Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

The Living Work of Art That nation which approaches its god in the cult of the rehgion 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 activity.

This universal spirit, confronting the self-conscious nation, is consequently not the " Light " of the world, 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 rehgious cult of this simple unembodied ultimate Being gives back, therefore, to its votaries in the main merely this: that they are the ^2.3 nation of their god. It secures for them merely their stable subsistence, and their bare 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 rehgion of art, on the other hand, dispenses with that abstract simphcity of the absolute Being, and therefore with its " profundity. But that Bemg, which is directly at one with the self, is inherently spirit and comprehending truth, although not yet known exphcitly, in other words it does not know the " depths " of its nature. Because this Absolute, then, imphes self, consciousness finds itself at home with it 731

732 Phenomenology of Mind 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, in a despised and outcast nation whose mere substance is acknowledged, the absolute Being has not a selfless reality, but in the nation whose self is acknowledged as living in its substance.

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 gradually becomes objective ; it is substance satisfied, having its "pathos'' within it and in want of nothing, because it comes back from mere intuition, from objectivity which is overcome and superseded.

This " pathos " is, by itself, the Being of the Orient,* 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 reahty. It has here traversed the process of its actuahsation.

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 prepared and digested, jjiu.f is offered as material for the life which has a self. In * Tlie " Light " of the world.

The Living Work of Art 733 its being useful for food and drink it reaches its highest perfection. For therein it is the possibihty 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 energising substance, partly spiritual ferment ; in the first case it is the feminine principle, the nursing mother, in the other the mascuhne principle, the self-driving force of selfconscious existence. In this enjoyment, then, that orient "Light" of the world is discovered for what it really is : Enjojnnent 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 rehgion, however, is not only immediate and unreflecting, but at the same time fully cognitive certainty of self. What has thus been, through the cult, revealed to self-conscious spirit within itself, is simple absolute