1.  Considering how things stand with the antithesis in this realm, it's clear that self-consciousness has not yet emerged in its full right as single individuality.  Here it counts only as universal will on the one side and as the blood of the family on the other.  This single individual is here no more than an unreal shadow [VI.A.a. Customary ethical world etc. §6.13; §5.12 and §11.2 below].

– ²No act has as yet been undertaken, but the act is the real, actual self.

– ³The act disturbs the calm organisation and motion of the customary ethical world.  ⁴What here appears as order and harmony of both its essences, each of which confirms and completes the other, is turned by the act into a transition between opposites, in which each now proves to be the nullity of itself and the other rather than their confirmation.  It even becomes the negative motion, the eternal necessity of terrible fate that consumes the divine, as well as the human, law – just as it does both the self-consciousnesses in which these powers have their existence – in the abyss of its simplicity.  For us, it transits into the absolute being for itself of the pure, single self-consciousness [§9.7 below M].

2.  The realm of customary ethics is the ground from which this motion emerges and on which it proceeds; but the activity in this motion is self-consciousness.  ²As ethical consciousness it is the simple, pure orientation to the essential force of customary ethics, i.e. to duty.  ³There is no caprice, nor struggle, nor indecision in this self-consciousness, for making and scrutinising law has been given up.  Now that essential force of customary ethics is immediate, unshakeable and free from contradiction.  ⁴It's not like a bad play with a collision of passion and duty.  Nor like a comedy either with a collision of one duty and another, which is, in content, the same as the collision between passion and duty.  Passion can, after all, also be seen as duty, because, when consciousness pulls back out of its condition of immediate substantial essence, duty becomes the formal universal in which any content would fit as we saw above [V.C.c. Reason scrutinizing law §§2, 3 M].  ⁵The collision of duties is comic when it expresses the contradiction, an antithesis of absolutes, i.e. the absolute against the immediate nullification of that so-called absolute or duty.

– ⁶Customary ethical consciousness, however, knows what it has to do and is decisive, whether it belongs to the divine or to the human law.  ⁷This immediacy of its decisiveness is an implicit condition, a being in itself, which gives it simultaneously the significance of a natural condition, of natural being, as we have seen.  Nature, not the coincidence of circumstances or choice, assigns the one gender to one law and the other to the other, or conversely, these two ethical powers give themselves in the two genders their individual existence and realization.

3.  The customary ethical order thus consists essentially in this immediate decisiveness, so for consciousness the one and only law is its sole essence, while on the other hand since the ethical powers are real in the self of consciousness, they take on the sense of excluding each other and standing opposed to each other.  In self-consciousness each is for itself, where in the realm of customary ethics each is only in itself.  ²Customary ethical consciousness has decided for one of them, which is what makes it essentially character.  The two do not have the same essential quality for consciousness.  This is why the opposition appears as an unhappy collision of duty only with a lawless reality.  ³Ethical consciousness is self-consciousness in this opposition and as such it sets out to subjugate to the law to which it adheres the opposed reality by violence, or else to deceive it.  ⁴With right only on its side and injustice on the other, each sees only what belongs to the divine law on its side and on the other side only human, arbitrary violence.  What is ascribed to human law on the other side is self-interest and the disobedience of inner being for itself.  The orders of the government are universally valid and lie open before the public.  The will of the other law, however, is subterranean, the meaning sealed within, which in its existence appears to be the will of a single individual and to contradict the first, to be an outrage against it.

4.  The opposition between what is known and what is not known now emerges in consciousness just as, in substance, we had that of conscious and unconscious.  The consequence is that the absolute right of customary ethical self-consciousness falls into conflict with the divine right of essence.  ²For self-consciousness as consciousness, objective reality as such has essence.  In terms of its substance, however, self-consciousness is the unity of itself and that objective reality, its antithesis.  Further, customary ethical self-consciousness is the consciousness of substance.  Hence the object as set opposed to self-consciousness has completely lost the significance of having essence for itself.  ³Since the patterns in which the object is merely a thing [A. Consciousness; B. Self-consciousness; and C.AA. Reason: A. Observing reason and B. Self-realization of rational self-consciousness] are long gone, now the spheres in which consciousness fixes something from itself, making a single moment into essence, are also behind us.  ⁴Actual reality has a power all its own to deal with such one-sidedness.  It stands in an alliance with the truth against consciousness and only now reveals to consciousness what the truth is.  ⁵This ethical consciousness has drunk from of the chalice of absolute substance the forgetting of all one-sidedness of being for itself, of its goals and peculiar concepts, and thereby has drowned in this Stygian water all its own essential qualities and the independent significance of objective reality.  ⁶Its absolute right is thus that, in acting according to customary ethical law, it finds in that realization nothing other than the implementation of this law itself so that the act does not reveal anything other than what customary ethical action is.

