Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

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 reahty — 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 reconcihation.

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 fer 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 pecuhar form. Beside this immediacy, then, the mediation of ideal presentation is necessary.

Imphcitly and essentially, the knowledge of nature as the untrue inadequate expression of spirit's existence, and this universahty of self which has thereby arisen within the life of the self — these constitute the reconciHation of spirit with itself. This impHcit 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 {Begreifen), 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 ^t process by which God's individual self- consciousness * becomes the universal, becomes the rehgious communion. * Tlie 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 universahty 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 universahty 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 reconcihng 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.