The Phenomenology of Mind
C: Free Concrete Mind
672. IN the forms of experience hitherto dealt with — which are distinguished broadly as Consciousness, Self-consciousness, Reason, and Spirit — Religion also, the consciousness of Absolute Being in general, has no doubt made its appearance. But that was from the point of view of consciousness, when it has the Absolute Being for its object. Absolute Being, however, in its own distinctive nature, the Self-consciousness of Spirit, has not appeared in those forms.
673. Even at the plane of Consciousness, viz. when this takes the shape of “Understanding”, there is a consciousness of the supersenuous, of the inner being of objective existence. But the supersensible, the eternal, or whatever we care to call it, is devoid of selfhood. It is merely, to begin with, something universal, which is a long way still from being spirit knowing itself as spirit.
Then there was Self-consciousness, which came to its final shape in the “unhappy consciousness”; that was merely the pain and sorrow of spirit wrestling to get itself out into objectivity once more, but not succeeding. The unity of individual self-consciousness with its unchangeable Being, which is what this stage arrives at, remains, in consequence, a “beyond”, something afar off.
The immediate existence of Reason (which we found arising out of that state of sorrow), and the special shapes which reason assumes, have no form of religion, because self-consciousness in the case of reason knows itself or looks for itself in the direct and immediate present.
674. On the other hand, in the world of the Ethical Order, we met with a type of religion, the religion of the nether world. This is belief in the fearful and unknown darkness of Fate, and in the Eumenides of the spirit of the departed: the former being pure negation taking the form of universality, the latter the same negation but in the form of individuality. Absolute Being is, then, in the latter shape no doubt the self and is present, as there is no other way for the self to be except present. But the individual self is this individual ghostly shade, which keeps the universal element, Fate, separated from itself. It is indeed a shade, a ghost, a cancelled and superseded particular, and so a universal self. But that negative meaning has not yet turned round into this latter positive significance, and hence the self, so cancelled and transcended, still directly means at the same time this particular being, this insubstantial reality. Fate, however, without self remains the darkness of night devoid of consciousness, which never comes to draw distinctions within itself, and never attains the clearness of self-knowledge.
675. This belief in a necessity that produces nothingness, this belief in the nether world, becomes belief in Heaven, because the self which has departed must be united with its universal nature, must unfold what it contains in terms of this universality, and thus become clear to itself. This kingdom of belief, however, we saw unfold its content merely in the element of reflective thought (Denken), without bringing out the true notion (Begriff); and we saw it, on that account, perish in its final fate, viz. in the religion of enlightenment. Here in this type of religion, the supersensible beyond, which we found in “understanding”, is reinstate, but in such a way that self-consciousness rests and feels satisfied in the mundane present, not in the “beyond”, and knows the supersensible beyond, void and empty, unknowable, and devoid of all terrors, neither as a self nor as power and might.
676. In the religion of Morality it is at last reinstated that Absolute Reality is a positive content; but that content is bound up with the negativity characteristic of the enlightenment. The content is an objective being, which . at the same time taken back into the self, and remains is there enclosed, and is a content with internal distinctions, while its parts are just as immediately negated as they are posited. The final destiny, however, which absorbs this contradictory process, is the self conscious of itself as the controlling necessity (Schicksal) of what is essential and actual.
677. Spirit knowing its self is in religion primarily and immediately its own pure self-consciousness. Those modes of it above considered — “objective spirit”, “spirit estranged from itself” and “spirit certain of its self” — together constitute what it is in its condition of consciousness, the state in which, being objectively opposed to its own world, it does not therein apprehend and consciously possess itself. But in Conscience it brings itself as well as its objective world as a whole into subjection, as also its idea(1) and its various specific conceptions;(2)and is now self-consciousness at home with itself. Here spirit, represented as an object, has the significance for itself of being Universal Spirit, which contains within itself all that is ultimate and essential and all that is concrete and actual; yet is not in the form of freely subsisting actuality, or of the apparent independence of external nature. It has a shape, no doubt, the form of objective being, in that it is object of its own consciousness; but because this consciousness is affirmed in religion with the essential character of being self-consciousness, the form or shape assumed is one perfectly transparent to itself; and the reality spirit contains is enclosed in it, or transcended in it, just in the same way as when we speak of “all reality”; it is “all reality”, but universal reality only in the sense of an object of thought.
678. Since, then, in religion, the peculiar characteristic of what is properly consciousness of spirit does not have the form of detached independent otherness, the existence of spirit is distinct from its self-consciousness, and its actual reality proper falls outside religion. There is no doubt one spirit in both, but its consciousness does not embrace both together; and religion appears as a part of existence, of acting, and of striving, whose other part is the life lived within spirit's own actual world. As we now know that spirit in its own world and spirit conscious of itself as spirit, i.e. spirit in the sphere of religion, are the same, the completion of religion consists in the two forms becoming identical with one another: not merely in its reality being grasped and embraced by religion, but conversely — it, as spirit conscious of itself, becomes actual to itself, and real object of its own consciousness.
So far as spirit in religion presents itself to itself, it is indeed consciousness, and the reality enclosed within it is the shape and garment in which it clothes its idea of itself. The reality, however, does not in this presentation get proper justice done to it, that is to say, it does not get to be an independent and free objective existence and not merely a garment. And conversely, because that reality lacks within itself its completion, it is a determinate shape or form, which does not attain to what it ought to reveal, viz. spirit conscious of itself. That spirit's shape might express spirit itself, the shape would have to be nothing else than spirit, and spirit would have to appear to itself, or to be actual, as it is in its own essential being. Only thereby, too, would be attained — what may seem to demand the opposite — that the object of its consciousness has, at the same time, the form of free and independent reality. But only spirit which is object to itself in the shape of Absolute Spirit, is as much aware of being a free and independent reality as it remains therein conscious of itself.
679. Since in the first instance self-consciousness and consciousness simply, religion, and spirit as it is externally in its world, or the objective existence of spirit, are distinct, the latter consists in the totality of spirit, so far as its moments are separated from each other and each is set forth by itself. These moments, however, are consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit — spirit, that is, qua immediate spirit, which is not yet consciousness of spirit. Their totality, taken all together, constitutes the mundane existence of spirit as a whole; spirit as such contains the previous separate embodiments in the form of universal determinations of its own being, in those moments just named. Religion presupposes that these have completely run their course, and is their simple totality, their absolute Self and soul.
The course which these traverse is, moreover, in relation to religion, not to be pictured as a temporal sequence. It is only spirit in its entirety that is in time, and the shapes assumed, which are specific embodiments Of the whole of spirit as such, present themselves in a sequence one after the other. For it is only the whole which properly has reality, and hence the form of pure freedom relatively to anything else, the form which takes expression as time. But the moments of the whole, consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit, have, because they are moments, no existence separate from one another.
Just as spirit was distinct from its moments, we have further, in the third place, to distinguish from these moments their specific individuated character. Each of those moments, in itself, we saw broke up again in a process of development all its own, and took various shapes and forms: as e.g. in the case of consciousness, sensuous certainty and perception were distinct phases. These latter aspects fall apart in time from one another, and belong to a specific particular whole. For spirit descends from its universality to assume an individual form through specific determination. This determination, or mediate element, is consciousness, self-consciousness, and so on. But individuality is constituted just bv the forms assumed by these moments. Hence these exhibit and reveal spirit in its individuality or concrete reality, and are distinguished in time from one another. though in such a way that the succeeding retains within it the preceding.
680. While, therefore, religion is the completion of the life of spirit, its final and complete expression, into which, as being their ground, its individual moments, consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit, return and have returned, they, at the same time, together constitute the objectively existing realization of spirit in its totality; as such spirit is real only as the moving process of these aspects which it possesses, a process of distinguishing them and returning back into itself. In the process of these universal moments is contained the development of religion generally. Since, however, each of these attributes was set forth and presented, not only in the way it in general determines itself, but as it is in and for itself, i.e. as, within its own being, running its course as a distinct whole — there has thus arisen not merely the development of religion generally; those independently complete processes pursued by the individual phases or moments of spirit contain at the same time the determinate forms of religion itself. Spirit in its entirety, spirit in religion, is once more the process from its immediacy to the attainment of a knowledge of what it implicitly or immediately, is; and is the process of attaining the state where the shape and form, in which it appears as an object for its own consciousness, will be perfectly adequate to its essential nature, and where it will behold itself as it is.
In this development of religion, then, spirit itself assumes definite shapes, which constitute the distinctions involved in this process: and at the same time a determinate or specific form of religion has likewise an actual spirit of a specific character. Thus, if consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit belong to self-knowing spirit in general, in a similar way the specific shapes, which self-knowing spirit assumes, appropriate and adopt the distinctive forms which were specially developed in the case of each of the stages — consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit. The determinate shape, assumed in a given case by religion, appropriates, from among the forms belonging to each of its moments, the one adapted to it, and makes this its actual spirit. Any one determinate attitude of religion pervades and permeates all aspects of its actual existence, and stamps them with this common feature.
681. In this way the arrangement now assumed by the forms and shapes which have thus far appeared, is different from the way they appeared in their own order. On this point we may note shortly at the out,set what is necessary. In the series we considered, each moment, exhaustively elaborating its entire content, evolved and formed itself into a single whole within its own peculiar principle. And knowledge was the inner depth, or the spirit, wherein the moments, having no subsistence of their own, possessed their substance. This substance, however, has now at length made its appearance; it is the deep life of spirit certain of itself; it does not allow the principle belonging to each individual form to get isolated, and become a whole within itself: rather it collects all these moments into its own content, keeps them together, and advances within this total wealth of its concrete actual spirit; while all its particular moments take into themselves and receive together in common the like determinate character of the whole. This spirit certain of itself and the process it goes through-this is their true reality, the independent self-subsistence, which belongs to each individually.
Thus while the previous linear series in its advance marked the retrogressive steps in it by knots, but thence went forward again in one linear stretch, it is now, as it were, broken at these knots, these universal moments, and falls asunder into many lines, which, being bound together into a single bundle, combine at the same time symmetrically, so that the similar distinctions, in which each separately took shape within its own sphere, meet together.
For the rest, it is self-evident from the whole argument, how this co-ordination of universal directions, just mentioned, is to be understood; so that it becomes superfluous to remark that these distinctions are to be taken to mean essentially and only moments of the process of development, not parts. In the case of actual concrete spirit they are attributes of its substance; in religion, on the other hand, they are only predicates of the subject. In the same way, indeed, all forms in general are, in themselves or for us, contained in spirit and contained in every spirit. But the main point of importance, in dealing with its reality, is solely what determinate character it has in its consciousness, in which specific character it has expressed its self, or in what shape it knows its essential nature.
682. The distinction made between actual spirit and that same spirit which knows itself as spirit, or between itself qua consciousness and qua self-consciousness, is transcended and done away with in the case where spirit knows itself in its real truth. Its consciousness and its self-consciousness have come to terms. But, as religion is here to begin with and immediately, this distinction has not yet reverted to spirit. It is merely the conception, the principle, of religion that is established at first. In this the essential element is self-consciousness, which is conscious of being all truth, and which contains all reality within that truth. This self-consciousness, being consciousness [and so aware of an object], has itself for its object. Spirit, which knows itself in the first instance immediately, is thus to itself spirit in the form of immediacy; and the specific character of the shape in which it appears to itself is that of pure simple being. This being, this bare existence, has indeed a filling drawn neither from sensation or manifold matter, nor from any other one-sided moments, purposes, and determinations; its filling is solely spirit, and is known by itself to be all truth and reality. Such filling is in this first form not in adequate agreement with its own shape, spirit qua ultimate essence is not in accord with its consciousness. It is actual only as Absolute Spirit, when it is also for itself in its truth as it is in its certainty of itself, or, when the extremes, into which spirit qua consciousness falls, exist for one another in spiritual shape. The embodiment adopted by spirit qua object of its own consciousness, remains filled by the certainty of spirit, and this self-certainty constitutes its substance. Through this content, the degrading of the object to bare objectivity, to the form of something that negates self-consciousness, disappears. The immediate unity of spirit with itself is the fundamental basis, or pure consciousness, inside which consciousness breaks up into its constituent elements [viz. an object with subject over against it]. In this way, shut up within its pure self-consciousness, spirit does not exist in religion as the creator of a nature in general; rather what it produces in the course of this process are its shapes qua spirits, which together constitute all that it can reveal when it is completely manifested. And this process itself is the development of its perfect and complete actuality through the individual aspects thereof, i.e. through its imperfect modes of realization.
683. The first realization of spirit is just the principle and notion of religion itself-religion as immediate and thus Natural Religion. Here spirit knows itself as its object in a “natural” or immediate shape. The second realization, is, however, necessarily that of knowing itself in the shape of transcended and superseded natural existence, i.e. in the form of self. This therefore is Religion in the form of Art. For the shape it adopts is raised to the form of self through the productive activity of consciousness, by which this consciousness beholds in its object its own action, i.e. sees the self. The third realization, finally, cancels the one-sidedness of the first two: the self is as much as immediate self as the immediacy is a self. If spirit in the first is in the form of consciousness, and in the second in that of self-consciousness, it is in the third in the form of the unity of both; it has then the shape of what is completely self-contained (An-und-Fürsichseyns); and in being thus presented as it is in and for itself, this is Revealed Religion. Although spirit, however, here reaches its true shape, the very shape assumed and the conscious presentation are an aspect or phase still unsurmounted; and from this spirit has to pass over into the life of the Notion, in order therein completely to resolve the form of objectivity, in the notion which embraces within itself this its own opposite.
It is then that spirit has grasped its own principle, the notion of itself, as so far only we [who analyse spirit] have grasped it; and its shape, the element of its existence, in being the notion, is then spirit itself.
1. Vorstellung.
2. Begriff.
684. SPIRIT knowing spirit is consciousness of itself; and is to itself in the form of objectivity. It is; and is at the same time self-existence (Fürsichsein). It is for itself; it is the aspect of self-consciousness, and is so in contrast to the aspect of its consciousness, the aspect by which it relates itself to itself as object. In its consciousness there is the opposition and in consequence the determinateness of the form in which it appears to itself and knows itself. It is with this determinateness of shape that we have alone to do in considering religion; for its essential unembodied principle, its pure notion, has already come to light. The distinction of consciousness and self-consciousness, however, falls at the same time within this notion. The form or shape of religion does not contain the existence of spirit in the sense of its being nature detached and free from thought, nor in the sense of its being thought detached from existence. The shape assumed by religion is existence contained and preserved in thought as well as a something thought which is consciously existent.
It is by the determinate character of this form, in which spirit knows itself, that one religion is distinguished from another. But we have at the same time to note that the systematic exposition of this knowledge about itself, in terms of this individual specific character, does not as a fact exhaust the whole nature of an actual religion. The series of different religions, which will come before us, just as much sets forth again merely the different aspects of a single religion, and indeed of every single religion, and the imagery, the conscious ideas, which seem to mark off one concrete religion from another, make their appearance in each. All the same the diversity must also be looked at as a diversity of religion. For while spirit lives in the distinction of its consciousness and its self-consciousness, the process it goes through finds its goal in the transcendence of this fundamental distinction and in giving the form of self-consciousness to the given shape which is object of consciousness. This distinction, however, is not eo ipso transcended by the fact that the shapes, which that consciousness contains, have also the moments of self in them, and that God is presented as self-consciousness. The consciously presented self is not the actual concrete self. In order that this, like every other more specific determination of the shape, may in truth belong to this shape, it has partly to be put into this shape by the action of self-consciousness, and partly the lower determination must show itself to be cancelled and transcended and comprehended by the higher. For what is consciously presented (vorgestellt) only ceases to be something “presented” and alien to spirit's knowledge, by the self having produced it, and so viewing the determination of the object as its own determination, and hence seeing itself in that object. By this operation, the lower determination [that of being something “presented"] has at once vanished; for doing anything is a negative process which is carried through at the expense of something else. So far as that lower determination still continues to appear, it has withdrawn into the condition of unessentiality: just as, on the other hand, where the lower still predominates, while the higher is also present, the one coexists in a self-less way alongside of the other. While, therefore, the various ideas falling within a single religion no doubt exhibit the whole course taken by the forms of religion, the character of each is determined by the particular unity of consciousness and self-consciousness; that is to say, by the fact that the self-consciousness has taken into itself the determination belonging to the object of consciousness, has, by its own action, made that determination altogether its own, and knows it to be the essential one as compared with the others.
The truth of belief in a given determination of the religious spirit shows itself in this, that the actual spirit is constituted after the same manner as the shape in which spirit beholds itself in religion; thus e.g. the incarnation of God, which is found in Eastern religion, has no truth, because the concrete actual spirit of this religion is without the reconciliation this principle implies.
It is not in place here to return from the totality of specific determinations back to the individual determination, and show in what shape the plenitude of all the others is contained within it and within its particular form of religion. The higher form, when put back under a lower, is deprived of its significance for self-conscious spirit, belongs to spirit merely in a superficial way, and is for it at the level of presentation. The higher form has to be considered in its own peculiar significance, and dealt with where it is the principle of a particular religion, and is certified and approved by its actual spirit.
685. SPIRIT, as the absolute Being,, which is self-consciousness-or the self-conscious absolute Being, which is all truth and knows all reality as itself — is, to begin with, merely its notion and principle in contrast to the reality which it gives itself in the process of its conscious activity. And this notion is, as contrasted with the clear daylight of that explicit development, the darkness and night of its inner life; in contrast to the existence of its various moments as independent forms or shapes, this notion is the creative secret of its birth. This secret has its revelation within itself; for existence has its necessary place in this notion, because this notion is spirit knowing itself, and thus possesses in its own nature the moment of being consciousness and of presenting itself objectively. We have here the pure ego, which in its externalization, in itself qua universal object, has the certainty of self; in other words, this object is, for the ego, the interfusion of all thought and all reality.
686. When the first and immediate cleavage is made within self-knowing Absolute Spirit, its shape assumes that character which belongs to immediate consciousness or to sense-certainty. It beholds itself in the form of being; but not being in the sense of what is without spirit, containing only the contingent qualities of sensation — the kind of being that belongs to sense-certainty. Its being is filled with the content of spirit. It also includes within it the form which we. found in the case of immediate self-consciousness, the form of lord and master,(3) in regard to the self-consciousness of spirit which retreats from its object.
This being, having as its content the notion of spirit, is, then, the shape of spirit in relation simply to itself — the form of having no special shape at all. In virtue of this characteristic, this shape is the pure all-containing, all-suffusing Light of the Sunrise, which preserves itself in its formless indeterminate substantiality. Its counterpart, its otherness, is the equally simple negative — Darkness. The process of its own externalization, its creations in the unresisting element of its counterpart, are bursts of Light. At the same time in their ultimate simplicity they are its way of becoming something for itself, and its return from its objective existence, streams of fire consuming its embodiment. The distinction, which it gives itself, no doubt thrives abundantly on the substance of existence, and shapes itself as the diverse forms of nature. But the essential simplicity of its thought rambles and roves about inconstant and inconsistent, enlarges its bounds to measureless extent, and its beauty heightened to splendour is lost in its sublimity.(4)
687. The content, which this state of pure being evolves, its perceptive activity, is, therefore, an unreal by-play on this substance which merely rises, without setting into itself to become subject and secure firmly its distinctions through the self. Its determinations are merely attributes, which do not succeed in attaining independence; they remain merely names of the One, called by many names. This One is clothed with the manifold powers of existence and with the shapes of reality, as with a soulless, selfless ornament; they are merely messengers of its mighty power,(5) claiming no will of their own, visions of its glory, voices in its praise.
688. This revel of heaving life(6) must, however, assume the character of distinctive self-existence, and give enduring subsistence to its fleeting shapes. Immediate being, in which it places itself over against its own consciousness, is itself the negative destructive agency which dissolves its distinctions. It is thus in truth the Self; and spirit therefore passes on to know itself in the form of self. Pure Light scatters its simplicity as an infinity of separate forms, and presents itself as an offering to self-existence, that the individual may take sustainment to itself from its substance.
689. SELF-CONSCIOUS spirit, passing away from abstract, formless essence and going into itself-or, in other words, having raised its immediacy to the level of Self — makes its simple unity assume the character of a manifold of self-existing entities, and is the religion of spiritual sense-perception. Here spirit breaks up into an innumerable plurality of weaker and stronger, richer and poorer spirits. This Pantheism, which, to begin with, consists in the quiescent subsistence of these spiritual atoms, passes into a process of active internal hostility. The innocence, which characterizes the flower and plant religions, and which is merely the selfless idea of Self, gives way to the seriousness of struggling warring life, to the guilt of animal religions; the quiescence and impotence of contemplative individuality pass into the destructive activity of separate self-existence.
It is of no avail to have removed the lifelessness of abstraction from the things of perception, and to have raised them to the level of realities of spiritual perception: the animation of this spiritual kingdom has death in the heart of it, owing to the determinateness and the negativity, which overcome and trench upon the innocent indifference [of the various species of plants] to one another. Owing to this determinateness and negativity, the dispersion of spirit into the multiplicity of the passive plant-forms becomes a hostile process, in which the hatred stirred up by their independent self-existence rages and consumes.
The actual self-consciousness at work in this dispersed and disintegrated spirit, takes the form of a multitude of individualized mutually-antipathetic folk-spirits, who fight and hate each other to the death, and consciously accept certain specific forms of animals as their essential being and nature:(8) for they are nothing else than spirits of animals, or animal lives separate and cut off from one another, and with no universality consciously present in them.
690. The characteristic of purely negative independent self-existence, however, consumes itself in this active hatred towards one another; and through this process, involved in its very principle, spirit enters into another shape. Independent self-existence cancelled and abolished is the form of the object, a form which is produced by the self, or rather is the self produced, the self-consuming self, i.e. the self that becomes a “thing”. The agent at work, therefore, retains the upper hand over these animal spirits merely tearing each other to pieces; and his action is not merely negative, but composed and positive. The consciousness of spirit is, thus, now the process which is above and beyond the immediate inherent [universal] nature, as well as transcends the abstract self-existence in isolation. Since the implicit inherent nature is reduced, through opposition, to the level of a specific character, it is no longer the proper form of Absolute Spirit, but a reality which its consciousness finds lying over against itself as an ordinary existing fact and cancels; at the same time this consciousness is not merely this negative cancelling self-existent being, but produces its own objective idea of itself,-self-existence put forth in the form of an object. This process of production is, all the same, not yet perfect production; it is a conditioned activity, the forming of a given material.
691. SPIRIT, then, here takes the form of the artificer, and its action, when producing itself as object, but without having as yet grasped the thought of itself, is an instinctive kind of working, like bees building their cells.
692. The first form, because immediate, has the abstract character of “understanding”, and the work accomplished is not yet in itself endowed with spirit. The crystals of Pyramids and Obelisks, simple combinations of straight lines with even surfaces and equal relations of parts in which the incommensurability of roundness is set aside — these are the works produced by this artificer, the worker of the strict form. Owing to the purely abstract intelligible nature of the form, the work is not in itself its own true significance; it is not the spiritual self. Thus, either the works produced only receive spirit into them as an alien, departed spirit, one that has forsaken its living suffusion and permeation with reality, and, being itself dead, enters into these lifeless crystals; or they take up an external relation to spirit as something which is itself there externally and not as spirit — they are related to it as to the Orient Light, which throws its significance on them.
693. The separation of elements from which spirit as artificer starts — the separation of the implicit essential nature, which becomes the material it works upon, and independent self-existence, which is the aspect of the self-consciousness at work — this division has become objective to spirit in its work. Its further endeavour has to be directed to cancelling and doing away with this separation of soul and body; it must strive to clothe and give embodied shape to soul per se, and endow the body with soul. The two aspects, in that they are brought closer to one another, bear towards each other, in this condition, the character of ideally presented spirit and of enveloping shell. Spirit's oneness with itself contains this opposition of individuality and universality. As the work comes closer to itself in the coming together of its aspects, there comes about thereby at the same time the other fact, that the work comes closer to the self-consciousness performing it, and that the latter attains in the work knowledge of itself as it truly is. In this way, however, the work merely constitutes to begin with the abstract side of the activity of spirit, which does not yet know the content of this activity within itself but in its work, which is a “thing”. The artificer as such, spirit in its entirety, has not yet appeared; the artificer is still the inner, hidden reality, which qua entire is present only as broken up into active self-consciousness and the object it has produced.
694. The surrounding habitation, then, external reality, which has so far been raised merely to the abstract form of the understanding, is worked up by the artificer into a more animated form. The artificer employs plant life for this purpose, which is no longer sacred as in the previous case of inactive impotent pantheism; rather the artificer, who grasps himself as the self existent reality, takes that plant life as something to be used and degrades it to an external aspect, to the level of an ornament. But it is not turned to use without some alteration: for the worker producing the self-conscious form destroys at the same time the transitoriness, inherently characteristic of the immediate existence of this life, and brings its organic forms nearer to the more exact and more universal forms of thought. The organic form, which, left to itself, grows and thrives in particularity, being on its side subjugated by the form of thought, elevates in turn these straight-lined and level shapes into more animated roundness — a blending which becomes the root of free architecture.(10)
695. This dwelling, (the aspect of the universal element or inorganic nature of spirit), also includes within it now a form of individuality, which brings nearer to actuality the spirit that was formerly separated from existence and external or internal thereto, and thus makes the work to accord more with active self-consciousness. The worker lays hold, first of all, on the form of self-existence in general, on the forms of animal life. That he is no longer directly aware of himself in animal life, he shows by the fact that in reference to this he constitutes himself the productive force, and knows himself in it as being his own work, whereby the animal shape at the same time is one which is superseded and becomes the hieroglyphic symbol of another meaning, the hieroglyph of a thought. Hence also this shape is no longer solely and entirely used by the worker, but becomes blended with the shape embodying thought, with the human form.(11) Still, the work lacks the form and existence where self exists as self: it also fails to express in its very nature that it includes within itself an inner meaning; it lacks language, the element in which the sense and meaning contained are actually present. The work done, therefore, even when quite purified of the animal aspect, and bearing the form and shape of self-consciousness alone, is still the silent soundless shape, which needs the rays of the rising sun in order to have a sound which, when produced by light, is even then merely noise and not speech, shows merely an outer self, not the inner self.(12)
696. Contrasted with this outer self of the form and shape, stands the other form, which indicates that it has in it an inner being. Nature, turning back into its essential being, degrades its multiplicity of life, ever individualizing itself and confounding itself in its own process, to the level of an unessential encasing shell, which is the covering for the inner being. And as yet this inner being is still simple darkness, the unmoved, the black formless stone.(13)
697. Both representations contain inwardness and existence — the two moments of spirit: and both kinds of manifestation contain both moments at once in a relation of opposition, the self both as inward and as outward. Both have to be united. The soul of the statue in human form does not yet come out of the inner being, is not yet speech, objective existence of self which is inherently internal, — and the inner being of multiform existence is still without voice or sound, still draws no distinctions within itself, and is still separated from its outer being, to which all distinctions belong. The artificer, therefore, combines both by blending the forms of nature and self-consciousness; and these ambiguous beings, a riddle to themselves — the conscious struggling with what has no consciousness, the simple inner with the multiform outer, the darkness of thought mated with the clearness of expression — these break out into the language of a wisdom that is darkly deep and difficult to understand.(14)
698. With the production of this work, the instinctive method of working ceases, which, in contrast to self-consciousness, produced a work devoid of consciousness. For here the activity of the artificer, which constitutes self-consciousness, comes face to face with an inner being equally self-conscious and giving itself expression. He has therein raised himself by his work up to the point where his conscious life breaks asunder, where spirit greets spirit. In this unity of self-conscious spirit with itself, so far as it is aware of being embodiment and object of its own consciousness, its blending and mingling with the unconscious state of immediate shapes of nature become purified. These monsters in form and shape, word and deed, are resolved and dissolved into a shape which is spiritual — an outer which has entered into itself, an inner which expresses itself out of itself and in itself,— they pass into thought, which brings forth itself, preserves the shape and form suited to thought, and is transparent existence. Spirit is Artist.
1. Primarily Oriental religion.
2. Parsee religion.
3. Term applied in e.g. Judaism and Mohammedanism.
4. Cp. Philos. Of Relig., W.W., XI, 403,404, 411.
5. Angels.
6. Cp. Ency., § 389.
7. Primarily religions of India.
8. Sacred animals in Indian religion.
9. Egyptian religions.
10. The Egyptian columns and architecture.
11. The representations of the gods with forms half animal, half human.
12. The statues of Memnon which gave forth a moaning harp-like noise at sunrise.
13. The Black Stone of Mecca: a fetish still worshipped by the faithful.
14. Sphinxes.
699. SPIRIT has raised the shape in which it is object for its own consciousness into the form of consciousness itself; and spirit produces such a shape for itself. The artificer has given up the synthesizing activity, that blending of the heterogeneous forms of thought and nature. When the shape has gained the form of self-conscious activity, the artificer has become a spiritual workman.
700. If we next ask, what the actual spirit is, which finds in the religion of art the consciousness of its Absolute, it turns out that this is the ethical or objective spirit. This spirit is not merely the universal substance of all individuals; but when this substance is said to have, as an objective fact for actual consciousness, the form of consciousness, this amounts to saying that the substance, which is individualized, is known by the individuals within it as their proper essence and their own achievement. It is for them neither the Light of the World, in whose, unity the self-existence of self-consciousness is contained only negatively, only transitorily, and beholds the lord and master of its reality; nor is it the restless waste and destruction of hostile nations; nor their subjection to “castes”, which together constitute the semblance of organization of a completed whole, where, however, the universal freedom of the individuals concerned is wanting. Rather this spirit is a free nation, in which custom and order constitute the common substance of all, whose reality and existence each and every one knows to be his own will and his own deed.
701. The religion of the ethical spirit, however, raises it above its actual realization, and is the return from its objectivity into pure knowledge of itself. Since an ethically constituted nation lives in direct unity with its own substance, and does not contain the principle of pure individualism of self-consciousness, the religion characteristic of its sphere first appears in complete form in its parting from its stable security. For the reality of the ethical substance rests partly on its quiet unchangeableness as contrasted with the absolute process of self-consciousness; and consequently on the fact that this self-consciousness has not yet left its serene life of customary convention and its confident security therein, and gone into itself. Partly, again, that reality rests on its organization into a plurality of rights and duties, as also on its organized distribution into the spheres of the various classes, each with its particular way of acting which co-operates to form the whole; and hence rests on the fact that the individual is contented with the limitation of his existence, and has not yet grasped the unrestricted thought of his free self. But that serene immediate confidence in the substance of this ethical life turns back into trust in self and certainty of self; and the plurality of rights and duties, as well as the restricted particular action this involves, is the same dialectic process in the sphere of the ethical life as the plurality of “things"and their various “qualities” — a process which only comes to rest and stability in the simplicity of spirit certain of self
The complete fulfilment of the ethical life in free self-consciousness, and the destined consummation (Schicksal) of the ethical world, are therefore that individuality which has entered into itself; the condition is one of absolute levity on the part of the ethical spirit; it has dissipated and resolved into itself all the firmly established distinctions constituting its own stability, and the separate spheres of its own articulated organization and, being perfectly sure of itself, has attained to boundless cheerfulness of heart and the freest enjoyment of itself. This simple certainly of spirit within itself has a double meaning; it is quiet stability and solid truth, as well as absolute unrest, and the disappearance of the ethical order. It turns round, however, into the latter; for the truth of the ethical spirit lies primarily just in this substantial objectivity and trust, in which the self does not know itself as free individual, and which, therefore, in this inner subjectivity, in the self becoming free, falls into ruins. Since then its trust is broken, and the substance of the nation cracked, spirit, which was the connecting medium of unstable extremes, has now come forward as an extreme — that of self-consciousness grasping itself as essential and ultimate. This is spirit certain within itself, which mourns over the loss of its world, and now out of the purity of self produces its own essential being, raised above actual reality.
702. At such an epoch art in absolute form(2) comes on the scene. At the earlier stage it is instinctive in its operation; its operation is steeped in existence, works its way out of existence and works right into the existent; it does not find its substance in the free life of an ethical order, and hence, too, as regards the self operating does not exercise free spiritual activity.
Later on, spirit goes beyond art in order to gain its higher manifestation, viz. that of being not merely the substance born and produced out of the self, but of being. in its manifestation as object, this very self; it seeks at that higher level not merely to bring forth itself out of its own notion, but to have its very notion as its shape, so that the notion and the work of art produced may know each other reciprocally as one and the same.(3)
703. Since, then, the ethical substance has withdrawn from its objective existence into its pure self-consciousness, this is the aspect of the notion, or the activity with which spirit brings itself forth as object. It is pure form, because the individual in ethical obedience and service has so worked off every unconscious existence and every fixed determination, as the substance has itself become this fluid and undifferentiated essence. This form is the night in which the substance was betrayed, and made itself subject. It is out of this night of pure certainty of self that the ethical spirit rises again in a shape freed from nature and its own immediate existence.
