1.  The antinomy of the moral world view that there exists a moral consciousness and that there does not, that duty's validity is a beyond of consciousness and, conversely, that it must lie within consciousness, was summarized in the claims that non-moral consciousness is moral, its contingent knowing and willing is of the highest importance and it finds happiness from grace.  ²Moral self-consciousness did not take responsibility for these contradictions pushing them onto an essence other than itself [VI.C.a. Moral world view §14.2 - §17 and §§10, 11 ("finds happiness from grace") M].  ³Setting things it must regard as necessary outside itself is just as much a contradiction in terms of form as the others are in terms of content.  ⁴In fact, the terms that appeared to be contradictory, which the moral world view tried clumsily to deal with by separating and then dismantling them, are inherently the same thing, pure duty, namely, as pure knowledge and that is nothing other than the self of consciousness, which, further, is being and actual reality.  Similarly, what is supposed to be beyond actual consciousness is nothing other than pure thinking and thus, again, in fact the self.  So for us or in itself, self-consciousness returns back into itself and knows that essence to be itself in which what is actual is simultaneously pure knowledge and pure duty.  ⁵Self-consciousness sees itself as completely valid even in its contingency and it knows its immediate singularity to be pure knowledge and action; true, actual reality and harmony.

2.  The self of conscience, spirited mind immediately certain of itself as absolute truth and being, is the third self that has emerged to us from the third world of spirit/mind and must now be briefly compared with the previous ones [VI.B. Self-alientated spirited etc. §3.7].  ²[1] Totality or actual reality, which presents itself as the truth of the customary ethical world, is the self of the person and its existence is the state of recognition.  ³Just as the person is the self empty of substance, so is the latter, its existence, no less abstract reality.  The person certainly has his validity; indeed, immediately.  The self is the point immediately at rest in the element of its being [VI.A.c. Legal status §2 M].  It exists without being cut off from its universality and so both are not in motion and relation with respect to each other.  The universal has no differentiation within it, nor is it content of the self; and neither is the self filled by itself.

– ⁴[2] The second self is the world of culture and education that has arrived at its own truth, the spirit of division that has been returned to it – absolute freedom.  ⁵In this self that first immediate unity of singularity and universality comes apart.  The universal, which remains just as much pure, spiritual/mental essence as it is recognized, universal will and knowledge, is object and content of the self and its universal actual reality [VI.B.III. Absolute freedom and the Terror §3.2-4 M].  ⁶But its form is not existence free of the self.  Fulfilment doesn't happen in this self and it doesn't arrive at any positive content, it doesn't arrive at any kind of world.  ⁷Moral self-consciousness does let its universality free so that it becomes its own nature, but it also holds it firmly within it overcome [VI.C.a. Moral world view §2 M].  ⁸It is just the duplicitous game of alternation between these two terms.  ⁹[3] Only as conscience does it have in its self-certainty the content for the previously empty duty, for empty right, and for empty universal will.  It has existence too because this self-certainty is immediate.

3.  Once arrived at its truth, moral self-consciousness leaves the separation within itself behind, or better: it overcomes it; the separation namely from which the distortions of duplicity emerged, the separation of the in itself and the self, of pure duty as the pure goal and actual reality as a nature and sensuousness set opposed to the pure goal [VI.C.A. Moral world view §14.2 ff M].  ²Moral self-consciousness has thus returned back into itself and as such is concrete, moral, spirited mind that does not set itself a standard in the consciousness of pure duty that would be opposed to actual consciousness.  Now pure duty is, just like the nature opposed to it, overcome, a moment.  Spirited mind here is in immediate unity the moral being realizing itself and its action is immediately concrete, moral, embodied form.

4.  We now have a case of action [VI.A.a. Customary ethical world etc. §1.2].  It is an objective reality for knowing consciousness.  ²Conscience, this knowing consciousness, knows the case in an immediate and concrete manner and the case is only as this knowing consciousness knows it.  ³Knowledge is contingent when it is something other than the object; the spirited mind certain of itself, however, is no longer such a contingent knowledge and production of thoughts within itself from which actual reality would be separate.  Now that the separation between the in itself and the self has been overcome, eliminated, the case is now immediately one of the sense certainty of knowledge as much as it is in itself.  Moreover, it is in itself in this way only as it is in this knowledge.

– ⁴The action as realization here is the pure form of will, the mere inversion of actual reality as a given, existing case into a done, completed reality, of the mere mode of objective knowledge into the mode of knowledge of actual reality as one produced by consciousness.  ⁵Just as sense certainty is immediately accepted into the in itself of spirit/mind, or better, is inverted, just so is this inversion also simple, integral, and unmediated; a transition that happens through the agency of the pure concept without any change to the content, determined by the interest of the consciousness that knows of it.

– ⁶Conscience does not separate the circumstances of the case any further into distinct duties.  ⁷It does not behave as a positive universal medium in which the many duties would each acquire a solid, unmoved substantial character, so that either action is completely impossible or, if action is undertaken, one of the opposed duties is actually transgressed.  Action might be impossible if each concrete case contained some kind of opposition, with the moral case containing a conflict of duties, which would mean that action would always include one side, one duty that is betrayed.  ⁸Conscience is rather the negative one [VI.A.a. Customary ethical world etc. §7.10 and §10.5] or the absolute self that destroys these distinct moral substances.  It is simple, dutiful action that does not fulfil this or that duty, but that knows concrete right and does it.  ⁹It is thus first moral action as the action into which the previously passive consciousness of morality has transited [VI.C.b. Duplicity §5.5 ff M].

– ¹⁰The concrete embodied form of the act may be analysed into various properties by differentiating consciousness, i.e. here into different moral relations and these can either each be declared to be absolute, as it must be if it is to be a duty, or they can be compared and examined.  ¹¹In the simple moral action of conscience the duties are simply thrown around so that all these individual essences are immediately terminated and, given the unshakeable certainty of conscience, raking over the duties to examine them doesn't happen at all.

