Hence, if it must be said that good and evil in 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 selfexistence, or again pure knowledge, is 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 " 790 Phenomenology of Mind 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 the case of the sameness of the Divine Being and Nature in general and human nature in particular: the former is Nature so far as it is not essentially 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, pure thought or self-centredness, and with its moment of opposition to spiritual unity it is the principle of Evil. The difficulty 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 the process which is Spirit.
It is this spiritual unity, — unity where the distinctions are merely in the form of moments, or are transcended and maintained — which became known to presentative 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.
Spirit thus takes up its position in the third element, Revealed Religion 791 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 selfconsciousness; he has to become explicitly so for this self - consciousness. Or, since this self - consciousness constitutes one side of the opposition involved in ideal presentation, viz. the side of evil, which takes natural existence and individual self-existence to be the essential reality — this aspect, which is presented 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 this aspect.
This particular self-consciousness is Spirit in natural form, natural spirit: self has to withdraw from this natural existence and enter into itself, become selfcentred; that means, 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 presentational picturethinking 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 figurative presentation of the truth, as regards its form, is considered to be merely a moment that is already superseded and transcended; for the self is the principle of negation, and hence knowledge — a knowledge which is a pure act of consciousness within itself. This moment of the nega- 792 Phenomenology of Mind tive must in like manner find expression as regards the content. Since, that is to say, the Absolute Being is inherently and from the start reconciled with itself and is a spiritual unity, in which the parts constituting the presentation are sublated, are moments, what we find is that each element of the presentation 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 and completed: just as formerly we saw opposite meanings combined and united objectively, or in themselves, and even the abstract forms of " the same " and " not- the- same," " identity " and " nonidentity " cancelled one another and were transcended. If, then, from the point of view of figurative thought, the natural self-consciousness rooted and fixed in itself was the real 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 recognised as the first moment of reconciliation. For, being a return into self out of the immediacy of nature which is specifically the principle of 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 fixing itself within itself, of becoming self-centred, is just as much a mediate process: it presupposes itself, i.e. is its own ground and principle: the reason for fixing itself in self is Revealed Religion 793 because nature has per se already done so. On account of evil man must be turned back into himself, but evil is itself the process of doing so, of "fixing himself in self." This first movement is just on that account itself merely immediate, is its bare and simple notion, because it is the same as what its ground or reason is. The movement, or the process of passing into otherness, must therefore come out afterwards in its own more peculiar form.
Beside this immediacy, then, the mediation of ideal presentation is necessary. Implicitly and essentially, the knowledge of nature as the untrue inadequate expression of spirit's existence, and this universality of self which has thereby arisen within the life of the self —these constitute the reconciliation of spirit with itself. This implicit state is apprehended by the self-consciousness that does not think conceptually, in the form of an objective existence, and as something presented to it figuratively. Conceptual comprehension (Begreiferi), 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 laying hold of that ideal presentation, the imaginative idea ( Vorstellung) that the Divine Being is reconciled with its existence through an event, — the event of God's emptying Himself of Himself, relinquishing His Divine Being, through His factual Incarnation and His Death. The laying hold 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 * becomes the universal, becomes the religious communion.
* The Christ.
794 Phenomenology of Mind 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 its natural significance; it passes into its true principle or conception, the conception just mentioned. Death then ceases to signify what it means directly — the nonexistence of this particular individual — and becomes transformed and transfigured into the universality of spirit, which lives in its own communion, dies there daily, and daily rises again.
That which belongs to the sphere of pictorial thought — viz., that Absolute Spirit, qua individual or rather qua particular, embodies and presents in its objective existence the nature of spirit — is thus here transferred to selfconsciousness itself, to the sphere where knowledge maintains itself in its otherness, in its opposite. This self-consciousness does not therefore really die, as the particular person * is represented to have really died; its particularity succumbs and expires in its universality, i.e. in its knowledge, which is true Being reconciling itself with itself. That primary and prior element of presentative thinking is thus here set forth as transcended, has, in other words, returned into the self, into its notion. What was in the former merely an existent entity 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 and outside 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 laid hold of by the self, brought * Christ.
Revealed Religion 795 within its grasp, this means the sublation and transcendence 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 abstract unreal Spirit of bare thought has become concrete and 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 true 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-sided, which takes as true Being the simple abstract element of thought, not concrete reality. This one-sided extreme of self has not yet equal worth and value with ultimate Being; the self first gets this as Spirit. When the mediator as imaginatively presented dies, his death implies at the same time the death of the mere abstraction of Divine Being, which is not yet affirmed as a self. That death is the bitterness and pain of the " unhappy consciousness," when it feels that God himself is dead. This harsh utterance is the expression of inmost self-knowledge which has self bare and simple for its content; it is the return of consciousness into the depth of darkness where Ego is nothing but bare identity of 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 and inner assurance of itself, which it lacked when it was object or immediacy, pure ultimate 796 Phenomenology of Mind Being. This knowledge is thus the process of spiritualisation, whereby Substance becomes Subject, by which its abstraction and hfelessness have expired, and Substance therefore has become concrete and real, simple universal self-consciousness.