704. The existence of the pure notion into which spirit has fled from its bodily shape, is an individual, which spirit selects as the vessel for its sorrow. Spirit acts in this individual as his universal and his power, from which he suffers violence, as his element of “Pathos”, by having given himself over to which his self-consciousness loses freedom. But that positive power belonging to the universal is overcome by the pure self of the individual, the negative power. This pure activity, conscious of its inalienable force, wrestles with the unembodied essential being. Becoming its master, this negative activity has turned the element of pathos into its own material, and given itself its content; and this unity comes out as a work, universal spirit individualized and consciously presented.
1. Greek religion.
2. The religion of pure beauty.
3. This paragraph may be regarded as a parenthetical note.
705. THE first work of art is, because immediate, abstract and particular. As regards itself, it has to move away from this immediate and objective phase towards self-consciousness, while, on the other side, the latter for itself endeavours in the “cult” to do away with the distinction, which it at first gives itself in contrast to its own spirit, and by so doing to produce a work of art inherently endowed with life.
706. The first way in which the artistic spirit keeps as far as possible removed from each other its shape and its active consciousness, is immediate in character — the shape assumed is there as a “thing” in general. It breaks up into the distinction of individualness which has the shape of the self, and universality, which presents the inorganic nature in reference to the shape adopted, and is its environment and habitation. This shape assumed obtains its pure form, the form belonging to spirit, by the whole being raised into the sphere of the pure notion. It is not the crystal, belonging as we saw to the level of understanding, a form which housed and covered a lifeless element, or is shone upon externally by a soul. Nor, again, is it that commingling of the forms of nature and thought, which first arose in connexion with plants, thought's activity here being still an imitation. Rather the notion strips off the remnant of root, branches, and leaves, still clinging to the forms, purifies the forms, and makes them into figures in which the crystal's straight lines and surfaces are raised into incommensurable relations, so that the animation of the organic is taken up into the abstract form of understanding, and, at the same time, its essential nature-incommensurability-is preserved for understanding. The indwelling god, however, is the black stone extracted from the animal encasement,(1) and suffused with the light of consciousness. The human form strips off the animal character with which it was mixed up. The animal form is for the god merely an accidental vestment; the animal appears alongside its true form,(2) and has no longer a value on its own account, but has sunk into being a significant sign of something else, has become a mere symbol. By that very fact, the form assumed by the god in itself casts off even the restrictions of the natural conditions of animal existence, and hints at the internal arrangements of organic life melted down into the surface of the form, and pertaining only to this surface.
707. The essential being of the god, however, is the unity of the universal existence of nature and of self-conscious spirit which in its actuality appears confronting the former. At the same time, being in the first instance an individual shape, its existence is one of the elements of nature, just as its self-conscious actuality is a particular national spirit.(3) But the former is, in this unity, that element reflected back into spirit, nature made transparent by thought and united with self-conscious life. The form of the gods retains, therefore, within it its nature element as something transcended, as a shadowy, obscure memory. The utter chaos and confused struggle amongst the elements existing free and detached from each other, the non-ethical disordered realm of the Titans, is vanquished and banished to the outskirts of self-transparent reality, to the cloudy boundaries of the world which finds itself in the sphere of spirit and is there at peace. These ancient gods, first-born children of the union of Light with Darkness, Heaven, Earth, Ocean, Sun, earth's blind typhonic Fire, and so on, are supplanted by shapes, which do but darkly recall those earlier titans, and which are no longer things of nature, but clear ethical spirits of self-conscious nations.
708. This simple shape has thus destroyed within itself the dispeace of endless individuation, the individuation both in the life of nature, which operates with necessity only qua universal essence, but is contingent in its actual existence and process; and also in the life of a nation, which is scattered and broken into particular spheres of action and into individual centres of self-consciousness, and has an existence manifold in action and meaning. All this individuation the simplicity of this form has abolished, and brought together into an individuality at peace with itself. Hence the condition of unrest stands contrasted with this form; confronting quiescent individuality, the essential reality, stands self-consciousness, which, being its source and origin, has nothing left over for itself except to be pure activity. What belongs to the substance, the artist imparted entirely to his work; to himself, however, as a specific individuality he gave in his work no reality. He could only confer completeness on it by relinquishing his particular nature, divesting himself of his own being, and rising to the abstraction of pure action.
In this first and immediate act of production, the separation of the work and his self-conscious activity is not yet healed again. The work is, therefore, not by itself really an animated thing; it is a whole only when its process of coming to be is taken along with it. The obvious and common element in the case of a work of art, that it is produced in consciousness and is made by the hand of man, is the moment of the notion existing qua notion, and standing in contrast to the work produced. And if this notion, qua the artist or spectator, is unselfish enough to declare the work of art to be per se absolutely animated, and to forget himself qua agent or onlooker, then, as against this, the notion of spirit has to be insisted on; spirit cannot dispense with the moment of being conscious of itself. This moment, however, stands in contrast to the work, because spirit, in this its primary disruption, gives the two sides their abstract and specifically contrasted characteristics of “doing” something and of being a “thing”; and their return to the unity they started from has not yet come about.
709. The artist finds out, then, in his work, that he did not produce a reality like himself. No doubt there comes back to him from his work a consciousness in the sense that an admiring multitude honours it as the spirit, which is their own true nature. But this way of animating his work, since it renders him his self-consciousness merely in the way of admiration, is rather a confession to the artist that the animated work is not on the same level as himself. Since his self comes back to him in the form of gladness in general, he does not find therein the pain of his self-discipline and the pain of production, nor the exertion and strain of his own toil. People may, moreover, judge the work, or bring it offerings and gifts, or endue it with their consciousness in whatever way they like — if they with their knowledge set themselves over it, he knows how much more his act is than what they understand and say; if they put themselves beneath it, and recognize in it their own dominating essential reality, he knows himself as the master of this.
710. The work of art hence requires another element for its existence; God requires another way of going forth than this, in which, out of the depths of his creative night, he drops into the opposite, into externality, to the character of a “thing” with no self-consciousness. This higher element is that of Language-a way of existing which is directly self-conscious existence. When individual self-consciousness exists in that way, it is at the same time directly a form of universal contagion; complete isolation of independent self-existent selves is at once fluent continuity and universally communicated unity of the many selves; it is the soul existing as soul. The god, then, which takes language as its medium of embodiment, is the work of art inherently animated, endowed with a soul, a work which directly in its existence contains the pure activity which was apart from and in contrast to the god when existing as a “thing” In other words, self -consciousness, when its essential being becomes objective, remains in direct unison with itself. It is, when thus at home with itself in its essential nature, pure thought or devotion, whose inwardness gets at the same time express existence in the Hymn. The hymn keeps within it the individuality of self-consciousness, and this individual character is at the same time perceived to be there universal. Devotion, kindled in every one, is a spiritual stream which in all the manifold self-conscious units is conscious of itself as one and the same function in all alike and a simple state of being. Spirit, being this universal self-consciousness of every one, holds in a single unity its pure inwardness as well as its objective existence for others and the independent self-existence of the individual units.
711. This kind of language is distinct from another way God speaks, which is not that of universal self-consciousness. The Oracle, both in the case of the god of the religions of art as well as of the preceding religions, is the necessary and the first form of divine utterance. For God's very principle implies that God is at once the essence of nature and of spirit, and hence has not merely natural but spiritual existence as well. In so far as this moment is merely implied as yet in God's principle and is not realized in religion, the language used is, for the religious self-consciousness, the speech of an alien and external self-consciousness. The self-consciousness which remains alien and foreign to its religious communion, is not yet there in the way its essential principle requires it should be. The self is simple self-existence, and thereby is altogether universal self-existence; that self, however, which is cut off from the self-consciousness of the communion, is primarily a mere individual self.
The content of this its own peculiar and individual form of speech results from the general determinate character which the Absolute Spirit is affirmed to have in its religion as such. Thus the universal spirit of the Sunrise, which has not yet particularized its existence, utters about the Absolute equally simple and universal statements, whose substantial content is sublime in the simplicity of its truth, but at the same time appears, because of this universality, trivial to the self-consciousness developing further.
712. The further developed self, which advances to being distinctively for itself, rises above the pure “pathos” of [unconscious] substance, gets the mastery over the objectivity of the Light of the rising Sun, and knows that simplicity of truth to be the inherent reality (das Ansichseyende) which does not possess the form of contingent existence through an utterance of an alien self, but is the sure and unwritten law of the gods, a law that “lives for ever, and no man knows what time it came”.
As the universal truth, revealed by the “Light” of the world, has here returned into what is within or what is beneath, and has thus got rid of the form of contingent appearance; so too, on the other hand, in the religion of art, because God's shape has taken on consciousness and hence individuality in general, the peculiar utterance of God, who is the spirit of an ethically constituted nation, is the Oracle, which knows its special circumstances and situation, and announces what is serviceable to its interests. Reflective thought, however, claims for itself the universal truths enunciated, because these are known as the essential inherent reality of the nation's life; and the utterance of them is thus for such reflexion no longer a strange and alien speech, but is its very own. Just as that wise man of old(4) searched in his own thought for what was worthy and good, but left it to his “Daimon” to find out and decide the petty contingent content of what he wanted to know — whether it was good for him to keep company with this or that person, or good for one of his friends to go on a journey, and such like unimportant things; in the same way the universal consciousness draws the knowledge about the contingent from birds, or trees, or fermenting earth, the steam from which deprives the self-conscious mind of its sanity of judgment. For what is accidental is not the object of sober reflexion, and is extraneous; and hence the ethical consciousness lets itself, as if by a throw of the dice, settle the matter in a manner that is similarly unreflective and extraneous. If the individual, by his understanding, determines on a certain course, and selects, after consideration, what is useful for him, it is the specific nature of his particular character which is the ground of this self-determination. This basis is just what is contingent; and that, knowledge which his understanding supplies as to what is useful for the individual, is hence just such a knowledge as that of “oracles” or of the “lot”; only that he who questions the oracle or lot, thereby shows the ethical sentiment of indifference to what is accidental, while the former, on the contrary, treats the inherently contingent as an essential concern of his thought and knowledge. Higher than both, however, is to make careful reflexion the oracle for contingent action, but yet to recognize that this very act reflected on is something contingent, because it refers to what is opportune and has a relation to what is particular.
713. The true self-conscious existence, which spirit receives in the form of speech, which is not the utterance of an alien and so accidental, i.e. not universal, self-consciousness, is the work of art which we met with before. It stands in contrast to the statue, which has the character of a “thing”. As the statue is existence in a state of rest, the other is existence in a state of transience. In the case of the former, objectivity is set free and is without the immediate presence of a self of its own; in the latter, on the other hand, objectivity is too much confined within the self, attains insufficiently to definite embodiment, and is, like time, no longer- there just as soon as it is there.
714. The religious Cult constitutes the process of the two sides — a process in which the divine embodiment in motion within the pure feeling-element of self-consciousness, and its embodiment at rest in the element of thinghood, reciprocally abandon the different character each possesses, and the unity, which is the underlying principle of their being, becomes an existing fact. Here in the Cult, the self gives itself a consciousness of the Divine Being descending from its remoteness into it, and this Divine Being, which was formerly the unreal and merely objective, thereby receives the proper actuality of self-consciousness.
715. This principle of the Cult is essentially contained and present already in the flow of the melody of the Hymn. These hymns of devotion are the way the self obtains immediate pure satisfaction through and within itself. It is the soul purified, which, in the purity it thus attains, is immediately and only absolute Being, and is one with absolute Being. The soul, because of its abstract character, is not consciousness distinguishing its object from itself, and is thus merely the night of the object's existence and the place prepared for its shape. The abstract Cult, therefore, raises the self into being this pure divine element. The soul fulfils the attainment of this purity in a conscious way.
Still the soul is not yet the self, which has descended to the depths of its being, and knows itself as evil. It is something that merely is, a soul, which cleanses its exterior with the washing of water, and robes it in white, while its innermost traverses the imaginatively presented path of labour, punishment, and reward, the way of spiritual discipline in general, of relinquishing its particularity — the road by which it reaches the mansions and the fellowship of the blest.
716. This ceremonial cult is, in its first form, merely in secret, i.e. is a fulfilment accomplished merely in idea, and unreal in fact. It has to become a real act, for an unreal act is a contradiction in terms. Consciousness proper thereby raises itself to the level of its pure self-consciousness. The essential Being has in it the significance of a free object; through the actual cult this object turns back into the self; and in so far as, in pure consciousness, it has the significance of absolute Being dwelling in its purity beyond actual reality, this Being descends, through this mediating process of the cult, from its universality into individual form, and thus combines and unites with actual reality.
717. The way the two sides make their appearance in the act is of such a character that the self-conscious aspect, so far as it is actual consciousness, finds the absolute Being manifesting itself as actual nature. On the one hand, nature belongs to self-consciousness as its possession and property, and stands for what has no existence per se. On the other hand, nature is its proper immediate reality and particularity, which is equally regarded as not essential, and is superseded. At the same time, that external nature has the opposite significance for its pure consciousness — viz. the significance of being the inherently real, for which the self sacrifices its own [relative] unreality, just as, conversely, the self sacrifices the unessential aspect of nature to itself. The act is thereby a spiritual movement, because it is this double-sided process of cancelling the abstraction of absolute Being (which is the way devotion determines the object), and making it something concrete and actual, and, on the other hand, of cancelling the actual (which is the way the agent determines the object and the self acting), and raising it into universality.
718. The practice of the religious Cult begins, therefore, with the pure and simple “offering up” or “surrender” of a possession, which the owner, apparently without any profit whatsoever to himself, pours away or lets rise up in smoke. By so doing he renounces before the absolute Being of his pure consciousness all possession and right of property and enjoyment thereof; renounces personality and the reversion of his action to his self; and instead, reflects the act into the universal, into the absolute Being rather than into himself. Conversely, however, the objective ultimate Being too is annihilated in that very process. The animal offered up is the symbol of a god; the fruits consumed are the actual living Ceres and Bacchus. In the former die the powers of the upper law the [Olympians] which has blood and actual life, in the latter the powers of the lower law [the Furies] which possesses in bloodless form secret and crafty power.
The sacrifice of the divine substance, so far as it is active, belongs to the side of self-consciousness. That this concrete act may be possible, the absolute Being must have from the start implicitly sacrificed itself. This it has done in the fact that it has given itself definite existence, and made itself an individual animal and fruit of the earth. The self actively sacrificing demonstrates in actual existence, and sets before its own consciousness, this already implicitly completed self-renunciation on the part of absolute Being; and replaces that immediate reality, which absolute Being has, by the higher, viz. that of the self making the sacrifice. For the unity which has arisen, and which is the outcome of transcending the singleness and separation of the two sides, is not merely negative destructive fate, but has a positive significance. It is merely for the abstract Being of the nether world that the sacrifice offered to it is wholly surrendered and devoted; and, in consequence, it is only for that Being that the reflexion of personal possession and individual self-existence back into the Universal is marked distinct from the self as such. At the same time, however, this is only a trifling part; and the other act of sacrifice is merely the destruction of what cannot be used, and is really the preparation of the offered substance for a meal, the feast that cheats the act out of its negative significance. The person making the offering at that first sacrifice reserves the greatest share for his own enjoyment; and reserves from the latter sacrifice what is useful for the same purpose. This enjoyment is the negative power which cancels the absolute Being as well as the singleness; and this enjoyment is, at the same time, the positive actual reality in which the objective existence of absolute Being is transmuted into self-conscious existence, and the self has consciousness of its unity with its Absolute.
719. This cult, for the rest, is indeed an actual act, although its meaning lies for the most part only in devotion. What pertains to devotion is not objectively produced, just as the result when confined to the feeling of enjoyment(5) is robbed of its external existence. The Cult, therefore, goes further, and replaces this defect, in the first instance by giving its devotion an objective subsistence, since the cult is the common task-or the individual takes for each and all to do-which produces for the honour and glory of God a House for Him to dwell in and adornment for His presence. By so doing, partly the external objectivity of statuary is cancelled; for by thus dedicating his gifts and his labours the worker makes God well disposed towards him and looks on his self as detached and appertaining to God. Partly, too, this action is not the individual labour of the artist; this particularity is dissolved in the universality. But it is not only the honour of God which is brought about, and the blessing of His countenance and favour is not only shed in idea and imagination on the worker; the work also has a meaning the reverse of the first which was that of self-renunciation and of honour done to what is alien and external. The Halls and Dwellings of God are for the use of man, the treasures preserved there are in time of need his own; the honour which God enjoys in his decorative adornment, is the honour and glory of the artistic and magnanimous nation. At the festival season, the people adorn their own dwellings, their own garments, as well as God's establishments with furnishings of elegance and grace. In this manner they receive a return for their gifts from a responsive and grateful God; and receive the proofs of His favour-wherein the nation became bound to the God because of the work done for Him-not as a hope and a deferred realization, but rather, in testifying to His honour and in presenting gifts, the nation finds directly and at once the enjoyment of its own wealth and adornment.
1. v. sup., p. 706.
2. e.g. the eagle as the “bird of Zeus”.
3. e.g. Athene.
4. Socrates.
5. i.e. at the feast.
720. THAT nation which approaches its god in the cult of the religion of art is an ethically constituted nation, knowing its State and the acts of the State to be the will and the achievement of its own self. This universal spirit, confronting the self-conscious nation, is consequently not the “Light-God”, which, being selfless does not contain the certainty of the individual selves, but is only their universal ultimate Being and the dominating imperious power, wherein they disappear. The religious cult of this simple unembodied ultimate Being gives back, therefore, to its votaries in the main merely this: that they are the nation of their god. It secures for them merely their stable subsistence, and their simple substance as a whole; it does not secure for them their actual self; this is indeed rejected. For they revere their god as the empty profound, not as spirit. The cult, however, of the religion of art, on the other hand, is without that abstract simplicity of the absolute Being, and therefore without its “profundity”. But that Being, which is directly at one with the self, is inherently spirit and comprehending truth, although not yet truth known explicitly, in other words not knowing the “depths” of its nature. Because this Absolute, then, implies self, consciousness finds itself at home with it when it appears; and, in the cult, this consciousness receives not merely the general title to its own subsistence, but also its self-conscious existence within it: just as, conversely, the Absolute has no being in a despised and outcast nation whose mere substance is acknowledged, whose reality is selfless, but in the nation whose self is acknowledged as living in its substance.
721. From the ceremonial cult, then, self-consciousness that is at peace and satisfied in its ultimate Being turns away, as also does the god that has entered into self-consciousness as into its place of habitation. This place is, by itself, the night of mere “substance”, or its pure individuality; but no longer the strained and striving individuality of the artist, which has not yet reconciled itself with its essential Being that is striving to become objective; it is the night [substance] satisfied, having its “pathos” within it and in want of nothing, because it comes back from intuition, from objectivity which is overcome and superseded.
This “pathos” is, by itself, the Being of the Rising Sun,(1) a Being, however, which has now “set” and disappeared within itself, and has its own “setting”, self-consciousness, within it, and so contains existence and reality.
It has here traversed the process of its actualization. Descending from its pure essentiality and becoming an objective force of nature and the expressions of this force, it is an existence relative to an other, an objective existence for the self by which it is consumed. The silent inner being of selfless nature attains in its fruits the stage where nature, duly self-prepared and digested, offers itself as material for the life which has a self. In its being useful for food and drink it reaches its highest perfection. For therein it is the possibility of a higher existence, and comes in touch with spiritual existence. In its metamorphosis the spirit of the earth has developed and become partly a silently energizing substance, partly spiritual ferment; in the first case it is the feminine principle, the nursing mother, in the other the masculine principle, the self-driving force of self-conscious existence.
722. In this enjoyment, then, that orient “Light” of the world is discovered for what it really is: Enjoyment is the Mystery of its being. For mysticism is not concealment of a secret, or ignorance; it consists in the self knowing itself to be one with absolute Being, and in this latter, therefore, becoming revealed. Only the self is revealed to itself ; or what is manifest is so merely in the immediate certainty of itself. But it is just in such certainty that simple absolute Being has been placed by the cult. As a thing that can be used, it has not only existence which is seen, felt, smelt, tasted; it is also object of desire, and, by actually being enjoyed, it becomes one with the self, and thereby disclosed completely to this self, and made manifest.
When we say of anything, “it is manifest to reason, to the heart”, it is in point of fact still secret, for it still lacks the actual certainty of immediate existence, both the certainty regarding what is objective, and the certainty of enjoyment, a certainty which in religion, however, is not only immediate and unreflecting, but at the same time purely cognitive certainty of self.
723. What has thus been, through the cult, revealed to self-conscious spirit within itself, is simple absolute Being; and this has been revealed partly as the process of passing out of its dark night of concealment up to the level of consciousness, to be there its silently nurturing substance; partly, however, as the process of losing itself again in nether darkness, in the self, and of waiting above merely with the silent yearning of motherhood. The more conspicuous moving impulse, however, is the variously named “Light” of the Rising Sun and its tumult of heaving life, which, having likewise desisted from its abstract state of being, has first embodied itself in objective existence in the fruits of the earth,(2) and then, surrendering itself to self-consciousness,(3) attained there to its proper realization; and now it curvets and careers about in the guise of a crowd of excited, fervid women, the unrestrained revel of nature in self-conscious form.(4)
724. Still, however, it is only Absolute Spirit in the sense of this simple abstract Being, not as spirit per se, that is discovered to consciousness: i.e. it is merely immediate spirit, the spirit of nature. Its self-conscious life is therefore merely the mystery of the Bread and the Wine, of Ceres and Bacchus, not of the other, the strictly higher, gods [of Olympus], whose individuality includes, as an essential moment, self-consciousness as such. Spirit has not yet qua self-conscious spirit offered itself up to it, and the mystery of bread and wine is not yet the mystery of flesh and blood.
725. This unstable divine revel must come to rest as an object, and the enthusiasm, which did not reach consciousness, must produce a work which confronts it as the statue stands over against the enthusiasm of the artist in the previous case, — a work indeed that is equally complete and finished, yet not as an inherently lifeless but as a living self. Such a cult is the Festival which man makes in his own honour, though not yet imparting to a cult of that kind the significance of the Absolute Being; for it is the ultimate Being that is first revealed to him, not yet Spirit — not such a Being as essentially takes on human form. But this cult provides the basis for this revelation, and lays out its moments individually and separately. Thus we here get the abstract moment of the living embodiment of ultimate Being, just as formerly we had the unity of both in the state of unconstrained emotional fervency. In the place of the statue man thus puts himself as the figure elaborated and moulded for perfectly free movement, just as the statue is the perfectly free state of quiescence. If every individual knows how to play the part at least of a torchbearer, one of them comes prominently forward who is the very embodiment of the movement, the smooth elaboration, the fluent energy and force of all the members. He is a lively and living work of art, which matches strength with its beauty; and to him is given, as a reward for his force and energy, the adornment, with which the statue was honoured [in the former type of religion], and the honour of being, amongst his own nation,, instead of a god in stone, the highest bodily representation of what the essential Being of the nation is.
726. In both the representations, which have just come before us, there is present the unity of self-consciousness and spiritual Being; but they still lack their due balance and equilibrium. In the case of the bacchic(5) revelling enthusiasm the self is beside itself; in bodily beauty of form it is spiritual Being that is outside itself. The dim obscurity of consciousness in the one case and its wild stammering utterance, must be taken up into the transparent existence of the latter; and the clear but spiritless form of the latter, into the emotional inwardness of the former. The perfect element in which the inwardness is as external as the externality is inward, is once again Language. But it is neither the language of the oracle, entirely contingent in its content and altogether individual in character; nor is it the emotional hymn sung in praise of a merely individual god; nor is it the meaningless stammer of delirious bacchantic revelry. It has attained to its clear and universal content and meaning. Its content is clear, for the artificer has passed out of the previous state of entirely substantial enthusiasm, and worked himself into a definite shape, which is his own proper existence, permeated through all its movements by self-conscious soul, and is that of his contemporaries. Its content is universal, for in this festival, which is to the honour of man, there vanishes the onesidedness peculiar to figures represented in statues, which merely contain a national spirit, a determinate character of the godhead. The finely built warrior is indeed the honour and glory of his particular nation; but he is a physical or corporeal individuality in which are sunk out of sight the expanse and the seriousness of meaning, and the inner character of the spirit which underlies the particular mode of life, the peculiar petitions, the needs and the customs of his nation. In relinquishing all this for complete corporeal embodiment, spirit has laid aside the particular impressions, the special tones and chords of that nature which it, as the actual spirit of the nation, includes. Its nation, therefore, is no longer conscious in this spirit of its special particular character, but rather of having laid this aside, and of the universality of its human existence.
1. The “Light” of the world.
2. As found in the mysteries of Demeter.
3. As found in the mysteries of Bacchus and Dionysus.
4. The Maenads; cp. Euripides, Bacchae.
5. As distinct from the worship of Apollo.
727. THE national spirits, which become conscious of their being in the shape of some particular animal, coalesce into one single spirit.(1) Thus it is that the separate artistically beautiful national spirits combine to form a Pantheon, the element and habitation of which is Language. Pure intuition of self in the sense of universal human nature takes, when the national spirit is actualized, this form: the national spirit combines with the others (which with it constitute, through nature and natural conditions, one people), in a common undertaking, and for this task builds up a collective nation, and, with that, a collective heaven. This universality, to which spirit attains in its existence, is, nevertheless, merely this first universality, which, to begin with, starts from the individuality of ethical life, has not yet overcome its immediacy, has not yet built up a single state out of these separate national elements. The ethical life of an actual national spirit rests partly on the immediate confiding trust of the individuals in the whole of their nation, partly in the direct share which all, in spite of differences of class, take in the decisions and acts of its government. In the union, not in the first instance to secure a permanent order but merely for a common act, that freedom of participation on the part of each and all is for the nonce set aside. This first community of life is, therefore, an assemblage of individualities rather than the dominion and control of abstract thought, which would rob the individuals of their self-conscious share in the will and act of the whole.
728. The assembly of national spirits constitutes a circle of forms and shapes, which now embraces the whole of nature, as well as the whole ethical world. They too are under the supreme command rather than the supreme dominion of the One. By themselves, they are the universal substances embodying what the self-conscious essential reality inherently is and does. This, however, constitutes the moving force, and, in the first instance, at least the centre, with which those universal entities are concerned, and which, to begin with, seems to unite in a merely accidental way all that they variously accomplish. But it is the return of the divine Being to self-consciousness which already contains the reason that self-consciousness forms the centre for those divine forces, and conceals their essential unity in the first instance under the guise of a friendly external relation between both worlds.
729. The same universality, which belongs to this content, attaches necessarily also to that form of consciousness in which the content appears. It is no longer the concrete acts of the cult; it is an action which is not indeed raised as yet to the level of the notion, but only to that of ideas, the synthetic connexion of self-conscious and external existence. The element in which these presented ideas exist, language, is the earliest language, the Epic as such., which contains the universal content, at any rate universal in the sense of completeness of the world presented, though not in the sense of universality of thought. The Minstrel is the individual and actual spirit from whom, as a subject of this world, it is produced, and by whom it is borne. His “pathos” is not the deafening power of nature, but Mnemosyne, Recollection, a gradually evolved inwardness, the memory of an essential mode of being once directly present. He is the organ and instrument whose content is passing away; it is not his own self which is of any account, but his muse, his universal song. What, however, is present in fact, has the form of an inferential process, where the one extreme of universality, the world of gods, is connected with individuality, the minstrel, through the middle term of particularity. The middle term is the nation in its heroes, who are individual men like the minstrel, but only ideally presented, and thereby at the same time universal like the free extreme of universality, the gods.
730. In this Epic, then, what is inherently established in the cult, the relation of the divine to the human, is set forth and displayed as a whole to consciousness. The content is an “act"(2) of the essential Being conscious of itself. Acting disturbs the peace of the substance, and awakens the essential Being; and by so doing its simple unity is divided into parts, and opened up into the manifold world of natural powers and ethical forces. The act is the violation of the peaceful earth; it is the trench which, vivified by the blood of the living, calls forth the spirits of the departed, who are thirsting for life, and who receive it in the action of self-consciousness.(3) There are two sides to the business the universal activity is concerned to accomplish: the side of the self-in virtue of which it is brought about by a collection of actual nations with the prominent individualities at the head of them; and the side of the universal — in virtue of which it is brought about by their substantial forces. The relation of the two, however, took, as we saw just now, the character of being the synthetic connexion of universal and individual, i.e. of being a process of ideal presentation. On this specific character depends the judgment regarding this world.
The relation of the two is, by this means, a commingling of both, which illogically divides the unity of the action, and in a needless fashion throws the act from one side over to the other. The universal powers have the form of individual beings, and thus have in them the principle from which action comes; when they effect anything, therefore, this seems to proceed as entirely from them and to be as free as in the case of men. Hence both gods and men have done one and the same thing. The seriousness with which those divine powers go to work is ridiculously unnecessary, since they are in point of fact the moving force of the individualities engaged in the acts; while the strain and toil of the latter again is an equally useless effort, since the former direct and manage everything. Overzealous mortal creatures, who are as nothing, are at the same time the mighty self that brings into subjection the universal beings, offends the gods, and procures for them actual reality and an interest in acting. Just as, conversely, these powerless gods, these impotent universal beings, who procure their sustenance from the gifts of men and through men first get something to do, are the natural inner principle and the substance of all events, as also the ethical material, and the “pathos” of action. If their cosmic natures first get reality and a sphere of effectual operation through the free self of individuality, it is also the case that they are the universal, which withdraws from and avoids this connexion, remains unrestricted and unconstrained in its own character, and, by the unconquerable elasticity of its unity, extinguishes the atomic singleness of the individual acting and his various features, preserves itself in its purity, and dissolves all that is individual in the current of its own continuity.
731. Just as the gods fall into this contradictory relation with the antithetic nature having the form of self, in the same way their universality comes into conflict with their own specific character and the relation in which it stands to others. They are the eternal and resplendent individuals, who exist in their own calm, and are removed from the changes of time and the influence of alien forces. But they are at the same time determinate elements, particular gods, and thus stand in relation to others. But that relation to others, which, in virtue of the opposition it involves, is one of strife, is a comic self-forgetfulness of their eternal nature. The determinateness they possess is rooted in the divine subsistence, and in its specific limitation has the independence of the whole individuality; owing to this whole, their characters at once lose the sharpness of their distinctive peculiarity, and in their ambiguity blend together.
One purpose of their activity and their activity itself, being directed against an “other” and so against an invincible divine force, are a contingent and futile piece of bravado, which passes away at once, and transforms the pretence of seriousness in the act into a harmless, self-confident piece of sport with no result and no issue. If, however, in the nature of their divinity, the negative element, the specific determinateness of that nature, appears merely as the inconsistency of their activity, and as the contradiction between the purpose and result, and if that independent self-confidence outweighs and overbalances the element of determinateness, then, by that very fact, the pure force of negativity confronts and opposes their nature, and moreover with a power to which it must finally submit, and over which it can in no way prevail. They are the universal, and the positive, as against the individual self of mortals, which cannot hold out against their power and might. But the universal self, for that reason, hovers over them [the gods in Homer] and over this whole world of imagination to which the entire content belongs; and is for them the unintelligible void of Necessity, — a mere happening to which they stand related selfless and sorrowing, for these determinate natures do not find themselves in this purely formal necessity.
732. This necessity, however, is the unity of the notion, a unity dominating and controlling the contradictory independent subsistence of the individual moments a unity in which the inconsistency and fortuitousness of their action is coherently regulated, and the sportive character of their acts receives its serious value in those acts themselves. The content of the world of imagination carries on its process in the middle element [term] detached by itself, gathering round the individuality of some hero, who, however feels the strength and splendour of his life broken, and mourns the early death he sees ahead of him. For individuality, firmly established and real in itself, is isolated and excluded to the utmost extreme, and severed into its moments, which have not yet found each other and united. The one individual element, the abstract unreal moment, is necessity which shares in the life of the mediating term just as little as does the other, the concrete real individual element, the minstrel, who keeps himself outside it, and disappears in what he imaginatively presents. Both extremes must get nearer the content; the one, necessity, has to get filled with it, the other, the language of the minstrel, must have a share in it. And the content formerly left to itself must acquire in itself the certainty and the fixed character of the negative.