5.  Conscience is just as free of that running back and forth in uncertainty of consciousness, the running about that now projects so-called pure morality outside itself into another, a holy being, seeing itself as the unholy one, now, however, claims moral purity for itself and projects the linkage between sensuousness and morality into the other being [VI.C.a. Moral world view §§8-11 and VI.C.b. Duplicity §8.3-§12 M].

6.  It repudiates all these attitudes and dissemblances of the moral world view when it repudiates the consciousness that took duty and reality to be contradictory [VI.C.a. Moral world view §3 ff M].  ²According to this now I act morally when I am aware of only doing pure duty and nothing else, which really means only when I don't act at all.  ³When I actually act, however, I am aware of something different from myself, an actual reality that is given, and of another one I wish to produce.  I have a specific goal and I fulfil a specific duty.  There is something different here from the pure duty that should alone lie in my intention.

– ⁴Conscience, in contrast, is the consciousness of the fact that when moral consciousness asserts pure duty to be the essence of its action, then this pure goal is a distortion of things.  The matter itself is that pure duty consists in the empty abstraction of pure thinking and has its actual reality and content only in a specific reality, in a reality, that is, which is one of consciousness itself, but not a thing of thought, rather a single individual.  ⁵For itself conscience has its truth in its immediate self-certainty.  ⁶This immediate, concrete certainty of itself is the essence.  Looked at in terms of the antithesis of consciousness [as that of form and content], its own immediate singularity is the content of moral action and its form is precisely this self as pure motion, i.e as knowledge or personal conviction.

7.  In terms of its unity and the significance of the moments, we can see that while moral consciousness only grasped itself as the in itself or essence, as conscience, however, it grasps its being for itself, its self.

– ²The contradiction of the moral world view resolves itself, i.e. the difference lying at its foundation reveals itself to be no difference at all, running together into pure negativity, which is precisely the self.  It is a simple, integral self that is pure knowledge as much as it is knowledge of itself as this single, individual consciousness.  ³This self thus constitutes the content of that previously empty essence, for it is actual and it no longer has the significance of being a nature alien to that essence and independent in its own laws [VI.C.a. Moral world view §1.7 M].  ⁴As the negative, it is the difference of the pure essence, a content; indeed, one that is valid in and for itself.

8.  Further, this self as pure, self-identical knowledge is what is simply universal so that precisely this knowledge as its own knowledge, as conviction, is duty.  ²Duty is no longer the universal confronting the self; now it is known that in this separation it has no validity.  It is now the law that exists for the sake of the self, not the self existing for its sake.  ³Law and duty thus do not only have the meaning of being for itself, but also that of the in itself, for its self-identity is precisely what makes this knowledge the in itself.  ⁴The in itself also separates itself in consciousness from that immediate unity with being for itself and in this confrontation it is being, being for another.

– ⁵Duty is now known as the duty that has been abandoned by the self, i.e. only a moment; it has declined from absolute being to being that is not even self, that is not for itself, but being for another [VI.C.a. Moral world view §1.1 M].  ⁶That is exactly why this being for another remains an essential moment.  The self as consciousness constitutes the opposition between being for itself and being for another, so now duty is immediately actual in itself, no longer merely abstract, pure consciousness.

9.  This being for another is thus the substance that exists in itself distinct from the self.  ²Conscience has not abandoned pure duty or the abstract in itself; rather, pure duty is the essential moment relating to others as universality.  ³Conscience is the common element of the self-consciousnesses and it constitutes the substance in which the act has persistence and actual reality, the moment of being recognized by the others.  ⁴Moral self-consciousness doesn't have this moment of being recognized, of a pure consciousness that is there, which is why moral self-consciousness is no kind of acting at all and not something that realizes anything.  ⁵Its in itself is for it either the abstract, unreal essence or being as an actual reality that has nothing of spirit or mind to it.  ⁶The existing reality of conscience, however, is something that is self, i.e. it is existence aware of itself, the spiritual/mental element of being recognized.  ⁷The action is thus only the translation of its personal content into the objective element, in which that content is universal and recognized.  The fact that the content is recognized is what turns the action into actual reality.  ⁸The action is recognized, and consequently actual, because the existing reality immediately links up with conviction, knowledge; which is another way of saying that knowledge of its goals is immediately the element of existence, universal recognition.  ⁹For the essence of the action, duty, lies in conscience being convinced of it and this conviction is precisely the in itself; it is what is in itself self-consciousness or the state of being recognized and hence actual reality.  ¹⁰What is done out of conviction of duty is thus immediately something that has existence and persistence.  ¹¹There is no more talk of good intentions not working out or that goodness is having a bad time [VI.C.a. Moral world view §3 and VI.C.b. Duplicity §10.2 M].  In fact, what is known as duty executes itself and makes it into reality precisely because what is dutiful is the universal of all self-consciousness, what is recognized; it is what exists because it is recognized.  ¹²Cut off and taken alone without the content of the self, however, this duty is being for another; it is transparent and is no more than content-free essence as such.

10.  Let's now take a look back at the sphere with which spiritual/mental reality first emerged.  The concept there was that individuality's expression was the in and for itself [V.C. Individuality in and for itself real to itself §§1-3 M].  ²But the pattern that immediately expressed this concept was the honourable consciousness that operated with the abstract matter itself.  ³This matter itself was there a predicate [V.C.a. Spirit/mind animal kingdom §14.4 and §15 ff M], but first in conscience is it the subject that has all the moments of consciousness established within it; for it all these moments, substance as such, external existence, and the essence of thinking are encompassed within this self-certainty.  ⁴The matter itself has substance as such in the customary ethical order; it has external existence in education and culture; and it has the self-knowing, essential character of thinking in morality.  Finally, in conscience it is the subject that knows all these moments to be within it.  ⁵Where honourable consciousness can only grasp the empty matter itself, conscience, in contrast, acquires it full up, a filling conscience itself gives the matter itself.  ⁶It is this power by virtue of knowing the moments of consciousness as moments and dominating them as their negative essence.