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 objectively presented 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 concrete actual Spirit.
It is this by the fact of its passing through and realising the three elements of its nature: this movement through the content of its whole self in this way 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 makes its way. We saw how the notion of spirit arose when we entered the sphere of religion: it was the process of self-assured spirit, which forgives and pardons evil, and in so doing puts aside its own simplicity of nature and rigid unchangeableness: it was, to state it otherwise, the process, in which what is absolutely in opposition recognises 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, sees 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.
Revealed Religion 797 This religious communion, however, has not yet achieved its complete self-consciousness. Its content, in general, is put before it in the form of an objective pictorial idea; so that this disruption or opposition* still attaches even to the actual spiritual character of the communion — to its return out of its presentative way of thinking; just as the element of pure thought itself was also hampered with that opposition. This spiritual communion, too, is not aware what it is; it is spiritual self-consciousness, which is not object to itself in this form, or does not develop into clear consciousness of itself. Eather, so far as it is consciousness, it has before it ideal presentations, those picture-thoughts which wrere 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 and empty itself of 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 self -identical Absolute Being: put otherwise, that Substance has here attained to being absolute self-consciousness — this is, for the devotional consciousness, an objective other, something external. It grasps this aspect — that the knowledge which becomes purely inward is inherently absolute simplicity, or Substance — as the idea of something which is not thus by its very conception, but as the act of satisfaction obtained from an 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 Ultimate Being is drawn down from its abstractness and * i.e. between spiritual consciousness and objective idea.
798 Phenomenology of Mind raised to the level of self by the strength and 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 an ultimate reality, 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 Ultimate Being and Self has been essentially and inherently brought about, consciousness, too, has this idea 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 absolute Being. Its satisfaction thus itself remains hampered with the opposition of an external 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 god-man * has an implicit, a potential father and only an actual mother, in like manner we may say the universal god-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 as an actual immediate object present in its consciousness. 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 inherent and essential element, the aspect of pure mediation, is the reconciliation that lies beyond: while what appears as actually present in its consciousness, as the * The historical Christ.
Revealed Religion 799 aspect of immediacy and of existence, is the world which has yet to await transfiguration. The world is no doubt implicitly reconciled with the Divine 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 implicitly and inherently are not separated, but this is an implicitness which is not realised, or has not yet become an absolute explicit self-existence as well.
(DD) VIII ABSOLUTE KNOWLEDGE* Spirit manifested in revealed religion has not as JL yet surmounted its attitude of consciousness as such; or, what is the same thing, its concrete self-consciousness is not at this stage the object it is aware of. Spirit as a whole and the moments distinguished in it fall within the sphere of presentative thinking, are presentations with the form of objectivity. The content of this presentational thought is Absolute Spirit. All that remains to be done now is to cancel and transcend this bare form; or better, because the form appertains to consciousness as such its true meaning must have come out in the shapes and modes consciousness has already assumed.
The surmounting of the object of consciousness in this way is not to be taken one-sidedly as meaning that the object shows itself returning into the self. It has a more definite and specific meaning: it means that the object as such presents itself to the self as a vanishing factor; and, furthermore, that the emptying, the relinquishment, of self-consciousness itself establishes thinghood, and that this laying aside of self-consciousness * v. sup. p. 684. "Absolute Knowledge" is at once the consummation of experience and, on the historical side, constructive philosophy: Absolute Knowledge 801 has not merely negative, but positive significance, a significance not merely for us or per se, but for selfconsciousness itself. The negative of the object, its cancelling its own existence, gets, for self-consciousness, a positive significance; or, self-consciousness knows this nothingness of the object because on the one hand self-consciousness itself relinquishes itself; for in doing so it establishes itself as object, or, by reason of the indivisible unity characterising its self-existence, sets up the object as its self. On the other hand, there is also this other moment in the process, that self-consciousness has just as really cancelled and done away with this self-relinquishment and objectification, and has resumed them into itself, and is thus at home with itself in its otherness. This is the movement of consciousness, and in this process consciousness is the totality of its moments.
Consciousness, at the same time, had to take up a relation to the object in all its aspects and phases, and grasp its meaning from the point of view of each of them. This totality of its determinate characteristics makes the object per se and inherently a spiritual reality; and it becomes so in truth for consciousness, when the latter apprehends every individual one of them as self, i.e. when it takes up towards them the spiritual relationship just spoken of.