733. This higher language, that of Tragedy, gathers and keeps more closely together the dispersed and scattered moments of the inner essential world and the world of action. The substance of the divine falls apart, in accordance with the nature of the notion, into its shapes and forms, and their movement is likewise in conformity with that notion. In regard to form, the language here ceases to be narrative, in virtue of the fact that it enters into the content, just as the content ceases to be merely one that is ideally imagined. The hero is himself the spokesman, and the representation given brings before the audience — who are also spectators — self-conscious human beings, who know their own rights and purposes, the power and the will belonging to their specific nature, and who know how to state them. They are artists who do not express with unconscious naïveté and naturalness the merely external aspect of what they begin and what they decide upon, as is the case in the language accompanying ordinary action in actual life; they make the very inner being external, they prove the righteousness of their action, and the “pathos” controlling them is soberly asserted and definitely expressed in its universal individuality, free from all accident of circumstance and the particular peculiarities of personalities. Lastly, it is in actual human beings that these characters get existence, human beings who impersonate the heroes, and represent them in actual speech, not in the form of a narrative, but speaking in their own person. Just as it is essential for a statue to be made by human hands, so is the actor essential to his mask — not as an external condition, from which, artistically considered, we have to abstract; or so far as abstraction must certainly be made, we thereby state just that art does not yet contain in it the true and proper self.
734. The general ground, on which the movement of these shapes produced from the notion takes place, is the consciousness expressed in the imaginative language of the Epic, where the detail of the content is loosely spread out with no unifying self. It is the commonalty in general, whose wisdom finds utterance in the Chorus of the Elders; in the powerlessness of this chorus the generality finds its representative, because the common people itself compose merely the positive and passive material for the individuality of the government confronting it. Lacking the power to negate and oppose, it is unable to hold together and keep within bounds the riches and varied fullness of divine life; it allows each individual moment to go off its own way, and in its hymns of honour and reverence praises each individual moment as an independent god, now this god and now again another. Where, however, it detects the seriousness of the notion, and perceives how the notion marches onward shattering these forms as it goes along; and where it comes to see how badly its praised and honoured gods come off when they venture on the ground where the notion holds sway; — there it is not itself the negative power interfering by action, but keeps itself within the abstract selfless thought of such power, confines itself to the consciousness of alien and external destiny, and produces the empty wish to tranquillize, and feeble ineffective talk intended to appease. In its terror before the higher powers, which are the immediate arms of the substance; in its terror before their struggle with one another, and before the simple self of that necessity, which crushes them as well as the living beings bound up with them; in its compassion for these living beings, whom it knows at once to be the same with itself — it is conscious of nothing but ineffective horror of this whole process, conscious of equally helpless pity, and, as the end of all, the mere empty peace of resignation to necessity, whose work is apprehended neither as the necessary act of the character, nor as the action of the absolute Being within itself.
735. Spirit does not appear in its dissociated multiplicity on the plane of this onlooking consciousness [the chorus], the indifferent ground, as it were, on which the presentation takes place; it comes on the scene in the simple diremption of the notion. Its substance manifests itself, therefore, merely torn asunder into its two extreme powers. These elementary universal beings are, at the same time, self-conscious individualities — heroes who put their conscious life into one of these powers, find therein determinateness of character, and constitute the effective activity and reality of these powers. This universal individualization descends again, as will be remembered, to the immediate reality of existence proper, and is presented before a crowd of spectators, who find in the chorus their image and counterpart, or rather their own thought giving itself expression.
736. The content and movement of the spirit, which is, object to itself here, have been already considered as the nature and realization of the substance of ethical life. In its form of religion spirit attains to consciousness about itself, or reveals itself to its consciousness in its purer form and its simpler mode of embodiment. If, then, the ethical substance by its very principle broke up, as regards its content, into two powers — which were defined as divine and human law, law of the nether world and law of the upper world, the one the family, the other state sovereignty, the first bearing the impress and character of woman, the other that of man — in the same way, the previously multiform circle of gods, with its wavering and unsteady characteristics, confines itself to these powers, which owing to this feature are brought closer to individuality proper. For the previous dispersion of the whole into manifold abstract forces, which appear hypostatized, is the dissolution of the subject which comprehends them merely as moments in its self; and individuality is therefore only the superficial form of these entities. Conversely, a further distinction of characters than that just named is to be reckoned as contingent and inherently external personality.
737. At the same time, the essential nature [in the case of ethical substance] gets divided in its form, i.e. with respect to knowledge. Spirit when acting, appears, qua consciousness, over against the object on which its activity is directed, and which, in consequence, is determined as the negative of the knowing agent. The agent finds himself thereby in the opposition of knowing and not knowing. He takes his purpose from his own character, and knows it to be essential ethical fact; but owing to the determinateness of his character, he knows merely the one power of substance; the other remains for him concealed and out of sight. The present reality, therefore, is one thing in itself, and another for consciousness. The higher and lower right come to signify in this connexion the power that knows and reveals itself to consciousness, and the power concealing itself and lurking in the background. The one is the aspect of light, the god of the Oracle, who as regards its natural aspect [Light] has sprung from the all-illuminating Sun, knows all and reveals all, Phœbus and Zeus, who is his Father. But the commands of this truth-speaking god, and his proclamations of what is, are really deceptive and fallacious. For this knowledge is, in its very principle, directly not knowledge, because consciousness in acting is inherently this opposition. He,(4) who had the power to unlock the riddle of the sphinx, and he too who trusted with childlike confidence,(5) are, therefore, both sent to destruction through what the god reveals to them. The priestess, through whose mouth the beautiful god speaks,(6) is in nothing different from the equivocal sisters of fate,(7) who drive their victim to crime by their promises, and who, by the double-tongued, equivocal character of what they gave out as a certainty, deceive the King when he relies upon the manifest and obvious meaning of what they say. There is a type of consciousness that is purer than the latter(8) which believes in witches, and more sober, more thorough, and more solid than the former which puts its trust in the priestess and the beautiful god. This type of consciousness,(9) therefore, lets his revenge tarry for the revelation which the spirit of his father makes regarding the crime that did him to death, and institutes other proofs in addition — for the reason that the spirit giving the revelation might possibly be the devil.
738. This mistrust has good grounds, because the knowing consciousness takes its stand on the opposition between certainty of itself on the one hand, and the objective essential reality on the other. Ethical rightness, which insists that actuality is nothing per se in opposition to absolute law, finds out that its knowledge is onesided, its law merely a law of its own character, and that it has laid hold of merely one of the powers of the substance. The act itself is this inversion of what is known into its opposite, into objective existence, turns round what is right from the point of view of character and knowledge into the right of the very opposite with which the former is bound up in the essential nature of the substance — turns it into the “Furies” who embody the right of the other power and character awakened into hostility. The lower right sits with Zeus enthroned, and enjoys equal respect and homage with the god revealed and knowing.
739. To these three supernatural Beings the world of the gods of the chorus is limited and restricted by the acting individuality. The one is the substance, the power presiding over the hearth and home and the spirit worshipped by the family, as well as the universal power pervading state and government. Since this distinction belongs to the substance as such, it is, when dramatically presented, not individualized in two distinct shapes [of the substance], but has in actual reality the two persons of its characters. On the other hand, the distinction between knowing and not knowing falls within each of the actual self-consciousnesses; and only in abstraction, in the element of universality, does it get divided into two individual shapes. For the self of the hero only exists as a whole consciousness, and hence includes essentially the whole of the distinction belonging to the form; but its substance is determinate, and only one side of the content distinguished belongs to him. Hence the two sides of consciousness, which have m concrete reality no separate individuality peculiarly their own, receive, when ideally represented, each its own particular form: the one that of the god revealed, the other that of the Furies keeping themselves concealed. In part both enjoy equal honour, while again, the form assumed by the substance, Zeus, is the necessity of the relation of the two to one another. The substance is the relation [1] that knowledge is for itself, but finds its truth in what is simple; [2] that the distinction, through and in which actual consciousness exists, has its basis in that inner being which destroys it; [3] that the clear conscious assurance of certainty has its confirmation in forgetfulness.
740. Consciousness disclosed this opposition by action, through doing something. Acting in accordance with the knowledge revealed, it, finds out the deceptiveness of that knowledge, and being committed, as regards its inner nature., to one of the attributes of substance, it did violence to the other and thereby gave the latter right as against itself. When following that god who knows and reveals himself, it really seized hold of what is not revealed, and pays the penalty for having trusted the knowledge, whose equivocal character (since this is its very nature) it also had to discover, and an admonition thereanent to be given. The frenzy of the priestess, the inhuman shape of the witches, the voices of trees and birds, dreams, and so on, are not ways in which truth appears; they are admonitory signs of deception, of want of judgment, of the individual and accidental character of knowledge. Or, what comes to the same thing, the opposite power, which consciousness has violated, is present as express law and authentic right, whether law of the family or law of the state; while consciousness, on the other hand, pursued its own proper knowledge, and hid from itself what was revealed.
The truth, however, of the opposing powers of content and consciousness is the final result, that both are equally right, and, hence, in their opposition (which comes about through action) are equally wrong. The process of action proves their unity in the mutual overthrow of both powers and both self-conscious characters. The reconciliation of the opposition with itself is the Lethe of the nether world in the form of Death-or the Lethe of the upper world in the form of absolution, not from guilt (for consciousness cannot deny its guilt, because the act was done), but from the crime, and in the form of the peace of soul which atones for the crime. Both are forgetfulness, the disappearance of the reality and action of the powers of the substance, of their component individualities, and of the powers of the abstract thought of good and evil. For none of them by itself is the real essence: this consists in the undisturbed calm of the whole within itself, the immovable unity of Fate, the quiescent existence (and hence want of activity and vitality) of the family and government, and the equal honour and consequent indifferent unreality of Apollo and the Furies, and the return of their spiritual life and activity into Zeus solely and simply.
741. This destiny completes the depopulation of Heaven-of that unthinking blending of individuality and. ultimate Being — a blending whereby the action of this absolute Being appears as something incoherent, contingent, unworthy of itself; for individuality, when attaching in a merely superficial way to absolute Being, is unessential. The expulsion of such unreal insubstantial ideas, which was demanded by the philosophers of antiquity, thus already has its beginning in tragedy in general, through the fact that the division of the substance is controlled by the notion, and hence individuality is the essential individuality, and the specific determinations are absolute characters. The self-consciousness represented in tragedy knows and acknowledges on that account only one highest power, Zeus. This Zeus is known and acknowledged only as the power of the state or of the hearth and home, and, in the opposition belonging to knowledge, merely as the Father of the knowledge of the particular, — a knowledge assuming a figure in the drama: — and again as the Zeus of the oath and of the Furies, the Zeus of what is universal, of the inner being dwelling in concealment. The further moments taken from the notion (Begriff) and dispersed in the form of ideal presentation (Vorstellung), moments which the chorus permits to hold good one after the other, are, on the other hand, not the “pathos” of the hero; they sink to the level of passions in the hero — to the level of accidental, insubstantial moments, which the impersonal chorus no doubt praises, but which are not capable of constituting the character of heroes, nor of being expressed and revered by them as their real nature.
742. But, further, the persons of the divine Being itself, as well as the characters of its substance, coalesce into the simplicity of what is devoid of consciousness. This necessity has, in contrast to self-consciousness, the characteristic of being the negative power of all the shapes that appear, a power in which they do not recognize themselves, but perish therein. The self appears as merely allotted amongst the different characters, and not as the mediating factor of the process. But self-consciousness, the simple certainty of self, is in point of fact the negative power, the unity of Zeus, the unity of the substantial essence and abstract necessity; it is the spiritual unity into which everything returns. Because actual self-consciousness is still distinguished from the substance and fate, it is partly the chorus, or rather the crowd looking on, whom this movement of the divine life fills with fear as being something alien and strange, or in whom this movement, as something closely touching themselves, produces merely the emotion of passive pity. Partly again, so far as consciousness co-operates and belongs to the various characters, this alliance is of an external kind, is a hypocrisy — because the true union, that of self, fate, and substance, is not yet present. The hero, who appears bef ore the onlookers, breaks up into his mask and the actor, into the person of the play and the actual self.
743. The self-consciousness of the heroes must step forth from its mask and be represented as knowing itself to be the fate both of the gods of the chorus and of the absolute powers themselves, and as being no longer separated from the chorus, the universal consciousness.
744. Comedy has, then, first of all, the aspect that actual self-consciousness represents itself as the fate of the gods. These elemental Beings are, qua universal moments, no definite self, and are not actual. They are, indeed, endowed with the form of individuality, but this is in their case merely put on, and does not really and truly belong to them. The actual self has no such abstract moment as its substance and content. The subject, therefore, is raised above such a moment, as it would be above a particular quality, and when clothed with this mask gives utterance to the irony of such a property trying to be something on its own account. The pretentious claims of the universal abstract nature are shown up and discovered in the actual self; it is seen to be caught and held in a concrete reality, and lets the mask drop, just when it wants to be something genuine. The self, appearing here in its significance as something actual, plays with the mask which it once puts on, in order to be its own person; but it breaks away from this seeming and pretence just as quickly again, and comes out in its own nakedness and commonness, which it shows not to be distinct from the proper self, the actor, nor again from the onlooker.
745. This general dissolution, which the formally embodied essential nature as a whole undergoes when it assumes individuality, becomes in its content more serious, and hence more petulant and bitter, in so far as the content possesses its more serious and necessary meaning. The divine substance combines the meaning of natural and ethical essentiality.
As regards the natural element, actual self-consciousness shows in the very fact of applying elements of nature for its adornment, for its abode and so on, and again in feasting on its own offering, that itself is the Fate to which the secret is betrayed, no matter what may be the truth as regards the independent substantialitv of nature. In the mystery of the bread and wine it makes its very owm this self-subsistence of nature together with the significance of the inner reality; and in Comedy it is conscious of the irony lurking in this meaning.
So far, again, as this meaning contains the essence of ethical reality, it is partly the nation in its two aspects of the state, or Demos proper, and individual family life; partly, however, it is self-conscious pure knowledge, or rational thought of the universal. Demos, the general mass, which knows itself as master and governor, and is also aware of being the insight and intelligence which demand respect, exerts compulsion and is befooled through the particularity of its actual life, and exhibits the ludicrous contrast between its own opinion of itself and its immediate existence, between its necessity and contingency, its universality and its vulgarity. If the principle of its individual existence, cut off from the universal, breaks out in the proper figure of an actual man and openly usurps and administers the commonwealth, to which it is a secret harm and detriment, then there is more immediately disclosed the contrast between the universal in the sense of a theory, and that with which practice is concerned; there stand exposed the entire emancipation of the ends and aims of the mere individual from the universal order, and the scorn the mere individual shows for such order.(10)
746. Rational thinking removes contingency of form and shape from the divine Being; and, in opposition to the uncritical wisdom of the chorus — a wisdom, giving utterance to all sorts of ethical maxims and stamping with validity and authority a multitude of laws and specific conceptions of duty and of right — rational thought lifts these into the simple Ideas of the Beautiful and the Good. The process of this abstraction is the consciousness of the dialectic involved in these maxims and laws themselves, and hence the consciousness of the disappearance of that absolute validity with which they previously appeared. Since the contingent character and superficial individuality which imagination lent to the divine Beings, vanish, they are left, as regards their natural aspect, with merely the nakedness of their immediate existence; they are Clouds,(11) a passing vapour, like those imaginative ideas. Having passed in accordance with their essential character, as deterned by thought, into the simple thoughts of the Beautiful and the Good, these latter submit to being filled with every kind of content. The force of dialectic knowledge(12) puts determinate laws and maxims of action at the mercy of the pleasure and levity of youth, led astray therewith, and gives weapons of deception into the hands of solicitous and apprehensive old age, restricted in its interests to the individual details of life. The pure thoughts of the Beautiful and the Good thus display a comic spectacle: — through their being set free from the opinion, which contains both their determinateness in the sense of content and also their absolute determinateness, the firm hold of consciousness upon them, they become empty, and, on that very account, the sport of the private opinion and caprice of any chance individuality.
747. Here, then, the Fate, formerly without consciousness, consisting in empty rest and forgetfulness, and separated from self-consciousness, is united with self-consciousness. The individual(13) self is the negative force through which and in which the gods, as also their moments, (nature as existent fact and the thoughts of their determinate characters), pass away and disappear. At the same time, the individual self is not the mere vacuity of disappearance, but preserves itself in this very nothingness, holds to itself and is the sole and only reality. The religion of art is fulfilled and consummated in it, and is come full circle. Through the fact that it is the individual consciousness in its certainty of self which manifests itself as this absolute power, this latter has lost the form of something ideally presented (vorgestellt), separated from and alien to consciousness in general — as were the statue and also the living embodiment of beauty or the content of the Epic and the powers and persons of Tragedy. Nor again is the unity the unconscious unity of the cult and the mysteries; rather the self proper of the actor coincides with the part he impersonates, just as the onlooker is perfectly at home in what is represented before him, and sees himself playing in the drama before him. What this self-consciousness beholds, is that whatever assumes the form of essentiality as against self-consciousness, is instead dissolved within it — within its thought, its existence and action, — and is quite at its mercy. It is the return of everything universal into certainty of self, a certainty which, in consequence, is this complete loss of fear of everything strange and alien, and complete loss of substantial reality on the part of what is alien and external. Such certainty is a state of spiritual good health and of self-abandonment thereto, on the part of consciousness, in a way that, outside this kind of comedy, is not to be found anywhere.(14)
1. v. sup., A., b.
2. A “drama”.
3. The Epic exorcises the dead past; v. Odyssey, XI.
4. Oedipus.
5. Orestos.
6. In the Delphic Oracle.
7. The witches in “Macbeth”.
8. Macbeth.
9. Hamlet.
10. Cp. Cleon in Aristophanes, Knights.
11. Cp. Aristophanes, Clouds.
12. Cp. the arguments in the Clouds.
13. In comedy.
14. Cp. Hegel's Aesthetik, W W., X., 3, 560.
748. THROUGH the Religion of Art spirit has passed from the form of substance into that of Subject; for art brings out its shape and form, and imbues it with the nature of action, or establishes in it the self-consciousness which merely disappears in the awesome substance and in the attitude of simple trust does not itself comprehend itself. This incarnation in human form of the Divine Being begins with the statue, which has in it only the outward shape of the self, while the inner life thereof, its activity, falls outside it. In the case of the cult, however, both aspects have become one; in the outcome of the religion of art this unity, in being completely attained, has at the same time also passed over to the extreme of self; in the spirit, which is perfectly certain of itself in the individual existence of consciousness, all essential content is swallowed up and submerged. The proposition, which gives this light-hearted folly expression, runs thus: “The Self is Absolute Being.” The Being which was substance, and in which the self was the accidental element, has dropped to the level of a predicate; and in this self-consciousness, over against which nothing appears in the form of objective Being, spirit has lost its aspect of consciousness.(2)
749. This proposition, “The Self is Absolute Being”, belongs, as is evident on the face of it, to the non-religious, the concrete actual spirit; and we have to recall what form of spirit it is which gives expression to it. This form will contain at once the movement of that proposition and its conversion, which lowers the self to a predicate and raises substance into subject. This we must understand to take place in such a way that the converse statement does not per se, or for us, make substance into subject, or, what is the same thing, does not reinstate substance again so that the consciousness of spirit is carried back to its commencement in natural religion; but rather in such a way that this conversion is brought about for and through self-consciousness itself. Since this latter consciously gives itself up, it is preserved and maintained in thus relinquishing itself, and remains the subject of the substance; but as being likewise self-relinquished, it has at the same time the consciousness of this substance. In other words, since, by thus offering itself up, it produces substance as subject, this subject remains its own very self. If, then, taking the two propositions, in the first the subject merely disappears in substantiality, and in the second the substance is merely a predicate, and both sides are thus present in each with contrary inequality of value — the result hereby effected is that the union and transfusion of both natures [subject and substance] become apparent. In this union both, with equal value and worth, are at once essential and also merely moments. Hence it is that spirit is equally consciousness of itself as its objective substance, as well as simple self-contained self-consciousness.
750. The religion of art belongs to the spirit animating the ethical sphere, the spirit which we formerly saw sink and disappear in the condition of right,(3) i.e. in the proposition: “The self as such, the abstract person, is absolute Being.” In ethical life the self is absorbed in the spirit of its nation, it is universality filled to the full. Simple abstract individuality, however, rises out of this content, and its lightheartedness clarifies and rarifies it till it becomes a “person” and attains the abstract universality of right. Here the substantial reality of the ethical spirit is lo,,t, the abstract insubstantial spirits of national individuals are gathered together into a pantheon; not into a pantheon represented in idea (Vorstellung), whose impotent form lets each alone to do as it likes, but into the pantheon of abstract universality, of pure thought, which disembodies them, and bestows on the spiritless self, on the individual person, complete existence on its own account.
751. But this self, through its being empty, has let the content go; this consciousness is Being merely within itself. Its own existence, the legal recognition of the person, is an unfulfilled empty abstraction. It thus really possesses merely the thought of itself; in other words, as it there exists and knows itself as object, it is something unreal. Consequently, it is merely stoic independence, the independence of thought; and this finds, by passing through the process of scepticism, its ultimate truth in that form we called the “unhappy self-consciousness” — the soul of despair.
752. This knows how the case stands with the actual claims to validity which the abstract [legal] person puts forward, as also with the validity of this person in pure thought [in Stoicism]. It knows that a vindication of such validity means really being altogether lost; it is just this loss become conscious of itself, and is the surrender and relinquishment of its knowledge about itself. We see that this “unhappy consciousness” constituted the counterpart and the complement of the perfectly happy consciousness, that of comedy. All divine reality goes back into this latter type of consciousness; it means, in other words, the complete relinquishment and emptying of substance. The former, on the contrary, is conversely the tragic fate that befalls certainty of self which aims at being absolute, at being self-sufficient. It is consciousness of the loss of everything of significance in this certainty of itself, and of the loss even of this knowledge or certainty of self-the loss of substance as well as of self; it is the bitter pain which finds expression in the cruel words, “God is dead”.(4)
753. In the condition of right or law, then, the ethical world has vanished, and its type of religion has passed away in the mood of Comedy. The “unhappy consciousness” the soul of despair, is just the knowledge of all this loss. It has lost both the worth and dignity it attached to its immediate personality [as a legal person] as well as that attaching to its personality when reflected in the medium of thought [in the case of Stoicism]. Trust in the eternal laws of the Gods is likewise silenced, just as the oracles are dumb, who pretended to know what to do in particular cases. The statues set up are now corpses in stone whence the animating soul has flown, while the hymns of praise are words from which all belief has gone. The tables of the gods are bereft of spiritual food and drink, and from his games and festivals man no more receives the joyful sense of his unity with the divine Being. The works of the muse lack the force and energy of the spirit which derived the certainty and assurance of itself just from the crushing ruin of gods and men. They are themselves now just what they are for us — beautiful fruit broken off the tree; a kindly fate has passed on those works to us, as a maiden might offer such fruit off a tree. Their actual life as they exist is no longer there, not the tree that bore them, not the earth, and the elements, which constituted their substance, nor the climate that determined their constitutive character, nor the change of seasons which controlled the process of their growth. So too it is not their living world that Fate preserves and gives us with those works of ancient art, not the spring and summer of that ethical life in which they bloomed and ripened, but the veiled remembrance alone of all this reality. Our action, therefore, when we enjoy them is not that of worship, through which our conscious life might attain its complete truth and be satisfied to the full: our action is external; it consists in wiping off some drop of rain or speck of dust from these fruits, and in place of the inner elements composing the reality of the ethical life, a reality that environed, created and inspired these works, we erect in prolix detail the scaffolding of the dead elements of their outward existence, — language, historical circumstances, etc. All this we do, not in order to enter into their very life, but only to represent them ideally or pictorially (vorstellen) within ourselves. But just as the maiden who hands us the plucked fruits is more than the nature which presented them in the first instance — the nature which provided all their detailed conditions and elements, tree, air, light, and so on — since in a higher way she gathers all this together into the light of her self-conscious eye, and her gesture in offering the gifts; so too the spirit of the fate, which presents us with those works of art, is more than the ethical life realized in that nation. For it is the inwardizing in us, in the form of conscious memory (Er-Innerung), of the spirit which in them was manifested in a still external way; — it is the spirit of the tragic fate which collects all those individual gods and attributes of the substance into the one Pantheon, into the spirit which is itself conscious of itself as spirit.
754. All the conditions for its production are present, and this totality of its conditions constitutes the development of it, its notion, or the inherent production of it. The cycle of the creations of art embraces in its scope all forms in which the absolute substance relinquishes itself. The absolute substance is in the form of individuality as a thing; as an object existing for sense experience; as pure language, or the process of that form whose existence does not get away from the self, and is a purely evanescent object; as immediate unity with universal self-consciousness when inspired with enthusiasm; as mediated unity when performing the acts of the cult; as corporeal embodiment of the self in a form of beauty; and finally as existence lifted into ideal representation (Vorstellung) and the expansion of this existence into a world which at length gathers its content together into universality, a universal which is at the same time pure certainty and assurance of itself. These forms, and, on the other side, the world of personality and legal right, the wild and desert waste of content with its constituent elements set free and detached, as also the thought-constituted personality of Stoicism, and the unresting disquiet of Scepticism — these compose, the periphery of the circle of shapes and forms, which attend., an expectant and eager throng, round the birthplace of spirit as it becomes self-consciousness. Their centre is the yearning agony of the unhappy despairing self-consciousness, a pain which permeates all of them and is the common birthpang at its production, — the simplicity of the pure notion, which contains those forms as its moments.
755. Spirit, here, has in it two sides, which are above represented as the two converse propositions: one is this, that substance empties itself of itself, and becomes self-consciousness; the other is the converse, that self-consciousness empties itself of itself and makes itself into the form of “thing”, or makes itself universal self. Both sides have in this way met each other, and in consequence, their true union has arisen. The relinquishment or “kenosis” on the part of the substance, its becoming self-consciousness, expresses the transition into the opposite, the unconscious transition of necessity, in other words, that it is implicitly self-consciousness. Conversely, the emptying of self-consciousness expresses this, that implicitly it is Universal Being, or — because the self is pure self-existence, which is at home with itself in its opposite-that the substance is self-consciousness explicitly for the self, and, just on that account, is spirit. Of this spirit, which has left the form of substance behind, and enters existence in the shape of self-consciousness, we may say, therefore-if we wish to use terms drawn from the process of natural generation — that it has a real mother but a potential or an implicit father. For actual reality, or self-consciousness, and implicit being in the sense of substance are its two moments; and by the reciprocity of their kenosis, each relinquishing or “emptying” itself of itself and becoming the other, spirit thus comes into existence as their unity.
756. In so far as self-consciousness in a one-sided way grasps only, its own relinquishment, although its object is thus f or it at once both existence and self and it knows all existence to be spiritual in nature, yet true spirit has not become thereby objective for it. For, so far, being in general or substance, would not essentially from its side be also emptied of itself, and become self-consciousness. In that case, then, all existence is spiritual reality merely from the standpoint of consciousness, not inherently in itself. Spirit in this way has merely a fictitious or imaginary existence.(5) This imagination is fantastic extravagance of mind, which introduces into nature as well as history, the World and the mythical ideas of early religions, another inner esoteric meaning different from what they, on the face of them, bear directly to consciousness, and, in particular, in the case of religions, another meaning than the self-consciousness, whose religions they were, actually knew to be there. But this meaning is one that is borrowed, a garment, which does not cover the nakedness of the outer appearance, and secures no belief and respect; it is no more than murky darkness and a peculiar crazy contortion of consciousness.
757. If then this meaning of the objective is not to be bare fancy and imagination, it must be inherent and essential (an sich), i.e. must in the first place arise in consciousness as springing from the very notion, and must come forth in its necessity. It is thus that self-knowing spirit has arisen; it has arisen through the knowledge of immediate consciousness, i.e. of consciousness of the existing object, by means of its necessary process. This notion, which, being immediate, had also, for its consciousness, the shape of immediacy, has, in the second place, taken on the form of self-consciousness essentially and inherently, i.e. by just the same necessity of the notion by which being or immediacy, the abstract object of self-consciousness, renounces itself and becomes, for consciousness, Ego. The immediate entity (Ansich), or [objectively] existent necessity, is, however, different from the [subjective] thinking entity, or the knowledge of necessity — a distinction which, at the same time, does not lie outside the notion, for the simple unity of the notion is itself immediate being. The notion is at once what empties or relinquishes itself, or the explicit unfolding of directly apprehended (angeschaut) necessity, and is also at home with itself in that necessity, knows it and comprehends it. The immediate inherent nature of spirit, which takes on the form of self-consciousness, means nothing else than that the concrete actual world-spirit has reached this knowledge of itself. It is then too that this knowledge first enters its consciousness, and enters it as truth. How that came about has already been explained.
758. That Absolute Spirit has taken on the shape of self-consciousness inherently, and therefore also consciously to itself — this appears now as the belief of the world, the belief that spirit exists in fact as a definite self-consciousness, i.e. as an actual human being; that spirit is an object for immediate experience; that the believing mind sees, feels, and hears this divinity.(6) Taken thus it is not imagination, not a fancy; it is actual in the believer. Consciousness in that case does not set out from its own inner life, does not start from thought, and in itself combine the thought of God with existence; rather it sets out from immediate present existence, and recognizes God in it.
The moment of immediate existence is present in the content of the notion, and present in such a way that the religious spirit, on the return of all ultimate reality into consciousness, has become simple positive self, just as the actual spirit as such, in the case of the “unhappy consciousness”, was just this simple self-conscious negativity. The self of the existent spirit has in that way the form of complete immediacy. It is neither set up as something thought, or imaginatively represented, nor as something produced, as is the case with the immediate self in natural religion, or again in religion as art. Rather, this concrete God is beheld sensuously I and immediately as a self, as a real individual human being, only so is it a self-consciousness.
759. This incarnation of the Divine Being, its having essentially and directly the shape of self-consciousness, is the simple content of Absolute Religion. Here the Divine Being is known as Spirit; this religion is the Divine Being's consciousness concerning itself that it is Spirit. For spirit is knowledge of self in a state of alienation of self: spirit is the Being which is the process of retaining identity with itself in its otherness. This, however, is Substance, so far as in its accidents substance at the same time is turned back into itself; and is so, not as being indifferent towards something unessential and, consequently, as finding itself in some alien element, but as being there within itself, i.e. so far as it is subject or self.
In this form of religion the Divine Being is, on that account, revealed. Its being revealed obviously consists in this, that what it is, is known. It is, however, known just in its being known as spirit, as a Being which is essentially self-consciousness.
There is something in its object concealed from consciousness if the object is for consciousness an “other”, or something alien, and if consciousness does not know the object as its self. This concealment, this secrecy, ceases when the Absolute Being qua spirit is object of consciousness. For here in its relation to consciousness the object is in the form of self; i.e. consciousness immediately knows itself there, or is manifest, revealed, to itself in the object. Itself is manifest to itself only in its own certainty of self; the object it has is the self; self, however, is nothing alien and extraneous, but inseparable unity with itself, the immediately universal. It is the pure notion, pure thought, or self-existence, (being-for-self), which is immediately being, and, therewith, being-for-another, and, qua this being-for-another, is immediately turned back into itself and is at home with itself (bei sich). It is thus the truly and solely revealed. The Good, the Righteous, the Holy, Creator of Heaven and Earth, etc. — all these are predicates of a subject, universal moments, which have their support on this central point, and only are when consciousness goes back into thought.
As long as it is they that are known, their ground and essential being, the Subject itself, is not yet revealed; and in the same way the specific determinations of the universal are not this universal itself. The Subject itself, and consequently this pure universal too, is, however, revealed as self; for this self is just this inner being reflected into itself, the inner being which is immediately given and is the proper certainty of that self, for which it is given. To be in its notion that which reveals and is revealed — this is, then, the true shape of spirit; and moreover, this shape, its notion, is alone its very essence and its substance. Spirit is known as self-consciousness, and to this self-consciousness it is directly revealed, for it is this self-consciousness itself. The divine nature is the same as the human, and it is this unity which is intuitively apprehended (angeschaut).
760. Here, then, we find as a fact consciousness, or the general form in which Being is aware of Being — the shape which Being adopts — to be identical with its self-consciousness. This shape is itself a self-consciousness; it is thus at the same time an existent object; and this existence possesses equally directly the significance of pure thought, of Absolute Being.
The absolute Being existing as a concrete actual self-consciousness, seems to have descended from its eternal pure simplicity; but in fact it has, in so doing, attained for the first time its highest nature, its supreme reach of being. For only when the notion of Being has reached its simple purity of nature, is it both the absolute abstraction, which is pure thought and hence the pure singleness of self, and immediacy or objective being, on account of its simplicity.
What is called sense-consciousness is just this pure abstraction; it is this kind of thought for which being is the immediate. The lowest is thus at the same time the highest: the revealed which has come forth entirely to the surface is just therein the deepest reality. That the Supreme Being is seen, heard, etc., as an existent self-consciousness this is, in very truth, the culmination and consummation of its notion. And through this consummation, the Divine Being is given and exists immediately in its character as Divine Being.