11.  Looking at conscience in relation to the individual terms of the antithesis appearing in action and its awareness of the nature of that antithesis [VI.A. True spirited mind etc. §1.2; §12.3 below], it is clear that conscience relates initially as knowledge to the reality of the case in which action is to be undertaken.  ²If the moment of universality lies in this knowledge, then encompassing the pre-existing reality without any restrictions belongs to the knowledge of acting in good conscience.  Thus the circumstances of the case must be known precisely and they must all be taken into consideration.  ³However, universality is but a moment in this knowledge, so as a knowledge of these circumstances it is aware that it does not encompass them at all, i.e. that it is not acting in good conscience.  ⁴A truly universal and pure relation of knowledge would be a relation to something that is not antithetical to itself; but through the opposition that lies essentially within it action relates to a negative of consciousness, to a reality existing in itself.  ⁵In contrast to the simplicity of pure consciousness, the absolute other, multiplicity in itself, is an absolute diversity of external circumstances that extends into infinity breaking down backwards into this diversity's conditions, sideways in its serial array, and forwards into its consequences.

– ⁶The consciousness of conscience is aware of this nature of the situation and of its relation to it.  It knows that it doesn't really know the case in which it is acting according to this required universality, so its claim to be considering all external circumstances in good conscience is null and void.  ⁷This knowledge and weighing up all external circumstances is not completely absent, but only present as a moment, as something that is only for another.  Its incomplete knowledge, because it is its knowledge, counts for it as sufficient, complete knowledge.

12.  The same thing happens with the universality of essence or with the efforts of pure consciousness to define the content.

– ²The conscience launching into action refers to the many sides of the case.  ³The case breaks itself down, as does the relation of pure consciousness to it [VI.A. True spirited mind etc. §1.2; §11.1 above], which makes the diversity in the case into a plurality of duties.

– ⁴Conscience knows that it must choose among and decide between them.  None of them is absolute in character nor in its content; only pure duty is absolute.  ⁵Still, this abstraction has achieved the meaning of the self-conscious ego, I.  ⁶Self-certain mindful spirit rests calmly as conscience within itself and its real universality, its duty, lies in its pure conviction of duty.  ⁷This pure conviction here is quite as empty as pure duty.  It is pure in the sense that nothing in it is duty, no specific content is duty.  ⁸Action should, however, be undertaken and it must be determined by the individual.  The in itself has achieved the significance of self-conscious ego, I, in self-certain mindful spirit, which now knows it has this character and content in the immediate certainty of its self.  ⁹In content and characterization this is natural consciousness, i.e. the instincts and inclinations.

– ¹⁰As absolute negativity of everything definite, conscience knows no content that is absolute for it.  ¹¹It makes its own determinations out of itself; while the circle of self, in which the determinations as such fall, is the so-called sensuousness; and as content derived from the immediate certainty of its self there is nothing else readily available than this sensuousness.

– ¹²Everything that counted as good or bad, as law and right in earlier patterns [V.C.b. Law-making reason; VI.A.c. Legal status; and VI.B.I.a. Education etc. §6 ff M] is something other than immediate self-certainty.  That other is a universal, which is now a being for another.  Looked at in another way, it is an object that mediates consciousness with itself and takes a position between consciousness and its own truth, in fact separating consciousness from itself rather than being its immediacy.

– ¹³For conscience, however, self-certainty is pure, direct truth.  This truth is thus its own immediate certainty of itself imagined as content, i.e. the arbitrariness of the single individual as such and the contingency of its unconscious natural being.

13.  At the same time this content counts as moral essence, as duty.  ²For pure duty is, as we saw already in the scrutiny of law, simply indifferent to all content and can bear any content [V.C.c. Reason scrutinizing law §§2,3 M].  ³Here it also has the essential form of being for itself and this form of individual conviction is nothing other than an awareness of the emptiness of pure duty and of the fact that it is only a moment, that its substance is a predicate, the subject of which lies in the individual whose arbitrariness gives pure duty content.  Each can connect to this form and its good conscience can connect with it.

– ⁴An individual increases his property in a certain way.  Each one has a duty to occupy himself with maintaining himself as well as his family.  He should be no less concerned to ensure the possibility of being useful to his neighbours and to do good to those in need.  ⁵The individual is aware that this is a duty, for this content is immediately contained in his self-certainty.  The individual sees further that in this case he fulfils this duty.  ⁶Others may consider this deception.  They look at other sides of the concrete case, while our individual sticks firmly to this side by regarding the increase of property as his pure duty.

– ⁷Others call it violence and injustice, but the individual fulfils what is his duty to assert his self-consciousness against others.  The duty of maintaining life and an ability to be useful to one's neighbours is something some may call cowardice, but he fulfils it.  What they call courage in fact undermines both duties.  ⁸Cowardice cannot be so foolish as not to know that the maintenance of life and that option of being useful to others are duties.  It cannot be unconvinced of the dutifulness of its action or that dutifulness lies in this knowledge.  Otherwise its foolishness would make it immoral.  ⁹Morality lies in the consciousness of having fulfilled the duty, so it will clearly not be lacking in the action that is called cowardice, and just as little as from what is called courage.  The abstraction called duty can handle this content just as well as any other.  It knows what it is doing as duty.  Knowing this and that dutifulness lies in the conviction of duty, it is recognized by the others.  This gives the action its validity and actual existence.

14.  This freedom lays any given arbitrary content in the universal passive medium of pure duty and knowledge as well as any other, so it doesn't help to plead that a different content should be inserted into it.  For no matter what it is, they all have the flaw of definiteness in them – from which pure knowledge is free – that medium can reject it with contempt just as it can accept any of them.  ²All content stands on the same line with the others in being definite, even if the particular seems to be overcome, accepted, in it.  ³In any given actual case duty splits into an opposition, indeed, into the opposition of singularity and universality, so it may seem as if the duty whose content is the universal itself immediately would have the nature of pure duty in this and then form and content would be totally congruent.  The consequence of this would then be that e.g. action for the universal best outcome is to be preferred to action for the individual's good.  ⁴In fact, this universal duty is substance existing in and for itself and as such is present as right and law independent of the knowledge and conviction as it is from the immediate interest of the single individual; it is thus precisely that against whose form morality is directed.  ⁵As far as its content goes, that too is definite, well-defined, to the extent that what is universally the best is opposed to the individual best; and with this conscience knows itself to be simply free of its law, taking for itself the absolute authority to submit to it, to ignore it, to leave it undone or to fulfil it.