– ⁷The customary ethical order, absolute essence and absolute power simultaneously, cannot suffer any inversion of its content.  ⁸If it were only absolute essence without power, it could be overturned by individuality; but this as customary ethical consciousness, with the abandonment of one-sided being for itself, has renounced such overturning; just so would naked power, in contrast, be overturned by essence if it were still such a being for itself.  ⁹For the sake of this unity individuality is the pure form of that substance which is the content, while the action is the transition from thought to reality only as the motion of an antithesis devoid of essence, whose moments have no special content and essential character distinguishing them from each other.  ¹⁰The absolute right of this ethical consciousness is thus that the act, the pattern of its actual reality, is nothing other than that it knows.

5.  The customary ethical essence has split itself into two laws, however, and consciousness as an undivided activity of relating to law is assigned to only one of them.  ²Just as this integral consciousness insists on the absolute right that, as customary ethical consciousness, essence should appear to it as it is in itself, so this essence insists on the right of its reality, i.e. on being doubled.  ³This right of essence does not stand confronting self-consciousness, as if it were somewhere else, for it is self-consciousness' own essence.  Only therein does it have its existence and its power and its opposite is the act of self-consciousness.  ⁴For this, precisely in being self to itself and moving into action, raises itself out of simple immediacy thus asserting the split itself.  ⁵Through the act it abandons the defining edge it had in the customary ethical order, that of being the simple certainty of immediate truth, asserting the splitting of itself into the active agent and the opposing reality, which for it is a negative reality.  ⁶The act thus turns self-consciousness into guilt.  ⁷For the act is its action, its most characteristic essence.  Guilt here takes on the significance of a crime: as simple ethical consciousness self-consciousness committed itself to one law and abandoned the other, against which it now transgresses with its act.

– ⁸Guilt is not the indifferent essence ambiguous in the sense that, as it actually is before the light of day, it might be the action of its self or just as well not, as if something external and contingent could attach to the action that did not belong to it making it innocent.  ⁹No, the action is this splitting itself, asserting itself for itself and opposed to it an alien, external reality; that external reality is part of, and only exists through, the action.  ¹⁰Innocence is then only inaction, perhaps the being of a stone, but certainly not that of a child.

– ¹¹In terms of content, customary ethical action has the moment of crime within it because it does not overcome the natural distribution of the two laws to the two genders, remaining within the undivided orientation to the law in natural immediacy; so then its action is that of making this one-sidedness into guilt, grasping only the one side of the essence and relating negatively to the other, i.e. transgressing against it.  ¹²Where in universal customary ethical life guilt and crime, action and behaviour fall will be more precisely determined later.  At this point it is at least immediately clear that it is not this single individual who acts and is guilty; for as this self, he is merely the unreal shadow [§1.1 above and §11.2 below], he is no more than the universal self, while individuality is purely the formal moment of the action whose content consists of the laws and customs, more specifically for the single individual, those of his station, his class.  He is substance as genus, which its specific characteristic turns into species, although the species remains the universal of the genus.  ¹³Within the people, self-consciousness declines from the universal only to particular quality, not down to single individuality asserting an exclusive self, a reality negative to itself within its action.  Rather, a secure trust in the whole lies at the foundation of its action and in that foundation nothing alien, no fear nor enmity is intermixed.