761. This immediate existence is at the same time not solely and simply immediate consciousness; it is religious consciousness. This immediacy means not only an existent self-consciousness, but also the purely thought-constituted or Absolute Being; and these meanings are inseparable. What we [the philosophers] are conscious of in our conception, — that objective being is ultimate essence, — is the same as what the religious consciousness is aware of. This unity of being and essence, of thought which is immediately existence, is immediate knowledge on the part of this religious consciousness just as it is the inner thought or the mediated reflective knowledge of this consciousness. For this unity of being and thought is self-consciousness and actually exists; in other words, the thought-constituted unity has at the same time this concrete shape and form of what it is. God, then, is here revealed, as He is; He actually exists as He is in Himself; He is real as Spirit. God is attainable in pure speculative knowledge alone, and only is in that knowledge, and is merely that knowledge itself, for He is spirit; and this speculative knowledge is the knowledge furnished by revealed religion. That knowledge knows God to be thought, or pure Essence; and knows this thought as actual being and as a real existence, and existence as the negativity of itself, hence as Self, an individual “this” and a universal self. It is just this that revealed religion knows.
The hopes and expectations of preceding ages pressed forward to, and were solely directed towards this revelation, the vision of what Absolute Being is, and the discovery of themselves therein. This joy, the joy of seeing itself in Absolute Being, becomes realized in self-consciousness, and seizes the whole world. For the Absolute is Spirit, it is the simple movement of those pure abstract moments, which expresses just this-that Ultimate Reality is then, and not till then, known as Spirit when it is seen and beheld as immediate self-consciousness.
762. This conception of spirit knowing itself to be spirit, is still the immediate notion; it is not yet developed. The ultimate Being is spirit; in other words, it has appeared, it is revealed. This first revelation is itself immediate; but the immediacy is likewise thought, or pure mediation, and must therefore exhibit and set forth this moment in the sphere of immediacy as such.
Looking at this more precisely, spirit, when self-consciousness is immediate, is “this” individual self-consciousness set up in contrast to the universal self-consciousness. It is a one, an excluding unit, which appears to that consciousness, for which it exists, in the as yet impervious form of a sensuous other, an unresolved entity in the sphere of sense. This other does not yet know spirit to be its own; in other words spirit, in its form as an individual self, does not yet exist as equally universal self, as all self. Or again, the shape it assumes has not as yet the form of the notion, i.e. of the universal self, of the self which in its immediate actual reality is at once transcended, is thought, universality, without losing its reality in this universality.
The preliminary and similarly immediate form of this universality is, however, not at once the form of thought itself, of the notion as notion; it is the universality of actual reality, it is the “allness”, the collective totality, of the selves, and is the elevation of existence into the sphere of figurative thought (Vorstellung); just as in general, to take a concrete example, the “this” of sense, when transcended, is first of all the “thing” of “perception”, and is not yet the “universal” of “understanding”.
763. This individual human being, then, which Absolute Being is revealed to be, goes through in its own case as an individual the process found in sense existence. He is the immediately present God; in consequence, His being passes over into His having been. Consciousness, for which God is thus sensuously present, ceases to see Him, to hear Him: it has seen Him, it has heard Him. And it is because it only has seen and heard Him, that it first becomes itself spiritual consciousness;(7) or, in other words, He has now arisen in Spirit, as He formerly rose before consciousness as an object existing in the sphere of sense. For, a consciousness which sees and hears Him by sense, is one which is itself merely an immediate consciousness, which has not cancelled and transcended the disparateness of objectivity, has not withdrawn it into pure thought, but knows this objectively presented individual, and not itself, as spirit. In the disappearance of the immediate existence of what is known to be Absolute Being, immediacy acquires its negative moment. Spirit remains the immediate self of actual reality, but in the form of the universal self-consciousness of a religious communion,(8) a self-consciousness which rests in its own proper substance, just as in it this substance is universal subject: it is not the individual subject by himself, but the individual along with the consciousness of the communion, and what he is for this communion is the complete whole of the individual spirit.
764. The conditions “past” and “distance” are, however, merely the imperfect form in which the immediateness gets mediated or made universal; this is merely dipped superficially in the element of thought, is kept there as a sensuous mode of immediacy, and not made one with the nature of thought itself. It is lifted out of sense merely into the region of pictorial presentation; for this is the synthetic [external] connexion of sensuous immediacy and its universality or thought.
765. Pictorial presentation constitutes the characteristic form in which spirit is conscious of itself in this its religious communion. This form is not yet the self-consciousness of spirit which has reached its notion as notion; the mediating process is still incomplete. In this connexion of being and thought, then, there is a defect; spiritual life is still cumbered with an unreconcited diremption into a “here” and a “beyond”. The content is the true content; but all its moments, when placed in the element of mere imaginative presentation, have the character, not of being conceptually comprehended, but of appearing as completely independent aspects, externally related to one another.
In order that the true content may also obtain its true form for consciousness, the latter must necessarily pass to a higher plane of mental development, where the absolute Substance is not intuitively apprehended but conceptually comprehended and where consciousness is for itself brought to the level of its self-consciousness;-as this has already taken place objectively or for us [who have analysed the process of experience].
766. We have to consider this content as it exists in its consciousness. Absolute Spirit is content; that is how it exists in the shape of its truth. But its truth consists not merely in being the substance or the inherent reality of the religious communion; nor again in coming out of this inwardness into the objectivity of imaginative thought; but in becoming concrete actual self, reflecting itself into self, and being Subject. This, then, is the process which spirit realizes in its communion; this is its life. What this self-revealing spirit is in and for itself, is therefore not brought out by the rich content of its life being, so to say, untwined and reduced to its original and primitive strands, to the ideas, for instance, presented before the minds of the first imperfect religious communion, or even to what the actual human being [incarnating the Divine Spirit] has spoken.(9) This reversion to the primitive is based on the instinct to get at the notion, the ultimate principle; but it confuses the origin, in the sense of the immediate, existence of the first historical appearance, with the simplicity of the notion. By thus impoverishing the life of spirit, by clearing away the idea of the communion and its action with regard to its idea, there arises, therefore, not the notion, but bare externality and particularity, merely the historical manner in which spirit once upon a time appeared, the soulless recollection of a presumably (gemeinten) individual historical figure and its past.(10)
767. Spirit is content of its consciousness to begin with in the form of pure substance; in other words, it is content of its pure consciousness. This element of thought is the process of descending into existence, or individuality. The middle term between these two is their synthetic connexion, the consciousness of passing into otherness, the process of imaginative presentation as such. The third stage is the return from this presentation and from that otherness; in other words, it is the element of self-consciousness itself.
These three moments constitute the life of spirit. Its resolution in imaginative thought consists in its taking on a determinate mode of being; this determinateness, however, is nothing but one of its moments. Its detailed process thus consists in spreading its nature out in each of its moments as in an element in which it lives: and in so far as each of these spheres completes itself in itself, this reflexion into itself is at the same time the transition into another sphere of its being. Imaginative presentation constitutes the middle term between pure thought and self-consciousness as such, and is merely one of the determinate forms. At the same time however, as has been shown, the character belonging to such presentation — that of being “synthetic connexion” — is spread over all these elements and is their common characteristic.
768. The content itself, which we have to consider, has partly been met with already, as the idea of the “unhappy” and the “believing” consciousness. In the case of the “unhappy” consciousness, however, the content has the characteristic of being produced from consciousness and for which it yearns, a content wherein the spirit can never be satiated nor find rest because the content is not yet its own content inherently and essentially, or in the sense of being its substance. In the case of the “believing” consciousness, again, this content was regarded as the impersonal Being of the World, as the essentially objective content of imaginative thought — a pictorial thinking that seeks to escape the actual world altogether, and consequently has not the certainty of self-consciousness, a certainty which is cut off from it, partly as being conceit of knowledge, partly as being pure insight. The consciousness of the religious communion, on the other hand, possesses the content as its substance, just as the content is the certainty the communion has of its own spirit.
769. Spirit, represented at first as substance in the element of pure thought, is, thus, primarily the eternal essential Being, simple, self-identical, which does not, however, have this abstract meaning of essential Being, but the meaning of Absolute Spirit. Yet spirit consists, not in being a meaning, not in being the inner, but in being the actual, the real. “Simple eternal essential Being” would, therefore, be spirit merely in empty phrase, if we remained at the level of pictorial thought, and went no further than the expression of “simple eternal essential Being”. “Simple essential Being”, however, because it is abstraction, is in point of fact the inherently negative, is indeed the negativity of reflective thought, or negativity as found in Being per se; i.e. it is absolute distinction from itself, is pure process of becoming its other. Qua essential Being, it is merely implicit, or for us: but since this purity of form is just abstraction or negativity, it is for itself, it is the self, the notion. It is thus objective; and since pictorial thinking apprehends and expresses as an event what has just been expressed as the necessity of the notion, it will be said that the eternal Being begets for itself an other. But in this otherness it has likewise, ipso facto, returned into itself again; for the distinction is distinction in itself, i.e. the distinction is directly distinguished merely from itself, and is thus the unity returned into itself.
770. There are thus three moments to be distinguished: Essential Being; explicit Self-existence, which is the express otherness of essential Being, and for which that Being is object; and Self-existence or Self-knowledge in that other. The essential Being beholds only itself in its Self-existence, in its objective otherness. In thus emptying itself, in this kenosis, it is merely within itself: the independent Self-existence which excludes itself from essential Being is the knowledge of itself on the part of essential Being. It is the “Word”, the Logos, which when spoken empties the speaker of himself, outwardizes him, and leaves him behind emptied, but is as immediately perceived, and only this act of self-perceiving himself is the actual existence of the “Word”. Hence, then, the distinctions which are set up are just as immediately resolved as they are made, and are just as directly made as they are resolved, and the truth and the reality consist precisely in this self -closed circular process.
771. This movement within itself expresses the absolute Being qua Spirit. Absolute Being, when not grasped as Spirit, is merely the abstract void, just as spirit which is not grasped as this process is merely an empty word. Since its moments are grasped purely as moments, they are notions in restless activity, which are merely in being inherently their own opposite, and in finding their rest in the whole. But the pictorial thought of the religious communion is not this notional thinking; it has the content without its necessity; and instead of the form of the notion it brings into the realm of pure consciousness the natural relations of Father and Son. Since it thus, even when thinking, proceeds by way of figurative ideas, absolute Being is indeed revealed to it, but the moments of this Being, owing to this [externally] synthetic pictorial thinking, partly fall of themselves apart from one another, so that they are not related to each other through their own very notion, while, partly again, this figurative thinking retreats from the pure object it deals with, and takes up a merely external relation towards it. The object is externally revealed to it from an alien source, and in this thought of Spirit it does not recognize its own self, does not recognize the nature of pure self-consciousness. In so far as the form of figurative thinking and that way of thinking by means of relationships derived from nature have to be transcended, and especially the method of taking the moments of the process, which Spirit is, as isolated immovable substances or subjects, instead of transient moments — this transcendence is to be looked at as a compulsion on the part of the notion, in the way we formerly pointed out when dealing with another aspect.(11) But since it is only an instinct, it mistakes its own real character, rejects the content along with the form, and, what comes to the same thing, degrades the content into a historical imaginative idea and an heirloom handed down by tradition. In this way there is retained and preserved only what is purely external in belief, and the retention of it as something dead and devoid of knowledge; while the inner element in belief has passed away, because this would be the notion knowing itself as notion.
772. The Absolute Spirit, as pictured in the element of pure essential Being, is not indeed the abstract pure essential Being; rather, just by the fact that this is merely a moment in the life of Spirit, abstract essential Being has sunk to the level of a mere element (in which Spirit lives). The representation of Spirit in this element, however, has inherently the same defect, as regards form, which essential Being as such has. Essential Being is abstraction, and, therefore, the negative of its simplicity, is an other: in the same way, Spirit in the element of essential Being is the form of simple unity, which, on that account, is just as essentially a process of becoming something else. Or, what is the same thing, the relation of the eternal Being to its self-existence, (its objective existence for Itself), is that of pure thought, an immediately simple relation. In this simple beholding of itself in the Other, otherness therefore is not as such set up independently; it is distinction in the way of distinction, in pure thought, is immediately no distinction-a recognition of Love, where lover and beloved are by their very nature not opposed to each other at all. Spirit, which is expressed in the element of pure thought, is essentially just this: not to be merely in that element, but to be concrete, actual; for otherness itself, i.e. cancelling and superseding its own pure thought-constituted notion, lies in the very notion of Spirit.
773. The element of pure thought, because it is an abstract element, is itself rather the other of its own simplicity, and hence passes over into the proper element of imagination — the element where the moments of the pure notion at once acquire a substantial existence in opposition to each other and are subjects as well, which do not exist in indifference towards each other, merely for a third, but, being reflected into themselves, break away from one another and stand confronting each other.
774. Merely eternal, or abstract Spirit, then, becomes an other to itself: it enters existence, and, in the first instance, enters immediate existence. It creates a World. This “Creation” is the word which pictorial thought uses to convey the notion itself in its absolute movement; or to express the fact that the simple which has been expressed as absolute, or pure thought, just because it is abstract, is really the negative, and hence opposed to itself, the other of itself; or because, to state the same in yet another way, what is put forward as essential Being is simple immediacy, bare existence, but qua immediacy or existence, is without Self, and, lacking thus inwardness, is passive, or exists for another. This existence for another is at the same time a world. Spirit, in the character of existing for another, is the undisturbed separate subsistence of those moments formerly enclosed within pure thought, is, therefore, the dissolution of their simple universality, and their dispersion into their own particularity.
775. The world, however, is not merely Spirit thus thrown out and dispersed into the plenitude of existence and the external order imposed on it; for since Spirit is essentially the simple Self, this self is likewise present therein. The world is objectively existent spirit, which is individual self, that has consciousness and distinguishes itself as other, as world, from itself. In the way this individual self is thus immediately established at first it is not yet conscious of being Spirit; it thus does not exist as Spirit; it may be called “innocent”, but not strictly “good”. In order that in fact it may be self and Spirit, it has first to become objectively an other to itself, in the same way that the Eternal Being manifests itself as the process of being self-identical in its otherness. Since this spirit is determined as yet only as immediately existing, or dispersed into the diverse multiplicity of its conscious life, its becoming “other” means that knowledge concentrates itself upon itself. Immediate existence turns into thought, or merely sense-consciousness turns round into consciousness of thought; and, moreover, because that thought has come from immediacy or is conditioned thought, it is not pure knowledge, but thought which contains otherness, and is, thus, the self-opposed thought of good and evil. Man is pictorially represented by the religious mind in this way: it happened once as an event, with no necessity about it, that he lost the form of harmonious unity with himself by plucking the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and was driven from the state of innocence, from Paradise, from the garden with all its creatures, and from nature offering its bounties without man's toil.
776. Since this self-concentration on the part of the existent consciousness has straightway the character of becoming discordant with itself, Evil appears as the first actual expression of the self-concentrated consciousness. And because the thoughts of good and evil are utterly opposed, and this opposition is not yet broken down, this consciousness is essentially and merely evil. At the same time, however, owing to just this very opposition, there is present also the good consciousness opposing the one that is evil, and again their relation to each other. In so far as immediate existence turns round into thought, and self-concentration is partly itself thought, while partly again the transition to otherness on the part of the inner self (Wesen), is thereby more precisely determined, — the fact of becoming evil can be removed further backwards away out of the actually existing world and transferred to the very earliest realm of thought. It may thus be said that it was the very first-born Son of Light [Lucifer] who, by becoming self-concentrated, fell, but that in his place another was at once created. Such a form of expression as “fallen”, belonging merely to figurative thought, and not to the notion, just like the term “Son”, either (we may say) transmutes and lowers the moments of the notion to the level of imaginative thought, or transfers pictures 'into the realm of thought.
In the same way, it is matter of indifference to coordinate a multiplicity of other shapes and forms(12) with the simple thought of otherness in the Being of the Eternal, and transfer to them that condition of self-concentration. This co-ordination must, all the same, win approval, for the reason that, through it, this moment of otherness does express diversity, as it should do: not indeed as plurality in general, but as determinate diversity, so that one part is the Son, that which is simple and knows itself to be essential Being, while the other part is the abandonment, the emptying, of self-existence, and merely lives to praise that Being. To this part may then also be assigned the resumption once again of the self-existence relinquished, and that “self-centredness” characteristic of evil. In so far as this condition of otherness falls into two parts, Spirit might, as regards its moments, be more exactly expressed numerically as a Quaternity, a four in one, or (because the multiplicity breaks up itself again into two parts, viz. one part which has remained good, the other which has become evil), might even be expressed as a Quinity.
Counting the moments, however, can be regarded as altogether useless, since, for one thing, what is distinguished is itself just as truly one and single-viz. The thought of distinction which is only one thought-as the thought is this element distinguished, the second over against the first. For another thing it is useless to count, because the thought which grasps the many in one has to be dissolved out of its universality and must be distinguished into more than three or four distinct components. This universality appears, in contrast to the absolute determinateness of the abstract unit-the principle of number-as indeterminateness in relation to number as such; so that in this connexion we can speak only of numbers in general, i.e. not of a specific number of distinctions. Hence, in general, it is here quite superfluous to think of number and counting, just as, in other connexions, the bare difference of magnitude and multitude says nothing at all and falls outside conceptual thought.
777. Good and Evil were the specific distinctions of thought which we found. Since their opposition is not yet broken down, and they are represented as essential realities of thought, each of them independent by itself, man is the self with no essential reality of his own and the mere ground which couples them together, and on which they exist and war with one another. But these universal powers of good and evil belong all the same to the self, or the self is their actuality. From this point of view it thus comes about that, as evil is nothing else than the self-concentration of the natural existence of spirit, conversely, good enters into actual reality and appears as an (objectively) existing self-consciousness. That which, when Spirit is interpreted in terms of pure thought, is in general merely hinted at as the Divine Being's transition into otherness, here, for figurative thinking, comes nearer its realization: the realization is taken to consist in the Divine Being “humbling” Itself, and renouncing its abstract nature and unreality. The other aspect, that of evil, is taken by imagination as an event extraneous and alien to the Divine Being: to grasp evil in the Divine Being itself as the wrath of God-that is the supreme effort, the severest strain, of which figurative thought, wrestling with its own limitations, is capable, an effort which, since it is devoid of the notion, remains a fruitless struggle.
778. The alienation of the Divine Nature is thus set up in its double-sided form: the self of Spirit, and its simple thought, are the two moments whose absolute unity is Spirit itself. Its alienation with itself consists in the two falling apart from each other, and in the one having an unequal value as against the other. This disparateness is, therefore, twofold in character, and two connexions arise, which have in common the moments just given. In the one, the Divine Being stands for what is essential, while natural existence and the self are unessential and are to be cancelled. In the other, on the contrary, it is self-existence which passes for what is essential and the simply Divine for unessential. Their mediating, though still empty, ground is existence in general, the bare community of their two moments.
779. The dissolution of this opposition does not take effect through the struggle between the two elements, which are pictured as separate and independent Beings. Just in virtue of their independence each must inherently, through its own notion, dissolve itself in itself. The struggle only takes place where both cease to be this mixture of thought and independent existence, and confront each other merely as thoughts. For there, being determinate notions, they essentially exist merely in the relation of opposition; qua independent, on the other hand, they have their essential nature outside their opposition; their movement is thus free, self-determined, and peculiar to themselves. If, then, we consider the movement of both as it is in themselves — i.e. as it is essentially — their movement starts only in that one of the two which has the character of being inherently essential as contrasted with the other. This is pictured as a spontaneous action; but the necessity for its self-abandonment lies in the notion that what is inherently essential, and gets this specific character merely through opposition, has just on that account no real independent subsistence. Therefore that element which has for its essence, not independent self-existence, but simple being, is what empties and abandons itself, gives itself unto death, and so reconciles Absolute Being with its own self. For in this process it manifests itself as spirit: the abstract Being is estranged from itself, it has natural existence and the reality of an actual self. This its otherness, or its being sensuously present, is taken back again by the second process of becoming “other”, and is affirmed as superseded, as universal. Thereby the Divine Being has come to itself in the sphere of the sensuous present; the immediate existence of actual reality has ceased to be something alien or external to the Divine, by being sublated, universal: this death (of immediacy) is therefore its rising anew as spirit. When the self-conscious Being cancels and transcends its immediate present, it is as universal self-consciousness. This notion of the transcended individual self which is Absolute Being, immediately expresses therefore the establishment of a communion which, while hitherto having its abode in the sphere of pictorial thought, now returns into itself as the Self: and Spirit thus passes from the second element constituting it, — figurative thought — and goes over to the third-self-consciousness as such.
If we further consider the kind of procedure that pictorial thinking adopts as it goes along, we find in the first place the expression that the Divine Being “takes on” human nature. Here it is eo ipso asserted that implicitly and inherently the two are not separate: just as in the statement, that the Divine Being from the beginning empties Itself of Itself, that its objective existence becomes concentrated in Itself and becomes evil, it is not asserted but implied that per se this evil existence is not something alien to the Divine nature. Absolute Being would be merely an empty name if in very truth there were any other being external to it, if there were a “fall"' from it. The aspect of self-concentration really constitutes the essential moment of the self of Spirit.
780. That this self-centredness, whence primarily comes its reality, belongs to the Divine Being — while this is for us a notion, and so as far as it is a notion, — appears to pictorial thinking as an inconceivable happening. The inherent and essential nature assumes for figurative thought the form of an indifferent objective fact. The thought, however, that those apparently mutually repugnant moments, absolute Being and self-existent Self, are not inseparable, comes also before this figurative way of thinking (since it does possess the real content), but that thought appears afterwards, in the form that the Divine Being empties Itself of Itself and is made flesh. This figurative idea, which in this manner is still immediate and hence not spiritual, i.e. it knows the human form assumed by the Divine as merely a particular form, not yet as a universal form — becomes spiritual for this consciousness in the process whereby God, who has assumed shape and form, surrenders again His immediate existence, and returns to His essential Being. The essential Being is then Spirit only when it is reflected into itself.
The reconciliation of the Divine Being with its other as a whole, and, specifically, with the thought of this other — evil — is thus presented here, in a figurative way. If this reconciliation is expressed conceptually, by saying it consists in the fact that evil is inherently the same as what goodness is, or again that the Divine Being is the same as nature in its entire extent, just as nature separated from God is simply nothingness, — then this must be looked at as an unspiritual mode of expression which is bound to give rise to misunderstandings. When evil is the same as goodness, then evil is just not evil nor goodness good; on the contrary, both are really done away with — evil in general, self-centred self-existence, and goodness, self-less simplicity. Since in this way they are both expressed in terms of their notion, the unity of the two is at once apparent; for self-centred self-existence is simple knowledge; and what is self-less simplicity is similarly pure self-existence centred within itself. Hence, if it must be said that good and evil in this their conception, i.e. so far as they are not good and evil, are the same, just as certainly it must be said that they are not the same, but absolutely different; for simple self-existence, or again pure knowledge, are equally pure negativity or per se absolute distinction. It is only these two propositions that make the whole complete; and when the first is asserted and asseverated, it must be met and opposed by insisting on the other with immovable obstinacy. Since both are equally right, they are both equally wrong, and their wrong consists in taking such abstract forms as “the same” and “not the same”, “identity” and “non-identity”, to be something true, fixed, real, and in resting on them. Neither the one nor the other has truth; their truth is just their movement, the process in which simple sameness is abstraction and thus absolute distinction, while this again, being distinction per se, is distinguished from itself and so is self-identity. Precisely this is what we have in sameness of the Divine Being and Nature in general and human nature in particular: the former is Nature so far as it is not essential Being; Nature is Divine in its essential Being. But it is in Spirit that we find both abstract aspects affirmed as they truly are, viz. as cancelled and preserved at once: and this way of affirming them cannot be expressed by the judgment, by the soulless word “is” , the copula of the judgment. In the same way Nature is nothing outside its essential Being [God]; but this nothing itself is all the same; it is absolute abstraction, therefore pure thought or self-centredness, and with its moment of opposition to spiritual unity it is the principle of Evil. The dffficulty people find in these conceptions is due solely to sticking to the term “is” and forgetting the character of thought, where the moments as much are as they are not, — are only the process which is Spirit. It is this spiritual unity, — unity where the distinctions are merely in the form of moments, or as transcended — which became known to pictorial thinking in that atoning reconciliation spoken of above. And since this unity is the universality of self-consciousness, self-consciousness has ceased to be figurative or pictorial in its thinking; the Process has turned back into it.
781. Spirit thus takes up its position in the third element, in universal self-consciousness: Spirit is its own community. The movement of this community being that of self-consciousness, which distinguishes itself from its figurative idea, consists in explicitly bringing out what has implicitly become established. The dead Divine Man, or Human God, is implicitly universal self-consciousness; he has to become explicitly so for this self-consciousness. Or, since this self-consciousness constitutes one side of the opposition involved in figurative thought, viz. the side of evil, which takes natural existence and individual self-existence to be the essential reality — this aspect, which is pictured as independent, and not yet as a moment, has, on account of its independence, to raise itself in and for itself to the level of spirit; it has to reveal the process of Spirit in its self.
782. This particular self-consciousness is Spirit in natural form, natural spirit: self has to withdraw from this natural existence and enter into itself, become self-centred; that would mean, it has to become evil. But this aspect is already per se evil: entering into itself consists therefore, in persuading itself that natural existence is what is evil. By picture-thinking the world is supposed actually to become evil and be evil as an actual fact, and the atoning reconcilement of the Absolute Being is viewed as an actual existent phenomenon. By self-consciousness as such, however, this pictured truth, as regards its form, is considered to be merely a moment that is already superseded and transcended; for the self is the negative, and hence knowledge — a knowledge which is a pure act of consciousness within itself. This moment of the negative must in like manner find expression in the content. Since, that is to say, the essential Being is inherently and from the start reconcited with itself and is a spiritual unity, in which what are parts for figurative thought are sublated, are moments, what we find is that each part of figurative thought receives here the opposite significance to that which it had before. By this means each meaning finds its completion in the other, and the content is then and thereby a spiritual content. Since the specific determinateness of each is just as much its opposite, unity in otherness — spiritual reality — is achieved: just as formerly we saw the opposite meanings combined objectively (für uns), or in themselves, and even the abstract forms of “the same” and “not-the-same”, “identity” and “non-identity” cancelled one another and were transcended.
783. If, then, from the point of view of figurative thought, the becoming self-centred on the part of the natural self-consciousness was actually existing evil, that process of becoming fixed in itself is in the sphere of self consciousness, the knowledge of evil as something that per se belongs to existence. This knowledge is certainly a process of becoming evil, but merely of the thought of evil, and is therefore recognized as the first moment of reconciliation. For, being a return into self out of the immediacy of nature, which is specifically characterized as evil, it is a forsaking of that immediacy, and a dying to sin. It is not natural existence as such that consciousness forsakes, but natural existence that is at the same time known to be evil. The immediate process of becoming self-centred, is just as much a mediate process: it presupposes itself, i.e. is its own ground and reason: the reason for self-concentrating is because nature has per se already done so. Because of evil man must be self-centred (in sich gehen); but evil is itself the state of self-concentration. This first movement is just on that account itself merely immediate, is its simple notion, because it is the same as what its ground or reason is. The movement, or the process of passing into otherness, has therefore still to come on the scene in its own more peculiar form.
784. Beside this immediacy, then, the mediation of figurative thought is necessary. The knowledge of nature as the untrue existence of spirit, and this universality of self which has arisen within the life of the self — these constitute implicitly the reconciliation of spirit with itself. This implicit state is apprehended by the self-consciousness, that does not comprehend (begreifen), in the form of an objective existence, and as something presented to it figuratively. Conceptual comprehension (Begreifen), therefore, does not mean for it a grasping (Ergreifen) of this conception (Begriff) which knows natural existence when cancelled and transcended to be universal and thus reconciled with itself; but rather a grasping of the imaginative idea (Vorstellung) that the Divine Being is reconciled with its existence through an event, — the event of God's emptying Himself of His Divine Being through His factual Incarnation and His Death. The grasping of this idea now expresses more specifically what was formerly called in figurative thinking spiritual resurrection, or the process by which God's individual self-consciousness(13) becomes the universal, becomes the religious communion. The death of the Divine Man, qua death, is abstract negativity, the immediate result of the process which terminates only in the universality belonging to nature. In spiritual self-consciousness death loses this natural significance; it passes into its true conception, the conception just mentioned. Death then ceases to signify what it means directly — the non-existence of this individual — and becomes transfigured into the universality of the spirit, which lives in its own communion, dies there daily, and daily rises again.
785. That which belongs to the sphere of pictorial thought — viz., that Absolute Spirit presents the nature of spirit in its existence, qua individual or rather qua particular, — is thus here transferred to self-consciousness itself, to the knowledge which maintains itself in its otherness. This self-consciousness does not therefore really die, as the particular person(14) is pictorially imagined to have really died; its particularity expires in its universality, i.e. in its knowledge, which is essential Being reconciling itself with itself. That immediately preceding element of figurative thinking is thus here affirmed as transcended, has, in other words, returned into the self, into its notion. What was in the former merely an (objective) existent has come to assume the form of Subject. By that very fact the first element too, pure thought and the spirit eternal therein, are no longer away beyond the mind thinking pictorially nor beyond the self; rather the return of the whole into itself consists just in containing all moments within itself. When the death of the mediator is grasped by the self, this means the sublation of his factuality, of his particular independent existence: this particular self-existence has become universal self-consciousness.
On the other side, the universal, just because of this, is self-consciousness, and the pure or non-actual Spirit of bare thought has become actual. The death of the mediator is death not merely of his natural aspect, of his particular self-existence: what dies is not merely the outer encasement, which, being stripped. of essential Being, is eo ipso dead, but also the abstraction of the Divine Being. For the mediator, as long as his death has not yet accomplished the reconciliation, is something one-isided, which takes as essential Being the simple abstract element of thought, not concrete reality. This one-sided extreme of self has not yet equal worth and value with essential Being; the self first gets this as Spirit. The death of this pictorial idea implies at the same time the death of the abstraction of Divine Being, which is not yet affirmed as a self. 'That death is the bitterness of feeling of the “unhappy consciousness”, when it feels that God Himself is dead. This harsh utterance is the expression of inmost selfknowledcre which has simply self for its content; it is the return of consciousness into the depth of darkness where Ego is nothing but bare identity with Ego, a darkness distinguishing and knowing nothing more outside it. This feeling thus means, in point of fact, the loss of the Substance and of its objective existence over against consciousness. But at the same time it is the pure subjectivity of Substance, the pure certainty of itself, which it lacked when it was object or unmediacy, or pure essential Being. This knowledge is thus spiritualization, whereby Substance becomes Subject, by which its abstraction and lifelessness have expired, and Substance therefore has become real, simple, and universal self-consciousness.
786. In this way, then, Spirit is Spirit knowing its own self. It knows itself; that, which is for it object, exists, or, in other words, its figurative idea is the true absolute content. As we saw, the content expresses just Spirit itself. It is at the same time not merely content of self-consciousness, and not merely object for self-consciousness; it is also actual Spirit. It is this by the fact of its passing through the three elements of its nature: this movement through its whole self constitutes its actual reality. What moves itself, that is Spirit; it is the subject of the movement, and it is likewise the moving process itself, or the substance through which the subject passes. We saw how the notion of spirit arose when we entered the sphere of religion: it was the process of spirit certain of its self, which forgives evil, and in so doing puts aside its own simplicity and rigid unchangeableness: it was, to state it otherwise, the process, in which what is absolutely in opposition recognizes itself as the same as its opposite, and this knowledge breaks out into the “yea, yea”, with which one extreme meets the other. The religious consciousness, to which the Absolute Being is revealed, beholds this notion, and does away with the distinction of its self from what it beholds; and as it is Subject, so it is also Substance; and is thus itself Spirit just because and in so far as it is this process.
787. This religious communion, however, is not yet fulfilled in this its self-consciousness. Its content, in general, is put before it in the form of a pictorial idea; so that this disruption still attaches even to the actual spiritual character of the communion — to its return out of its figurative thinking; just as the element of pure thought itself was also hampered with that opposition.(15) This spiritual communion is not also consciously aware what it is; it is spiritual self-consciousness, which is not object to itself as this self-consciousness, or does not develop into clear consciousness of itself. Rather, so far as it is consciousness, it has before it those picturethoughts which were considered.
We see self-consciousness at its last turning point become inward to itself and attain to knowledge of its inner being, of its self-centredness. We see it relinquish its natural existence, and reach pure negativity. But the positive significance — viz. that this negativity, or pure inwardness of knowledge is just as much the selfidentical essential Being: put other-wise, that Substance has here attained to being absolute self-consciousness — this is, for the devotional consciousness, an external other. It grasps this aspect-that the knowledge which becomes purely inward is inherently absolute simplicity, or Substance — as the pictorial idea of something which is not thus by its very conception, but as the act of satisfaction obtained from an (alien) other. In other words, it is not really aware as a fact that this depth of pure self is the power by which the abstract essential Being is drawn down from its abstractness and raised to the level of self by the force of this pure devotion. The action of the self hence retains towards it this negative significance, because the relinquishment of itself on the part of substance is for the self something per se; the self does not at once grasp and comprehend it, or does not find it in its own action as such.
