Stoicism

^'198' This freedom of self-consciousness has been called Stoicism.

Its principle is that:

• consciousness is essentially that which thinks, is a thinking reality
• anything is really essential for consciousness, or is true and good, only when consciousness in dealing with it adopts the attitude of a thinking being.

^'199' The manifold, self-differentiating expanse of life, with all its individualization and complication, is the object upon which desire and labour operate.

This varied activity has now contracted itself into the simple distinction which is found in the pure process of thought.

What has still essential reality is not a distinction in the sense of a determinate thing, or in the shape of a consciousness of a determinate kind of natural existence, in the shape of a feeling, or again in the form of desire and its specific purpose, whether that purpose be set up by the consciousness desiring or by an extraneous consciousness.

What has still essential significance here is solely that distinction which is a thought-constituted distinction, or which, when made, is not distinguished from me.

This consciousness in consequence takes a negative attitude towards the relation of lordship and bondage.

Its action, in the case of the master, results in his not simply having his truth in and through the bondsman; and, in that of the bondsman, in not finding his truth in the will of his master and in service.

The essence of this consciousness is to be free, on the throne as well as in fetters, throughout all the dependence that attaches to its individual existence, and to maintain that stolid lifeless unconcern which persistently withdraws from the movement of existence, from effective activity as well as from passive endurance, into the simple essentiality of thought.

Stubbornness is that freedom which makes itself secure in a solid singleness, and keeps within the sphere of bondage. Stoicism, on the other hand, is the freedom which ever comes directly out of that spheres and returns back into the pure universality of thought.

It is a freedom which can come on the scene as a general form of the world’s spirit only in a time of universal fear and bondage, a time, too, when mental cultivation is universal, and has elevated culture to the level of thought.

^'200' This self-consciousness finds its essential reality to be neither something other than itself, nor the pure abstraction of ego, but ego which has within it otherness-otherness in the sense of a thought-constituted distinction-so that this ego in its otherness is turned back directly into itself.

Yet this essential nature is, at the same time, only an abstract reality. The freedom of self-consciousness is indifferent towards natural existence, and has, therefore, let this latter go and remain free.

The reflection is thus duplicated.

Freedom of thought takes only pure thought as its truth. This lacks the concrete filling of life.

It is, therefore, merely the notion of freedom, not living freedom itself; for it is, to begin with, only thinking in general that is its essence, the form as such, which has turned away from the independence of things and gone back into itself.

Since, however, individuality when acting should: show itself to be alive, or when thinking should grasp the living world as a system of thought, there ought to lie in thought itself a content to supply the sphere of the ego, in the former case with what is good, and, in the latter, true, in order that there should throughout be no other ingredient in what consciousness has to deal with, except the notion which is the real essence.

But here, by the way in which the notion as an abstraction cuts itself off from the multiplicity of things, the notion has no content in itself; the content is a datum, is given.

Consciousness abolishes the content as an external, a foreign existent, by the fact that it thinks it, but the notion is a determinate notion, and this determinateness of the notion is the alien element the notion contains within it.

Stoicism, therefore, got embarrassed, when, as the expression went, it was asked for the criterion of truth in general, i.e properly speaking, for a content of thought itself.

To the question, what is good and true, it responded by giving again the abstract, contentless thought; the true and good are to consist in reasonableness. But this self-identity of thought is simply once more pure form, in which nothing is determinate. The general terms true and good, wisdom and virtue, with which Stoicism has to stop short, are, therefore, in a general way, doubtless elevating; but seeing that they cannot actually and in fact reach any expanse of content, they soon begin to get wearisome.

^'201' This thinking consciousness, in the way in which it is thus constituted, as abstract freedom, is therefore only incomplete negation of otherness. Withdrawn from existence solely into itself, it has not there fully vindicated itself as the absolute negation of this existence.

It holds the coent is held indeed to be only thought, but in doing so also takes thought as a specific determinate thought, and at the same time the general character of the content.