Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

774 Phenomenology of Mind itself merely an immediate consciousness, which has not cancelled and transcended the disparateness of objectivity, has not withdrawn it into pure thought, but accepts this objectively presented individual, and not itself, as spirit.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 preserves its negative moment.

Spirit remains the immediate self of actual reahty, but in the form of the universal self-consciousness of a rehgious communion,* 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 iTi, 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.

The terms " 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 hfted out of sense merely into the region of ideation, of pictorial presentation ; for this is the synthetic [external] connexion of sensuous immediacy and its universahty or thought. Imaginative presentation constitutes the characteristic form in which spirit is conscious of itself in this rehgious 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 * " Lo, I am with you alvvay even to the end of the world " (Matt, xxviii. ; also xviii. 20).

Revealed Religion 175 life is still cumbered with an unreconciled diremption into a '* hither " and a " yonder/' a " here " and a " beyond.

The content is the true content ; but all its moments, when placed in the element of mere 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 preserve its true form when before 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 ; — in the way this has already taken place objectively or for us [who have analysed the process of experience].

We have to consider this content as it exists in its consciousness. Absolute Spirit is content ; that is how it exists in the form of its truth. But its truth consists not merely in being the substance or the inherent reahty of the rehgious communion ; nor again in coming out of this inwardness into the objectivity of perceptual and presentational thought; but in becoming concrete actual self, reflecting itself into self, and being Subject.

This, then, is the process which Spirit r5 5' reahses in its communion ; this is its life.

What this self -revealing spirit is in and by itself, is therefore not brought out by the rich and full content of its hfe 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 rehgious communion, or even to what the actual human being * This paragraph is explanatory.

776 Phenomenology of Mind [incarnating the Divine Spirit] * has spoken. This reversion to the primitive and elementary is based on the instinct to get at the notion and ultimate principle ; but it confuses the origin, in the sense of the immediate existence of the first historical appearance, with the pure simphcity of the notion.

By thus impoverishing the hfe 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 externahty and particularity, merely the historical manner in which spirit once upon a time appeared, the soulless recollection of an ideally presented historical figure and its past.j 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, the sphere of particularity. The middle term between these two is their synthetic connexion, the consciousness of passing into otherness, the process of ideal presentation as such. The third stage is the return from representation in idea and from that otherness ; in other words, it is the element of self-consciousness itself. These three movements constitute the Hfe of spirit.

Its resolution into separate parts, when it enters the form of presentation, 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 over its various moments, entering every one, each being an element in its composition : and since each of these spheres is * e.g. Christ. t '1 lie lite and work of the historical Jesus.