Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

798 Phenomenology of Mind raised to the level of self by the strength and force of this pure devotion. The action of the self hence retains towards it this negative significance, because the relinquishment of itself on the part of substance is for the self an ultimate reality, something fer se ; the self does not at once grasp and comprehend it, or does not find it in its own action as such.

Since this unity of Ultimate Being and Self has been essentially and inherently brought about, consciousness, too, has this idea of its reconcihation, but in the form of an imaginative idea. It obtains satisfaction by attaching, in an external way, to its pure negativity the positive significance of the unity of itself with absolute Being. Its satisfaction thus itself remains hampered with the opposition of an external beyond.

Its own peculiar reconcihation therefore enters its consciousness as something remote, something far away in the future, just as the reconcihation, which the other self achieved, appears as away in the distance of the past.

Just as the individual god-man * has an imphcit, a potential father and only an actual mother, in Hke manner we may say the universal god-man, the spiritual communion, has as its father its own proper action and knowledge, while its mother is eternal Love, which it merely feels, but does not behold as an actual immediate object present in its consciousness.

Its reconcihation, therefore, is in its heart, but still with its conscious life sundered in twain and its actual reahty shattered. What falls within its consciousness as the inherent and essential element, the aspect of pure mediation, is the reconciliation that lies beyond : while what appears as actually present in its consciousness, a.s the * The historical Christ.

Revealed Religion 799 aspect of immediacy and of existence, is the world which has yet to await transfiguration. The world is no doubt implicitly reconciled with the Divine Being ; and that Being no doubt knows that it no longer regards the object as ahenated from itself, but as one with itself in its Love. But for self-consciousness this immediate presence has not yet the form and shape of spiritual reahty.

Thus the spirit of the communion is, in its immediate consciousness, separated from its rehgious consciousness, which declares indeed that these two modes of consciousness imphcitly and inherently are not separated, but this is an implicitness which is not reahsed, or has not yet become an absolute explicit self-existence as well.

(DD) VIII ABSOLUTE KNOWLEDGE* THE Spirit manifested in revealed religion has not as yet surmounted its attitude of consciousness as such ; or, what is the same thing, its concrete self-consciousness is not at this stage the object it is aware of. Spirit as a whole and the moments distinguished in it fall within the sphere of presentative thinking, are presentations with the form of objectivity.

The content of this presentational thought is Absolute Spirit. All that remains to be done now is to cancel and transcend this bare form ; or better, because the form appertains to consciousness as such its true meaning must have come out in the shapes and modes consciousness has already assumed.

The surmounting of the object of consciousness in this way is not to be taken one-sidedly as meaning that the object shows itself returning into the self.

It has a more definite and specific meaning: it means that the object as such presents itself to the self as a vanishing factor ; and, furthermore, that the emptying, the relinquishment, of self-consciousness itself establishes thinghood, and that this laying aside of self-consciousness * V. sup. p. 684. "Absolute Knowledge" is at once the consummation of experience and, on the historical side, constructive philosophy: V. infra, p. 816 if. 800