– ⁶The next thing is that, in terms of the nature of opposition, differentiation of duty into single individual and universal is not really fixed.  ⁷What the individual does for himself also does good for the universal.  The more he busies himself with his own maintenance, the greater his options for being useful to others; but more, his actual reality itself is only this: to be and to live in relation with others.  His personal pleasure lies essentially in making what he has available to others and helping them to secure their happiness.  ⁸Fulfilling the duty to the single individual, thus to himself, also fulfils that to the general community.

– ⁹Weighing up and comparing the duties involved here would come down to calculating the advantage the community would get from an action.  This leaves morality subject to the necessary contingency of insight, while the essence of conscience lies in discarding such weighing up and calculating and in deciding by itself and for itself without such reasons.

15.  This is how conscience acts and sustains itself in the unity of being in itself and being for itself, in the unity of pure thinking and individuality, as the mindful spirit certain of itself that has its truth within itself, in its self, in its knowledge, knowledge of duty.  ²Conscience sustains itself in all that precisely by virtue of the fact that what is positive in the action – the content as well as the form of duty and the knowledge of it – belongs to the self, to its self-certainty.  Also important to conscience's self-maintenance is that whatever wishes to confront the self as its own in itself counts as untrue, as only something overcome, only as a moment.  ³So what counts is not universal knowledge as such, but its information on external circumstances.  ⁴Conscience inserts the content it takes from its own natural individuality into duty as the universal being in itself, for that is content within conscience itself and through the universal medium in which it exists this content becomes the duty performed.  This makes the empty, pure duty something overcome, a moment; this content is duty's emptiness overcome, the fulfilment, the filling.

– ⁵At the same time, conscience is completely free of all content; it absolves itself of all definite duties that are supposed to count as laws.  In the power of self-certainty it has the majesty of absolute autarky, the power namely to bind and to loose [Matthew 18.18, 19.16 M].

– ⁶This is what makes this self-determination immediately simple dutifulness; duty is knowledge itself; but this simple selfhood is the in itself, for the in itself is pure self-identity and it lies in this consciousness.

16.  This pure knowledge is immediately being for another, for as pure self-identity it is immediacy, being.  ²This being is simultaneously the pure universal, the selfhood of everything; action is recognized, acknowledged, and for that reason actual.  ³This being is the element that puts conscience immediately in the relation of equality to all self-consciousness and the meaning of this relation is not the selfless law, but the self of conscience.

17.  This right, this law, that conscience executes is also being for another, which seems to bring an inequality into conscience.  ²The duty it performs is a specific, determinate content, the self of consciousness and as such its knowledge of itself, its equality with itself.  ³Now, once performed, once asserted in the universal medium of being, this equality is no longer knowledge, no longer the differentiation that also immediately overcomes its differences.  No, within being the difference persists and the action is specific, unequal to the element of the self-consciousness of all and therefore not necessarily acknowledged.  ⁴Both sides, the acting conscience and the universal consciousness recognizing this action as duty, are equally free from the definite character of this action.  ⁵This freedom makes the relation within the common medium of the relationship rather one of complete inequality; consequently the consciousness for which the action is performed finds itself in complete uncertainty about the self-certain mindful spirit conducting the action.  ⁶This spirit acts.  It brings something definite into existence and the others hold to this being as its truth and that makes them certain of it.  Spirited mind has here declared what counts as a duty for it.  ⁷Then again, it is free of any kind of definite duty whatsoever, over it just where they claim it is actual and real.  This medium of being itself, as well as duty as inherently existent, are now just moments to it.  ⁸What spirited mind presented them with, it distorts again; in fact, it has already distorted it.  ⁹For it does not regard its actual reality as the duty and specificity presented to the others, but that which it has in its absolute self-certainty.

18.  They clearly do not know whether this conscience is morally good or evil; but not only is it impossible for them to know that, in fact they have to assume it is evil.  ²Conscience is free from the definiteness of duty and from duty as something inherently existent, so they are too.  ³They know perfectly well how to distort what it presents them with.  Conscience is something with which only the self of another is expressed, not their own.  Not only do they know themselves to be free of that, they must dissolve it in their own consciousness and destroy it through judgements and explanations just to maintain their own self.

19.  Now, the action of conscience does not only have this character of being devoid of pure self.  ²What in it should count as duty and be recognized as such is that solely from knowledge, from being convinced that knowledge of its self in the act is what makes it duty.  ³When the act ceases to have this self in it, it ceases to be what alone is its essence.  ⁴Abandoned by this consciousness, its existence would be just a common reality and the action would appear to us as pandering to its pleasure and desire.  ⁵What should be there is only essential now by virtue of the fact that it is known as the individuality expressing itself and this state of being known is the state of being recognized, i.e. what should as such have existence.

20.  The self enters into existence as a self.  The spirited mind certain of itself exists as such for others.  Not its immediate action is valid and actually real; not the determinate self, not the self as existing in itself, but solely the self that knows itself as such is what is recognized.  ²The element of persistence is universal self-consciousness; whatever enters into this element cannot be the effect of action.  The effect of the action cannot continue in that medium and is given no room.  No, only self-consciousness is what is recognized and acquires actual reality.

21.  Once again we see that language is the existence of spirit/mind [VI.B.I.a Education etc. §21 ff. M].  ²Language is self-consciousness existing for another in immediate presence, universal as this.  ³Language is the self that separates itself off from itself, becoming objective to itself as pure I = I.  In this objectivity it secures itself as this self just as it immediately flows together with the others being their self-consciousness.  It hears itself exactly as it is heard by the others and this hearing is precisely the existence that has turned into the self.

