1.  The first artwork is immediate, abstract and single.  ²For its part, it must move out of the immediate and objective mode in the direction of self-consciousness, just as, on the other side, self-consciousness for itself in the cult has to overcome the distinction it initially draws between itself and spirit/mind in order to generate a work of art that is animated.

2.  The first mode in which the artistic spirit separates its pattern and its active consciousness to the greatest extent is the immediate one in which the former is there like a thing.

– ²The pattern breaks down in this mode into the difference of singularity, with the pattern of self to it, and universality, representing the inorganic essence in relation to the pattern, i.e. its surroundings and housing.  ³With the elevation of the whole into the pure concept the latter acquires its pure form, which belongs to spirit/mind.  ⁴This form is neither the crystal of understanding housing the dead, or which is illuminated by the external soul; nor the mixture of forms that emerges first from the plant, the mixture of nature and of that thought whose behaviour in this is still one of mimicry [VII.A.c. Craft master §2 and §4 ff. M].  ⁵No, the concept here sheds all that still hangs on the forms from the root, stem and leaves, cleansing them into pictures.  In these pictures the linearized and flattened aspect of the crystal is elevated into incommensurable relations so that the soul of the organic is accepted into the abstract form of the understanding, which thus takes hold of the essence of that form, incommensurability.

3.  The god dwelling within, however, is the black stone taken out of the animal housing that is now permeated by the light of consciousness.  ²The human pattern sheds the animal pattern with which it was mixed [VII.A.c. Craft master §5.4 M].  The animal is only a temporary costume for the god; it moves aside from its true shape, has no significance for itself any more, and is reduced to meaning something else, a mere sign.  ³The same process sees the embodied form of the god lose the poverty of natural conditions, of animal existence, so that it now displays the internal functions of organic life welded on its surface, showing that it belongs only to these.

– ⁴The essence of the god, however, is the unity of the universal existence of nature and self-conscious spirit, the spirit that, in its actual reality, appears to be in confrontation with the former.  ⁵Initially though, as a single, individual pattern, its existence is one of the elements of that nature, just as its self-conscious reality is a single national spirit.  ⁶But the former is in this unity the element reflected into the spirit, it is nature united with self-conscious life and transfigured by thought.  ⁷The pattern of the god thus has its natural element as one overcome, a dark memory within it.  ⁸The barren essence and the confused struggle of the elements in their free existence, the unethical realm of the titans, these are defeated and driven to the fringe of the reality that has become clear to itself, to the obscure borders of the becalmed world that finds itself in the spirit.  ⁹These old gods, into which the light god particularizes itself – first generation born of the union with darkness – sky, earth, ocean, sun, the blind Typhonic fire of the earth etc. are replaced by patterns that only bear a dark memory association with those titans; no longer of the essence of nature, but clear, ethical and customary spirits of self-conscious, self-confident peoples.

4.  Infinite individualization is thus now there in this simple, integral pattern.  Individualization is there whether the pattern is the natural element – whose behaviour is only necessary as a universal essence, within its existence and motion that behaviour is merely contingent – or the people – dispersed through the particular masses of action and the individual points of self-consciousness, an existence of diverse significances and actions.  But it has subjugated the turbulence of infinite individualization, concentrating it into calm individuality.  ²The moment of unrest, self-consciousness, now stands against it, against that pattern, the essence.  As the birthplace, the cradle of that unrest, self-consciousness holds on to nothing more for itself than being pure activity.  ³What belongs to substance the artist gave wholly to his work, while refraining from endowing himself as a determinate individuality, a particular individual, any reality in the work.  He could only impart perfection to it by externalizing, expressing his particularity, intensifying it to the abstraction of pure action and thereby depriving it of corporeal embodiment.

