Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

Absolute Knowledge 819 content is the immediate unity of self-knowledge. The pure process of thus rehnquishing itself to externahty constitutes — when we consider this process in its bearing on the content — the necessity of this content. The diversity of content is, qua determinate and specific, due to relation, and is not inherent ; it is its restless activity of cancelhng and superseding itself, or its negativity.

Thus the necessity or diversity, hke its free existence, is the self too ; and in this self-form, in which existence is immediately thought, the content is a notion. Seeing, then, that Spirit has attained the notion, it unfolds its existence and develops its processes in this ether of its hfe and is Systematic Science.

The moments of its process are set forth in Science no longer as determinate modes or forms of consciousness, but — since the distinction, which consciousness imphes, has reverted to and has become a distinction within the self — as determinate notions, and as the organic self-explaining and self-constituted process of these conceptions.

While in the Phenomenology of Mind each moment is the distinction of knowledge and truth, and the process in which that distinction is cancelled and transcended, on the other hand Systematic Science does not contain this distinction and supersession of distinction. Kather, since each moment has the form of the notion, it unites the objective form of truth and the knowing self in an immediate unity.

In Science the individual moment does not appear as the process of passing back and forward from consciousness or presentation to self-consciousness and conversely : there the pure form, hberated from the condition of being an appearance in mere consciousness, — the pure notion with its further development, depends solely and purely

820 PJienomenology of Mind on its characteristic and specific nature. Conversely, again, there corresponds to every abstract moment of absolute Science a form or mode in which mind as a whole makes it appearance. As the mind that actually exists and historically appears is not richer than Science, so, too, mind in its actual content is not poorer.

To know the pure notions of Science in the form in which they are modes or types of consciousness — this constitutes the aspect of their reality, in which its essential element, the notion, appearing there in its simple mediating activity as thinking, breaks up and separates the moments of this mediation, and exhibits its content by reference to the internal and immanent opposition of its elements.

Science contains within itself this necessity of rehnquishing and divesting itself of the form of the pure notion, and necessarily involves the transition of the notion into consciousness. For Spirit that knows itself is, just for the reason that it grasps its own notion, immediate identity with itself ; and this, in the distinction it implies, is the certainty of what is immediate or is sense-consciousness — the beginning from which we started.

This process of releasing itself from the form of its self is the highest freedom and security of its knowledge of itself. All the same, this rehnquishment of self and abandonment to externahty are still incomplete. This process expresses the relation of the certainty of its self to the object, an object which, just by being in relation, has not yet attained its full freedom..

Systematic knowledge is aware not only of itself, but also of the negative of itself, or its hmit. Knowing its hmit means knowing how

Absolute Knowledge 821 to sacrifice itself. This sacrifice is the emptying of self, the self-abandonment, in which Spirit sets forth, in the form of free and miconstrained fortuitous contingency, its process of becoming Spirit, intuitively apprehending outside it its pure self as Time, and Hkewise its existence as Space.* This last form into which Spirit passes, Nature, is its hving immediate process of development.

Natm^e — Spirit divested of self and given over to externaUty — is, in its actual existence, nothing but this eternal process of abandoning its own independent subsistence, and the movement which reinstates Subject. The other aspect, however, in which Spirit comes into being, History, is process in terms of knowledge, a conscious self-mediating process — Spirit given over to and emptied into Time.

But this form of abandonment is, similarly, an emptying of itself by itself.; the negative is negative of itself. This way of becoming presents a tardy procession and succession of spiritual shapes and forms, a gallery of pictures, each of which is endowed with the entire wealth of Spirit, and moves so tardily just for the reason that the self has to permeate and assimilate all this wealth of its substance.

Since its accomphshment consists in Spirit knowing what it is, in fully comprehending its substance, this knowledge means its subjectification, a state in which Spirit leaves its external existence behind and gives itself over to the attitude of Recollection [Erinnerumj). In this subjectification.

Spirit is engulfed in the darkness and night of its own self-consciousness ; its vanished existence is, however, conserved therein; and this superseded existence— the previous state, but born anew from the * Cp. Ency. §244 ; also Nuturphilos., lutrod.