Since this unity of Essential Being and Self has been inherently brought about, consciousness has this idea also of its reconciliation, but in the form of an imaginative idea. It obtains satisfaction by attaching, in an external way, to its pure negativity the positive significance of the unity of itself with essential Being. Its satisfaction thus itself remains hampered with the opposition of a beyond. Its own peculiar reconciliation therefore enters its consciousness as something remote, something far away in the future, just as the reconciliation, which the other self achieved, appears as away in the distance of the past. Just as the individual divine man(16) has an implied (essential, an sich) father and only an actual mother, in like manner the universal divine man, the spiritual communion, has as its father its own proper action and knowledge, while its mother is eternal Love, which it merely feels, but does not behold in its consciousness as an actual immediate object. Its reconciliation, therefore, is in its heart, but still with its conscious life sundered in twain and its actual reality shattered. What falls within its consciousness as the immanent essential element, the aspect of pure mediation, is the reconciliation that lies beyond: while what appears as actually present, as the aspect of immediacy and of existence, is the world which has yet to await transfiguration. The world is no doubt implicitly reconciled with the essential Being; and that Being no doubt knows that it no longer regards, the object as alienated from itself, but as one with itself in its Love. But for self-consciousness this immediate presence has not yet the form and shape of spiritual reality. Thus the spirit of the communion is, in its immediate consciousness, separated from its religious consciousness, which declares indeed that these two modes of consciousness inherently are not separated; but this is an implicitness which is not realized, or has not yet become an equally absolute explicit self-existence.
1. Christianity.
2. Which implies such opposition.
3. The Roman State.
4. From a hymn of Luther.
5. As in neo-Platonism.
6. e.g. in Christianity.
7. Cp. “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John xiv.). “If I go not away the Comforter will not come unto you” (ibid. xiv.).
8. "Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world” (Matt. xxviii.; also xviii.20).
9. viz. Christ.
10. The life and work of the historical Jesus.
11. v. p. 764.
12. The angelic hosts.
13. The Christ.
14. Christ.
15. I.e. between spiritual consciousness and objective idea.
16. The historical Christ.
Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion
It has appeared to me to be necessary to make religion by itself the object of philosophical consideration, and to add on this study of it, in the form of a special part, to philosophy as a whole. By way of introduction I shall, however, first of all (A) give some account of the severance or division of consciousness, which awakens the need our science has to satisfy, and describe the relation of this science to philosophy and religion, as also to the prevalent principles of the religious consciousness. Then, after I have (B) touched upon some preliminary questions which follow from those relations, I shall give (C) the division of the subject.
To begin with, it is necessary to recollect generally what object we have before us in the Philosophy of Religion, and what is our ordinary idea of religion. We know that in religion we withdraw ourselves from what is temporal, and that religion is for our consciousness that region in which all the enigmas of the world are solved, all the contradictions of deeper-reaching thought have their meaning unveiled, and where the voice of the heart’s pain is silenced — the region of eternal truth, of eternal rest, of eternal peace. Speaking generally, it is through thought, concrete thought, or, to put it more definitely it is by reason of his being Spirit, that man is man; and from man as Spirit proceed all the many developments of the sciences and arts, the interests of political life, and all those conditions which have reference to mail’s freedom and will. But all these manifold forms of human relations, activities, and pleasures, and all the ways in which these are intertwined; all that has worth and dignity for man, all wherein he seeks his happiness, his glory, and his pride, finds its ultimate centre in religion, in the thought, the consciousness, and the feeling of God. Thus God is the beginning of all things, and the end of all things. As all things proceed from this point, so all return back to it again. He is the centre which gives life and quickening to all things, and which animates and preserves in existence all the various forms of being. In religion man places himself in a relation to this centre, in which all other relations concentrate themselves, and in so doing he rises up to the highest level of consciousness and to the religion which is free from relation to what is other than itself, to something which is absolutely self-sufficient, the unconditioned, what is free, and is its own object and end.
Religion, as something which is occupied with this final object and end, is therefore absolutely free, and is its own end; for all other aims converge in this ultimate end, and in presence of it they vanish and cease to have value of their own. No other aim can hold its ground against this, and here alone all find their fulfilment.
In the relation where the spirit occupies itself with this end, it unburdens itself of all finiteness, and wills for itself final satisfaction and deliverance; for here the spirit relates itself no longer to something that is other than itself, and that is limited, but to the unlimited and infinite, and this is an infinite relation, a relation of freedom and no longer of dependence. Here its consciousness is absolutely free, and is indeed true consciousness, because it is consciousness of absolute truth. In its character as feeling, this condition of freedom is the sense of satisfaction which we call blessedness, while as activity it has nothing further to do than to manifest the honour of God and to reveal His glory, and in this attitude it is no longer with himself that man is concerned with his own interests or his empty pride — but with the absolute end. All the various peoples feel that it is in the religious consciousness they possess truth, and they have always regarded religion as constituting their true dignity and the Sabbath of their life. Whatever awakens in us doubt and fear, all sorrow, all care, all the limited interests of finite life, we leave behind on the shores of time; and as from the highest peak of a mountain, far away from all definite view of what is earthly, we look down calmly upon all the limitations of the landscape and of the world, so with the spiritual eye man, lifted out of the hard realities of this actual world, contemplates it as something having only the semblance of existence, which seen from this pure region bathed in the beams of the spiritual still, merely reflects back its shades of colour, its varied tints and lights, softened away into eternal rest. In this region of spirit flow the streams of forgetfulness from which Psyche drinks, and in which she drowns all sorrow, while the dark things of this life are softened away into a dream-like vision, and become transfigured until they are a mere framework for the brightness of the Eternal.
This image of the Absolute may have a more or less present vitality and certainty for the religions and devout mind, and be a present source of pleasure; or it may be represented as something longed and hoped for, far off, and in the future. Still it always remains a certainty, and its rays stream as something divine into this present temporal life, giving the consciousness of the active presence of truth, even amidst the anxieties which torment the soul here in this region of time. Faith recognises it in this last case he is inwardly occupied with it, and cannot free himself from it. As man, religion is essential to him, and is not a feeling foreign to his nature.
Yet the essential question is the relation of religion to his general theory of the universe, and it is with this that philosophical knowledge connects itself, and upon which it essentially works.
In this relation we have the source of the division which arises in opposition to the primary absolute tendency of the. spirit toward religion, and here, too, all the manifold forms of consciousness, and their most widely differing connections with the main interest of religion, have sprung up. Before the Philosophy of Religion can sum itself up in its own peculiar conception, it must work itself through all those ramifications of the interests of the time which have at present concentrated themselves in the widely-extended sphere of religion. At first the movement of the principles of the time has its place outside of philosophical study, but this movement pushes on to the point at which it comes into contact, strife, and antagonism with philosophy.
We shall consider this opposition and its solution when we have examined the opposition as it still maintains itself outside of philosophy, and have seen it develop until it reaches that completed state where it involves philosophical knowledge in itself.
A. Relation of the Philosophy of Religion to its Pre-suppositions
a. In the relation in which religion, even in its immediacy, stands to the other forms of the consciousness of man, there already lie germs of division, since both sides are conceived of as in a condition of separation relatively to each other. In their simple relation they already constitute two kinds of pursuits, two different regions of consciousness, and we pass to and fro from the one to the other alternately only. Thus man has in his actual worldly life a number of working days during which he occupies himself with his own special interests, with worldly aims in general, and with the satisfaction of his needs; and then he has a Sunday, when he lays all this aside, collects his thoughts, and, released from absorption in finite occupations, lives to himself and to the higher nature which is in him, to his true essential being. But into this separateness of the two sides there directly enters a double modification.
(a.) Let us consider first of all the religion of the godly man; that is, of one who truly deserves to be so called. Faith is still presupposed as existing irrespective of, and without opposition to, anything else. To believe in God is thus in its simplicity, something different from that where a man, with reflection and with the consciousness that something else stands opposed to this faith, says, “ I believe in God.” Here the need of justification, of inference, of controversy, has already come in. Now that religion of the simple, godly man is not kept shut off and divided from the rest of his existence and life, but, on the contrary, it breathes its influence over all his feelings and actions, and his consciousness brings all the aims and objects of his worldly life into relation to God, as to its infinite and ultimate source. Every moment of his finite existence and activity, of his sorrow and joy, is lifted up by him out of his limited sphere, and by being thus lifted up produces in him the idea and sense of his eternal nature. The rest of his life, in like manner, is led under the conditions of confidence, of custom, of dutifulness, of habit; he is that which circumstances and nature have made him, and be takes his life, his circumstances, and rights as he receives everything, namely, as a lot or destiny which he does not understand. It is so. In regard to God, he either takes what is His and gives thanks, or else he offers it up to Him freely as a gift of free grace. The rest of his conscious life is thus subordinated, without reflection, to that higher region.
(b.) From the worldly side, however, the distinction involved in this relation develops until it becomes opposition. It is true that the development of this side does not seem to affect religion injuriously, and all action seems to limit itself strictly to that side in the matter. Judging from what is expressly acknowledged, religion is still looked upon as what is highest; but as a matter of fact it is not so, and starting from the worldly side, ruin and disunion creep over into religion. The development of this distinction may be generally designated as the maturing of the understanding and of human aims. While understanding awakens in human lire and in science, and reflection has become independent, the will sets before itself absolute aims; for example, justice, the state, objects which are to have absolute worth, to be in and for themselves. Thus research recognises the laws, the constitution, the order, and the peculiar characteristics of natural things, and of the activities and productions of Spirit. Now these experiences and forms of knowledge, as well as the willing and actual carrying out of these aims, is a work of man, both of his understanding and will. In them he is in presence of what is his own. Although he sets out from what is, from what he finds, yet he is no longer merely one who knows, who has these rights; but what he makes out of that which is given in knowledge and in will is his affair, his work, and he has the consciousness that he has produced it. Therefore these productions constitute his glory and his pride, and provide for him an immense, an infinite wealth — that world of his intelligence, of his knowledge, of his external possession, of his rights and deeds.
Thus the spirit has entered into the condition of opposition — as yet, it is true, artlessly, and without at first knowing it — but the opposition comes to be a conscious one, for the spirit now moves between two sides, of which the distinction has actually developed itself. The one side is that in which the spirit knows itself to be its own, where it lives in its own aims and interests, and. determines itself on its own authority as independent and self-sustaining. The other side is that where the spirit recognises a higher Power — absolute duties, duties without rights belonging to them, and what the spirit receives for the accomplishment of its duties is always regarded as grace alone. In the first instance it is the independence of the spirit which is the foundation, here its attitude is that of humility and dependence. Its religion is accordingly distinguished from what we have in that region of independence by this, that it restricts knowledge, science, to the worldly side, and leaves for the sphere of religion, feeling and faith.
(g.) Notwithstanding, that aspect of independence involves this also, that its action is conditioned, and knowledge and will must have experience of the fact that it is thus conditioned. Man demands his right; whether or not he actually gets it, is something independent of his efforts, and he is referred in the matter to an Other. In the act of knowledge he sets out from the organisation and order of nature, and this is something given. The content of his sciences is a material outside of him. Thus the two sides, that of independence and that of conditionality, enter into relation with each other, and this relation leads man to the avowal that everything is made by God — all things which constitute the content of his knowledge, which he takes possession of, and uses as means for his ends, as well as he himself, the spirit and the spiritual faculties of which he, as he says, makes use, in order to attain to that knowledge.
But this admission is cold and lifeless, because that which constitutes the vitality of this consciousness, in which it is “at home with itself,” and is self-consciousness, this insight, this knowledge are wanting, in it. All that is determined comes, on the contrary, to be included in the sphere of knowledge, and of human, self-appointed aims, and here, too, it is only the activity belonging to self-consciousness which is present. Therefore that admission is unfruitful too, because it does not get beyond the abstract — universal, that is to say, it stops short at the thought that all is a work of God, and with regard to objects which are absolutely different (as, for example, the course of the stars and their laws, ants, or men), that relation continues for it fixed at one and the same point, namely this, that God has made all. Since this religious relation of particular objects is always expressed in the same monotonous manner, it would become tedious and burdensome if it were repeated in reference to each individual thing. Therefore the matter is settled with the one admission, that God has made everything, and this religious side is thereby satisfied once for all, and then in the progress of knowledge and the pursuit of aims nothing further is thought of the matter. It would accordingly appear that this admission is made simply and solely in order to get rid of the whole business, or perhaps it may be to get protection for the religious side as it were relatively to what is without. In short, such expressions may be used either in earnest or not.
Piety does not weary of lifting up its eyes to God on all and every occasion, although it may do so daily and hourly in the same manner. But as religious feeling, it really rests in singleness or single instances; it is in every moment wholly what it is, and is without reflection and the consciousness which compares experiences. It is here, on the contrary, where knowledge and self-determination are concerned, that this comparison, and the consciousness of that sameness, are essentially present, and then a general proposition is enunciated once for all. On the one side we have understanding playing its part, while over against it is the religions feeling of dependence.
b.Even piety is not exempt from the fate of falling into a state of division or dualism. On the contrary, division is already present in it implicitly, in that its actual content is only a manifold, accidental one. These two attitudes, namely, that of piety and of the. understanding that compares, however different they seem to be, have this in common, that in them the relation of God to the other side of consciousness is undetermined and general. The second of these attitudes has indicated and pronounced this unhesitatingly in the expression already quoted, “God has created all.”
(a.) The manner of looking at things, however, which is followed by the religious man, and whereby he gives a greater completeness to his reflection, consists in the contemplation of the constitution and arrangement of things according to the relations of ends, and similarly in the regarding all the circumstances of individual life, as well as the great events of history, as proceeding from Divine purposes, or else as directed and leading back to such. The universal divine relation is thus not adhered to here. On the contrary, this becomes a definite relation, and consequently a more strictly defined content is introduced — for the manifold materials are placed in relation to one another, and God is then considered as the one who brings about these relations. Animals and their surroundings are accordingly regarded as beings definitely regulated, in that they have food, nurture their young are provided with weapons as a defence against g’ what is hurtful, stand the winter, and can protect themselves against enemies. In human life it is seen how man is led to happiness, whether it be eternal or temporal, by means of this or that apparent accident, or perhaps misfortune. In short, the action, the will of God, is contemplated here in definite dealings, conditions of nature, occurrences, and such-like.
But this content itself, these ends, representing thus a finite content, are accidental, are taken up only for the moment, and even directly disappear in an inconsistent and illogical fashion. If, for example, we admire the wisdom of God in nature because we see how animals are provided with weapons, partly to obtain their food and partly to protect them against enemies, yet it is presently seen in experience that these weapons are of no avail, and that those creatures which have been considered as ends are made use of by others as means.
It is therefore really progressive knowledge which has depreciated and supplanted this external contemplation
of ends; that higher knowledge, namely, which, to begin with, at least demands consistency, and recognises ends of this kind, which are taken as Divine ends, as subordinate and finite — as something which proves itself in the very same experience and observation to be worthless, and not to be an object of the eternal, divine Will.
If that manner of looking at the matter be accepted, and if, at the same time, its inconsistency be disregarded, yet it still remains indefinite and superficial, for the very reason that all and every content — no matter what it be — may be included in it; for there is nothing, no arrangement of nature, no occurrence, which, regarded in some aspect or other, might not be shown to have some use. Religious feeling is, in short, here no Ionger present in its naive and experimental character. On the contrary, it proceeds from the universal thought of an end, of a good, and makes inferences, inasmuch as it subsumes present things under these universal thoughts. But this argumentation, this inferential process, brings the religious man into a condition of perplexity, because however much he may point to what serves a purpose, and is useful in this immediate world of natural things, he sees, in contrast to all this, just as much that does not serve a purpose, and is injurious. What is profitable to one person is detrimental to another, and therefore does not serve a purpose. The preservation of life and of the interests bound up with existence, which in the one case is promoted, is in the other case just as much endangered and put a stop to. Thus an implicit dualism or division is involved here, for in contradiction to God’s eternal manner of operation, finite things are elevated to the rank of essential ends. The idea of God and of His manner of operation as universal and necessary is contradicted by this inconsistency, which is even destructive of that universal character.
Now if the religious man considers external ends and the externality of the whole matter in accordance with which these things are profitable for an Other, the natural determinateness, which is the point of departure, appears indeed to be only for an Other. But this, more closely considered, is its own relation, its own nature, the immanent nature of what is related, its necessity, in short. Thus it is that the actual transition to the other side, which was formerly designated as the moment of selfness, conies about for ordinary religious thought.
(b.) Religious feeling, accordingly, is forced to abandon its argumentative process; and now that a beginning has once been made with thought, and with the relations of thought, it becomes necessary, above all things to thought, to demand and to look for that which belongs to itself namely, first of all consistency and necessity, and to place itself in opposition to that standpoint of contingency. And with this, the principle of selfness at once develops itself completely. I,” as simple, universal, as thought, am really relation since I am for myself, am self-consciousness, the relations too are to be for me. To the thoughts, ideas which I make my own, I give the character which I myself am. I am this simple point, and that which is for me I seek to apprehend in this unity.
Knowledge so far aims at that which is, and the necessity of it, and apprehends this in the relation of cause and effect, reason and result, power and manifestation; in the relation of the Universal, of the species and of the individual existing things which are included in the sphere of contingency. Knowledge, science, in this manner places the manifold material in mutual relation, takes away from it the contingency which it has through its immediacy, and while contemplating the relations which belong to the wealth of finite phenomena, encloses the world of finiteness in itself so as to form a system of the universe, of such a kind that knowledge requires nothing for this system outside of the system itself. For what a thing is, what it is in its essential determinate character, is disclosed when it is perceived and made the subject of observation. From the constitution of things, we proceed to their connections in which they stand in relation to all Other; not, however in an accidental, but in a determinate relation, and in which they point back to the original source from which they are a deduction. Thus we inquire after the reasons and causes of things; and the meaning of inquiry here is, that what is desired is to know the special causes. Thus it is no longer sufficient to speak of God as the cause of the lightning, or of the downfall of the Republican system of government in Rome, or of the French Revolution; here it is perceived that this cause is only an entirely general one, and does not yield the desired explanation. What we wish to know regarding a natural phenomenon, or regarding this or that law as effect or result, is, the reason as the reason of this particular phenomenon that is to say. not the reason which applies to all things, but only and exclusively to this definite thing. And thus the reason must be that of such special phenomena, and such reason or ground must be the most immediate, must be sought and laid hold of in the finite and must itself be a finite one. Therefore this knowledge does not go above or beyond the sphere of the finite, nor does it desire to do so, since it is able to apprehend all in its finite sphere, is conversant with everything, and knows its course of action. In this manner science forms a universe of knowledge, to which God is not necessary, which lies outside of religion, and has absolutely nothing to do with it. In this kingdom knowledge spreads itself out in its relations and connections, and in so doing has all determinate material and content on its side; and for the other side, the side of the infinite and the eternal, nothing whatever is left.
(g.) Thus both sides have developed themselves completely in their opposition, on the side of religion the heart is filled with what is Divine, but without freedom, or self-consciousness, and without consistency in regard to what is determinate, this latter having, on the contrary, the form of contingency. Consistent connection of what is determinate belongs to the side of knowledge, which is at home in the finite, and moves freely in the thought-determinations of the manifold connections of things, but can only create a system which is without absolute substantiality — without God. The religious side gets the absolute material and purpose, but only as something abstractly positive. Knowledge has taken possession of all finite material and drawn it into its territory, all determinate content has fallen to its share; but although it gives it a necessary connection, it is still unable to give it the absolute connection. Since finally science has taken possession of knowledge, and is the conscious ness of the necessity of the finite, religion has become devoid of knowledge, and has shrivelled up into simple feeling, into the contentless or empty elevation of the spiritual to the Eternal. It can, however, affirm nothing regarding the Eternal for all that could be regarded knowledge would be a drawing down of the Eternal into the sphere of the finite, and of finite connections of things.
Now when two aspects of thought, which are so developed in this way, enter into relation with one another, their attitude is one of mutual distrust. Religious feeling distrusts the finiteness which lies in knowledge, and it brings against science the charge of futility, because in it the subject clings to itself, is in itself, and the “I” as the knowing subject is independent in relation to all that is external. On the other hand, knowledge has a distrust of the totality in which feeling entrenches itself, and in which it confounds together all extension and development. It is afraid to lose its freedom should it comply with the demand of feeling and unconditionally recognise a truth which it does not definitely understand. And when religious feeling comes out of its universality, sets ends before itself, and passes over to the determinate, knowledge can see nothing but arbitrariness in this, and if it were to pass in a similar way to anything definite, would feel itself given over to mere contingency. When, accordingly, reflection is fully developed, and. has to pass over into the domain of religion, it is unable to hold out in that region, and becomes impatient with regard to all that peculiarly belongs to it.
c. Now that the opposition has arrived at this stage of development, where the one side, whenever it is approached by the other, invariably thrusts it away from it as an enemy, the necessity for an adjustment comes in, of such a kind that the infinite shall appear in the finite, and the finite in the infinite, and each no longer form a separate realm. This would be the reconciliation of religious, genuine simple feeling, with knowledge and intelligence. This reconciliation must correspond with the highest demands of knowledge, and of the Notion, for these can surrender nothing of their dignity. But just as little can anything of the absolute content be given up, and that content be brought down into the region of finiteness; and when face to face with it knowledge must give up its finite form. In the Christian religion, more than in other religions, the need of this reconciliation has of necessity come into prominence, for the following reasons: —
(a.) The Christian religion has its very beginning in absolute dualism. or division, and starts from that sense of suffering in which it rends the natural unity of the spirit asunder, and destroys natural peace. In it man appears as evil from his birth, and is thus in his innermost life in contradiction with himself, and the spirit, as it is driven back into itself, finds itself separated from the infinite, absolute Essence.
(b.) The Reconciliation, the need of which is here intensified to the uttermost degree, appears in the first place for Faith, but not in such a way as to allow of faith being of a merely ingenuous kind. For the spirit has left its natural simplicity behind, and entered upon an internal conflict; it is, as sinful, an Other in opposition to the truth; it is withdrawn, estranged from it. “I,” in this condition of schism, am not the truth, and this is therefore given as an independent content of ordinary thought, and the truth is in the first instance put forward upon authority.
(g.) When, however, by this means I am transplanted into an intellectual world in which the nature of God, the characteristics and modes of action which below, to God, are presented to knowledge, and when the truth of these rests on the witness and assurance of others, yet I am at the same time referred into myself, for thought, knowledge, reason are in me, and in the feeling of sinfulness, and in reflection upon this, my freedom is plainly revealed to me. Rational. knowledge, therefore, is an essential element in the Christian religion itself.
In the Christian religion I am to retain my freedom or rather, in it I am to become free. In it the subject, the salvation of the soul, the redemption of the individual as an individual, and not only the species, is an essential end. This subjectivity, this selfness (not selfishness) is just the principle of rational knowledge itself.
Rational knowledge being thus a fundamental characteristic in the Christian religion, the latter gives development to its content, for the ideas regarding its general subject-matter are implicitly or in themselves thoughts, and must as such develop themselves. On the other hand, however, since the content is something, which exists essentially for the mind as forming ideas, it is distinct from unreflecting opinion and sense-knowledge, and as it were passes right beyond the distinction. In short, it has in relation to subjectivity the value of an absolute content existing in and for itself. The Christian religion therefore touches the antithesis between feeling and immediate perception on the one hand, and reflection and knowledge on the other. It contains rational knowledge as an essential element, and has supplied to this rational knowledge the occasion for developing itself to its full logical issue as Form and as a world of form, and has thus at the same time enabled it to place itself in opposition to this content as it appears in the shape of given truth. It is from this that the discord which characterises the thought of the present day arises. Hitherto we have considered the progressive growth of the antitheses only in the form in which they have not yet developed into actual philosophy, or in which they still stand outside of it. Therefore the questions which primarily come before us are these: 1. How does philosophy in general stand related to religion? 2. How does the Philosophy of Religion stand related to philosophy? and 3. What is the relation of the philosophical study of religion to positive religion
In saying above that philosophy makes religion the subject of consideration, and when further this consideration of it appears to be in the position of something which is different from its object, it would seem as if we are still occupying that attitude in which both sides remain mutually independent and separate. In taking up such an attitude in thus considering the subject, we should accordingly come out of that region of devotion and enjoyment which religion is, and the object and the consideration of it as the movement of thought would be as different as, for example, the geometrical figures in mathematics are from the mind which considers them. Such is only the relation, however, as it at first appears, when knowledge is still severed from the religious side, and is finite knowledge. On the contrary, when we look more closely, it becomes apparent that as a matter of fact the content, the need, and the interest of philosophy represent something which it has in common with religion.
The object of religion as well as of philosophy is eternal truth in its objectivity, God and nothing but God, and the explication of God. Philosophy is not a wisdom of the world, but is knowledge of what is not of the world — it is not knowledge which concerns external mass, or empirical existence and life, but is knowledge of that which is eternal, of what God is, and what flows out of His nature. For this His nature must reveal and develop itself. Philosophy, therefore, only unfolds itself when it unfolds religion, and in unfolding itself it unfolds religion. As thus occupied with eternal truth which exists on its own account, or is in and for itself, and, as in fact, a dealing on the part of the thinking spirit, and not of individual caprice and particular interest, with this object, it is the same kind of activity as religion is. The mind in so far as it thinks philosophically immerses itself with like living interest in this object, and renounces its particularity in that it permeates its object, in the same way, as religious consciousness does, for the latter also does not seek to have anything of its own, but desires only to immerse itself in this content.
Thus religion and philosophy come to be one. Philosophy is itself, in fact, worship; it is religion, for in the same way it renounces subjective notions and opinions in order to occupy itself with God. Philosophy is thus identical with religion, but the distinction is that it is so in a peculiar manlier, distinct from the manner of looking at things which is commonly called religion as such. What they have in common is, that they are religion; what distinguishes them from each other is merely the kind and manner of religion we find in each. It is in the peculiar way in which they both occupy themselves with God that the distinction comes out. It is just here, however, that the difficulties lie which appear so great, that it is even regarded as an impossibility that philosophy should be one with religion. Hence conies the suspicion with which philosophy is looked upon by theology, and the antagonistic attitude of religion and philosophy. In accordance with this antagonistic attitude (as theology considers it to be) philosophy seems to act injuriously, destructively, upon religion, robbing it of its sacred character, and the way in which it occupies itself with God seems to be absolutely different from religion. Here, then, is the same old opposition and contradiction which had already made its appearance among the Greeks. Among that free democratic people, the Athenians, philosophical writings were burnt, and Socrates was condemned to death; now, however, this opposition is held to be an acknowledged fact, more so than that unity of religion and philosophy just asserted.
Old though this opposition is, however, the combination of philosophy and religion is just as old. Already to the neo-Pythagoreans and neo-Platonists, who were as yet within the heathen world, the gods of the people were not cods of imagination, but had become gods of thought. That combination had a place, too, among the most eminent of the Fathers of the Church, who in their religious life took up an essentially intellectual attitude inasmuch as they set out from the presupposition that theology is religion together with conscious thought and comprehension. It is to their philosophical culture that the Christian Church is indebted for the first beginnings of a content of Christian doctrine.
This union of religion and philosophy was carried out to a still-greater extent in the Middle Ages. So little was it believed that the knowledge which seeks to comprehend is hurtful to faith, that it was even held to be essential to the further development of faith itself. It was by setting out from philosophy that those great men, Anselm and Abelard, further developed the essential characteristics of faith.
Knowledge in constructing its world for itself, without reference to religion, had only taken possession of the finite contents; but since it has developed into the true philosophy, it has the same content as religion. If we now look provisionally for the distinction between religion and philosophy as it presents itself in this unity or content, we find it takes the following form: —
a. A speculative philosophy is the consciousness of the Idea, so that everything is apprehended as Idea; the Idea, however, is the True in thought, and not in mere sensuous contemplation or in ordinary conception. The True in thought, to put it more precisely, means that it is something concrete, posited as divided in itself, and in such away, indeed, that the two sides of what is divided are opposed characteristics of thought, and the Idea must be conceived of as the unity of these. To think speculatively means to resolve anything real into its parts, and to oppose these to each other in such a way that the distinctions are. set in opposition in accordance with the characteristics of thought, and the object is apprehended as unity of the two.
In sense-perception or picture-thought we have the object before us as a whole, our reflection distinguishes, apprehends different sides, recognises the diversity in them, and severs them. In this act of distinguishing reflection does not keep firm hold of their unity. Sometimes it forgets the wholeness, sometimes the distinctions and if it has both before it, it yet separates the properties from the object, and so places both that that in which the two are one becomes a third, which is different from. the object and its properties. In the case of mechanical objects which appear in the region of externality, this relation may have a place, for the object is only the lifeless substratum for the distinctions, and the quality of oneness is the gathering together of external aggregates
In the true object, however, which is not merely an aggregate, an externally united multiplicity, the object is one, although it has characteristics which are distinguished from it, and it is speculative thought which first gets a grasp of the unity in this very antithesis as such. It is in fact the business of speculative thought to apprehend all objects of pure thought, of nature and of Spirit, in the form of thought, and thus as the unity of the difference.
b. Religion, then, is itself the standpoint of the consciousness of the True, which is in and for itself, and is consequently the stage of Spirit at which the speculative content generally is object for consciousness. Religion is not consciousness of this or that truth in individual objects, but of the absolute truth, of truth as the Universal, the All-comprehending outside of which there lies nothing at all. The content of its consciousness is further the Universally True, which exists on its own account or in and for itself, which determines itself, and is not determined from without. While the finite required an Other for its determinateness, the True has its determinateness, the limit, its end in itself; it is not limited through an Other, but the Other is found in itself. It is this speculative element which comes to consciousness in religion. Truth is, indeed, contained in every other sphere, but not the highest absolute truth, for this exists only in perfect universality of characterisation or determination, and in the fact of being determined in and for itself, which is not simple determinateness having reference to an Other, but contains the Other, the difference in its very self.
c. Religion is accordingly this speculative element in the form, as it were, of a state of consciousness, of which the aspects are not simple qualities of thought, but are concretely filled up. These moments can be no other than the moment of Thought, active universality, thought in operation, and reality as immediate, particular self-consciousness.
Now, while in philosophy the rigidity of these two sides loses itself through reconciliation in thought, be cause both sides are thoughts, and the one is not pure universal thought, and the other of an empirical and individual character, religion only arrives at the enjoyment of unity by lifting these two rigid extremes out of this state of severance, by rearranging them, and bringing them together again. But by thus stripping off the form of dualism from its extremes, rendering the opposition in the element of Universality fluid, and bringing it to reconciliation, religion remains always akin to thought, even in its form and movement; and philosophy, as simply active thought, and thought which unites opposed elements, has approached closely to religion. The contemplation of religion in thought has thus raised the determinate moments of religion to the rank of thoughts, and the question is how this contemplation of religion in thought is related generally to philosophy as forming an organic part in its system.
a. In philosophy, the Highest is called the Absolute, the Idea; it is superfluous to go further back here, and to mention that this Highest was in the Wolfian Philosophy called ens, Thing,; for that at once proclaims itself an abstraction, which corresponds very inadequately to our idea of God. In the more recent philosophy, the Absolute is not so complete an abstraction, but yet it has not on that account the same signification as is implied in the term, God. In order even to make the difference apparent, we must in the first place consider what the word signify itself signifies. When we ask, What does this or that signify we are asking about two kinds of things, and, in fact, about things which are opposed. In the first place, we call what we are thinking of, the meaning, the end or intention, the general thought of this or that expression, work of art, &c.; if we ask about its intrinsic character, it is essentially the thought that is in it of which we wish to have an idea. When we thus ask “What is God?” “What does the expression God signify?” it is the thought involved in it that we desire to know; the idea we possess already.