– ⁴In this first immediate act of creation the separation of the work and the artist's self-conscious activity is not yet eliminated, they are not yet reunited; the work is hence not for itself actually endowed with soul, but it is only whole together with its becoming, the process by which it came to be.  ⁵What is common in the artwork is that it is generated within consciousness and is made by the hand of man; this is the moment of the concept existing as the concept that moves over to confront it.  ⁶And when this one, as artist or as observer, declares the artwork inherently and absolutely endowed with soul and is selfless enough to forget himself as the doer or the observer, then against this the concept of spirit/mind must be upheld, the concept that is nothing without the moment of being conscious of itself.  ⁷However, this moment stands against the work, for in this its first division the concept gives both sides their terms as action and thinghood in opposition to each other; the return back into the unity from which they emerged has not yet taken place.

5.  The artist thus experiences in his work that he did not produce an essence or a being equal to himself.  ²From this he gets back an awareness that an admiring public honours his work as the spirit/mind that is their essence.  ³But this endowing with soul, given that it only returns his self-consciousness to him as admiration, is rather an acknowledgement the artist himself places in his work that its spirit is not his equal.  ⁴Coming back to him as joy as such, he doesn't see in that the pain of his education and production, none of the stresses and strains of his labour.  ⁵His public may evaluate the work and even bring sacrifices to it, but no matter how they lay their consciousness in it when asserting themselves to be somehow superior with their knowledge of it, at least he knows how much more his act was than their understanding and talk.  And when they set themselves below it, recognizing the essence dominating them within it, either way he knows himself to be the master of the work.

6.  The artwork thus requires another element of his existence, just as the god requires a different kind of emergence, than this in which from out of the depths of his creative night it falls into the opposite, into the outside, where the thing is devoid of self-consciousness.  ²This higher element is language, which is immediately self-conscious existence.  ³As the single, individual self-consciousness is there within language, so is it similarly immediate as a general infection; the complete particularization of being for itself is at once the fluid and generally communicated unity of the many selves; that particularization is the soul existing as soul.  ⁴The god with language as the element of its embodied form is the inherently ensouled artwork, which was the pure activity that stood against the god when he existed as a thing, and now he has that immediately in his existence.  ⁵This amounts to saying that self-consciousness remains by itself while its essence becomes objective.  ⁶Remaining by itself in its essence is what makes it pure thinking, prayer, whose inwardness finds existence in the hymn.  ⁷It retains the singularity of self-consciousness in it and in being heard, this singularity is there also as universal.  Sparked in each, prayer is the spiritual stream which, in the diverse community of self-consciousnesses, is aware of itself as an action equal in and uniting all in simple being.  Spirit as this general self-consciousness of all has its pure inwardness as well as the being for another and the being for itself of the single individual in one unity.

7.  This language distinguishes itself from another language of the god, which is not the language of the general self-consciousness.  ²For the god of art as well as for those of the previous religions, the oracle is necessarily their first language, for in its concept it is just as much the essence of nature as of spirit, so it not only has natural, but also spiritual existence.  ³This moment lies initially in its concept and is not yet realized in religion, so the language for the religious self-consciousness is the language of an alien self-consciousness.  ⁴The self-consciousness that is still alien to its own community is not yet there in the manner its concept demands.  ⁵The self is the simple, and hence simply universal being for itself; that alien self-consciousness, however, which is separated from the self-consciousness of the community, is only initially a single individual one.

– ⁶The content of this personal and single, individual language emerges from out of the universal definiteness absolute spirit acquires in its religion.

– ⁷The general spirit of the sunrise [VII.A.a. Light god §2.4 ff. M], which has not yet particularized its existence, thus utters statements no less simple and universal on the essence which, although its substantial content is sublime in its simple truth, appears trivial to the self-consciousness that is still progressively developing itself precisely because of this universality.

8.  The self that has been further developed, raising itself to being for itself, is master of the pure pathos of substance, master of the objectivity of the rising light god and it knows that simplicity of truth as the law existing in itself  that does not have the form of contingent existence from an alien language, but is the secure and unwritten law of the gods that lives forever and of which no-one knows whence it came [Sophocles, Antigone v. 456 f. see also V.C.c. Reason scrutinizing law §9.5 M].

