1.  The universal unity into which the living, immediate unity of individuality and substance returns is the spiritless, soulless community that has ceased to be the unselfconscious substance of the individuals.  Now those individuals count in it only with their isolated being for itself as beings with a self [V.A.b. Customary ethical action etc. §12.14] and substances.  ²The universal has exploded into the atoms of an absolute number of individuals and this dead spirit is an equality in which everyone has the same value as every other, just as a person [IV.A. Lordship and bondage §10.8].

– ³The hidden divine law [VI.A.a. Customary ethical world §§4, 5 M], as it it was called in the world of the customary ethical order, has now come out of hiding and steps into the daylight of actual reality.  There the single individual figured, was actually real, only as the universal blood [III. Force etc. §31.1] of the family.  ⁴As this single one he was the spirit cut-off, without a self [VI.A.a. Customary ethical world §§6, 7 M], but now he has emerged from his unreality.  ⁵This ethical substance is only the true spirited mind [VI.A.b. Customary ethical action etc. §10.1] and that's why the individual returns back into his self-certainty; he is that substance as the positive universal, but his actual reality consists in being a negative universal self.

– ⁶We saw the powers and the patterns of the ethical world sink into the simple necessity of empty fate [VI.A.b. Customary ethical action §9.7 M].  ⁷This is their power: substance reflecting itself in their simplicity; but the absolute essence reflecting itself into itself, precisely that necessity of empty fate, is nothing other than the ego, I, of self-consciousness.

2.  This stands from here on as essence existing in and for itself.  This state of recognition is its substantive character, which is abstract universality because its content is this fixed, unyielding self, not the self dissolved in substance.

3.  Personality has stepped out of the life of ethical substance.  It is now the actually valid independence of consciousness.  ²We saw earlier the unreal thought of that, emerging through an act of renunciation of reality, in the form of stoic self-consciousness.  This emerged from lordship and bondage, the immediate existence of self-consciousness, and just so does personality emerge from the immediate spirited mind that is at once the universal, dominant will of all and their servile obedience.  ³What was the in itself only in abstraction for stoicism is now the real world.  ⁴Stoicism is here nothing other than the consciousness that brings the principle of legal status, spiritless, soulless independence, to its abstract form.  Its flight from reality brings it only to the thought of independence.  Stoicism is absolutely for itself because it does not attach its essence to any particular existence, instead abandoning all such and asserting its essence solely in the unity of pure thought.  ⁵In the same way the right of person is not related to a richer or more powerful existence of the individual as such, nor to a universal living spirit, but now only to the pure one of his abstract reality, to it as self-consciousness in general.

4.  This now repeats the earlier motion of stoicism in the realization of its abstract independence.  ²Then stoicism transited into the sceptical confusion of consciousness, in the drivel of the negative, stumbling without form from one contingency of being and thought to another, resolving, or dissolving, the negative into absolute independence only to regenerate it again [IV.B. Freedom of self-consciousness §9.8-13 M].  There really is no more to it than the contradiction of dependence and independence of consciousness.

– ³Similarly, personal independence in law is essentially this same general confusion and mutual dissolution.  ⁴For what was seen as absolute essence is self-consciousness as the pure, empty one of the person.  ⁵Against this empty universality, substance assumes the form of filling, content, which is now left completely free and unordered; for the mindful spirit is no longer present that subjugated it and held it together in its unity.

– ⁶This empty one of the person is thus in real terms just a contingent existence, motion and action without essence that finds no persistence.  ⁷Just like scepticism, the formalism of law is, given its concept, devoid of characteristic content.  It confronts a diverse, pre-existing form of persistence, namely possession, and impresses the same abstract universality as scepticism on this, calling it property.  ⁸That reality determined in this way is called simply illusory appearance in scepticism and only has a negative value, but now in law it has a positive value.  ⁹That negative value consists in the fact that reality has the significance of the self as thought, as the inherently universal, while the positive value here lies in 'mine', in the sense of the category [V. Certainty and Truth of Reason §5 - 8] whose validity is recognized and actual.

– ¹⁰Both are the same abstract universal.  The actual content, the definiteness of being 'mine' – whether that's a question of external possession or of the inner riches or poverty of the spirit, mind and character – is not contained in this empty form and does not concern it in any way.  ¹¹It thus belongs to a power all its own, something other than the formal universal; it is arbitrary, chance.

– ¹²The consciousness of law experiences in its actual implementation the loss of its reality; the fact of being completely irrelevant.  This makes designating an individual a person an expression of contempt [IV.A. Lordship and bondage §10.8].

5.  The free power of the content is determined in such a way that by its nature it collects the dispersed absolute multiplicity of personal atoms into one point alien, and just as spiritless, to them all.  The point is partly a pure single reality quite as fixed as their personalities, while, in contrast to their empty singularity, the point also has the meaning for them of being all content, and hence real essence.  Against their supposed absolute reality, which is inherently devoid of essence, it is the universal power and absolute reality.  ²This lord of the world considers himself in this way the absolute person encompassing all existence within himself, for whose consciousness no higher spirit or mind exists.  ³He is a person, but a lonely one confronting all, i.e. those who constitute the valid universality of the person, for the single individual as such is true only as the universal multiplicity of singularity.  Cut off from this, the lonely self is really the unreal, powerless self.

– ⁴At the same time it is the consciousness of the content confronting that universal personality.  ⁵This content, liberated from its negative power, is the chaos of the spiritual/mental powers, which, freed from their chains, move as elemental essence in wild dissipation madly and destructively against each other.  Their impotent self-consciousness is the powerless enclosure and the ground of their tumult.  ⁶Knowing itself thus to be the embodiment of all actual powers, this lord of the world is the grotesque self-consciousness who knows himself to be the actually real god; but being only the formal self incapable of containing these powers, his motion and enjoyment of himself are no less grotesque dissipation.

6.  The lord of the world has the real consciousness of what he is, the universal power of actual reality, in the destructive violence he exercises against the self of the subjects confronting him.  ²For his power is not the unanimity of mindful spirit, in which the persons could recognize their own self-consciousness; instead each is a person for itself, the absolute fixation of their pointedness excluding continuity with others.  Their relation to each other is negative just like their relation to him and he is their only sense of relatedness or continuity.  ³As this continuity, he is the essence and the content of their formalism; but he is the content alien to them and the enemy essence, which is exactly what overcomes, eliminates, what counts as their essence for them, the being for itself devoid of content.  As the continuity of their personality, he destroys this too.  ⁴Legal personality thus experiences its lack of substance as the content alien to it asserts its validity within it, because that alien content is its reality.  ⁵The destructive raking around in this ground without essence, in contrast, only becomes aware of its omnipotence.  This self, mere desolation, is thus only outside itself and really more about throwing its self-consciousness away.

7.  This is how self-consciousness looks in terms of being actual reality as absolute essence.  ²But the consciousness driven out of this reality back into itself thinks only of its own irrelevance.  We saw earlier how the stoic independence of pure thinking went through scepticism and ended up finding its truth in the unhappy consciousness, the truth of the relation it has with its being in and for itself.  ³Then this knowledge only appeared in this way as the one-sided view of such a consciousness; but here its real truth has emerged.  ⁴It consists in the fact that this universal validity, this universally acknowledged authority, of self-consciousness is the reality alienated from it.  ⁵This validity is the universal reality of the self, but it is also immediately the inversion, the loss of its essence.

– ⁶The actual reality of the self not present in the customary ethical world has been gained by its return back into the person and what was formerly present in harmonious unity now emerges in a developed form, but alienated from itself.