Accordingly, what is signified here is that we have got to specify the Notion, and thus it follows that the Notion is the signification; it is the Absolute, the nature of God as grasped by thought, the logical knowledge of this, to which we desire to attain. This, then, is the one signification of signification, and so far, that which we call the Absolute has a meaning identical with the expression God.
b. But we put the question again, in a second sense, according to which it is the opposite of this which is sought after. When we begin to occupy ourselves with pure thought-determinations, and not with outward ideas, it may be that the mind does not feel satisfied, is not at home, in these, and asks what this pure thought-determination signifies. For example, every one can understand for himself what is meant by the terms unity, objective, subjective, &c., and yet it may very well happen that the specific form of thought we call the unity of subjective and objective, the unity of real and ideal, is not understood. What is asked for in such a case is the meaning in the very opposite sense from that which was required before. Here it is an idea or a pictorial conception of the thought — determination which is demanded, an example of the content, which has as yet only been given in thought. If we find a thought content difficult to understand, the difficulty lies in this, that we possess no pictorial idea of it; it is by means of an example that it becomes clear to us, and that the mind first feels at home with itself in this content. When, accordingly, we start with the ordinary conception of God, the Philosophy of Religion has to consider its signification — this, namely, that God is the Idea, the Absolute, the Essential Reality which is grasped in thought and in the Notion, and this it has in common with logical philosophy; the logical Idea is God as He is in Himself. But it is just the nature of God that He should not be implicit or in Himself only. He is as essentially for Himself, the Absolute Spirit, not only the Being who keeps Himself within thought, but who also manifests Himself, and gives Himself objectivity.
c. Thus, in contemplating the Idea of God, in the Philosophy of Religion, we have at the same time to do with the manner of His manifestation or presentation to us; He simply makes Himself apparent, represents Himself to Himself. This is the aspect of the determinate being or existence of the Absolute. In the Philosophy of Religion we have thus the Absolute as object; not, however, merely in the form of thought, but also in the form of its manifestation. The universal Idea is thus to be conceived of with the purely concrete meaning of essentiality in general, and is to be regarded from the point of view of its activity in displaying itself, in appearing, in revealing itself. Popularly speaking, we say God is the Lord of the natural world and of the realm of Spirit. He is the absolute harmony of the two, and it is He who produces and carries on this harmony. Here neither thought and Notion nor their manifestation — determinate being or existence — are wanting. This aspect, thus represented by determinate being, is itself, however, to be grasped again in thought, since we are here in the region of philosophy. Philosophy to begin with contemplates the Absolute as logical. Idea, the Idea as it is in thought, under the aspect in which its content is constituted by the specific forms of thought. Further, philosophy exhibits the Absolute in its activity, in its creations. This is the manner in which the Absolute becomes actual or “for itself,” becomes Spirit, and God is thus the result of philosophy. It becomes apparent, however, that this is not merely a result, but is something which eternally creates itself, and is that which precedes all else. The onesidedness of the result is abrogated and absorbed in the very result itself. Nature, finite Spirit, the world of consciousness, of intelligence, and of will, are embodiments of the divine Idea, but they are definite shapes, special modes of the appearance of the Idea, forms, in which the Idea has not yet penetrated to itself, so as to be absolute Spirit.
In the Philosophy of Religion, however, we do not contemplate the implicitly existing logical Idea merely, in its determinate character as pure thought, nor in those finite determinations where its mode of appearance is a finite one, but as it is in itself or implicitly in thought, and at the same time as it appears, manifests itself, and thus in infinite manifestation as Spirit, — which reflects itself in itself; for Spirit which does not appear, is not. In this characteristic of appearance finite appearance is also included — that is, the world of nature, and the world of finite spirit, — but Spirit is regarded as the power or force of these worlds, as producing them out of itself, and out of them producing itself.
This, then, is the position of the Philosophy of Religion in relation to the other parts of philosophy. Of the other parts, God is the result; here, this End is made the Beginning, and becomes our special Object, is the simply concrete Idea, with its infinite manifestations; and this characteristic concerns the content of the Philosophy of Religion. We look at this content, however, from the point of view of rational thought, and this concerns the form, and brings us to consider the position of the Philosophy of Religion with regard to religion as this latter appears in the shape of positive religion.
It is well known that the faith of the Church, more especially of the Protestant Church, has taken a fixed form as a system of doctrine. This content has been universally accepted as truth; and as the description of what God is, and of what man is in relation to God, it has been called the Creed, that is, in the subjective sense that which is believed, and objectively, what is to be known as content, in the Christian Church, and what God has revealed Himself to be. Now as universal established doctrine this content is partly laid down in the Apostolic Symbolum or Apostles’ Creed, partly in later symbolical books. And moreover, in the Protestant Church the Bible has always been characterised as the essential foundation of doctrine.
a. Accordingly, in the apprehension and determination of the content of doctrine, the influence of reason, as “argumentation” has made itself felt. At first indeed, this was so much the case that the doctrinal content, and the Bible as its positive foundation, were to remain unquestioned, and thought was only to take up the thoughts of the Bible as Exegesis. But as a matter of fact understanding had previously established its opinions and its thoughts for itself, and then attention was directed towards observing how the words of Scripture could be explained in accordance with these. The words of the Bible are a statement of truth which is not systematic; they are Christianity as it appeared in the beginning; it is Spirit which grasps the content, which unfolds its meaning. This exegesis having thus taken counsel with reason, the result has been that a so-called Theology of Reason has now come into existence, which is put in opposition to that doctrinal system of the Church, partly by this theology itself, and partly by that doctrinal system to which it is opposed. At the same time, exegesis takes possession of the written word, interprets it, and pretends only to lay stress on the understanding of the word, and to desire to remain faithful to it.
But whether it be chiefly to save appearances, or whether it is really and in downright earnest that the Bible is made the foundation, it is inherent in the very nature of any explanation which interprets, that thought should have its part in it. Thought explicitly contains categories, principles, premises, which must make their influence felt in the work of interpretation. If interpretation be not mere explanation of words but explanation of the sense, the thoughts of the interpreter must necessarily be put into the words which constitute the foundation. Mere word-interpretation can only amount to this, that for one word another coextensive in meaning is substituted; but in the course of explanation further categories of thought are combined with it. For a development is advance to further thoughts. In appearance the sense is adhered to, but in reality further thoughts are developed. Commentaries on the Bible do not so much make us acquainted with the content of the Scriptures, as rather with the manner in which things were conceived in the age in which they were written. It is, indeed, the sense contained in the words which is supposed to be given. The giving of the sense means, however, the bringing forward of the sense into conscious ness, into the region of ideas; and these ideas, which get determinate character elsewhere, then assert their influence in the exposition of the sense supposed to be contained in the words. It is the case even in the presentation of a philosophical system which is already fully developed, as, for example, that of Plato or of Aristotle, that the presentation takes a different form, according to the definite kind of idea which those who undertake thus to expound it have already formed themselves. Accordingly, the most contradictory meanings have been exegetically demonstrated by means of Theology out of the Scriptures, and thus the so-called Holy Scriptures have been made into a nose of wax. All heresies have, in common with the Church, appealed to the Scriptures.
b. The Theology of Reason, which thus came into existence, did not, however, limit itself to being merely ail exegesis which kept to the Bible as its foundation, but in its character as free, rational knowledge assumed a certain relation to religion and its content generally. In this more general relation the dealing with the subject and the result can amount to nothing more than to the taking possession by such knowledge of all that, in religion, has a determinate character. For the doctrine concerning God goes on to that of the characteristics, the attributes, and the actions of God. Such knowledge takes possession of this determinate content, and would make it appear that it belongs to it. It, on the one hand, conceives of the Infinite in its own finite fashion, as something which has a determinate character, as an abstract infinite, and then on the other hand finds that all special attributes are inadequate to this Infinite. By such a mode of proceeding the religious content is annihilated, and the absolute object reduced to complete poverty. The finite and determinate which this knowledge has drawn into its territory, points indeed to a Beyond as existing for it, but even this Beyond is conceived of by it in a finite manner, as ail abstract, supreme Being possessing no character at all. Enlightenment” — which is that consummation of finite knowledge just described — intends to place God very high when it speaks of Him as the Infinite with regard to which all predicates are inadequate, and are unwarranted anthropomorphisms. In reality, however, it has, in conceiving God as the supreme Being, made Him hollow, empty, and poor.
c. If it should now seem as if the Philosophy of Religion rested on the same basis as this Theology of Reason, or Theology of Enlightenment, and was consequently in the same condition of opposition to the content, of religion, further reflection shows that this is merely an appearance of resemblance which vanishes directly it is examined into.
(a.) For God was conceived by that rationalistic way of looking at religion, which was only the abstract metaphysic of the understanding, as an abstraction which is empty ideality, and as against which the finite stands in an external fashion, and thus too from this point of view morals constituted, as a special science, the knowledge of that which was held to belong to the actual subject as regards general actions and conduct. The fact of the relation of man to God, which represents the one side, occupied a separate and independent position. Thinking reason, on the contrary, which is no longer abstract, but which sets out from the faith of man in the dignity of his spirit, and is actuated by the courage of truth and freedom, grasps the truth as something concrete as fullness of content, as Ideality, in which determinateness — the finite — is contained as a moment. Therefore, to thinking reason. God is not emptiness, but Spirit; and this characteristic of Spirit does not remain for it a word only, or a superficial characteristic; on the contrary, the nature of Spirit unfolds itself for rational thought, inasmuch as it apprehends God as essentially the Triune God. Thus God is conceived of as making Himself an object to Himself, and further, the object remains in this distinction in identity with God; in it God loves Himself. Without this characteristic of Trinity, God would not be Spirit, and Spirit would be an empty word. But if God be conceived as Spirit, then this conception includes the subjective side in itself or even develops itself so as to reach to that side, and the Philosophy of Religion, as the contemplation of religion by thought, binds together again the determinate content of religion in its entirety.
(b.) With regard, however, to that form of contemplation in thought, which adheres to the words of Holy Scripture, and asserts that it explains them by the aid of reason, it is only in appearance that the Philosophy of Religion stands on the same basis with it. For that kind of contemplation by its own sovereign power lays down its argumentations as the foundation of Christian doctrine; and although it still leaves the Biblical words standing, yet the particular meaning remains as the principal determination, and to this the assumed Biblical truth must subordinate itself. This argumentation accordingly retains its assumptions, and moves within the relations of the Understanding, which below, to Reflection, without subjecting these to criticism. But the Philosophy of Religion, as being rational knowledge, is opposed to the arbitrariness of this argumentative process, and is the Reason of the Universal, which presses forward to unity.
Philosophy is therefore very far removed from being on the common highway on which this Theology of Reason and this exegetical argumentative process move, the truth rather being that it is these tendencies chiefly which combat it, and seek to bring, it under suspicion. They protest against philosophy, but only in order to reserve to themselves the arbitrariness of their argumentative process. Philosophy is called something special and particular, although it is nothing else than rational, truly universal thought. Philosophy is regarded as a something ghostly, of which we know nothing and about which there is something uncanny; but this idea only shows that these rationalistic theologians find it more convenient to keep to their unregulated arbitrary reflections, to which philosophy attaches no validity. If, then, those theologians, who busy themselves with their argumentations in exegesis, and — appeal to the Bible in connection with all their notions, when they deny as against philosophy the possibility of knowledge, have brought matters to such a pass, and have so greatly depreciated the reputation of the Bible, that if the truth were as they say, and if according to the true explanation of the Bible no knowledge of the nature of God were possible, — the spirit would be compelled to look for another source in order to acquire such truth as should be substantial or full of content.
(g.) The Philosophy of Religion cannot, therefore, in the fashion of that metaphysic of the Understanding and exegesis of inferences, put itself in opposition to positive religion, and to such doctrine of the Church as has still preserved its content. On the contrary, it will become apparent that it stands infinitely nearer to positive doctrine than it seems at first sight to do. Indeed, the re-establishment of the doctrines of the Church, reduced to a minimum by the Understanding, is so truly the work of philosophy, that it is decried by that so-called Theology of Reason, which is merely a Theology of the Understanding, as a darkening of the mind, and this just because of the true content possessed by it. The fears of the Understanding, and its hatred of philosophy, arise from a feeling of apprehension, based on the fact that it perceives how philosophy carries back its reflecting process to its foundation, that is, to the affirmative in which it perishes, and yet that philosophy arrives at a content, and at a knowledge of the nature of God, after all content seemed to be already done away with. Every content appears to this negative tendency to be a darkening of the mind, its only desire being to continue in that nocturnal darkness which it calls enlightenment, and hence the rays of the light of knowledge must be necessarily regarded by it as hostile. It is sufficient here merely to observe regarding the supposed opposition of the Philosophy of Religion and positive religion, that there cannot be two kinds of reason and two kinds of Spirit; there cannot be a Divine reason and a human, there cannot be a Divine Spirit and a human, which are absolutely different. Human reason — the consciousness of one’s being is indeed reason; it is the divine in man, and Spirit, in so far as it is the Spirit of God, is not a spirit beyond the stars, beyond the world. On the contrary, God is present, omnipresent, and exists as Spirit in all spirits. God is a living God, who is acting and working. Religion is a product of the Divine Spirit; it is not a discovery of man, but a work of divine operation and creation in him. The expression that God as reason rules the world, would be irrational if we did not assume that it has reference also to religion, and that the Divine Spirit works in the special character and form assumed by religion. But the development of reason as perfected in thought does not stand in opposition to this Spirit, and consequently it cannot be absolutely different from the work which the Divine Spirit has produced in religion. The more a man in thinking rationally lets the true thing or fact itself hold sway with him, renounces his particularity, acts as universal consciousness, while his reason does not seek its own in the sense of something special, the less will he as the embodiment of this reason, get into that condition of opposition; for it, namely, reason, is itself the essential fact or thing, the spirit, the Divine Spirit. The Church or the theologians may disdain this aid, or may take it amiss when their doctrine is made reasonable; they may even repel the exertions of philosophy with proud irony, though these are not directed in a hostile spirit against religion, but, on the contrary, seek to fathom its truth; and they may ridicule the “ manufactured truth — but this scorn is no longer of any avail, and is, in fact, idle when once the need of true rational knowledge, and the sense of discord between it and religion, have been awakened. The intelligence has here its rights, which can in no way be longer denied to it., and the triumph of knowledge is the reconciliation of the opposition.
Although then, philosophy, as the Philosophy of Religion is so very different from those tendencies of the understanding, which are at bottom hostile to religion, and is in no way such a spectral thing as it has usually been represented to be, yet even at the present day we still see the belief in the absolute opposition between philosophy and religion made one of the shibboleths of the time. All those principles of the religious consciousness which have been developed at the present time, however widely distinguished their forms may be from one another, yet agree in this, that they are at enmity with philosophy, and endeavour at all hazards to prevent it from occupying itself with religion; and the work that now lies before us is to consider philosophy in its relation to these principles of the time. From this consideration of the subject we may confidently promise ourselves success, all the more that it will become apparent how, in presence of all that enmity which is shown to philosophy, from however many sides it way come — indeed, it comes from almost every side of consciousness in its present form — the time has nevertheless arrived when philosophy can, partly in an unprejudiced and partly in a favourable and successful manner, occupy itself with. religion. For the opposition takes one or other of those forms of the divided consciousness which we considered above. They occupy partly the standpoint of the metaphysic of the Understanding, for which God is emptiness, and content has vanished, partly the standpoint of feeling, which after the loss of absolute content has withdrawn itself into its empty subjectivity, but is in accord with that metaphysic in coming to the result that every characterisation is inadequate to the eternal content — for this indeed is only an abstraction. Or we may even see that the assertions of the opponents of philosophy contain nothing else than what philosophy itself contains as its principle, and as the foundation of its principle. This contradiction, namely, that the opponents of philosophy are the opponents of religion who have been overcome by it, and that they yet implicitly possess the principle of philosophical knowledge in their reflections, has its foundation in this, that they represent the historical element out of which philosophical thought in its complete shape has been formed.
If at the present day philosophy be an object of enmity because it occupies itself with religion, this cannot really surprise us when we consider the general character of the time. Every one who attempts to take to do with the knowledge of God, and by the aid of thought to comprehend His nature, must be prepared to find, that either no attention will be paid to him, or that people will turn against him and combine to oppose him.
The more the knowledge of finite things has increased — and the increase is so great that the extension of the sciences has become almost boundless, and all regions of knowledge are enlarged to all extent which makes a comprehensive view impossible — so much the more has up sphere of the knowledge of God become contracted. There was a time when all knowledge was knowledge of God. Our own time, on the contrary, has the distinction of knowing, about all and everything, about au infinite number of subjects, but nothing at all of God. Formerly the mind found its supreme interest in knowing God, and searching into His nature. It had and it found no rest unless in thus occupying itself with God. When it could not satisfy this need it felt unhappy. The spiritual conflicts to which the knowledge of God gives rise in the inner life were the highest which the spirit knew and experienced in itself, and all other interests and knowledge were lightly esteemed. Our own time has put this need, with all its toils and conflicts, to silence; we have done with all this, and got rid of it. What Tacitus said of the ancient Germans, that they were securi adversus deos, we have once more become in regard to knowledge, securi adversus deum. It no longer gives our age any concern that it knows nothing of God; on the contrary, it is regarded as a mark of the highest intelligence to hold that such knowledge is not even possible. What is laid down by the Christian religion as the supreme, absolute commandment, “Ye shall know God” is regarded as a piece of folly. Christ says, “Be ye perfect, as My Father in heaven is perfect.” This lofty demand is to the wisdom of our time an empty sound. It has made of God an infinite phantom, which is far from us, and in like manner has made human knowledge a futile phantom of finiteness, or a mirror upon which fall only shadows, only phenomena. How, then, are we any longer to respect the commandment, and grasp its meaning when it says to us, “Be ye perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect,” since we know nothing of the Perfect One, and since our knowing and willing are confined solely and entirely to appearance, and the truth is to be and to remain absolutely and exclusively a something beyond the present? And what, we must further ask, what else would it be worth while to comprehend, if God is incomprehensible?
This standpoint must, judged by its content, be considered as the last stage of the degradation of man, in which at the same time he is, it is true, all the more arrogant inasmuch as he thinks he has proved to himself that this degradation is the highest possible state, and is his true destiny. Such a point of view is, indeed, directly opposed to the lofty nature of the Christian religion, for according to this we ought to know God, His nature, and His essential Being and to esteem this knowledge as something which is the highest of all. (The distinction as to whether this know, edge is brought to us by means of faith, authority, revelation, or reason, is here of no importance.) But although this is the case, and although this point of view has come to dispense both with the content which revelation gives of the Divine nature, and with what belongs to reason, yet it has not shrunk, after all its abject gropings, in that blind arrogance which is proper to it, from turning against philosophy. And yet it is philosophy which is the liberation of the spirit from that shameful degradation, and which has once more brought religion out of the stage of intense suffering which it had to experience when occupying the standpoint referred to. Even the theologians, who are on their own round in that region of vanity, have ventured to charge philosophy with its destructive tendency — theologians who have no longer anything left of that substantial element which could possibly be destroyed.
In order to repel these not merely groundless, but, what is more, frivolous and unprincipled objections, we need only observe cursorily how theologians have, on the contrary, done everything in their power to do away with what is definite in religion, in that they have (1) thrust dogmas into the background, or pronounced them. to be unimportant; or (2) consider them only as extraneous definitions given by others, and as mere phenomena of a past history. When we have reflected in this manner upon the aspect presented by the content, and have seen how this last is re-established by philosophy, and placed in safety from up devastations of theology, we shall (3) reflect upon the form of that standpoint, and shall see here how the tendency which, taking its departure from the form, is at enmity with philosophy, is so ignorant of what it is, that it does not even know that it contains in itself the very principle of philosophy.
If, then, it be made a reproach to philosophy in its relation to religion that the content of the doctrine of revealed positive religion, and more expressly of the Christian religion, is depreciated by it, and that it subverts and destroys its dogmas, yet this hindrance is taken out of the way, and by the new theology itself, in fact. There are very few dogmas of the earlier system of Church confessions left which have any longer the importance formerly attributed to them, and in their place no other dogmas have been set up. It is easy to convince oneself, by considering what is the real value now attached to ecclesiastical dogmas, that into the religious world gene rally there has entered a widespread, almost universal, indifference towards what in earlier times were held to be essential doctrines of the faith. A few examples will prove this.
Christ still indeed continues to be made the central point of faith, as Mediator, Reconciler, and Redeemer; but what was known as the work of redemption has received a very prosaic and merely psychological signification, so that although the edifying words have been retained, the very thing that was essential in the old doctrine of the Church has been expunged.
“Great energy of character, steadfast adherence to conviction for the sake of which He regarded not His life” — these are the common categories through which Christ is brought down, not indeed to the plane of ordinary everyday life, but to that of human action in general and moral designs, and into a moral sphere into which even heathens like Socrates were capable of entering. Even though Christ be for many the central point of faith and devotion in the deeper sense, yet Christian life as a whole restricts itself to this devotional bent, and the weighty doctrines of the Trinity, of the resurrection of the body, as also the miracles in the Old and New Testaments, are neglected as matters of indifference, and have lost their importance. The divinity of Christ, dogma what is peculiar to the Christian religion is set aside, or else reduced to something of merely general nature. It is not only by “enlightenment” that Christianity has been thus treated, but even by pious theologians themselves. These latter join with the men of enlightenment in saying that the Trinity was brought into Christian doctrine by the Alexandrian school, by the neo-Platonists. But even if it must be conceded that the fathers of the Church studied Greek philosophy, it is in the first instance a matter of no importance whence that doctrine may have come; the only question is, whether it be essentially, inherently, true; but that is a point which is not examined into, and yet that doctrine is the key-note of the Christian religion.
If an opportunity was given to a large number of these theologians to lay their hand on their heart, and say whether they consider faith in the Trinity to be indispensably necessary to salvation, and whether they believe that the absence of such faith leads to damnation, there can be no doubt what the answer would be.
Even the words eternal happiness and eternal damnation are such as cannot be used in good society; such expressions are regarded as arrhta as words which one shrinks from uttering. Even although a man should not wish to deny these doctrines, he would, in case of his being directly appealed to, find it very difficult to express himself in ail affirmative way.
In the doctrinal teaching of these theologians, it will be found that dogmas have become very thin and shrunken, although they are talked about a great deal. If any one were to take a number of religious books, or collections of sermons, in which the fundamental doctrines of the Christian religion are supposed to be set forth, and attempt to sift the greater part of those writings conscientiously in order to ascertain whether, in a large proportion of such literature, the fundamental doctrines of Christianity are to be found contained and stated in the orthodox sense, without ambiguity or evasion, the answer is again not a doubtful one.
It would appear that the theologians themselves, in accordance with the general training which most of them have received, only attribute that importance which they formerly assigned to the principle and doctrines of positive Christianity — when these were still regarded as such — to these doctrines when they are veiled in a misty indefiniteness. Thus if philosophy has always been regarded as the opponent of the doctrines of the Church, it cannot any longer be such, since these doctrines, which it seemed to threaten with destruction, are no longer regarded by general conviction as of importance. A great part of the danger which threatens philosophy from this side when she considers these dogmas in order to comprehend them ought to be thus taken away, and so philosophy can take up a more untrammelled attitude with regard to dogmas which have so much sunk in interest with theologians themselves.
The strongest indication, however, that the importance of these dogmas has declined, is to be perceived in the fact that they are treated principally in an historical manner, and are regarded in the light of convictions which belong to others, as matters of history, which do not go on in our own mind as such, and which do not concern the needs of our spirit. The real interest here is to find out how the matter stands so far as others are concerned, what part others have played, and centres in this accidental origin and appearance of doctrine. The question as to what is a man’s own personal conviction only excites astonishment. The absolute manner of the origin of these doctrines out of the depths of Spirit, and thus the necessity, the truth, which they have for our spirits too, is shoved on one side by this historical treatment. It brings much zeal and erudition to bear on these doctrines it is not with their essential substance, however, that it is occupied, but with the externalities of the controversies about them, and with the passions which have gathered around this external mode of the origin of truth. Thus Theology is by her own act put in a low enough position. If the philosophical knowledge of religion is conceived of as something to be reached historically only, then we should have to regard the theologians who have brought it to this point as clerks in a mercantile house, who have only to keep an account of the wealth of strangers, who only act for others without obtaining any property for themselves. They do, indeed, receive salary, but their reward is only to serve, and to register that which is the property of others. Theology of this kind has no longer a place at all in the domain of thought; it has no longer to do with infinite thought in and for itself, but only with it as a finite fact, as opinion, ordinary thought, and so on. History occupies itself with truths which were truths — namely, for others, not with such as would come to be the possession of those who are occupied with them. With the true content, with the knowledge of God, such theologians have no concern. They know as little of God as a blind man sees of a painting, even though he handles the frame. They only know how a certain dogma was established by this or that council; what grounds those present at such a council had for establishing it, and how this or that opinion came to predominate. And in all this, it is indeed religion that is in question, and yet it is not religion itself which here comes under consideration. Much is told us of the history of the painter of the picture, and of the fate of the picture itself, what price it had at different times, into what hands it came, but we are never permitted to see anything of the picture itself.
It is essential in philosophy and religion, however, that the spirit should itself enter with supreme interest into ail inner relation, should not only occupy itself with a thing that is foreign to it, but should draw its content from that which is essential, and should regard itself as worthy of such knowledge. For here it is with the value of his own spirit that man is concerned, and he is not at liberty humbly to remain outside and to wander about at a distance.
In consequence of the emptiness of the standpoint just considered, it might appear as if we only mentioned the reproaches which it casts upon philosophy in order to pronounce expressly against such a point of view, and that our aim, which we do not relinquish, is to do the opposite of that which it holds to be the highest of all aims — namely, to know God. Yet this standpoint has an aspect belonging to its form in which it must really have a rational interest for us, and regarded from this side, the recent attitude of theology is more favourable for philosophy. For with the thought that all objective determinateness has converged in the inwardness of subjectivity, the conviction is bound up that God gives revelation in an immediate way in man; that religion consists just in this, that man has immediate knowledge of God. This immediate knowing is called reason, and also faith, but in a sense other than that in which the Church takes faith.
All knowledge, all conviction, all piety, regarded from the point of view which we are considering, is based on the principle that in the spirit, as such, the consciousness of God exists immediately with the consciousness of its self.
a. This statement taken in a direct sense, and as not implying that any polemical attitude has been taken up to philosophy, passes for one which needs no proof, no confirmation. This universal idea, which is now matter of assumption, contains this essential principle — namely, that the highest, the religious content shows itself in the spirit itself, that Spirit manifests itself in Spirit, and in fact in this my spirit, that this faith has its source, its root in my deepest personal being, and that it is what is most peculiarly my own, and as such is inseparable from the consciousness of pure spirit.
Inasmuch as this knowledge exists immediately in myself, all external authority, all foreign attestation. is cast aside; what is to be of value to me must have its verification in my own spirit, and in order that I may believe I must have the witness of my spirit. It may indeed come to me from without, but any such external origin is a matter of indifference; if it is to be valid, this validity can only build itself up upon the foundation of all truth, in the witness of the Spirit.
This principle is the simple principle of philosophical knowledge itself, and philosophy is so far from rejecting it that it constitutes a fundamental characteristic in it itself. Thus it is to be regarded as a gain, a kind of happy circumstance, that fundamental principles of philosophy live even in general popular conceptions, and have become general assumptions, for in this way the philosophical principle may expect the more easily to obtain the general consent of the educated. As a result of this general disposition of the spirit of our time, philosophy has not only won a position which is externally favourable — with what is external it is never concerned, and least of all where it, and active interest in it, takes the form of an institution of the State — but is favoured inwardly, since its principle already lives in the minds and in the hearts of men as an assumption. For philosophy has this in common with the form of culture referred to, that reason is regarded as that part of the spirit in which God reveals himself to man.
b. But the principle of immediate knowledge does not rest satisfied with this simple determinateness, this natural and ingenuous content; it does not only express itself affirmatively, but takes up a directly polemical attitude to philosophical knowledge, and directs its attacks especially against the philosophical knowledge and comprehension of God. Not only does it teach that we are to believe and to know in an immediate manner, not only is it maintained that the consciousness of God is bound up with the consciousness of self, but that the relation to God is only an immediate one. The immediateness of the connection is taken as excluding the other characteristic of mediateness, and philosophy, because it is mediated knowledge, is said to be only a finite knowledge of that which is finite.
Thus this knowledge in its immediacy is to get no further than this, that we know that God is, but not what He is — the content, the filling up of the idea of God, is negated. By philosophical knowledge or cognition, we mean not only that we know that an object is, but also what it is; and that to know what it is, is not to know it to, the extent of possessing a certain know ledge, certainty, of what it is; but more than this, this knowledge must relate to its characteristics, to its content, and it must be complete and full and proved knowledge, in which the necessary connection of these characteristics is a matter of knowledge.
If we consider more closely what is involved in the assertion of immediate knowledge, it is seen to mean that the consciousness so relates itself to its content that it itself and this content — God — are inseparable. It is this relation, in fact — knowledge of God — and this inseparableness of consciousness from this content, which we call religion. Further, however, it is of the essence of this assertion that we are to limit ourselves to the consideration of religion as such, and to keep strictly to the consideration of the relation to God, and are not to proceed to the knowledge of God, that is, of the divine content — of what the divine content essentially is in itself.
In this sense it is slated, further, that we can only know our relation to God, not what God Himself is; and that it is only our relation to God which is embraced in what is generally called religion. Thus it happens that at the present time we only hear religion spoken of, and do not find that investigation is made regarding the nature of God, what He is in Himself, and how the nature of God must be determined. God, as God, is not even made an object of thought; knowledge does not trench upon that object, and does not exhibit distinct attributes in Him, so as to make it possible that He Himself should be conceived of as constituting the relation of these attributes, and as relation in Himself. God is not before us as an object of knowledge, but only our relation with God, our relation to Him; and while discussions of the nature of God have become fewer and fewer, it is now only required of a man that he should be religious, that he should abide by religion, and we are told that we are not to proceed further to get a knowledge of any divine content.
c. If, however, we bring out what is inherent in the principle of immediate knowing, that is, what is directly affirmed in it, we find it to be just this, that God is spoken of in relation to consciousness in such a way that this relation is something inseparable, or, in other words, that we must of necessity contemplate both. It implies, in the first place, the essential distinction which the conception of religion contains; on the one side, subjective consciousness, and on the other, God recognised as Object in Himself, or implicitly. At the same time, however, it is stated that there is an essential relation between the two, and that it is this inseparable relation of religion which is the real point, and not the notions which one may have concerning. God.
What is really contained in this position, and really constitutes its true kernel, is the philosophical Idea itself, only that this Idea is confined by immediate knowledge within limitations which are abolished by philosophy, and which are by it exhibited in their onesidedness and untruth. According to the philosophical conception, God is Spirit, is concrete; and if we inquire more closely what Spirit is, we find that the whole of religious doctrine consists in the development of the fundamental conception of Spirit. For the present, however, it may suffice to say that Spirit is essentially self-manifestation — its nature is to be for Spirit. Spirit is for Spirit, and not, be it observed, only in an external, accidental manner. On the contrary, Spirit is only Spirit in so far as it is for Spirit; this constitutes the conception or notion of Spirit itself. Or, to express it more theologically, God is essentially Spirit, so far as He is in His Church. It has been said that the world, the material universe, must have spectators, and must be for Spirit or mind; how much wore, then, must God be for Spirit.
We cannot, consequently, view the matter in a onesided way, and consider the subject merely according to its finiteness, to its contingent life, but inasmuch too as it has the infinite absolute object as its content. For if the Subject be considered by itself, it is considered within the limits of finite knowledge, of knowledge which concerns the finite. It is also maintained, on the other hand, that God, in like manner, must not be considered for Himself, for man only knows of God in relation to consciousness; and thus the unity and inseparability of the two determinations — of the knowledge of God and self-consciousness — even presupposes what is expressed in identity, and that dreaded identity itself is contained in it.
As a matter of fact, we thus find the fundamental conception which belongs to philosophy already existing as an universal element in the cultured thought of the present day. And here it becomes apparent, too, that philosophy does not stand above its age as if it were something absolutely different from the general character of the time, but that it is One Spirit which pervades both the actual world and philosophical thought, and that this last is only the true self-comprehension of what is actual. Or, in other words, it is one movement upon which both the age and its philosophy are borne, the distinction being only that the character of the time still appears to present itself as accidental, and is not rationally justified, and may thus even stand in an unreconciled, hostile attitude towards the truly essential content; while philosophy, as the justification of principles, is at the same time the universal peace-bringer and universal reconciliation. As the Lutheran Reformation carried faith back to the first centuries, so the principle of immediate knowledge has carried Christian knowledge back to the primary elements. If, however, this process at first causes the essential content to evaporate, yet it is philosophy which recognises this very principle of immediate knowledge as representing content, and as being such carries it forward to its true expansion within itself.
The want of sound sense which marks the arguments advanced against philosophy knows no bounds. The very opinions which are supposed by those who hold them to militate against philosophy, and to be in the sharpest antagonism to it, upon examination of their content exhibit essential agreement with that which they combat. Thus the result of the study of philosophy is that these walls of separation, which are supposed to divide absolutely, become transparent; and that when we go to up root of things we find that there is absolute accordance where it was believed that there was the greatest opposition.
Before we can proceed to the treatment of our subject itself, it appears to be indispensable to solve several preliminary questions, or rather to institute an investigation into these with the view of showing that the possibility of any such treatment of the subject, and of a rational knowledge of religion, is made dependent on the result of this investigation. It appears to be absolutely necessary to examine and to answer these questions, for this reason, that they have very specially engaged the interest of thinking men in our day, both in a philosophical and in a popular connection, and because they have to do with the principles upon which prevalent opinions regarding the religious content, or substantial element of religion, as also regarding the knowledge of it, are based.
If we omit such examination, it will at least be necessary to prove that this omission is not accidental, and that we possess the right to do this, since the essential element of any such examination is included in the science of philosophy itself, and all those questions can only find their solution there.