– ²The universal truth revealed by the light god has here stepped back into what is inner, or under, releasing it from the form of contingent appearance, so in contrast in art religion, since the pattern of the god has taken on consciousness and therewith singularity as such, the personal language of that god who is the spirit of the customary ethical people is the oracle that knows the particular circumstances of the people and announces what is useful in those terms.  ³The universal truths are known as what exists in itself, so knowing thought vindicates itself and its language is no longer alien, but its own.  ³Just as in ancient times they sought what is good and bad in their own thinking, leaving the bad, contingent content of knowledge as to whether it would be good to associate with this person or that, whether it would be good for a friend to make this journey, and such like meaningless things [like Socrates] to a daimonion [Plato, Theaetetus 151a M], similarly they took the general consciousness of knowledge of the contingent from bird flight formations or trees or the fermenting earth, whose steam robs self-consciousness of its calm deliberation and self-possession; the contingent is the imprudent and alien and when this happens customary ethical consciousness is determined in an unthinking and alien manner, as by a roll of dice.  ⁵When the single individual makes his own decision using his own understanding and with cautious consideration chooses what is useful to him, then this self-determination is based on the definition of the particular character.  That character itself is what is contingent and that knowledge of the understanding as to what is useful to the individual is thus exactly the same kind of knowledge as that of the oracles or of a lottery.  The difference lies in the fact that whoever asks the oracle or relies on a lottery expresses in that the customary ethical attitude of indifference to coincidence, for the former, the individual who makes his own decisions, in contrast, treats what is in itself contingent as the essential interest of his thinking and knowledge.  ⁶What is higher than both would be to make careful consideration into the oracle on contingent action while knowing that this considered action itself, given its relation to the particular and its utility, as something contingent.

9.  The true self-conscious existence acquired by the spirit in a language which is not the language of a self-consciousness that is alien and hence contingent, a self-consciousness that is not universal, is the artwork that we just considered above.  ²It contrasts with the thing-like existence of the statue.  ³As this latter is the one at rest, so is the former the vanishing existence, as objectivity freely released in the latter lacks its own immediate self, in contrast, it remains in the former too much enclosed in the self, attains too little shaping and articulation and is, like time, immediately no longer there precisely in being there.

10.  The motion of the two sides is that the divine form in motion in the pure, sensitive element of self-consciousness and the divine form at rest in the element of thinghood together give up their distinctiveness so that the unity that is the concept of their essence comes into existence.  This motion is what constitutes the cult.  ²In the cult the self confers on itself the consciousness of the divine being coming from out of its beyond down to the cult so that it, which was formerly unreal and merely objective, acquires the genuine reality of self-consciousness.

11.  This concept of the cult is in itself already contained in the stream of the hymnal songs and really present there.  ²Devotion here is the immediate pure satisfaction of the self through and in itself.  ³It is the purified soul, which in this purity is immediately only essence and one with the essence.  ⁴Its abstraction makes this purified soul not the consciousness that distinguishes its object from itself and so is only the night of its existence and the prepared location for its embodied form.  ⁵The abstract cult thus elevates the self into being this pure divine element.  ⁶The soul performs this purification with consciousness; but it is still not the self which, having descended into its own depths, knows itself to be evil; it is something given, a soul that purifies its outside with washing, covers it with white clothing and inwardly performs the imagined path of labour, punishment, and rewards, the path of education and culture externalizing particularity, the path by which it reaches into the homes and the community of blessedness.

12.  This cult is only initially secret, i.e. an exercise only imagined and unreal.  It has to become actual action, for an unreal action is self-contradictory.  ²Genuine consciousness elevates itself in this way into its pure self-consciousness.  ³The essence has the significance of a free object in it, which through the real cult returns back into the self.  To the extent that has the significance in pure consciousness of a pure essence, a pure being, dwelling beyond actual reality, in this mediation that being comes from its universality down into singularity, binding itself together with reality.