22.  The content acquired by language here is no longer that distorted and distorting, fragmented self of the world of education and culture [VI.B.I.a Education etc. §33.6 ff. M].  Now it has returned back into itself, certain of itself and of its truth, of its recognition, within its self; this is the knowledge that makes it recognized mindful spirit.  ²The language of customary ethical spirit is law, the simple command, and the complaint that is more of a tear shed over necessity, while moral consciousness remains silent [VI.A.b. Customary ethical action etc. §3.4 middle sentence: "What is ascribed to human law on the other side is self-interest and the disobedience of inner being for itself." and §7.5 Antigone quote: "In our suffering, we admit that we have transgressed." M].  Closed up inside by itself, moral consciousness still does not afford the self existence, leaving these two – existence and the self – in an external relation to each other.  ³Language only really emerges into clear relief as the midpoint of independent and recognized self-consciousnesses and then the existing self is immediately the state of being recognized, universal, multifaceted and, in this diversity, simple.  ⁴The content of the language of conscience is the self that knows itself to be essence.  ⁵This is alone what language expresses and this utterance is the true actual reality of the act and the validity of action.  ⁶Consciousness states its conviction; this conviction is that in which alone action is duty.  And the only way it is valid as duty is that the conviction is uttered.  ⁷For universal self-consciousness is free from merely existing, definite action.  Action as existence is nothing for self-consciousness; the conviction that the action is a duty is what counts and this conviction is actual in language.

– ⁸Realizing action here does not mean translating action's content from the form of the goal or being for itself into that of abstract reality, but from the form of immediate self-certainty knowing its knowledge, its being for itself, to be its essence into the form of the assurance that consciousness is convinced of the duty and knows from within itself that this duty is conscience.  This is the assurance that consciousness is convinced that its conviction is the essence.

23.  Questions as to the truth of the assurance of acting from being convinced of duty or whether what is done really is a duty, such questions and doubts have no meaning at all for conscience.

– ²The question as to whether the assurance is true assumes that the inner intention is different from the one stated, i.e. that the will of the individual self can separate itself from the duty, from the will, of the universal and pure consciousness.  The latter would be stated in the utterance, the former being the real motive force of the action.  ³In fact, this difference between universal consciousness and the single, individual self is precisely what has overcome itself and whose overcoming is conscience.  ⁴Immediate knowledge of the self certain of itself is law and duty; being its intention, the intention of immediate knowledge is what is right; all that is demanded is that knowledge knows this and clearly states it is convinced that its knowledge and will are what is right.  ⁵Stating this assurance inherently overcomes the form of its particularity; it acknowledges the necessary universality of the self.  When it calls itself conscience it calls itself pure knowing of itself and pure, abstract willing, i.e. it calls itself a universal knowing and willing that recognizes the others and is equal to them, for they are precisely this pure self-knowing and -willing, which is why it is recognized by them too.  ⁶In the willing of the self-certain self, in this knowledge that the self is essence, lies the essence of what is right.

– ⁷Whoever says he acts out of conscience speaks truly, for his conscience is the knowing and willing self.  ⁸It is, however, essential that he say this, for this self must be also the universal self.  ⁹It is not that in the content of the action, for the specificity of the content makes it inherently indifferent.  No, the universality lies in the form of the action.  The form is what needs to be actual; this form is the self that is actual in language, uttering itself as what is true, recognizing every self in this and being recognized by them.

24.  Conscience, then, in the majesty of its sublime elevation above definite laws and every content of duty, inserts arbitrary content into its knowing and willing.  Conscience is moral genius that knows the inner voice of its immediate knowledge to be the divine voice.  Knowing existence to be immediately within this knowledge is what makes it the divine creative force that has living vitality in its concepts.  ²That voice is also inherently the holy mass for its action is the observance, the viewing, of this its own divinity.

25.  The lonely mass is also essentially the mass of a congregation inwardly knowing and listening to itself as it moves forward to the moment of consciousness.  ²Self-observation is its objective existence and this objective element is the declaration of its knowing and willing as of something universal.  ³This utterance is what gives the self validity and makes the action an act of performance, execution.  ⁴The actual reality and the persistence of its act is universal self-consciousness; while the utterance of conscience asserts self-certainty as the pure and hence universal self.  The others let the action stand because of this speech in which the self expresses itself as the essence and is recognized as such.  ⁵The spirit and substance of their connection is thus the mutual assurance of their good conscience, good intentions, the joy in mutual purity and expatiating upon the wonderfulness of knowledge and expression, of cherishing and pursuing such excellence.

– ⁶This conscience has its life only hidden in God so long as it continues to distinguish its abstract consciousness from it self-consciousness.  He is immediately present in its spirit and heart, in its self; but revelation, the actual consciousness and its mediating motion, this is something other for conscience than that hidden interiority and the immediacy of present essence.  ⁷Only in the perfection of conscience is the difference between its abstract consciousness and its self-consciousness overcome.  ⁸Conscience knows that abstract consciousness is this self, which is its certain being for itself.  The in itself, on the other hand, is the abstract essence and that which is hidden from it when established apart from the self, so conscience knows that the difference between them is overcome in the immediacy of the relation of self to in itself.  ⁹For that relation is a mediating one in which the terms related are not one and the same, but distinct to each other and only one in a third term; the immediate relation in fact is nothing other than unity.  ¹⁰Consciousness elevated above the thoughtlessness that takes these differences – which are nothing of the kind – seriously, knows the immediacy of the presence of essence in it to be the unity of essence with its own self and hence its self as the living, vital in itself.  Moreover, it knows this its knowledge to be religion, which as intuited, existing knowledge is the speech of the community about its spirit.

26.  Here we see self-consciousness returned back into its innermost region from which all externality vanishes into the intuition of the I = I in which this ego, I, is all essence and existence.  ²It sinks into this concept of itself.  For it is driven to the peak of its extremes in such a way that the differentiated moments that make it real, or still consciousness, are these pure extremes not only for us, but that what is for itself, what to it is in itself and what existence have all fled into abstractions that have no hold, no substance any more for this consciousness and everything that was previously essence for consciousness has retreated back into these abstractions.

– ³Clarifed into this purity, consciousness is in its poorest pattern and the poverty that constitutes its sole possession is itself a vanishing; substance has dissolved into this absolute certainty, which is the absolute untruth that internally collapses.  It is the absolute self-consciousness into which consciousness sinks.