Here, therefore, we have only to look the hindrances in the face which the culture and opinion of the time, as hitherto considered, put in the way of our exercising the right to get an intellectual grasp of religion.
1. In the first place, it is not religion in general that we have before us, but positive religion, regarding which it is acknowledged that it is the gift of God, which rests on higher than human authority, and therefore appears to be outside the sphere of human reason, and to be elevated above it. The first hindrance in this connection is, that we should be called upon, before proceeding further, to verify the competence and capability of reason to deal with the truth and doctrine of a religion which is supposed to be withdrawn from the sphere of human reason. Rational or philosophical knowledge comes, however, and must of necessity come, into relation with positive religion. It has been said indeed, and is said still, that positive religion is “for itself,” or stands on its own basis. We do not question its doctrines; we respect them, and hold them in honour; on the other side stands reason, thought, which seeks to grasp its object intellectually, and these two are supposed not to come into relation; reason is not to interfere with. these doctrines. Formerly, it was imagined that the freedom of philosophical investigation could be guarded in this way. It was then said, that it was a thing by itself, which was not to do any harm to positive religion, and its result, moreover, also was subordinated to the teaching of positive religion. We do not wish, however, to place the present investigation on this footing. It is a false idea that these two, faith and free. philosophical investigation, can subsist quietly side by side. There is no foundation for maintaining that faith in the content or essential element of positive religion can continue to exist, if reason has convinced itself of the opposite. The Church has, therefore, consistently and justly refused to allow that reason might stand in opposition to faith, and yet be placed under subjection to it. The human spirit in its inmost nature is not something so divided up that two contradictory elements might subsist together in it. If discord has arisen between intellectual insight and religion, and is not overcome in knowledge, it leads to despair, which comes in the place of reconciliation. This despair is reconciliation carried out in a one-sided manner. The one side is cast away, the other alone held fast; but a man cannot win true peace in this way. The one alternative is, for the divided spirit to reject the demands of the intellect and try to return to simple religious feeling. To this, however, the spirit can only attain by doing violence to itself, for the independence of consciousness demands satisfaction, and will not be thrust aside by force; and to renounce independent thought, is not within the power of the healthy mind. Religious feeling becomes yearning hypocrisy, and retains the moment of non-satisfaction. The other alternative is a one-sided attitude of indifference toward religion, which is either left unquestioned and let alone, or is ultimately attacked and opposed. That is the course followed by shallow spirits.
This, then, is the first preliminary question in virtue of which the right of reason to occupy itself with the doctrines of religion has to be proved.
2. In the sphere above referred to, it is only maintained that reason cannot apprehend the truth of the nature of God: the possibility of apprehending other truths is not denied to it; it is only the highest truth which is said to be beyond its knowledge. According to another position, however, it is entirely denied to reason to know truth at all. It is asserted that philosophical knowledge, when it deals with Spirit in its true essence, in and for itself, with life, with the infinite, only produces mistakes, and that reason must renounce all claim to grasp anything of the infinite in an affirmative manner the infinite is destroyed by thought, is brought down to the level of the finite. This result, in regard to reason, this negation of reason, is even said to be a result of rational knowledge itself. Thus it would be necessary first to examine reason itself in order to ascertain whether the capability of knowing God, and consequently the possibility of a philosophy of religion, is inherent in it.
3. It follows from this that the knowledge of God is Dot to be placed in the reason which seeks to comprehend its object, but that the consciousness of God springs only out of feeling; and that the relation of man to God lies within the sphere of feeling only, and is not to be brought over into thought. If God be excluded from the region of rational intelligence or insight, of necessary, substantial subjectivity, nothing indeed is left but to assign to Him the region of accidental subjectivity, that of feeling, and in this case it may well be a subject of wonder that objectivity is ascribed to God at all. In this respect, materialistic views, or by whatever other name you choose to designate them, empirical, historical, naturalistic, have been at least more consistent, in that they have taken Spirit and Thought for something — material, and imagine they have traced the matter back to sensations, even taking God to be a product of feeling, and denying to Him objectivity. The result has, in this case, been atheism. God would thus be an historical product of weakness, of fear, of joy, or of interested hopes, cupidity, and lust of power. What has its root only in my feelings, is only for me; it is mine, but not its own; it has no independent existence in and for itself. Therefore it appears to be necessary, before going further, to show that God is not rooted in feeling merely, is not merely my God. For this reason the older metaphysic has always demonstrated first of all that a God is, and not merely that there is a feeling of God, and thus the Philosophy of Religion too finds the demand made upon it to demonstrate God.
It might seem as if the other sciences had the advantage over philosophy, inasmuch as their material is already acknowledged, and they are exempted from the necessity of proving the existence of this material. To arithmetic the fact of numbers, to geometry that of space, to medicine that of human bodies and diseases, is granted from the very beginning, and it is not required of them to prove, for example, that space, bodies, diseases, exist. Philosophy, however, seems to labour under the disadvantage of being obliged, before beginning, to guarantee an existence to its objects; if it be granted without challenge that there is a world, yet no sooner does philosophy go on to assume the reality of the immaterial in general, of a Thought and Spirit free from what is material, and still more the reality of God, than it is at once taken to task. The object with which philosophy occupies itself is not, however, of such a character as to be something merely hypothetical, and it is not to be regarded as such. Were it so, philosophy, and especially the Philosophy of Religion, would have in the first place to verify its object for itself. It would have to direct its efforts toward showing it to be necessary that before it exist it prove that it is; it would have before its existence to prove its existence.
These, then, are the preliminary questions which it seems would have to be solved beforehand, as in their solution the very possibility of a Philosophy of Religion would lie. For, if such points of view be valid, then any Philosophy of Religion is absolutely impossible, since in order to prove its possibility these obstacles must in the first place be removed. So it appears at first sight. We nevertheless leave them on one side; and for what reason we do so will, so far as the principal points are concerned, be briefly explained, in order that this difficulty may be met.
The first demand is that reason’ the faculty of knowledge, should be examined to begin with, before we advance to knowledge. Knowledge is thus conceived of as if it were to be got at by means of an instrument, with which the truth is to be laid hold of. When looked at more closely, however, the demand that this instrument should first be known is a clumsy one. Criticism of the faculty of knowledge is a position of the Kantian philosophy, and one which is general in the present time, and in the theology of the day. It was believed to be a great discovery, but as so often happens in the world, this belief proved to be self-deception. For it is commonly the case that when people have a notion which they consider to be a very clever one, it is in connection with it that they show themselves most foolish, and their satisfaction consists in having found a splendid outlet for their folly and ignorance. Indeed they are inexhaustible in finding such outlets when it is a question of keeping a good conscience in the face of their indolence, and of getting quit of the whole affair.
Reason is to be examined, but how? It is to be rationally examined, to be known; this is, however, only possible by means of rational thought; it is impossible in any other way, and consequently a demand is made which cancels itself. If we are not to begin philosophical. speculation without having attained rationally to a knowledge of reason, no beginning can be made at all, for in getting to know anything in the philosophical sense, we comprehend it rationally; we are, it seems, to give up attempting this, since the very thing we have to do is first of all to know reason. This is just the demand which was made by that Gascon who would not go into the water until he could swim. It is impossible to make any preliminary examination of rational activity without being rational.
Here in the Philosophy of Religion it is more especially God, reason in fact, that is the object; for God is essentially rational, rationality, which as Spirit is in and for itself. Now in speculating philosophically upon reason, we investigate knowledge, only we do it in such a way as to imply that we do not suppose we would want to complete this investigation beforehand outside of the object; on the contrary, the knowledge of reason is precisely the object with which we are concerned. It is of the very essence of Spirit to be for Spirit. That is just what Spirit is, and this consequently implies that finite spirit has been posited, and the relation of finite spirit, of finite reason to the divine, originates of itself within the Philosophy of Religion itself, and must be treated of there, and indeed in the very place where it first originates. It is this which constitutes the difference between a science and conjectures about a science; the latter are accidental; in so far, however, as they are thoughts, which relate to the matter itself, they must be included in its treatment, and they are in this case no longer mere chance bubbles of thought.
Spirit in making itself an object gives itself essentially the form of Appearance or Manifestation, as something which comes in a higher manner to the finite spirit; and it is essentially owing to this that the finite spirit arrives at a positive religion. Spirit becomes for itself or actual in the form of mental representation or idea in the form of the Other, and for that other for which it is, religion is produced as something positive. Thus, too, there is inherent in religion that characteristic of reason in virtue of which it involves knowledge, in virtue of which it is activity of comprehension and of thought. This standpoint of knowledge is included in religion, and so, too, is the standpoint of feeling”. Feeling is the subjective element; that which belongs to me as this individual, and because of which it is to myself that I appeal. The standpoint of feeling, too, in so far as God gives Himself this ultimate individualisation of This One, of one who feels, has its place in the development of the conception of religion, because this feeling has in it a spiritual relation, has spirituality in it. The determination, too, that God is, is a determination which is essentially included in the consideration of religion.
Religion, however, speaking generally, is the ultimate and the highest sphere of human consciousness, whether it be opinion, will, idea, ordinary knowledge, or philosophical knowledge. It is the absolute result — it is the region into which man passes over., as into the domain of absolute truth.
By reason of this universal character of religion, consciousness must, when in this sphere, have already raised itself above all that is finite — above finite existence, conditions, ends, interests, as well as above finite thoughts, finite relations of all kinds. To be actually within the sphere of religion, it is necessary to have laid these aside.
Yet although even for the ordinary consciousness religion is the act of rising-up above the finite, it usually happens when philosophy in general, and especially the philosophy which deals with God, with religion, is attacked, that in support of this polemical attitude, finite thoughts, relations belonging, to limitation, categories and forms of the finite are brought forward to the disregard of this fundamental characteristic. Such forms of the finite are made points of departure from which to oppose philosophy, especially the highest philosophy, the Philosophy of Religion.
We shall only touch briefly upon this. Immediacy of knowledge — the fact of consciousness — is, for example, such a finite form; such finite categories are the antitheses of finite and infinite, subject and object. But these antitheses, finite or infinite, subject or object, are abstract forms, which are out of place in such an absolutely rich, concrete content as religion is. In Spirit, soul — that which has to do with religion — quite other qualities are present than finiteness, &c.; and on such qualities is based all that is essential in religion. These forms must indeed be employed, since they are moments of the essential relation which lies at the foundation of religion, but it is of primary importance that their nature should have been examined into and recognised long before. This logical knowledge, which comes first, must lie behind us when we have to deal with religion scientifically; such categories must have Ion, ago been done with. But the usual thing is to employ these as weapons against the Notion, the Idea; against rational knowledge. Those categories. are used entirely without criticism, in a quite artless way, just as if Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” did not exist, which at least attacked these forms, and after its own fashion reached the result that it is only phenomena which can be known by means of these categories. In religion it is not, however, with phenomena that we have to do, it is with an absolute content. But those who employ this argumentative kind of reasoning seem to think the Kantian philosophers have existed only to afford opportunity for the more unblushing use of those categories.
It is entirely out of place, it is indeed preposterous, to bring forward these categories such as immediacy, fact of consciousness, in opposition to philosophy, and to meet philosophy with the reply that the finite is different from the infinite, and the object from the subject, as if there were any one, any philosopher whatever, who did not know this, or had still to learn such trivialities. Yet people are not ashamed to parade triumphantly cleverness of this sort, as if they had made a new discovery.
We shall here remark only that such characteristics as finite and infinite, subject and object — and this is what always constitutes the foundation of that very knowing and overwise talk — are undoubtedly different, but are at the same time inseparable too. We have an example of this in physics, in the north and south pole of the magnet. It is often said “ those characteristics are as different as heaven and earth.” That is quite correct; they are absolutely different, but as is already suggested by the figure just mentioned, they are in separable. Earth cannot be shown without heaven, and vice versa.
It is difficult to enter into discussion with those who wage war on the Philosophy of Religion and think they have triumphed over it, for they tell us so bluntly that immediacy, after all, “is something quite different from mediation.” At the same time they show an incredible ignorance, and a complete want of acquaintance with the forms and categories by means of which they make their attacks and pronounce a final judgment upon philosophy. They make their affirmations quite artlessly, with out having thought over these subjects, or having made any thorough observation of external nature and of the inner experience of their consciousness — of their minds — and of the manner in which these qualities present themselves there. Reality is not for them something present, but is something strange and unknown. The hostile language which they direct against philosophy is therefore mere scholastic pedantry — the chatter of the schools — which entangles itself in empty, unsubstantial categories, while in philosophy we are not in the so-called di school,” but are in the world of reality; and in the wealth of its qualities we do not find a yoke under which we are in bondage, but have in them free movement. And then, those who attack and disparage philosophy are, owing to their finite style of thinking incapable of even grasping a philosophical proposition; and though they may perhaps repeat its words, they have given it a wrong meaning, for they have not grasped its infiniteness, but have introduced their finite conditions into it. Thus philosophy is indefatigable, so to speak, and im poses upon itself the great labour of carefully investigating what its opponents have to say. Indeed that is its necessary course, being in accordance with its conception, and it can only satisfy the inward impulse of its notion or conception by getting a knowledge both of itself and of what is opposed to it (verum index sui et falsi), but it ought to be able to expect as a recompense that the opposition should now, by way of a reciprocal service, relinquish its hostility, and calmly comprehend its essential nature. But that is certainly not the result in this case, and the magnanimity which desires to recognise in a friendly way the adversary, and which heaps coals of fire on his head, does not help philosophy in the least; for the adversary will not keep quiet, but persists in his attacks. When we perceive, however, that the antithesis vanishes like a phantom, and dissolves into mist, we shall at the same time only render to ourselves and to philosophical thought what is due, and shall not seek merely to carry our point as against the other. And indeed to convince that “other,” to exert this personal influence upon him, is impossible, since he remains wedded to his limited categories.
The thinking spirit must have got beyond all these forms of Reflection; it must know their nature, the true relation involved in them, the infinite relation, that is to say, that in which their finiteness is done away with. Then it will become apparent, too, that immediate knowledge, like mediated knowledge, is entirely one-sided. What is true is their unity, an. immediate knowledge which is likewise mediated, something mediated which is likewise simple in itself, which is immediate reference to itself. Inasmuch as the one-sidedness is done away with by means of such combination, it is a condition of infiniteness. Here is union, in which the difference of those characteristics is done away with, [Aufgehoben] while they at the same time being preserved ideally have the higher destiny of serving as the pulse of vitality, the impulse, movement, unrest of the spiritual, as of the natural life.
Since it is with religion, with what is supreme and ultimate, that we are to be occupied in the following dissertation, we ought now to be in a position to assume that the futility of those relations has long ago been overcome. But at the same time, since we do not begin at the very beginning of the science, but are considering religion per se, regard must be also had when dealing with it to such relations of understanding as are wont to come principally under consideration in connection with it.
With this reference to the following dissertation itself, we shall now proceed to give the general survey, the synopsis or division of our science.
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There can be but one method in all science, since the method is the self-unfolding Notion (Begriff) and nothing else, and this latter is only one.
In accordance, therefore, with the moments of the Notion, the exposition and development of religion will be presented in three parts. In the first place, the notion or conception of religion will be considered in its universal aspect; then, secondly, in its particular form as the self-dividing and self-differentiating, notion, that is, under the aspect of judgment, [Ur-theil = separation of subject from predicate] of limitation, of difference, and of finiteness; and thirdly, we shall consider the notion, which encloses itself within itself, the syllogism, or the return of the notion to itself out of the particularity in which it is unequal to itself, so that it arrives at equality with its form, and does away with its limitation. This is the rhythm, the pure eternal life of Spirit itself; and had it not this movement, it would be something dead. It is of the essential nature of Spirit to have itself as object, and thence arises its manifestation. But here Spirit is to begin with in the relation of objectivity, and in this relation it is something finite. The third stage is reached when it is object to itself in such a way that it reconciles itself with itself in the object, is “with itself,” and in being so has attained its freedom. For freedom means to be self-contain ed, or at home with oneself.
But this rhythm, within which our science as a whole, and the entire development of the Notion moves, reappears in each of the three moments specified, since each of these is potentially totality in its determinateness, until this totality is made explicit as such in the final moment. Therefore, when the Notion first appears in the form of Universality, then in the form of Particularity, and lastly, in the form of Singularity, or when the movement of our science as a whole is that in which the Notion becomes judgment, and completes itself in the syllogism, in every sphere of this movement the same development of the moments will show itself, only that in the first sphere it is held together within the determinate character of universality, in the second sphere within that of particularity, where it exhibits the moments independently, and it is only on arriving at the sphere of individuality that it returns to the real syllogism, which mediates itself in the totality of determinations.
Such, then, is the division of the subject, representing the movement, nature, and action of Spirit itself, of which we, so to speak, are only spectators. It is necessitated by the Notion; the necessity of the progression has, however, to present, explicate, prove itself in the development itself. The division, the different parts and content of which we shall now indicate in a more definite way, is therefore simply historical.
What comes first is the notion in its universal aspect, what follows in the second place is the determinateness of the notion, the notion in its definite forms; these are indissolubly united with the notion itself, for in the philosophical mode of treatment it is not the case that the Universal, the Notion, is put into prominence, to do it honour, as it were. There are indeed notions or conceptions of Right and of Nature which are general definitions, and which are given a prominent place, and as to which there is to tell the truth room for doubt.
These are not, however, taken seriously, and so we feel that it is not these that are of importance, but the particular content itself, the particular subjects. What is in this connection called the notion, has no further influence upon this content beyond pointing out in a general way what is the ground upon which we stand in dealing with these subjects, and preventing the introduction of content from any other sphere. The content, for. example, magnetism, electricity, answers to the subject-matter itself, [Sache] the notion to the formal element. The conception or notion which is placed in the foreground (as, for example, that of Right) may, however, in connection with such a mode of Considering the subject, become a mere name for the most abstract, uncertain content.
For the philosophical way of looking at things, too, the notion occupies the first place, but here the notion is the content itself, the absolute subject-matter, the substance, as in the case of the germ, out of which the whole tree develops itself. All specifications or determinations are contained in this, the whole nature of the tree, the kind of sap it has, the way in which the branches grow; but in a spiritual manner, and not pre-formed so that a microscope could reveal its boughs, its leaves, in miniature. It is thus that the notion contains the whole nature of the object, and knowledge itself is nothing else than the development of the notion, of that which is implicitly contained in the notion, and has not yet come into existence, has not been unfolded, displayed. Thus we begin with the notion or conception of religion.
In the notion or conception of religion the purely universal, again, does indeed take the first place; that is, the moment of thought in, its complete universality.
It is not this or that that is thought, but Thought thinks itself. The object is the Universal, which, as active, is Thought. As the act of rising-up to the True, religion is a departing from sensuous, finite objects. If this beg comes merely an advance to all “ Other)” it is the false progressive process ad infinitum, and is that kind of talk which does not act out of the bit. Thought, however, is a rising up from the limited to the absolutely Universal, and religion is only through thought, and in thought. God is not the highest emotion, but the highest Thought. Although He is lowered down to popular conception, yet the content of this conception belongs to the realm of thought. The opinion that thought is injurious to religion, and that the more thought is abandoned the more secure the position of religion is, is the maddest error of our time. This misunderstanding originates in a fundamental misconception of the higher spiritual relations. Thus in regard to Right, good-will for itself (or as an independent motive) is taken as something which stands in contrast to intelligence, and men are given the more credit for true good-will the less they think. Right and morality, on the contrary, consist in this alone, that I am a thinking being; that is to say, in the fact that I do not look upon my freedom as that of my empirical personality, which belongs to me as this individual, and in which I might subjugate my neighbour by means of stratagem or force, but in my regarding freedom as something that has its being in and for itself, or exists on its own account, that is, as something Universal.
If we now say that religion has the moment of thought in its complete Universality in itself, and that the Unlimited Universal is supreme absolute Thought, we do not as yet make the distinction here between subjective and objective Thought. The Universal is object, and is thought pure and simple, but not as yet thought developed and made determinate in itself. All distinctions are as yet absent, and exist potentially only. In this ether of thought all that is finite has passed away, everything has disappeared, while at the same time everything is included in it. But this element of the Universal has not as yet taken those more explicit forms. Out of this liquid element, and in this transparency, nothing has as yet fashioned itself into distinct shape.
Sow the further advance consists in this, that this Universal determines itself for itself, and this self-determination constitutes the development of the Idea of God. In the sphere of Universality the Idea itself is, to begin with, the material of determination, and the progress is revealed in divine figures, but as yet the second element — form — is retained in the divine Idea, which is still in its substantiality, and under the character of eternity it remains in the bosom of the Universal.
The particularisation, therefore, which is as yet retained in the sphere of the Universal, when it actually manifests itself outwardly as such, constitutes the Other as against the extreme of Universality, and this other extreme is consciousness in its individuality as such. It is the subject in its immediacy, and with its needs, conditions, sins — in fact, in its wholly empirical, temporal character.
In religion, I am myself the relation of the two sides as thus determined. I who think, who am that which lifts myself up, the active Universal, and Ego, the immediate subject, are one and the same “I” And further, the relation of these two sides which are so sharply opposed — the absolutely finite consciousness and being on the one hand, and the infinite on the other — exists in religion for me. In thinking I lift myself up to the Absolute above all that is finite, and am infinite consciousness, while I am at the same time finite consciousness, and indeed am such in accordance with my whole empirical character. Both sides, as well as their relation, exist for me. Both sides seek each other, and both flee from each other. At one time, for example, I accentuate my empirical, finite consciousness, and place myself in opposition to infiniteness ; at another I exclude myself from myself, condemn myself, and give the preponderance to the infinite consciousness. The middle term contains nothing else than. the characteristics of both the extremes. They are not pillars of Hercules, which confront each other sharply. I am, and it is in myself and for myself that this conflict and this conciliation take place. In myself, I as infinite am against or in contrast with myself as finite, and as finite consciousness I stand over against my thought as infinite. I am the feeling, the perception, the idea alike of this unity and this conflict, and am what holds together the conflicting elements, the effort put forth in this act of holding together, and represent the labour of heart and soul to obtain the mastery over this opposition.
I am thus the relation of these two sides, which are not abstract determinations, as “ finite and infinite.” On the contrary, each is itself totality. Each of the two extremes is itself “I,” what relates them ; and the holding together, the relating is itself this which is at once in conflict with itself, and brings itself to unity in the conflict, Or, to put it differently, I am the conflict, for the conflict is just this antagonism, which is not any indifference of the two as different, but is their being bound together. I am not one of those taking part in the strife, but I am both the combatants, and am the strife itself. I am the fire and the water which touch each other, and am the contact and union of what flies apart, and this very contact itself is this double, essentially conflicting relation, as the relation of what is now separated, severed, and now reconciled and in unity with itself.
As representing the forms of the relation of the two extremes, we shall make ourselves acquainted with (1) Feeling; (2) Sense-perception [Anschauung]; (3) Idea [Vorstellung], or ordinary thought.
Before entering upon this subject, it will be necessary to get a knowledge of the entire sphere of these relations in its necessity, in so far as it contains, as elevation of the finite consciousness to the Absolute, the forms of religious consciousness. In investigating this necessity of religion, we are obliged to conceive religion as posited through what is other than itself.
In this mediation indeed, when it opens for us the way into the sphere of those forms of consciousness, religion will present itself already as a result which at once does away with itself as a result; consequently it will present itself as the primary thing, through which all is mediated, and on which all else depends. We shall thus see in what is mediated the counter-impact, the reciprocal action of the movement and of necessity, which both goes forwards and pushes backwards. But this mediation of necessity is now to be posited within religion itself too, so that in fact the relation and the essential connection of the two sides, which are comprised in the religious spirit, may be known as necessary.
The forms of feeling, of sense-perception, and of idea or mental representation, as they necessarily proceed one out of the other, are now forced of themselves into that sphere in which the inward mediation of their moments proves itself to be necessary, that is to say, into the sphere of thought in which religious consciousness will get a grasp of itself in its notion. These two mediations of necessity, therefore, of which one leads to religion and the other takes place within religious consciousness itself, comprise the forms of religious consciousness as it appears as feeling, sense-perception, and idea or ordinary thought.
The movement in the preceding, sphere is just that of the notion of God, of the Idea, in becoming objective to itself. We have this movement before us in the language of ordinary thought, in the expression “God is a Spirit.” Spirit is not something having a single existence, but is Spirit only in being objective to itself, and in beholding itself in the “Other,” as itself. The highest characteristic of Spirit is self-consciousness, which includes this objectivity in itself. God, as Idea, is subjective for what is objective, and is objective for what is subjective. When the moment of subjectivity defines itself further, so that the distinction is made between God as Object and the knowing spirit, the subjective side defines itself in this distinction as that which belongs to the side of finiteness, and the two stand at first so contrasted, that the separation constitutes the antithesis of finiteness and infiniteness. This infinitude, however, being still encumbered with this opposition, is not the true infinitude; to the subjective side, which exists for itself, the absolute object remains still an Other, and the relation in which it stands to it is not self-consciousness. Such an attitude, however, also involves the relation which is expressed by saying, that the finite knows itself as a nullity in its state of separation, and knows its object as the Absolute, as its Substance. And here the first attitude toward the absolute object is that of fear; for individuality knows itself as in regard to the absolute object only as accidental, or as something which is transient and vanishing. But this standpoint of separation is not the true relation. On the contrary, it is what knows itself to be a nullity, and, therefore. something which is to be done away with and absorbed and its attitude is not merely a negative one, but is in itself, or implicitly, positive. The subject recognises the absolute substance, in which it has to annul or lose itself, as being at the same time its essence, its substance, in which, therefore, self-consciousness is inherently contained. It is this unity, reconciliation, restoration of the subject and of its self-consciousness, the positive feeling of possessing a share in, of partaking in this Absolute, and making unity with it actually one’s own — this abolition of the dualism, which constitutes the sphere of worship. Worship comprises this entire inward and outward action, which has this restoration to unity as its object. Tile expression “ worship “ is usually taken merely in the limited sense in which it is understood to mean only outward public acts, and the inward action of the heart does not get so much prominence. We, however, shall conceive of worship as that action which includes both inwardness and outward manifestation, and which in fact produces restoration of unity with the Absolute, and in so doing is also essentially an inward conversion of the spirit and soul. Thus Christian worship does not only include the sacraments and the acts and duties pertaining to the Church, but it also includes the so-called “way of salvation” as a matter of absolutely inward history, and as a series of actions on the part of the inner life — in fact, a movement which goes forward in the soul, and has its right place there.
But we shall always find these two sides, that of self-consciousness, that is, of worship, and that of consciousness or of idea, corresponding with each other at every stage of religion. According as the content of the notion or conception of God or consciousness is determined, so too is the attitude of the subject to Him; or to put it otherwise, so too is self-consciousness in worship determined. The one moment is always a reflection or copy of the other, the one points to the other. Both modes, of which the one holds fast to objective consciousness only, and the other to pure self-consciousness, are one-sided, and each brings about its own abrogation.
It was, therefore, a one-sided view if the natural theology of former times looked upon God as’ Object of consciousness only. Such a mode of contemplating the Idea of God, although the words “ Spirit “ or “ Person might be made use of, could never in reality get beyond the idea of an Essence. It was inconsistent, for if actually carried out it must have led to the other, the subjective side, that of self-consciousness.
It is just as one-sided to conceive of religion as something subjective only, thus in fact making the subjective aspect the only one. So regarded, worship is absolutely bald and empty; its action is a movement which makes no advance, its attitude toward God a relation to a nullity, an aiming at nothing. But even this merely subjective action has inconsistency inherent in it, and must of necessity annul itself. For if the subjective side also is to be in any way determined or qualified, it is involved too in the very conception of Spirit, that it is consciousness, and that its determinate character becomes object to it. The richer the feeling, the more fully determined or specialised it is, the richer must the object be for it too. And further, the absoluteness of that feeling which is supposed to be substantial, would, in accordance with its very nature, require to get itself free from its subjectivity; for the substantial character which is supposed to belong to it, is specially directed against the accidental element of opinion and of inclination, is in fact something permanent and fixed in and for itself, independent of our feeling or experience. It is the Objective, what exists in and for itself. If this substantial element remains shut up in the heart only, it is not recognised as the something higher than ourselves, and God Himself becomes something merely subjective, while the efforts of subjectivity remain at the most, as it were a drawing of lines into empty space. For the recognition of a something higher than ourselves, which is capable too of being described, this recognition of One who is undefined, and these lines which are to be drawn in accordance with such recognition, possess no support, no connecting element, derived from what is objective, and are and remain merely our act, our lines, something subjective and the finite never attains to a true real renunciation of itself; while Spirit ought, on the contrary, in worship to liberate itself from its finiteness, and to feel and know itself in God. In the absence of that which is self-existent and commands our obedience, all worship shrinks up into subjectivity. Worship is essentially made up of dealings with and enjoyment of a something higher than ourselves, and includes assurances, evidences, and confirmation of the existence of this higher Being; but such definite dealings, such actual enjoying and assurances can have no place if the objective, obligatory moment be wanting to them, and worship would, in fact, be annihilated if the subjective side were taken to be the whole. The possibility of getting out of the subjective heart into action would thus be as much precluded as the possibility of consciousness attaining to objective knowledge. The one is connected in the closest manner with the other. What a man believes he has to do in relation to God, corresponds with the idea which he has formed of God. His consciousness of self answers to his consciousness, and conversely he cannot believe himself to have any definite duties toward God if he neither have nor suppose himself to have any definite idea of Him as an Object. Not until religion is really relation, and contains the distinction involved in consciousness, does worship attain to a definite form as the lifting up into a higher unity of the severed elements, and become a vital process. This movement of worship does not, however, confine itself to the inner life alone in which consciousness frees itself from its finiteness, is the consciousness of its essence, and the subject as knowing itself in God has penetrated into the foundation of its life. But this its infinite life now develops towards what is outside too, for the worldly life which the subject leads has that substantial consciousness as its basis, and the way and manner in which the subject defines its ends depends on the consciousness of its essential truth. It is in connection with this side that religion reflects itself into worldly or secular life, and that knowledge of the world shows itself. This going out into the actual world is essential to religion, and in this transition religion appears as morality in relation to the State and to the entire life of the State. According, as the religion of nations is constituted, so also is their morality and their government. The shape taken by these latter depends entirely on whether the conception of the freedom of Spirit which a people has reached is a limited one, or on whether the nation has the true consciousness of freedom.
The more definite characteristics of worship will be seen to be the moment of presupposed unity, the sphere of separation, and the freedom which re-establishes itself in the separation.
a. Worship is thus, in fact, the eternal process by which the subject posits itself as identical with its essential being.
This process of the cancelling of the dualism seems to belong to the subjective side only, but it is posited in the object of consciousness too. Through worship, unity is attained; what is not originally united, however, cannot be posited or made explicit as such. This unity, which appears as the act, the result of worship, must be recognised, too, as existing in and for itself. For what is object for consciousness is the Absolute, and its essential characteristic is that it is unity of its absoluteness with particularity. This unity is therefore in the object itself; for example, in the Christian conception of the Incarnation of God.
This self-existent unity, or, put more definitely, the human form, God’s becoming man, is in fact an essential moment of religion, and must necessarily appear in the definition of its object. In the Christian religion this characteristic is completely developed, but it occurs, too, in inferior religions. even if the only sign of it is that the infinite is seen in unity with the finite in such a way that it appears as this particular Being, as a definite immediate existence in stars or animals. Further, too, it must be observed here that it is only momentarily that God assumes a human or other form of existence, that He becomes externally manifest, or inwardly reveals Himself in a dream, or as an inward voice.
This is the moment of presupposed or hypothetical unity, which is essentially involved in the conception of God, and in such a way that the object of consciousness (God) exhibits the entire conception of religion in its content, and is itself totality. The moments of the conception of religion thus present themselves here in the character of unification. Each of the aspects or sides of the true Idea is itself the same totality which the whole is. The specific characteristics of content in the two sides are consequently not different in themselves, but only in their form. The absolute object therefore determines itself for consciousness as totality which is in unity with itself.
b. This totality now presents itself in the form of separation and of finiteness, which, as representing the other side, stands over against that totality which is in unity with itself. The moments of the content of the entire conception are here posited as separating themselves from one another, as differentiated, and consequently as abstract. The first moment on this side of differentiation is that of potentiality, the moment of Being which is in identity with itself, of formlessness, of objectivity, in fact. This is matter as representing what is indifferent or undifferentiated, as existence of which all parts are of equal value. Form may be introduced into it, but it remains still in a condition of abstract being for self. We then call it the World, which in relation to God appears partly as His garment, vesture, form, or as something in contrast with Himself.
