Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

Absolute Knowledge 801 has not merely negative, but positive significance, a significance not merely for us or fer se, but for selfconsciousness itself.

The negative of the object, its cancelhng its own existence, gets, for self-consciousness, a positive significance ; or, self-consciousness knows this nothingness of the object because on the one hand self-consciousness itself relinquishes itself ; for in doing so it establishes itself as object, or, by reason of the indivisible unity characterising its self-existence, sets up the object as its self.

On the other hand, there is also this other moment in the process, that self-consciousness r/^" has just as really cancelled and done away with this self -relinquishment and objectification, and has resumed them into itself, and is thus at home with itself in its otherness. This is the movement of consciousness, and in this process consciousness is the totahty of its moments.

Consciousness, at the same time, had to take up a relation to the object in all its aspects and phases, and grasp its meaning from the point of view of each of them.

This totahty of its determinate characteristics makes the object per se and inherently a spiritual reahty; and it becomes so in truth for consciousness, when the latter apprehends every individual one of them as self, i.e. when it takes up towards them the spiritual relationship just spoken of.

The object is, then, partly immediate existence, a thing in general — corresponding to immediate consciousness ; partly an alteration of itself, its relatedness, (or existence-for-anotherand existence-for-self),c?e^ermmateness — corresponding to perception ; partly essential being or in the form of a universal — corresponding to intelhgence or understanding. The object as a whole is VOL. 11.— 2 c

802 Phenomenology of Mind the mediated result [the conclusion] or the passing of universality into individuality through specification, as also the reverse process from individual to universal through cancelled individuality or specific determination. These three specific aspects, then, determine the ways in which consciousness must get to know the object in the form of self.

This knowledge of which we are speaking is, however, not knowledge in the sense of pure conceptual comprehension of the object; here this knowledge is to be taken as a developing process, has to be taken in its various moments and set forth in the manner appropriate to consciousness as such ; and the moments of the notion proper, of pure and absolute knowledge, are to assume the form of modes or attitudes of consciousness.

For that reason the object does not yet, when present in consciousness as such, appear as the inner essence of Spirit in the way this has just been expressed.

The procedure consciousness adopts in regard to the object is not that of considering it either in this totality as such or in the pure conceptual form ; it is partly that of a mode or attitude of consciousness in general, partly a multitude of such modes which we [who analyse the process] gather together, and in which the totality of the moments of the object and of the procedure of consciousness can be shown merely resolved into their separate elements.

To understand this method of grasping the object, where apprehension is a form or mode of consciousness, we have here only to recall the previous forms of consciousness which came before us earlier in the argument. As regards the object, then, so far as it is immediate, an indifferent objective entity, we saw Reason, at the stage of "Observation,"' seeking and finding itself in

Absolute Knowledge 803 this indifferent thing — i.e. we saw it conscious that its activity is there of an external sort, and at the same time conscious of the object merely as an immediate ob j ect. We saw, too , its specific character take expression at its highest stage in the infinite judgment : " the being of the ego is a thing. And, further, the ego is an immediate thing of sense.

When ego is called a soul, it is indeed represented also as a thing, but a thing in the sense of something invisible, impalpable, etc., i.e. in fact not as an immediate entity, and not as that which is generally understood by a thing. That judgment, then, *' ego is a thing " taken at first glance, has no spiritual content, or rather, is just the absence of spirituahty.

In its conception, however, it is in fact the most luminous and illuminating judgment ; and this, its inner significance, which is not yet made evident, is what the two other moments to be considered express. The thing is ego. In point of fact, thing is transcended in this infinite judgment. The thing is nothing in itself ; it only has significance in a relation, only through the ego and its reference to the ego.

This moment came before consciousness in pure insight and enhghtenment. Things are simply and solely useful, profitable, and only to be considered from the point of view of their utihty.

The trained and cultivated self-consciousness, which has traversed the region of spirit in self-alienation, has, by giving up itself, produced the thing as its self ; it retains itself, therefore, still in the thing, and knows the thing to have no independence, in other words knows that the thing has essentially and solely a relative existence.

Or again — to give complete expression to the relationship, i.e. to what here alone constitutes the nature of the object — the thing stands lor something that