27.  Sinking within itself, for consciousness knowledge as substance existing in itself is its knowledge.  ²Being consciousness means it's divided into the opposition between itself and object, which object is for it the essence; but this object is completely transparent; it is its self, so its consciousness is just knowledge of itself.  ³All life and all spiritual/mental essence has returned back into the self and has lost any distinction with this I-self.  ⁴The moments of consciousness are thus these extreme abstractions, none of which persists, all of them losing itself in the others that it generates.  ⁵It is the flux of the unhappy consciousness within itself, which, however, does operate for itself within itself and is conscious of being the concept of reason, while that of the earlier unhappy consciousness was only in itself [VI.B. Freedom of self-consciousness etc. §34. M].  ⁶Absolute self-certainty, as consciousness, immediately turns them into a fading sound, into objectivity of its being for itself, but this created world is its speech, which it just as immediately hears as its echo comes back only to it.  ⁷This is why the return does not have the significance of being in and for itself in that, for the essence is not an in itself to it, but simply itself.  Neither does it have existence, for what is objective does not arrive at the condition of being a negative of the actual self, just as this does not make it into actual reality.  ⁸It lacks the power of alienation, the power to make itself into a thing and to endure being.  ⁹It lives in fear that action and existence could besmirch its interior.  To preserve the purity of its heart it flees from contact with actual reality and remains obstinately powerless to renounce the self it has driven to the ultimate abstraction, to give itself some sort of substance, i.e. to transform its thought into being, or to entrust itself to absolute difference.  ¹⁰The hollow object it creates for itself it can only fill with the consciousness of emptiness.  Its action is the longing that only loses itself in the transition of itself into an object devoid of essence, only getting over this loss by falling back into itself and ending up finding itself as one lost.  In this transparent purity of its moments of an unhappy, so-called beautiful soul, it fades out completely in itself and evaporates into a formless mist that completely vanishes into thin air.

28.  This quiet flowing together of the coreless, hollow essence of the accursed life must also be considered in terms of the other meaning of the actual reality of conscience and in the appearance of its motion; conscience must be considered in its action.

– ²The objective moment in this consciousness turned out above to be universal consciousness; self-knowing knowledge is distinguished from other selves as this self.  The language in which they all mutually acknowledge each other as acting in good conscience, this universal equality, collapses into the inequality of the single being for itself and each consciousness is similarly reflected out of its universality back into itself; this necessarily provokes singularity's opposition to the other single individuals as well as to the universal, so we now have to consider this relation and its motion.

– ³Another option is that this universality and duty has the directly opposite meaning of a determinate singularity that excludes itself from the universal, for which pure duty is only the universality that has emerged onto the surface directed outwards.  Duty only lies in the words, just a being for another.  ⁴Conscience, initially merely negative against duty as something definite and present, now knows itself to be free of duty.  When it fills the empty duty with definite content from out of itself, it has the positive consciousness of the fact that it makes itself into the content as this self.  Its pure self as empty knowledge is something free of content and definition.  The content it gives that knowledge is taken from its self as this definite self, from itself as a natural individuality [§12.7 ff. above M] and in the talk of the good conscience of its action it is indeed aware of its pure self.  Now, in the goal of its action as real content it is conscious of itself as this particular single individual and of its opposition, what it is for itself and what it is for another, the opposition between the universality or duty and its reflection from out of duty.

29.  When the opposition into which conscience enters here, when it acts, emerges in the interior of conscience, then it is also the inequality directed outward in the element of existence, the inequality of its particular singularity against another single individual.

– ²Its particularity consists in the fact that the two moments constituting its consciousness, the self and the in itself, have different values.  Self-certainty is regarded as the essence against the in itself, the universal, which is only considered to be a moment.  ³This interior perspective confronts the element of existence, universal consciousness, which regards universality, duty, as the essence, while singularity, merely for itself against the universal, only counts as a moment overcome.  ⁴Holding fast to duty in this way counts for the first consciousness as evil because it is the inequality of its interiority with the universal.  Indeed, since this also declares its action to be equality, consistent, with itself, to be duty and good conscience, it is hypocrisy.

30.  The motion of this opposition is initially the formal production of the equality between what is evil in itself and what it says.  It must emerge into clear relief that it is evil and hence that its existence is equal to its essence; the hypocrisy must be exposed.

– ²Returning this inequality within it to equality does not happen simply because hypocrisy, as one says, proves its respect for duty and virtue by disguising itself as them, using them as masks for its own consciousness as well as for others; as if in this recognition of the exact opposite there lies inherently the required equality and agreement.

– ³In fact, it is no less beyond this recognition in language and already reflected back into itself.  Rather, its use of being in itself only as a being for another reveals its contempt for the former and its lack of essence for all to see.  ⁴Anything that can be used as an external tool shows itself to be just a thing that has no weight of its own.

31.  Neither is it the case that this equality can be achieved by evil consciousness one-sidedly clinging to itself; nor, indeed, from the judgement of the universal.

– ²Evil consciousness can deny itself to the consciousness of duty, declaring what that consciousness calls badness, i.e. absolute inequality with the universal, to be an action fully in accordance with the inner laws and with conscience.  In this case, this one-sided assurance of equality remains an inequality with the other, because that other does not believe it and does not recognize it.

– ³If the one-sided clinging to one extreme resolves itself, that would amount to evil consciousness confessing its evil, thereby immediately overcoming, abolishing, itself; so it would not then be hypocrisy nor would it expose itself as such.  ⁴It certainly does confess itself to be evil in the claim that it, opposed to the recognized universal, acts according to its inner laws and conscience.  ⁵For if this law and conscience were not the law of its single individuality and hence arbitrary, then it would not be something internal, personal, but universally recognized.  ⁶Whoever says he acts according to his laws and conscience against the others says in fact that he is mishandling them.  ⁷But real conscience is not this clinging to knowledge and will setting itself against the universal, for the universal is the element of its existence and its language declares its action to be a recognized duty.

