Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

Revealed Religion 765 is at the same time pure certainty and assurance of itself.

These forms, and, on the other side, the world of personaHty 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 mihappy despairing self-consciousness, a pain which permeates all of them, and is the common birthpang at its production, — the simpHcity of the pure notion, which contains those forms as its moments.

Spirit, here, has in it two sides, which are above represented as the two converse statements : one is this, that substance empties itself of itself, and becomes selfconsciousness ; the other is the converse, that selfconsciousness 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 imphcitly it is Universal Being, or — because the self is pure selfexistence, which is at home with itself in its opposite — that the substance is self-consciousness exphcitly for the self, and, just on that account, is spirit. Of this spirit,

766 Phenomenology of Mind 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 imphcit father.

For actual reahty, or self-consciousness, and implicit being in the sense of substance, are its two moments ; and by the reciprocity of their kenosis, each rehnquishing or " emptying " itself of itself and becoming the other, spirit thus comes into existence as their unity.

In so far as self-consciousness in a one-sided way grasps only its oivn rehnquishment, although its object is thus for 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 necessarily from its side be also emptied of itself, and SL 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.* This fanciful imagination is fantastic extravagance of mind, which introduces into nature as well as history, the world and the mythical ideas of early reHgions, another inner esoteric meaning different from what they, on the face of them, bear directly to consciousness, and, in particular, in the case of reH- gions, another meaning than the self-consciousness, whose religions they were, could find and admit 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 ; * As in neo-Platonism.

Revealed Religion 767 it is no more than murky darkness and a peculiar crazy twist of consciousness. 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 at once arise in consciousness as springing from the very notion, and must come forward in its necessity.

It is thus that self-knowing spirit has arisen ; it has arisen by means of its necessary process through the knowledge of immediate consciousness, i.e. of consciousness of the immediately existing object.

This notion, which, being immediate, had also, for consciousness, the form 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 sense-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 he outside the notion, for the simple unity of the notion is itself immediate being.

The notion is at once what empties or rehnquishes itself, or the exphcit unfolding of directly apprehended [angeschaut) necessity, and is also at home with itself in that necessity, knows it and comprehends it. The immediate ^"i^q inherent nature of spirit, which takes on the form of self-consciousness, means nothing else than that the concrete actual ivorld-sfirit 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. That Absolute Spirit has taken on the form of self-