Already Dead, Not Yet Living: The Tragedy of Ethics in Hegel's Phenomenology

sociality (as ‘universality’) into the active constitution (actuality) of the concept of Reason. However, the subject still retains his strictly individualized conception of this so-called union of truth and reality. Accordingly, the subject experiences the integration of the opposing material/social being of the work into Individualitat as such. This means that the ‘true’ result of individual action is not that mere work, the consequence of this momentary, contingent action, a perishing entity that loses its specificity within the abstract universality of being. Instead, the ‘object’ of action is the unity of action and being itself, retained as a subjective relation. What endures in “action,” in so far as it is considered rationally, is not some petty, contingent self-expression of a particular actor, it is instead the subjective experience of unity with being, the explicit manifestation of the connection between individual activity and reality. This unity is what Hegel calls “die Sache selbst,” translated by A.V. Miller as “the heart of the matter,” but is also translated as “the thing that matters.” In reflecting back on itself and seeing that ‘the thing that matters’ about action is not its contingent result but rather the unity of individuality and objective reality affected in acting, self-consciousness, our Hegelian subject, finds that “the true concept of self-consciousness has in the eyes of self-consciousness come to be, that is, selfconsciousness has arrived at a consciousness of its substance” (367). Through “the thing that matters,” the subject first begins to understand, at least formally, the constitutive role of an always-already constituted substantial reality in the formation of its own selfconception, in so far as this conception is rational. But as “the thing that matters” rather than the “thing in itself,” Hegel’s substance has a decidedly social character. It is not the inaccessible source of intuitions, but the exterior social reality into which the subject expresses himself. 43 Though the nature of the “Sache selbst” at first seems elusive, we can remember that in the meta-phenomenological reflection that begins Individualitat..., Hegel tells us that the subject regards himself as the unity of reality and individuality, and in doing so