6.  Customary ethical self-consciousness now experiences in its own act the developed nature of actual action, whether it submitted to the divine law or to the human one, just the same.  ²The law revealed to it is linked in the essence to the opposed side; the essence is the unity of the two.  The act, however, has only executed the one against the other.  ³Linked to this in the essence, the satisfaction of the one calls the other up as what the act has made of it, namely a transgressed, and now enemy, essence demanding revenge.  ⁴Only the one side of the decision is revealed to the action.  That decision, however, is in itself the negative such that another stands against it, something alien to the decision, which is the knowledge, stands opposed to it.  ⁵Reality thus holds the other side, alien to knowledge, hidden within itself and does not show itself to consciousness as it is in and for itself.  It does not show the son [Oedipus] his own father in the man who insults him, the man the son knocks down dead.  It does not show the son his own mother in the queen he takes to wife.  ⁶A power shy of exposure follows in this way ethical self-consciousness, which only bursts forth when the act is accomplished and takes hold of that self-consciousness through it, for the accomplished act is the opposition overcome, the opposition namely of the knowing self and the actual reality standing against it.  ⁷The one acting cannot deny the crime and his guilt.  The act is precisely this: to move the immovable bringing forth what is still enclosed only in possibility, thereby tying the unconscious to the conscious, non-being to being.  ⁸In this truth then the act steps into the sun such that within the act something conscious is linked to something unconscious, what is its own to something alien, as the split essence whose other side consciousness experiences also as its own, but still as the enemy power transgressed by it and dangerously aroused.

7.  It could be that the right, the law, that was waiting in ambush is not present in its characteristic form for the acting consciousness, but only in itself, in the inner guilt of the decision and the action.  ²But customary ethical consciousness is more complete, its guilt purer, when it knows the law and the power it confronts in advance, when it sees in it only violence and injustice, a customary contingency, and still knowingly commits the crime, like Antigone [Oedipus' daughter].  ³The done deed reverses its perspective on the situation.  It declares the accomplishment itself, that what is custom must also be actual, for turning the purpose into actual reality is the whole point of the action.  ⁴The action declares the unity of actual reality and substance.  It declares the reality not to be merely coincidental to the essence, but that in league with each other the two will acknowledge nothing that is not true law.  ⁵Customary ethical consciousness, in view of this reality and its own action, must acknowledge what stands against it as its own.  It must admit its own guilt:

        In our suffering, we acknowledge that we have transgressed.

                                                [Sophocles Antigone line 926 M].

8.  This acknowledgement, the admission, expresses the overcoming of the conflict between the ethical purpose and reality; it expresses the return to the customary ethical disposition which knows that nothing holds but what is right.  ²With this acknowledgement, however, the agent surrenders his character and the reality of his self and goes under.  ³His being lies in belonging to his customary ethical law as his substance.  In acknowledging the opposite law, however, his customary ethical law ceases to be substance to him and what was his reality turns into unreality, mere sentiment, attitude.

– ⁴Substance certainly does appear in individuality, as its pathos, and individuality appears as what animates substance and thus stands over it.  Substance is, however, a pathos that is also the character of the agent.  Customary ethical individuality is immediately, inherently one with this character, the universal of pathos; this individuality has its existence only in that.  This all means it cannot survive the downfall this customary ethical power suffers at the hands of the opposing law.

9.  Still, it can at least be certain that the individuality, whose pathos is this opposed power, does not suffer anything worse than the pain it inflicts.  ²The motion of the ethical powers in relation to each other, as well as that of the individualities giving them life and putting them into action, has only achieved its true end here, namely that both sides suffer the same downfall.  ³For neither of the powers has anything over the other that would make it somehow more essential as a moment of substance.  ⁴The same sort of essence and the indifferent persistence of both, cheek by jowl, is what constitutes their selfless being.  The act is what turns them into beings with a self, but that also makes them different, which contradicts the unity of the self leading to their lawlessness and their necessary downfall.  ⁵Similarly, depending on pathos or substance, character belongs only to one of them, but it is also true that in terms of knowledge both are split into conscious and unconscious parts.  Now, each generates its own opposition between conscious and unconscious.  Also, since its own act makes ignorance part of its work, each drives itself into the guilt that consumes it.  ⁶The victory of one power and its character and the defeat of the other side would thus be only a partial result, an incomplete work, that must inevitably advance forward to the balance of the two.  ⁷Only with the equal subjugation of both sides is absolute right, absolute law, consummated with the emergence of the ethical substance as the negative power consuming both sides, i.e. all-powerful, just fate.