Over against this moment of undifferentiated potential Being there now stands Being-for-self, the Negative in general, Form. This negative now appears, in its at first indeterminate form, as the negative element in the world, while the latter is the positive element, what subsists. The negativity which is opposed to this subsisting element, to this feeling of self, to this definite being, to this established existence, is Evil. In contrast to God, to this reconciled unity of Being-in-itself and Being-for-itself, appears the element of distinction or difference. We have on the one hand the world as positively and independently existing, and on the other destruction and contradiction in the world; and here the questions suggest themselves, which pertain to all religions based on a more or less developed consciousness, as to how evil is to be reconciled with the absolute unity of God, and wherein lies the origin of evil. This negative, in the first place, appears as the evil in the world, but it recalls itself into identity with itself, in which it is the Being-for-self of self-consciousness — finite Spirit.
This negative which recalls itself into itself is now once more a something positive, because it relates itself simply to itself. As evil, it appears as involved in positive existence. But the negativity which is present for itself and independently, and not in another which is regarded as having independent existence of its own, the negativity which reflects itself into itself, the inward, infinite negativity which is object to itself, is just the “Ego.” In this self-consciousness, and in its own inner movement, finiteness definitely appears, and self-contradiction is thus incident in it. Thus there is an element of disturbance in it, evil makes its appearance in it, and thus is evil of the will.
c. I, however, who am free can abstract from everything; it is this negativity and isolation which constitutes my essential being. Evil is not the whole of the subject. On the contrary, this latter has in it also unity with itself, which constitutes the positive side (goodness) and the absoluteness, the infinitude of consciousness of self. It is this ability to abstract from all that is immediate, from all that is external, — which constitutes the essential moment of the isolation or seclusion of Spirit. This isolation is exempted from the temporariness, change and vicissitude of this world, from evil and from disunion, and is represented as the absoluteness of consciousness of self in the thought of the immortality of the soul. At first the prominent element in this thought is continued existence in time; this exemption from the dominion and from the vicissitudes of change is represented, however, as essentially and originally belonging to Spirit, and not as being brought about secondarily by means of reconciliation. And thus advance is made to the further determination that the Spirit’s consciousness of self is an eternal, absolute moment in that eternal life in which it is lifted up far above time, above this abstraction of change, and above the reality of change, above dualism, when it is taken up into the unity and reconciliation which is presupposed as originally present in the object of consciousness.
If in the first part we have considered religion in its notion or conception, the simple conception of religion, the character of the content, the Universal, it is now necessary to leave this sphere of Universality and go on to treat of determinateness in religion.
The notion as such is not as yet unfolded; the determinate qualities, the moments are contained in it, but are not as yet openly displayed, and have not received the right distinction or difference which belongs to them. It is only by means of the judgment (i.e., the act of differentiation) that they receive this. It is when God, the Notion, performs the act of judgment, and the category of determinateness enters, that we first come to have existing religion, which is at the same time definitely existing religion.
The course followed in passing from the abstract to the concrete is based upon our method, upon the notion, and not on the fact that much special content is present. There is a complete distinction between this and our point of view. Spirit, to which belongs Being which is absolute and supreme, is, exists only as activity; that is to say, in so far as it posits itself, is actual or for itself, and produces itself. But in this its activity it has the power of knowing, and only as it thus knows is it that which it is. It is thus essential to religion not only to exist in its notion, but also to be the consciousness of that which the notion is, and the material in which the notion as the plan, so to speak, realises itself, which it makes its own, which it moulds in accordance with itself, is human consciousness. So too, Right, for example, only is when it exists in the spirit, when it takes possession of the wills of men, and they know of it as the determination of their wills. And it is in this way that the Idea first realises itself, having before only been posited as the form of the notion.
Spirit, in short, is not immediate; natural things are immediate, and remain in this condition of immediate Being. The Being of Spirit is not thus immediate, but is, exists only as producing itself, as making itself for itself by means of negation as Subject; otherwise it would be substance only. And this coming to itself on the part of Spirit is movement, activity, and mediation of itself with itself.
A stone is immediate, it is complete. Wherever there is life, however, this activity is already to be found. Thus the first form of the existence of plants is the feeble existence of the germ, and out of this it has to develop itself and to produce itself. Finally the plant epitomises itself when it has unfolded itself in the seed; this beginning of the plant is also its ultimate product. In like manner man is at first a child, and as belonging to Nature he describes this round in order to beget another.
In plants there are two kinds of individual forms this germ which begins, is different from the one which is the completion of its life, and in which this evolution reaches maturity. But it is the very nature of Spirit, just because it is living, to be at first only potential, to be in its notion or conception, then to come forward into existence, to unfold, produce itself, become mature, bringing forth the notion of itself, that which it implicitly is, so that what it is in itself or implicitly ma v be its notion actually or for itself. The child is not as yet a reasonable person; it has capacities only, it is at first reason, Spirit, potentially only. It is by means of education and development that it becomes Spirit.
This, then, is what is called self-determination entering into existence, being “ for other,” bringing one’s moments into distinction, and unfolding one’s self. These distinctions are no other than the characteristics which the notion itself implicitly contains.
The development of these distinctions, and the course of the tendencies which result from them, are the way by which Spirit comes to itself; it is itself, however, the goal. The absolute end, which is that Spirit should know itself, comprehend itself, should become object to itself as it is in itself, arrive at perfect knowledge of itself, first appears as its true Being. Now this process, followed by self-producing Spirit, this path taken by it, includes distinct moments; but the path is not as yet the goal, and Spirit does not reach the goal without having traversed the path; it is not originally at the goal; even what is most perfect must traverse the path to the goal in order to attain it. Spirit, in these halting places of its progress, is not as yet perfect; its knowledge, its consciousness regarding itself, is not what is true, and it is not as yet revealed to itself. Spirit being essentially this activity of self-production, it follows that there are stages of its consciousness, but its consciousness of itself is always in proportion only to the stage which has been reached. Now these stages supply us with definite relig ion; here religion is consciousness of the universal Spirit, which is not as yet fully developed as absolute; this consciousness of Spirit at each stage is definite consciousness of itself, it is the path of the education of Spirit. We have therefore to consider the definite forms of religion. These, as being stages on the road followed by Spirit, are imperfect.
The different forms or specific kinds of religion are, in one aspect, moments of religion in general, or of perfected religion. They have, however, an independent aspect too, for in them religion has developed itself in time, and historically.
Religion, in so far as it is definite, and has not as yet completed the circle of its determinateness — so far that is as it is finite religion, and exists as finite — is historical religion, or a particular form of religion. Its principal moments, and also the manner in which they exist historically, being exhibited in the progress of religion from stage to stage, and in its development, there thus arises a series of forms of religion, or a history of religion. That which is determined by means of the Notion must of necessity have existed, and the religions, as they have followed upon one another, have not arisen accidentally. It is Spirit which rules inner life, and to see only, chance here, after the fashion of the historical school, is absurd.
The essential moments of the notion or conception of religion show themselves and make their appearance at ever y stage in which religion exists at all. It is only because the moments are not as yet posited in the totality of the notion, that any difference between it and its true form arises. These definite religions are not indeed our religion, yet they are included in ours as essential, although as subordinate moments, which cannot miss having in them absolute truth. Therefore in them we have not to do with what is foreign to us, but with what is our own, and the knowledge that such is the case is the reconciliation of the true religion with the false. Thus the moments of the notion or conception of religion appear on lower stages of development, though as yet in the shape of anticipations or presentiments, as natural flowers and creations of fancy which have, so to speak, blossomed forth by chance. What determines the characteristics of these stages, however, through their entire history, is the determinateness of the notion itself, which can at no stage be absent. The thought of the Incarnation, for example, pervades every religion. Such general conceptions make their presence felt too in other spheres of Spirit. What is substantial in moral relations, as, for example, property, marriage, protection of the sovereign and of the State, and the ultimate decision which rests with subjectivity regarding that which is to be done for the whole, all this is to be found in an uneducated society as well as in the perfect state; only the definite form of this substantial element differs according to the degree of culture which such a society has reached. What is here of special importance, however, is that the notion should also become actually known in its totality, and in exact accordance with the degree in which this knowledge is present, is the stage at which the religious spirit is, higher or lower, richer or poorer. Spirit may have something in its possession without having a developed consciousness of it. It actually has the immediate, proper nature of Spirit, has a physical, organic nature, but it does not know that nature in its essential character and truth, and has only an approximate, general idea of it. Men live in the State, they are themselves the life, activity, actuality of the State, ‘but the positing, the becoming conscious of what the State is, does not on that account take place, and yet the perfected State just means that everything which is potentially in it, that is to say, in its notion or conception should be developed, posited, and made into rights and duties, into law. In like manner the moments of the notion or conception are actually present in the definite religions, in mental pictures, feelings, or immediate imagery; but the consciousness of these moments is not as yet evolved, or, in other words, they have not as yet been elevated to the point at which they are the determination of the absolute object, and God is not as yet actually represented under these determinations of the totality of the conception of religion. It is undoubtedly true that the definite religions of the various peoples often enough exhibit the most distorted, confused, and abortive ideas of the divine Being, and likewise of duties and relations as expressed in worship. But we must not treat the matter so lightly, and conceive of it in so superficial a manner, as to reject these ideas and these rites as superstition, error, and deceit, or only trace back their origin to pious feeling, and thus value them as merely representing some sort of religious feeling without caring how they may chance to be constituted. The mere collection and elaboration of the external and visible elements cannot satisfy us either. On the contrary, something higher is necessary, namely, to recognise the meaning, the truth, and the connection with truth; in short, to get to know what is rational in them They are human beings who have hit upon such religions, therefore there must be reason in them, and amidst all that is accidental in them a higher necessity. We must do them this justice, for what is human, rational in them, is our own too, although it exists in our higher consciousness as a moment only. To get a grasp of the history of religions in this sense, means to reconcile ourselves even with. what is horrible, dreadful, or absurd in them, and to justify it. We are on no account to regard it as right or true, as it presents itself in its purely immediate form — there is no question of doing this — but we are at least to recognise its beginning, the source from which in it has originated as being in human nature. Such is the reconciliation with this entire sphere, the reconciliation which completes itself in the notion. Religions, as they follow upon one another, are determined by means of the notion. Their nature and succession are not determined from without; on the contrary, they are determined by the nature of Spirit which has entered into the world to bring itself to consciousness of itself. Since we look at these definite religions in accordance with the notion, this is a purely philosophical study of what actually is or exists. Philosophy indeed treats of nothing which is not and does not concern itself with what is so powerless as not even to have the energy to force itself into existence.
Now in development as such, in so far as it has not as yet reached its goal, the moments of the notion are still in a state of separation or mutual exclusion, so that the reality has not as yet come to be equal to the notion or conception. The finite religions are the appearance in history of these moments. In order to grasp these in their truth, it is necessary to consider them under two aspects; on the one hand, we have to consider how God is known, how He is characterised; and on the other, how the subject at, the same time knows itself. For the two aspects the objective and subjective have but one foundation for their further determination, and but one specific character pervades them both. The idea which a man has of God corresponds with. that which he has of himself, of his freedom. Knowing himself in God, he at the same time knows his imperishable life in God; He knows of the truth of his Being, and therefore the idea of the immortality of the soul here enters as an essential moment into the history of religion. The ideas of God and of immortality have a necessary relation to each other; when a man knows truly about God, he knows truly about himself too: the two sides correspond with each other. At first God is something quite undetermined; but in the course of the development of the human mind, the consciousness of that which God is gradually forms and matures itself, losing more and more of its initial indefiniteness, and with this the development of true self-consciousness advances also. The Proofs of the Existence of God fall to be included also within the sphere of this progressive development, it being their aim to set forth the necessary elevation of the spirit to God. For the diversity of the characteristics which in this process of elevation are attributed to God, is fixed by the diversity of the points of departure, and this diversity again has its foundation in the nature of the historical stage of actual self-consciousness which has been reached. The different forms which this elevation of the spirit takes will always indicate the metaphysical spirit of the period in question, for this corresponds with the prevalent idea of God and the sphere of worship. If we now attempt to indicate in a more precise way the divisions of this stage of definite religion, we find that what is of primary importance here is the manner of the divine manifestation. God is manifestation, not in a general sense merely, but as being Spirit He determines Himself as appearing to Himself; that is to say, He is not Object in the general sense, but is Object to Himself.
1. As for manifestation generally, or abstract manifestation, it is Nature in General. Manifestation is Being for Other, an externalisation of things mutually distinct, and not vet reflected and one, in fact, which is immediate into itself. This logical determination is taken here in its concrete sense as the natural world. What is for an “ Other,” exists for this very reason in a sensuous form. The thought, which is for another thought, which, as having Being, is to be posited as distinct, that is to say, as something which exists as an independent subject in reference to the other, is only capable of being communicated by the one to the other through the sensuous medium of sign or speech, in fact, by bodily means.
But since God exists essentially only as appearing to Himself, that abstract attitude of man to nature does not belong to religion; on the contrary, in religion nature is only a moment of the Divine, and therefore must, as it exists for the religious consciousness, have also the characteristic note of the spiritual mode of existence in it. It thus does not remain in its pure, natural element, but receives the characteristic quality of the Divine which dwells in it. It cannot be said of any religion that in it men have worshipped the sun, the sea, or nature; when they worship these objects, the latter no longer have for the worshippers the prosaic character which they have for ourselves. Even while these objects are for them divine, they still, it is true, remain natural; but when they become objects of religion, they at once assume a spiritual aspect. The contemplation of the sun, the stars, &c., as individual natural phenomena, is outside the sphere of religion. The so-called prosaic manner of looking at nature, as the latter exists for consciousness when regarding it through the understanding, betokens a separation which comes later; its presence is consequent on much deeper and more thorough-going reflection. Not till the spirit or mind has posited itself independently for itself, and as free from nature, does the latter appear to it as an Other, as something external.
The first mode of manifestation then, in the form of Nature namely, has the subjectivity, the spiritual nature of God as its centre in a general sense only, and consequently these two determinations have not as yet come into relation through reflection. When this takes place, it constitutes the second mode of manifestation.
2. In Himself or potentially God is Spirit; this is our notion or conception of Him. But for this very reason He must be posited too as Spirit, and this means that the manner of His manifestation must be itself a spiritual one, and consequently the negation of the natural. And for this it is necessary that His determinateness, the Idea on the side of reality, be equal to the conception; and the relation of reality to the divine conception is complete when Spirit exists as Spirit; that is to say, when both the conception and reality exist as this Spirit. To begin with, however, we see that the form of nature constitutes that determinateness of the conception of God, or the aspect of reality belonging to the Idea. The emergence of the spiritual element of subjectivity out of nature, accordingly appears at first merely as a conflict between the two sides, which are still entangled with one another in that conflict. Therefore this stage of definite religion too remains in the sphere of what is natural, and in fact constitutes, in common with the preceding one, the stage of the Religion of Nature.
3. It is actually within the definite religions as they succeed each other that Spirit in its movement attempts to make the determinateness correspond with the notion or conception, but this determinateness appears here as still abstract, or, to put it otherwise, the notion appears as still the finite notion. These attempts, in which the principle of the preceding stages, namely, Essence, or essential Being, strives to grasp itself together into infinite inwardness are: 1. the Jewish religion; 2. the Greek; 3. the Roman. The God of the Jews is Oneness or soleness, which as such continues to be abstract unity, and is not as yet concrete in itself. This God is indeed God in the Spirit, but does not exist as yet as Spirit. He is something not presented to sense, an abstraction of Thought, which has not as yet that fullness in itself which constitutes it Spirit. The freedom which the notion seeks to reach through self-development in the Greek religion, still lives under the sway of up sceptre of necessity of Essence; and the notion as it appears in and seeks to win its independence in the Roman religion is still limited, since it is related to an external world which stands opposite to it, in which it is only to be objective, and is, therefore, external adaptation to an end, or external utility.
These are the principal specific forms which here present themselves as the modes of the Reality of Spirit. As determinate they are inadequate to the notion or conception of Spirit, and are finite in character, and this infinitude, namely, that there is one God, this abstract affirmation, is finite also. This determination of the manifestation of God in consciousness as pure ideality of the One, as abolition of the manifold character of external manifestation, might perhaps be contrasted, as being that which is true, with the religion of nature, but it is really only one form of determinateness as against the totality of the notion of Spirit. It corresponds with this totality just as little as its opposite does. These definite relations are not in fact as yet the true religion, and in them God is not as yet known in His true nature, since there is wanting to them the absolute content of Spirit.
Manifestation, development, and determination or specification do not go on ad infinitum, and do not cease accidentally. True progress consists rather in this, that this reflexion of the notion into itself stops short, inasmuch as it really returns into itself. Thus manifestation is itself infinite in nature; the content is in accordance with the conception of Spirit, and the manifestation is, like Spirit, in and for itself. The notion or conception of religion has in religion become objective to itself. Spirit, which is in and for itself, has now no longer individual forms, determinations of itself, before it, as it unfolds itself. It knows itself no longer as Spirit in any definite form or limitation, but has now overcome those limitations, this finiteness, and is actually, what it is potentially. This knowledge of Spirit for itself or actually, as it is in itself or potentially, is the being in-and-for-itself of Spirit as exercising knowledge, the perfect, absolute religion, in which it is revealed what Spirit, what God is; this is the Christian religion.
That Spirit, as it does in all else, must in religion also run through its natural course, is necessarily bound up with the conception of Spirit. Spirit is only Spirit when it exists for itself as the negation of all finite forms, as this absolute ideality.
I form ideas, I have perceptions, and here there is a certain definite content, as, for instance, this house, and so on. They are my perceptions, they present themselves to me I could not, however, present them to myself if I did not grasp this particular content in myself, and if I had not posited it in a simple, ideal manner in myself. Ideality means that this definite external existence, these conditions of space, of time, and matter, this separateness of parts, is done away with in something higher; in that I know this external existence, these forms of it are not ideas which are mutually exclusive, but are comprehended, grasped together in me in a simple manner.
Spirit is knowledge; but in order that knowledge should exist, it is necessary that the content of that which it knows should have attained to this ideal form, and should in this way have been negated. What Spirit is must in that way have become its own, it must have described this circle; and these forms, differences, determinations, finite qualities, must have existed in order that it should make them its own.
This represents both the way and the goal — that Spirit should have attained to its own notion or conception, to that which it implicitly is, and in this way only, the way which has been indicated in its abstract moments, does it attain it. Revealed religion is manifested religion, because in it God has become wholly manifest. Here all is proportionate to the notion; there is no longer anything secret in God. Here, then, is the consciousness of the developed conception of Spirit, of reconciliation, not in beauty, in joyousness, but in the Spirit. Revealed religion, which was hitherto still veiled, and did not exist in its truth, came at its own time. This was not a chance time, dependent on some one’s liking, or caprice, but determined on in the essential, eternal counsel of God; that is, in the eternal reason, wisdom of God; it is the notion of the reality or fact itself, the divine notion, the notion of God Himself, which determines itself to enter on this development, and has set its goal before it.
This course thus followed by religion is the true theodicy; it exhibits all products of Spirit, every form of its self-knowledge, as necessary, because Spirit is something living, working, and its impulse is to press on through the series of its manifestations towards the consciousness of itself as embracing all truth.
Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences: Philosophy of Spirit
(a.) Theoretical Spirit
§ 368
Intelligence finds itself determined; as knowledge, however, intelligence consists in treating what is found as its own. Its activity is to be reason for itself because it is reason in itself and to make subjective its objectivity subsisting in and for itself Intelligence is therefore not receptive, but rather essentially active, suspending the pretence of finding reason, or raising the purely formal knowledge, which it is as the self-discovery of reason, to a determinate knowledge of itself The manner of this elevation is itself rational, because it is reason, and a necessary, conceptually determined transition of one determination of its activity into the other.
(1) The distinction of intelligence from will is often incorrectly taken to mean that each has a fixed and separate existence, as if will could exist without intelligence, or the activity of intelligence could be without will. But this would miss the truth of the will, for only free self-determination is will, as the will is intelligence, and freedom itself exists only as self-certainty in the immediate determination subsisting in itself Thus the truth of intelligence manifests itself as will, or rather, intelligence shows itself in the will as truth. The will of the spirit to be intelligence is its self-determination, by which the purposes and interests posited by the spirit are abstracted so that it does not relate to itself as will.
The most trivial form of that false distinction is the imagined possibility that the understanding could exist without the heart, and the heart without the understanding. Such a view is the abstraction of the observant understanding, which holds fast to such distinctions. just as it is the actual understanding in the individual which makes this kind of separation, ushers in the untruth of intellectual thought and remains fixed there, thus it is an understanding which is just as much will. But it is not philosophy which should take such untruths of thought and the imagination for truth.-A number of other phrases used for intelligence, namely, that it receives and accepts impressions from outside, that ideas arise through the causal operations of external things upon it, and so on, belong to a point of view which mixes sensory and rational determinations (§ 336), a standpoint that is alien to the spirit and earn less appropriate for philosophy.-That the intelligence appears determined in infinitely multiple, contingent ways is equally the standpoint of entirely finite individuality, and the extreme untruth of empirical observation.
(2) A favourite form of reflection deals with forces and faculties of the soul, the intelligence, or the spirit. In regards to a faculty-the dynamics of Aristotle have an entirely different meaning-it characterises being for itself and is different from the entelechy, from the activity of being for itself and from reality. Faculty, like force, is the fixed determinacy of any thought content, conceived as reflection into self Force (§ 85) is, to be sure, the infinity of form, of inside and outside; but its essential finitude constitutes the indifference of the content in contrast to the form (ibid. note). In this lies the irrational element which by this form of reflection and observation of the spirit, treating the spirit as a number of forces, is brought into the spirit as it is also brought into nature. What can be distinguished in this activity is stereotyped as an independent determinacy, and the spirit is made in this way into a skeleton-like, mechanical collection. If a force of the spirit, that is, its contents, the particular determinacy which it contains, is considered, it proves again to be determinate, that is, dialectic and transitory, not independent. Thus it is precisely the used form of a force that suspends itself which should be the reflection into self or determinacy, and is affixed to independence. In this way the concept emerges, in which the forces disappear.
This concept and the dialectic are intelligence itself pure subjectivity of the self in which the determinations as fluid moments are suspended, and for which the absolute concrete is the night of the self where there is intelligence as well as the determinations of their activity which are taken as forces. As the simple identity of this multiplicity it determines itself as the simplicity of a determinacy, understanding, the form of a force, of an isolated activity, and grasps itself as intuition, the power of imagination, the faculty of understanding, and so on. But this isolation, the abstractions of activities and the opinions of them are not the concept and the rational truth themselves.
§ 369
As the soul, intelligence is immediately determined, as consciousness it is related to this determinacy as to an external object; as intelligence it finds itself thus determined. It is therefore: (1) feeling, the inarticulate weave of the spirit into itself in which it is to some extent palpable, and contains the whole material of its knowledge. For the sake of the immediacy in which the spirit is as feeling or sensation, it exists above all only as individual and subjective.
§ 370
The form of sensation is, to be sure, a determinate affection, but this determinacy is simple and in it the differentiation of both their content against other contents, and the externality of it against the subjectivity which is still not posited.
It is commonly enough assumed that the spirit has in its sensation the material of its representations, but this thesis is more usually understood in a sense antithetical to that which it has here. In contrast with the simplicity of feeling, it is usual rather to assume that the primary mental phase is judgment generally and the distinction of consciousness into subject and object, and the particular quality of sensation is derived from an independent object, external or internal. Here in the sphere of the spirit, this standpoint of consciousness opposed to idealism has been submerged. The feeling or the sensation are, by their form, resembling content, since it is this immediate, still implicitly undifferentiated, dull knowledge of the spirit.
Aristotle, too, recognised the determination of sensation, for he saw that the sentient subject and the sensed object, separated by consciousness, only exist as the sensation of the possibility, though he said of the sensation that the entelechy of the sentient and the sensed are one and the same.-No prejudice is probably more false than the thesis that nothing exists in thought which does not exist in the senses, —and indeed, in the usual sense which is attributed to Aristotle. His actual philosophy, however, is the exact opposite of this idea.
Another equally familiar prejudice as this historical one is the idea that there is more in feeling than in thought; this point is often made in regards to moral and religious feelings. Now it has happened that the material which itself is the feeling spirit is the being determined in and for itself of reason. But this form of simplicity is the lowest an the worst, in which it can not be as spirit, as the free entity or the infinite generality which is its essence. It must, rather, above all go beyond this untrue manner of its being, because it exists in immediacy as determinate, and in any case is only a contingent, subjective, and particular entity. If someone refers on any topic not to the nature and the concept of the issue, least of all to reasons or to the generalities of common sense, but to one's own feeling, the only thing to do is to leave them alone, because by their behaviour they reject the community of rationality, and shut themselves up in their own isolated subjectivity, their private and particular selves.
§ 371
The abstract identical direction of the spirit in sensation, as in all other of its further determinations, is attention: the moment of the formal self-determination of the intelligence.
§ 372
This self-determination is, however, essentially not abstract; as an infinitude it dissolves the simplicity of its determinate being and thereby suspends its immediacy. Thus it posits itself as a negative, the felt entity, distinct from the intelligence as reflective into itself and from the subject, in which feeling is suspended. This level of reflection is the representation.
§ 373
(2) The representing activity of the intelligence is: (a) recollection. With its simple, dissolving sensation and its determination as a negative extreme set against the reflection into itself recollection posits the content of the sensation as subsisting outside of itself Thus it throws content into space and time, and is intuitive. The intuition is immediate, insofar as the abstract alienation and the intelligence are not all reflection into themselves and set against this externality.
§ 374
This positing, however, is the other extreme of the diremption: the intelligence posits the content of its feeling in its own inwardness, in a space and time of its own. In this way the content is an image or representation in general, freed from its initial immediacy and abstract individuality among other things, and taken up, at first abstractly and ideally, into the form of the self's generality.
§ 375
Recollection is the relation of both, the subsumption of the immediate, individual intuition under this formal generality, the representation which is the same content. Thus the intelligence in the determinate sensation and its intuition are inward, recognise themselves thus, no longer require the intuition and possess it as their own.
§ 376
(b) The intelligence which is active in this possession is the reproductive imagination, the production of images from the inferiority of the self The concrete images are in the first place related to the external, immediate space and time which are treasured along with them.-But since the image in the subject, where it is treasured, only has the negative unity in which it is carried and receives its concretion, thus its originally concrete condition, by which as a unit of sensation and intuition or in consciousness it is determined, has been broken up. The reproduced content, belonging as it does to the self-identical unity of the intelligence, and emerging from its interior into the representation, is a general representation, which supplies the link of association for the images which according to circumstances are either more abstract or more concrete representations.
The "laws of the association of idea? were of great interest, especially during that outburst of empirical psychology which occurred at the same time as the decline of philosophy. In the first place, it is not "ideas' which are associated. Secondly, these modes of association are not laws, just for the reason that there are so many laws about the same thing that they suggest an arbitrariness and a contingency which are the very opposite of a law. The ongoing sequence of images and representations suggested by association is in general the play of thoughtless representation, in which the determination of the intelligence is still an entirely formal generality, a content given in the images.-Image and idea are only distinguished by the fact that the former is more concrete; representation, the content, may be an image, concept, or idea, but always has the character, though belonging to intelligence, of being given and immediate in terms of its content.-Otherwise it appears, since intuition is immediate relation, the self an ideal one, and thus its self-reflection is an external generality, which is not yet the determination of the content, whereas representation and its production are a determinate generality-that intuition, representation, and imagination are essentially thinking, although they are not yet liberated thought, and their content is not a thought. —
Abstraction, which occurs in the representative activity, by which general representations are produced, is frequently explained as the incidence of many similar images one upon the other, and is supposed to be thus made intelligible. If this superimposition is to be no mere accident or without principle, a force of attraction in similar images must be assumed, or something of the sort, which at the same time would have the negative power of rubbing off the still-dissimilar elements against each other. This force is in fact intelligence itself the self as a general entity that by its memory gives the images generality directly.
§ 377
Thus even the association of representations is a subsumption of the individual under a single generality. This generality is at first a form of the intelligence. But it is in itself just as much determinate, concrete subjectivity, and its own content can be a thought, concept, or idea. As the subsumption of images under a specific content, intelligence recollects them in themselves as determinate, and forms them into their content. In this way it is creative imagination, imagination which symbolises, allegorises, or poeticises.
§ 378
Intelligence has been so far perfected in the determinate recollection of creative imagination that its self-generated content has a pictorial existence. Yet the material of the pictorial creation is given, and the product does not have the immediacy of existence. Intelligence must give the creation this immediacy: as intelligence in the creation forms the totality of the representation, it has turned back from its particularisation in subjective representation and animal intuition to the free, identical relation to itself This recollection of the intuition is memory.
§ 379
(c) Memory (Mnemosyne, muse) is the unity of the independent representation and the intuition, with the former as a free attempt to utter itself immediately.-This immediacy is, because the intelligence is not yet practical, immediate, or given; but in this identity the intuition does not count positively or as self-representing, but as a representative of something else. It is an image, which has received as its soul and meaning an independent representation of the intelligence. This intuition is the sign.
The sign is any immediate intuition, but representing a totally different content from what it has for itself;-it is the pyramid, into which a foreign soul is conveyed and preserved. The sign is different from the symbol, an intuition which according to its essence and concept is determined to be more or less the thought which it expresses as symbol. Intelligence, therefore, gives proof of a freer choice and authority in the use of intuitions when it treats them as signifying rather than symbolic.
Usually, language and the sign are relegated somewhere into the appendix on psychology, or even logic, with no recognition of their necessity and connection in the system of intelligent activity. The true place for the sign is the one just mentioned: where intelligence, which intuitively generates time and place, now gives its own independent representations a determinate existence, a filled place and time, treating the intuition which it has as its own material of sensation, eliminating its immediate and unique representation, and giving it another as its meaning and soul.-This sign-creating activity may justifiably be called memory, or "productive memory," since memory, which is often used in ordinary life as interchangeable and synonymous with recollection, and even with representation and imagination, above all has only to do with signs. And even if it is used in this more precise sense, it is otherwise thought of as only the reproductive memory: the intelligence essentially produces, however, what it reproduces.
§ 380
The intuition, which is used for a sign is in its immediate phase given and spatial. But since it exists only as suspended, and the intelligence is its negativity, the true form of the intuition as a sign is its existence in time, — but this existence vanishes in the moment of being, and its tone is the fulfilled manifestation of its self-proclaimed inferiority (§ 279). The tone which articulates itself further to express specific representations — speech and its system, language — gives to sensations and intuitions a second and higher existence than they immediately possess, and invests the images with existence in the realm of representation.
§ 381
The identity of intuition in the sign and its meaning is primarily a single production; but as a unity with the intelligence it is just as essentially general. 'Me activity of recollecting this and thereby making it general, as well as reproducing it, is the outwardly retentive and reproductive memory.
§ 382
There are many signs in general, and as such they are absolutely contingent in juxtaposition to each other. The empty bind which fixes such sequences and holds them in this order is the entirely abstract, pure power of subjectivity, — the memory, which is called mechanical for the complete externality in which the members of such sequences are juxtaposed.
§ 383
The name is thus the thing, as it exists and has validity in the realm of representation. But it also has an externality brought forth from the intelligence, and it is the intuition which is inessential for itself standing in the use of intelligence and subjectively made, so that it only has value through the meaning given to it by the intelligence, which is the determinate representation in and for itself and the thing or the objective entity. Mechanical memory is the formal suspension of that subjectivity, whereby the contradiction of the sign falls away and the intelligence makes itself for itself in the habit of language a thing, as an immediate objectivity. In this way, through the memory, it makes the transition to thought
§ 384
(3) Through the recollection of its immediate determinacy and the manifestation of its subjective activity of determination, the unity and truth of intelligence are achieved: the thought. The thought is the thing, the simple identity of subjective and objective. What is thought, is; and what is, is only insofar as it is thought.
§ 385
Thought is in the first place formal: generality as generality, and just as much being as the simple subjectivity of intelligence. In this way it is not determinate in and for itself; the recollected representations brought to thought are, insofar as they are still content, — a content which in itself is only the determinate being in and for itself of reason.
§ 386
Thought, however, as the free generality which it is only as pure negativity, is therefore not: (a) only the formally identical understanding, but (b) essentially diremption and determination, — judgment, and (c) the identity which finds itself in this particularisation, the concept and reason. Intelligence has determinate being in comprehension, though it existed at first as immediate material, and in itself it is absolutely only its own, thereby it exists not as determinate being, but as the act of determination.
In logic there is thought, in the first place as it is in itself then as it is for itself and in and for itself-these have been viewed as being, reflection, concept, and as idea. In the soul it is alert self-possession; in consciousness it also occurs as a phase. Thought thus recurs again and again in these different parts of philosophy, because they are different only through the element and the form of the antithesis they are in, but thought is this one and the same centre, to which as to their truth the antitheses return.
§ 387
Thought, as the free concept, is also free in terms of the content.. The determinacy of reason is the proper determinacy of subjective intelligence, and as determinate it is its content and existence. Thinking subjectivity is thereby actual; its determinations are purposes; it is free will.