in his consciousness lies in the fact that for him both – the law of the heart and its realization – take both forms: essence and its own reality.

10.  This is his downfall and he is perfectly well aware of it.  When he declares this moment to be the result of his experience, he lays open his inner self-reversal as the madness of consciousness for which its essence is immediately inessential, its reality immediately unreal.

– ²This madness cannot be seen as merely a matter of mistaking what has no essence for the essential, what is unreal for reality, as if whatever is essential or real for one individual could just as well be neither for another and the consciousness of reality and unreality or of essence and the inessential were quite separate.

– ³If something really is actual and essential for consciousness as such, but not for me, then, in my consciousness of its nullity I, being myself consciousness as such, also have the consciousness of its reality.  Fixed in this way, the two constitute a unity that is madness in general.  ⁴It only involves one object deranged for consciousness, not consciousness as such in and for itself.  ⁵In the result of the experience that has emerged here, however, consciousness is aware of its self in its law as this specific reality.  Now exactly the same essence, exactly the same reality is alienated from it, or has become alien to it, so self-consciousness, as absolute reality, is aware of its own unreality.  Both sides are immediately the essence even in their contradiction!  That essence is mad down to its innermost depths.

11.  The heart beating for the well-being of mankind thus passes over into the raving madness of conceit, the rage of consciousness defending itself from destruction.  It struggles to throw out, to project the derangement, which is its self, outside itself and to regard it as, indeed to declare it to be, another.  ²It declares the general order to be something invented by fanatical priests, luxuriating despots and their servants compensating for their debasement with oppression and debasement of those beneath them, a perversion of the law of the heart and its happiness causing endless suffering for deceived humanity.

– ³In its madness, consciousness declares individuality to be distorted, the deranging force, but one that is alien and coincidental.  ⁴In fact, the heart, the singularity of consciousness that wants immediate universality, is this distortion and the maddening force itself and the outcome of its action is merely that this contradiction emerges into its consciousness.  ⁵After all, truth is for it the law of the heart, something merely meant, intended which, unlike the existing order, has not outlived the day, but perishes before the day is over.  ⁶His law should have reality and in this, law is reality for him, goal and essence as the prevailing order, while reality, the law and prevailing order, is just as immediately for him null and void.

– ⁷By the same token its own actual reality, the heart as singularity of consciousness, is what it regards as essence; but it is its goal to establish its own reality as given, existing.  In fact, then, the essence or purpose as law is rather immediately its own self as something not singular, not individual at all, i.e. as a universality that it should be for his consciousness.

– ⁸This is its concept, which, through its action becomes its object; in this the heart experiences its self as something unreal and the unreality as its reality.  ⁹What is full-spectrum deranged and deranging is thus not a coincidental and alien individuality, but in fact this heart itself!

12.  Immediate universal individuality is deranged and deranging, so that means this universal order, being the law of all hearts, i.e. of the deranged ones, is no less in itself deranged and just what raving madness declared it to be.  ²On the one hand, in the resistance that the law of one heart encounters in another individual, it reveals itself to be the law of all hearts.  ³The existing laws are defended against the law of one individual, because they are not unconscious, empty and dead necessity, but spiritual/mental universality and substance in which those in whom it has its reality live as individuals, fully conscious of themselves.  When they complain about this order, claiming that it runs counter to the inner law, and hold on to the opinions of the heart against that order, then in fact they cling to it as their essence with their hearts.  When they are deprived of this order or they set themselves beyond it, then they lose everything.  ⁴Because the reality and power of public order lie precisely in this, it appears then as the general and animated essence identical to itself with individuality as its form.

– ⁵But it is precisely in this form that this order is deranged.

13.  The law of all hearts is that in which all individuals are immediately this universal.  Still, this order is only the actual reality for individuality existing for itself, i.e. the reality of the heart.  ²The consciousness that sets up the law of its heart thus runs into resistance from others because it contradicts the similarly individual laws of their hearts and in their resistance these do nothing other than set up their law and put it into force.  ³This universal is clearly just universal resistance, everyman's struggle against everyone else [Hobbes' bellum omnium contra omnes M], in which each asserts his own singularity without actually succeeding in realizing it because everyone experiences the same resistance.  They are all mutually nullified by all the others.  ⁴What appears to be public order is in fact this general feuding in which each grabs what he can, exercises justice on the singularity of the others and secures his own interests, which are similarly nullified through those of others.  ⁵This is the way of the world, the appearance of a persistent course, that is merely a meant, intended universality whose content is rather the game of fixations of singularity and their dissolution, all devoid of essence.

14.  If we now confront the two sides of general order with each other, the latter universality [the way of the world] has for its content the restless individuality for which what is meant, singularity, is law, reality is unreal and unreality is real.  ²It is, however, at the same time the side of the actual reality of order, since it possesses the being for itself of individuality.

– ³The other side is the universal as calm essence, but precisely for that reason only something inner that is not simply nothing, but certainly not actual reality, and can only become real by overcoming the individuality which has usurped reality.  ⁴This pattern of consciousness, i.e. only becoming essence, but not singularity, to itself in the law, in the inherently true and good, and knowing individuality to be deranged and deranging and for that reason having to sacrifice the singularity of consciousness, this pattern of consciousness is virtue.