The object is, then, partly immediate existence, a thing in general — corresponding to immediate consciousness; partly an alteration of itself, its relatedness, (or existence-for-anotherand existence-for-self ))determinateness — corresponding to perception; partly essential being or in the form of a universal — corresponding to intelligence or understanding. The object as a whole is VOL. II.— 2 C 802 Phenomenology of Mind the mediated result [the conclusion] or the passing of universality into individuality through specification, as also the reverse process from individual to universal through cancelled individuality or specific determination. These three specific aspects, then, determine the ways in which consciousness must get to know the object in /the form of self. This knowledge of which we are speaking is, however, not knowledge in the sense of pure conceptual comprehension of the object; here this knowledge is to be taken as a developing process, has to be taken in its various moments and set forth in the manner appropriate to consciousness as such; and the moments of the notion proper, of pure and absolute knowledge, are to assume the form of modes or attitudes of consciousness. For that reason the object does not yet, when present in consciousness as such, appear as the inner essence of Spirit in the way this has just been expressed. The procedure consciousness adopts in regard to the object is not that of considering it either in this totality as such or in the pure conceptual form; it is partly that of a mode or attitude of consciousness in general, partly a multitude of such modes which we [who analyse the process] gather together, and in which the totality of the moments of the object and of the procedure of consciousness can be shown merely resolved into their separate elements.
To understand this method of grasping the object, where apprehension is a form or mode of consciousness, we have here only to recall the previous forms of consciousness which came before us earlier in the argument.
As regards the object, then, so far as it is immediate, an indifferent objective entity, we saw Reason, at the stage of "Observation," seeking and finding itself in Absolute Knowledge 803 this indifferent thing — i.e. we saw it conscious that its activity is there of an external sort, and at the same time conscious of the object merely as an immediate ob j ect. We saw, too, its specific character take expression at its highest stage in the infinite judgment: " the being of the ego is a thing." And, further, the ego is an immediate thing of sense. When ego is called a soul, it is indeed represented also as a thing, but a thing in the sense of something invisible, impalpable, etc., i.e. in fact not as an immediate entity, and not as that which is generally understood by a thing. That judgment, then, " ego is a thing " taken at first glance, has no spiritual content, or rather, is just the absence of spirituality. In its conception, however, it is in fact the most luminous and illuminating judgment; and this, its inner significance, which is not yet made evident, is what the two other moments to be considered express.
The thing is ego. In point of fact, thing is transcended in this infinite judgment. The thing is nothing in itself: it only has significance in a relation, only through the ego and its reference to the ego. This moment came before consciousness in pure insight and enlightenment. Things are simply and solely useful, profitable, and only to be considered from the point of view of their utility. The trained and cultivated self-consciousness, which has traversed the region of spirit in self-alienation, has, by giving up itself, produced the thing as its self; it retains itself, therefore, still in the thing, and knows the thing to have no independence, in other words knows that the thing has essentially and solely a relative existence. Or again — to give complete expression to the relationship, i.e. to what here alone constitutes the nature of the object — the thing stands for something that 804 Phenomenology of Mind is self-existent; sense-certainty, sense-experience, is announced as absolute truth; but this self-existence is itself declared to be a moment which merely disappears, and passes into its opposite, into a being at the mercy of an " other."
But knowledge of the thing is not yet finished at this point. The thing must become known as self not merely in regard to the immediateness of its being and as regards specific determinateness, but also in the sense of essence or inner reality. This is found in the case of Moral Self -consciousness. This mode of experience thinks of its knowledge as the absolute essential element, knows no other objective being than pure will or pure knowledge. It is nothing but merely this will and this knowledge. Any other possesses merely non-essential being, i.e. being that has no inherent nature per se, but only its empty husk. In so far as the moral consciousness, in its view of the world, lets existence drop out of the self, it just as truly reclaims and takes this existence back again into the self. In the form of conscience, finally, it is no longer this incessant alternation between the " placing " and the " displacing " [dissembling] of existence and self; it knows that its existence as such is this pure certainty of its own self; the objective element, into which qua acting it puts forth itself, is nothing else than pure knowledge of itself by itself.
These are the moments which compose the reconciliation of spirit with its own consciousness proper. By themselves they are particular and separate; and it is their spiritual unity alone which furnishes the power for this reconciliation. The last of these moments is, however, necessarily this unity itself, and, as we see, Absolute Knowledge 805 binds them all in fact into itself. Spirit certain of itself in its objective existence takes as the element of its existence nothing else than this knowledge of self. The declaration that what it does it does in accordance with the convictions of duty — this statement is the warrant for its own action, and makes good its conduct.
Action is the first inherent division of the simple unity of the notion, and the return out of this division. This first movement turns round into the second, since the element of recognition is put forward as simple knowledge of duty in contrast to the distinction and diremption that He in action as such and, in this way, form a rigid reality confronting action. In pardon, however, we saw how this rigid fixity gave way and renounced its claims. Reality has here, qua immediate existence, no other significance for self-consciousness than that of being pure knowledge; similarly, qua determinate existence, or qua relation, what is self -opposed is a knowledge partly of this purely individual self, partly of knowledge qua universal. Herein it is established, at the same time, that the third moment, universality, or the essence, means for each of the two opposite factors merely knowledge. Finally they also cancel the empty opposition that still remains, and are the knowledge of ego as identical with ego: — this individual self which is immediately pure knowledge or universal.
This reconciliation of consciousness with self-consciousness thus proves to be brought about in a doublesided way; in the one case, in the religious mind, in the other case, in consciousness itself as such. They are distinguished inter se by the fact that the one is this reconciliation in the form of implicit immanence, the other in the form of explicit self-existence. As 806 Phenomenology of Mind