13.  The manner in which the two sides enter into the action is determined by the fact that the essence, the being presents itself as real nature precisely to the extent that the self-conscious side is real consciousness.  This nature belongs to the being as possession and property and counts as the existence that is not given in itself.  On the other hand that nature is the being's own immediate actual reality and singularity, which is regarded by the being as a nonentity and is overcome, abolished by it.  ²Still, for its pure consciousness that external nature also has the opposite meaning, namely the essence existing in itself to which the self sacrifices its inessential character just as, on the other hand, the inessential side of nature sacrifices itself.  ³This makes the action a spiritual motion because here it is double-sided.  One side is about overcoming the abstraction of essence, which is how devotion determines the object, and making it into something real.  The other is about overcoming what is real, in the way that the one acting determines both the object and itself, and to elevate it into universality.

14.  This is why the action of the cult starts with the pure donation of a possession the owner pours out or he lets it go up in smoke, apparently with no advantage to himself.  ²Before the essence, the being, of his pure consciousness, he renounces possession and the right of ownership and enjoyment of the same, personality and the return of the action into the self.  In this he reflects the action in the universal or in the essence rather than into himself.

– ³Conversely, however, the existing essence suffers its downfall.  ⁴The animal sacrificed is the sign of a god; the fruits consumed are the living Ceres and Bacchus themselves [I. Sense certainty §20.6; VII.B.b. Living artwork §5].  In the former the powers of the upper law die, those who had blood and real life; in the latter, however, it is the powers of the lower law that die, they who without blood possess the secret power of cunning.

– ⁵The sacrifice of the divine substance belongs, as action, to the self-conscious side; but for this actual action to be possible, the being must have already sacrificed itself.  ⁶It has already done that when it gives itself existence and makes itself into a single, individual animal or fruit.  ⁷This renunciation, which the being has thus already accomplished in itself, is presented by the acting self in existence and for its consciousness, replacing that immediate reality of the essence with the higher reality, namely with that of its own.  ⁸For the unity emerging as a result of overcoming the singularity and separation of both sides, is not only negative destiny; it has positive meaning too.  ⁹Only the abstract subterranean being gets completely what is sacrificed to him, hence representing the reflection of possession and being for itself into the universal distinguished from the self as such.  ¹⁰Now, this is only a small part and the other sacrifice is only the destruction of something useless, while the preparation of the sacrifice into a meal and the ensuing feasting defrauds the action of its negative significance.  ¹¹In that first sacrifice the one who made it retains most of it, and the useful part of that for his enjoyment.  ¹²This enjoyment is the negative power overcoming the essence and the singularity.  The enjoyment is also the positive reality transforming the objective existence of the essence, the being, into self-consciousness so that the self becomes aware of its unity with the being.

15.  This cult is also a real action, although its significance lies rather in devotion.  What belongs to devotion is not objectively generated, just as in the enjoyment the result robs itself of its own existence.  ²The cult thus goes further and replaces this lack initially by giving its meditation objective persistence as necessary labour for the community or the individual, producing the home and the decoration of the god to honour it.

– ³On the one hand the objectivity of the statue is overcome; with this donation of his gifts and labours, the worker makes the god favourable to him and sees his self as belonging to the god.  In fact, this action is not merely the action of the individual labour of the artist, for this particularity is dissolved in the universality [VII.B.a. Abstract artwork §§4,5 M].  ⁴What comes into being here is not only the honour of the god and the blessing of his favour does not only flow in the imagination onto the worker; the labour also has the opposite significance against the first one of externalization and unfamiliar honour.  ⁵The domiciles and halls of the god are for the use of the people and the treasures kept therein are, in times of emergency, their own.  The honour the former enjoys in his adornments is the honour of the people, generous and rich in art.  ⁶In festivals the people decorate their own dwellings and clothing and their daily tasks with artful accessories.  ⁷They receive for their gifts the response of the grateful god and the proof of his favour, in which the people is united with the god through their labour, not in hope and a later reality; in the demonstration of honour and the donation of gifts the people has immediately the enjoyment of its own wealth and adornment.