32.  Neither does universal consciousness clinging to its judgement amount to exposure and dissolution of hypocrisy.

– ²When it rails against hypocrisy as badness, baseness and so on, its judgement here refers to its own law just as evil consciousness appeals to its own.  ³Standing up to hypocrisy makes it just a particular law.  ⁴This gives universal consciousness no advantage over its opponent and, if anything, legitimating it.  Its eagerness does exactly the opposite of what it intends to do.  It shows up what it calls true duty, what it insists should be universally acknowledged, as not being recognized at all, ultimately conceding to its opponent the same right of being for itself.

33.  In fact, this judgement has another side enabling it to initiate the dissolution of the given opposition.

– ²Consciousness of the universal does not function as something actual and acting against the first, which itself is rather what is actually real, instead claiming to remain aloof in not getting stuck in the opposition between singularity and universality emerging in the action.  ³It remains in the universality of thought, behaves as receptive and its first action is only one of judgement.

– ⁴With this judgement it sets itself up, as just remarked upon above, beside the first one, establishing an equality enabling the first to gain an intuition of itself in this other consciousness.  ⁵For the consciousness of duty behaves receptively, passively; but this puts it into contradiction with itself as the absolute will of duty, with itself as that which simply defines itself by itself.  ⁶It has preserved its own purity well, for it does not act.  It is hypocrisy that wants to have its judging taken for an actual act and instead of proving its respectability through action does it by announcing its excellent attitude and integrity.  ⁷It thus comes down to pretty much the same thing as the one that was accused of only placing duty in its speech.  ⁸What they both have in common is that the aspect of actual reality is distinguished in exactly the same way from their speech; in the one through the self-interested goal of action and in the other through the lack of action of any kind.  The necessity of the latter's action lies in its statement of duty itself, for duty without the act has no meaning at all.

34.  Still, judging here must also be considered as a positive action of thought with a positive content; which only makes the contradiction in receptive consciousness as well as its equality with the first one that much more complete.

– ²Acting consciousness declares this its definite action to be a duty and judging consciousness cannot deny it that, for duty itself is a content-free form capable of taking on any content.  Or concrete action, differentiated with the many facets internal to it, has the universal side, the one that is taken as duty, as well as the particular ones that make up the part and the interest of the individual.  ³Judging consciousness does not now stand still with that side of duty and with the the agent's knowledge that this is its duty, the relation and the status of its actual reality.  ⁴It holds instead onto the other side, takes the action into the interior and explains it from the intention and the self-interested motive impulse distinct from itself.  ⁵Every action is capable of considering its conformity with duty and no less of this other consideration, namely of particularity; for as action it is the actual reality of the individual.

– ⁶This judging thus takes the action out of its existence and reflects it into the interior or into the form of its own particularity.

– ⁷If it is accompanied by fame then judgement knows this interior as addiction to fame.  If it is appropriate to the social class of the individual without going beyond it and its class or status is not externally attached to its individuality, which rather fills this universality itself, showing itself precisely in that to be capable of greater things, then judgement knows its interior to be a desire for honour, etc.  ⁸In any kind of action the agent gains an intuition of itself in objectivity, acquiring a feeling of self in its existence and deriving the consequent enjoyment; just so does judgement know the interior to be an instinct seeking its own happiness even if that amounts to no more than inner moral vanity, enjoyment of the consciousness of its own excellence and a foretaste, a hope, of a future happiness.

– ⁹ No action can deny itself such judging, since duty for the sake of duty, this pure goal, is completely unreal; it has its reality in the act of individuality, from which the action acquires its own aspect of particularity.

– ¹⁰There is no hero for the servant, not because the former is not a hero, but because the latter is a servant, for whom the hero is not seen as hero but as one eating, drinking, dressing and generally in the singularities of his needs and his images, his appearances.  ¹¹Thus for judging there is no action in which it does not set the sides of singularity of the individuality and universal aspect of the action against each other, taking on itself the role of the servant, morality, against the agent of the action.

35.  This makes the judging consciousness itself base because it splits open the action, producing the inequality with it and holding fast to it.  ²It is hypocrisy also because it does not take such judging for another manner of being evil, passing it off instead as the correct consciousness of action, and because it wants its unreality, its vanity of knowing what is good and knowing better than others, setting itself above the actions to show its contempt for them, its speech devoid of action – it wants all this to be taken for excellent and actual reality.

– ³Setting itself thus equal to the agent it is judging, it is indeed recognized by the agent as equal.  ⁴The agent finds itself not only accepted as something alien and unequal by judging consciousness, but more: this is, in terms of its own character, set equal to it.  ⁵Observing this equality and uttering it, the agent owns up to it and expects from the other, which set itself equal to it, that it too will respond with a statement of its equality so that acknowledgement and mutual recognition will have existence.  ⁶The confession is not a denigration, a humiliation, or a dismissal in relation to the other, for this statement is not a one-sided assertion of its inequality.  It must be uttered for the sake of the intuition into the equality with the other.  Its confession declares their equality from its side because language is the existence of mindful spirit as the immediate self.  This is why it has every reason to expect that the other will make its contribution to this existence.

36.  Of course, the confession of evil:  I am it!  does not elicit the same confession from the other.  ²That's not what was intended with that judging; quite the opposite!  ³Judging consciousness repudiates this mutuality.  Now it is the hard heart, aloof, for itself, rejecting continuity with the other.

– ⁴This is the point where the scene reverses.  ⁵The one that confessed sees itself repudiated and the other as unjust in rejecting verbal declaration to externalize its interior and bring it into existence, in insisting on the beauty of its soul against all charges of evil and maintaining its stiff-necked, unbreakable character against such confessions along with the stubborn silence of holding itself within itself, refusing to abandon its position for another.  ⁶Here we have the highest level of outrage of self-certain spirit, for it sees itself in the other, itself as such simple knowledge of the self.  Moreover, this happens in such a way that the external form of this other is not, as in wealth, one without essence, is not a thing [VI.B.I.a. Education etc. §30 M], but thought; it literally confronts knowledge itself.  What refuses to enter into communication with it is the absolutely fluid continuity of pure knowledge, even though the agent is the one that already in its confession denied itself any distinct, separated being for itself, asserting itself instead as particularity overcome, i.e. as continuity with the other, as the universal.  ⁷The other here reserves within itself its being for itself that declines to communicate; indeed, maintaining it also in the one confessing even though this has already discarded it.  ⁸It shows itself in this way as abandoned by the spirit, a consciousness that denies spirit, for it does not recognize that spirit, in absolute self-certainty beyond all action and reality, is the master and can reject them all and even render them undone.  ⁹At the same time it fails to recognize the contradiction it commits when it refuses to allow the rejection in its verbal declaration to stand as a true rejection while it retains the certainty of its spirit not in a real action but in its interior and its existence in the utterance of its judgement.  ¹⁰It is thus itself responsible for inhibiting the return of the other from out of the act into the spiritual/mental existence of speech and the equality of the spirit, producing the inequality through this hardness and that inequality remains present.