10.  The image of their structured struggle emerges when we take the two powers in terms of their determinate content and its individuation.  On its formal side it is the struggle of the customary ethical order and self-consciousness against unconscious nature and a contingency present in it.  Nature and its contingency has a right over self-consciousness, because the latter is only the true spirited mind, only in immediate unity with its substance.  In terms of content, the struggle is the conflict between divine and human law.

– ²Youth steps out of unconscious essence, out of the family spirit, becoming individuality in the community.  But that individuality still belongs to the nature youth has just torn itself out of, which is demonstrated by the fact that it breaks up into the contingency of two brothers [Eteocles and Polyneices, Antigone's brothers], both with equal rights to the community they proceed to subjugate.  Entering into the customary ethical community, now the difference of earlier and later birth is for them a difference of nature and hence of no significance at all.  ³But the government, the simple soul [uncle Creon], the self in the spirit of the people, cannot bear a doubling of individuality and the ethical necessity of this unity confronts nature as the coincidence of plurality.  ⁴This creates disunity between the two and their equal right to state power shatters both of them, both being in the wrong.  ⁵Looked at in human terms, he has committed a crime who is not in possession when he attacks the community at the head of which the other stands.  It's the one who knew how to take the other as a single individual separated from the community and drive that impotent one out who has right on his side.  He went for the individual as such, not the essence of the human law.  ⁶The community, attacked by empty singularity, defended itself against it and preserves itself, while the brothers both inflict mutual downfall on each other.  The individuality that attaches the danger of the whole to its own being for itself ostracised itself from the community and dissolves itself within itself.  ⁷The community will honour the one, however, who stood on its side; while the other, who announced its desolation and destruction even as he mounted the walls, will be punished by the government, the re-established simplicity of the community's self, all the way to depriving him of its last honour.  Whoever comes to attack the highest spirit of consciousness, the commonwealth, must be deprived of the honour of his whole, completed essence, the honour of the departed spirit.

11.  The universal easily pushes off the very peak of its pyramid carrying off the victory over the rebellious principle of individuality, the family.  In fact, however, with this the universal has only begun the struggle with the divine law, the mindful spirit conscious of itself with the unconscious.  For this latter is the other power, which is also essential and hence not destroyed by the former, but only wronged by it.  ²Against the law in power, open to the light of day, the unconscious can only call upon the assistance of bloodless shadows [§1.1 and §5.12 above] for its actual execution.  ³The law of the weak and of darkness, it is thus initially subject to the law of the day and of force, for its power holds sway beneath but not upon the earth.  ⁴Unfortunately, however, actual power, having deprived the inner power of its honour and force, has with that only consumed its own essence.  ⁵The revealed spirit has the roots of its power in the underworld.  The self-confident and self-sustaining certainty of the people has the truth of the oath binding its all-in-one only in the unconscious and dumb substance of all, in the waters of forgetfulness.  ⁶This is how the fulfilment of the revealed spirit of the day turns into its opposite and it learns that its highest right is the highest injustice, its victory is rather its own downfall.  ⁷The dead one, whose rights have been transgressed, knows how to find instruments for its revenge, which are no less real and powerful than the power that injured it.  ⁸These powers are other communities whose altars are besmirched by dogs or birds with the corpse.  The dead one is not elevated into the unconscious universal by receiving the return it deserves to the elemental individual, but is left on the earth in the realm of actual reality.  As the power of the divine law, now it acquires a self-conscious, actual universality.  ⁹Those other communites become enemies and destroy the polity that has dishonoured and broken its own force, the piety of the family.

12.  In this account the motion of human and divine laws finds the expression of its necessity in individuals, in whom the universal appears as a pathos and the activity of the motion as individual action, which gives that necessity the appearance of contingency.  ²But individuality and action constitute the principle of singularity as such, which in its pure universality was called the inner divine law [VI.A.a. Customary ethical world §4.1 ff. M].  ³As a moment of the visible community, it has not only that subterranean – in its existence, external – effectiveness, but also an existence and motion just as visible in the actual people.  ⁴Taken in this form, what was presented as the simple motion of individualized pathos takes on a different aspect and then the crime and ensuing destruction of the community take on the genuine form of their existence.

