Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

768 Phenomenology of Mind consciousness inherently and necessarily, and has done so too as a conscious fact — this position appears now as the behef of the world, the behef 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 beheving mind sees, feels, and hears this divinity.* Taken thus it is not an imagination, not a fancy ; it is actual in the behever.

Consciousness in that case does not set out from its own inner hfe, does not start from thought, and enclose the thought of God along with existence; rather it sets out from immediate present existence, and finds God there.

The moment of immediate existence is present as an element in the notion, and present in such a way that the rehgious spirit, on the return of all ultimate reahty 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 definitely 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 both in natural rehgion, and in rehgion as art. Rather, this concrete God is beheld sensuously and immediately as a self, as a real individual human being ; only so is it a self-consciousness.

This incarnation of the Divine Being, its having essentially and directly the form of self-consciousness, is the simple content of Absolute Rehgion. Here the Divine Being is known as spirit ; this rehgion is the Divine Being's consciousness concerning itself that it is Spirit. For spirit is knowledge of itself in * e.g. in Christianity.

Revealed Religion 769 its state of self-relinquishment, the absolute Reality, which is the process of retaining its harmony and identity with itself in its otherness.

This, however, is Substance, so far as in its accidents substance at the same time turns back into itself ; and does so, not as being indifferent towards something unessential and, consequently, finding itself in some ahen element, but as being there within itself, i.e. so far as it is subject or self. In this form of rehgion the Divine Being is, on that account, revealed.

Its being revealed obviously consists in this, that what it is, is consciously known. It is, however, known just in its being known as spirit, as a Being which is essentially self-consciousness. There is something in the object always concealed from consciousness when the object is for consciousness an " other," something alien and extraneous, and when consciousness does not laiow 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 at once and immediately knows itself there, or is manifest, revealed, to itself in the object.

Itself is manifest to itself merely in its own certainty of self; the object it has is the self; self, however, is nothing ahen and extraneous, but inseparable unity with itself, the immediate universal. It is the pure notion, pure thought, or self-existence, being-for-self, which is immediately being, and, therewith, being-foranother, and, qua this being-for-another, is immediately tm'ned 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 VOL. II.— 2 A

770 Phenomenology of Mind and Earth, etc. — all these are predicates of a subject, universal moments, which have their hold on this central point, and only are when consciousness goes back into thought. As long as it is tJiey 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 [other] self, for 511 which it is object.

To be in its notion that which reveals and is revealed — this is, then, the true form of spirit ; and moreover, this form, 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).

Here, then, we fiiid 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 selfconsciousness. 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 selfconsciousness, seems to have descended from its eternal pure simphcity ; but in fact it has, in so doing, attained for the first time its highest nature, its supreme reach of being. For when the notion of Being has reached its simple purity of nature, it is then both the absolute