37.  As the beautiful soul, the mindful spirit certain of itself does not possess the power of alienation of the self-knowledge holding to itself, so it cannot arrive at equality with the consciousness that has been pushed back and thus not to the intuited unity of itself in the other, not to existence.  Under these circumstances equality only happens negatively, as being devoid of spirit.  ²Lacking reality, the beautiful soul is caught in the contradiction between its pure self and that self's need to alienate, externalize, itself into being, to switch into reality, caught in the immediacy of this fixed opposition – an immediacy which alone is the midpoint and reconciliation of the opposition when driven to its pure abstraction; the midpoint is pure being, empty nothingness.  As the awareness of this contradiction in its unreconciled immediacy, the beautiful soul is reduced to madness and dissipates itself in a wasting, consumptive longing.  ³With this it does in fact give up the hard fixation on its being for itself, only producing in its place the spiritless unity of being.

38.  The true, self-conscious and existing, equalization is, in terms of its necessity, already contained in what has been discussed above.  ²Breaking the hard heart and its elevation to universality involves the same motion as that expressed in the consciousness that confessed.  ³The wounds of the spirit heal without leaving scars.  The act is not what does not pass away.  On the contrary, the spirit takes it back into itself and it's just the aspect of singularity present in the act, either as intention or as existing negativity and limitation, that immediately vanishes.  ⁴The realizing, doing self, the form of its action, is only a moment of the whole, just as the knowledge making determinations in judgement and fixing the difference between individual and universal aspects of the action is.  ⁵That evil established itself, or this alienation of itself, as a moment when it was drawn out into confessional existence through the intuition of itself in the other.  ⁶Just as evil's one-sided, unrecognized existence of particular being for itself was broken, so must now this other's one-sided, unrecognized judgement be broken.  And just as that represents the power of the spirit over its reality, so does this represent the power over its determinate concept.

39.  This now renounces dividing thought and the hard-heartedness of the being for itself clinging to it precisely because it does in fact see itself in its opponent.  ²Discarding its actual reality, it makes itself into a this overcome to indeed present itself as a universal, returning from out of its external reality back into itself as an essence in which universal consciousness recognizes itself.

– ³The pardon it grants to that opponent amounts to its own renunciation; renunciation of its unreal essence, which it set equal to that other as actual action and was called evil from the determination action acquired in thought, it now recognizes here as being good.  What is really happening here is that it drops the distinction between determinate thought and its determining judgement existing for itself, just as the other drops the determining of action, determination existing for itself.

– ⁴The verbal expression of reconciliation is the existing mindful spirit that sees the pure knowledge of itself as a universal essence within its opposite, within the pure knowledge of itself as the singularity existing absolutely in itself [Preface §26.1].  This is a mutual recognition that is absolute spirit/mind.

40.  It enters into existence only at its peak where its pure knowledge of itself is the antithesis and flux with itself.  ²Knowing that its pure knowledge is the abstract essence, spirit/mind is this knowing duty in absolute antithesis to the knowledge that knows itself to be the essence as the absolute singularity of the self.  ³The former is the pure continuity of the universal, which knows that the singularity knowing itself to be essence is in itself null and void, evil.  ⁴This, however, is absolute discretion that knows itself to be absolute as the pure one and knows the universal that is only for another to be unreal.  ⁵Both sides have been cleansed to this purity; they no longer contain any selfless existence, anything negative to consciousness.  Now that duty is the steadfastly self-identical character of its self-knowledge and this evil has its goal in its interiority and its reality in its speech; the content of this speech is the substance of its persistence.  That speech is the assurance of spirit/mind' self-certainty.

– ⁶Neither of these self-certain mindful spirits have any other purpose than their own pure self; indeed, they have no other reality and existence than precisely this pure self.  ⁷But they are still different and the difference is absolute because it is given in this element of the pure concept.  ⁸It is that not only for us, but also for the concepts themselves that stand in this opposition.  ⁹For while these concepts are determinate with respect to each other, in itself each is universal.  Consequently, they encompass the entire range of the self and this self has no other content than this its definite, specific character, which neither goes beyond the self nor is in any way less than, more limited than, the self.  In fact, the one, the absolute universal, is just as much pure self-knowledge as the other, the absolute discretion of singularity; indeed, both are only this pure self-knowledge.  ¹⁰Both terms are thus the knowing pure concepts whose definition itself is immediately knowledge, i.e. whose relation and antithesis is the ego, I.  ¹¹This all makes them simply antithetical for each other.  What is completely internal is here confronting itself and has moved into existence; they constitute pure knowledge, which is established as consciousness by this opposition.  ¹²It is still not self-consciousness though.  ¹³Realization here happens within the motion of this antithesis.  ¹⁴This opposition is itself discrete continuity and equality of the I = I and each for itself overcomes itself in itself precisely through the contradiction of its pure universality, which at the same time still resists its equality with the other, separating itself from that.  ¹⁵Alienation enables this knowledge here, divided in its existence, to return back into the unity of the self; the self is the real, actual ego, I, universal self-knowledge in its absolute opposite [Preface §26.1], in the implicit knowledge that is completely universal knowledge precisely by virtue of the purity of its separated interiority.  ¹⁶The reconciliatory YES in which both egos let go of their confrontational existence is the ego's existence expanded into two remaining self-identical within that and retaining self-certainty in its complete alienation, in its complete opposite.  It is the revealed God appearing amongst those who know themselves to be pure knowledge.