– ⁵The human law is thus: in its universal existence, the community; in its activation in general, masculinity; and in its actual activation, the government.  In these principles the human law is, moves and maintains itself; and it does all that by consuming and internalizing the separatism of the penates [VI.A.a. Customary ethical world §5.5 and §12.6], the families' assertion of independence, presided over by the women, and by keeping them dissolved in the continuity of its flux, its own fluidity.  ⁶But the family is obviously its element, while individual consciousness is its universal activating ground.  ⁷The community only ensures its own continuity by interrupting family happiness and dissolving self-consciousness in universal consciousness, so it creates its own internal enemy in what it oppresses and what is simultaneously essential to it, namely woman as such.  ⁸Woman – the eternal irony of the community – changes the universal purpose of the government with intrigues into a private purpose, transforms its universal activity into a work of this particular individual and usurps the general property of the state, making it a possession and decoration of the family.  ⁹With this, woman makes the serious wisdom of mature age – now that it has lost its singularity in joy and pleasure, as well as in real activity, and only thinks and produces the universal – into an object of contempt and jokes for wayward and immature youth, unworthy of its enthusiasm.  This is how she elevates the force of youth across the board to the one that really counts: of the son, whom the mother gave birth to for her lord; of the brother, in whom the sister has a man her equal; of the youth, through whom the daughter, freed of her dependence, achieves the pleasure and the dignity of the married woman.

– ¹⁰The community can only sustain itself through the oppression of this spirit of singularity and, because this spirit is an essential moment, the community actually generates it, while through the oppressive stance against it, driving it to enmity against the community.  ¹¹This principle, however, in separating itself from the general purpose, which makes it merely evil and inherently null and void, can do nothing unless the community itself acknowledges the power of youth, masculinity, even though it is not mature and still stands within singularity, as the force of the whole.  ¹²For it is a people, a polity.  It is itself individuality and essentially only for itself in the sense that other individualities are for it while it excludes them from itself and knows itself to be independent of them.  ¹³The negative side of the community, internally suppressing the separation of the individuals and externally self-active, has its weapons in individuality.  ¹⁴War is the spirit and form in which the essential moment of customary ethical substance, the absolute freedom of the customary ethical self-essence, or being with a self, from all existence, is present in its actual, confirmed reality.  ¹⁵By giving the single systems of property and personal independence, just like that of single personality itself, the feeling of the power of the negative, this negative essence raises itself within it as the sustaining factor in the whole.  Courageous youth, in which the feminine finds its joy, is the repressed principle of decay and spoiling and it emerges into the light of day to become the decisive factor.  ¹⁶Now it is the natural force and what appears to be coincidence and luck that determines the existence of the customary ethical community and its spiritual/mental necessity.  However, when the existence of that ethical community rests on strength and luck then its destruction is already a done deal.

– ¹⁷As we just saw [§12.5 above M], only the penates were destroyed in the spirit of the polity, but here the living spirits of the people suffer their downfall through their own individuality and are submerged into a universal community, whose simple universality is spiritless and dead and whose vitality is the single individual, as an isolated one.  ¹⁸The customary ethical pattern of the spirit has disappeared and now another takes its place.

13.  This downfall of ethical substance and its transition into another pattern is thus determined by the fact that customary ethical consciousness here is essentially directly, immediately oriented to law.  This directness is all that ensures that nature enters into the activity in this ethical order.  ²Its reality reveals only the contradiction and the germ of decay, a germ present in the beautiful unanimity and the calm balance of the customary ethical spirit precisely in this calm and beauty.  For the directness has the contradictory significance of both the unconscious calm of nature and the self-conscious, unruly calm of mindful spirit.

– ³This naturalness is all that makes this customary ethical polity an individuality determined by nature and to that extent limited, so that it suffers its overcoming, its downfall, through another.  ⁴Unfortunately, this definiteness, its naturalness, which is a limitation in terms of its existence but just as well the negative in general and the self of this individuality, vanishes and with it goes the life of the spirit, everyone's self-conscious substance.  ⁵Instead the substance turns into a formal universality in them; no longer a living spirit dwelling within them, the simple solidity of their individuality is exploded into a myriad points.