Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

Öulture and^its Sffiere of Reality 53ä longer be taken in a positive sense. The positive object is merely the pure ego itself ; and the consciousness that is rent in sunder is inherently and essentially this pure self-identity of self-consciousness returned to itself.

Belief and Pure Insight* The spiritual condition of self-alienation exists in the sphere of culture as a fact. But since this whole has become estranged from itself, there lies beyond this sphere the nonactual region of pure consciousness, of thought. Its content consists of what has been reduced piu:ely to thought, its absolute element is thinking. Since, however, thinking is in the first instance the element of this sphere, consciousness has merely these thoughts, but it does not as yet thinh them or does not know that they are thoughts : to consciousness they appear in the form of presentations, they are objects in the form of ideas. For it comes out of the sphere of actuality into that of pure consciousness, but is itself still to all intents and purposes in the sphere of actuahty with the determinateness that implies. The conscious state of being rent and torn to pieces is still essentially and inherently the self-identity of pure consciousness not as a fact that itself is aware of but only as presented to us who are considering its condition. It has thus not as yet completed within itself the process of rising above this condition, it is simply there ; and it still has within itself the opposite * The contrast between these two elements is found both in the pre- Reformation period and in the eighteenth century period ; — in the latter the contrast assumes perhaps its acutest form. 534

Belief and Pure Insight 535 principle by which it is conditioned, without as yet having become master of that principle through a mediating process.

Hence the essential content of its thought is not taken to be an essential object merely in the form of abstract immanence (Ansich), but in the form of a common object, an object that has merely been elevated into another element, without having lost the character of an object that is not constituted 3.3^? by thought. It is essentially distinct from the immanent nature which constitutes the essential being of the stoic type of consciousness.

The significant factor for Stoicism was merely the form of thought as such, which has any content foreign to it that is drawn from reahty. In the case of the consciousness just described, however, the form of thought is not the significant element.

Similarly it is essentially distinct from the inherent principle of the virtuous type of conscious life ; here the essential fact stands, no doubt, in a relation to reahty ; it is the essence of reahty itself : but it is no more than an unreahsed essence of it. In the above type of consciousness the essence, although no doubt beyond reahty, stands all the same for an actual real essence.

In the same way, the inherently right and good which reason as lawgiver estabhshes, and the universal operating when consciousness tests and examines laws — neither of these has the character of actual reahty.

Hence while pure thought fell within the sphere of spiritual culture as an aspect of the estrangement characteristic of this sphere, as the standard in fact for judging abstract good and abstract bad, it has become enriched, by having gone through the process

536 Phenomenology of Mind of the whole, with the element of reahty and thereby with content. This reahty of its essential being, however, is at the same time merely a reality of pure consciousness, not of concrete actual consciousness : it is no doubt lifted into the element of thought, but this concrete consciousness does not yet take it for a thought ; it is beyond the reality peculiar to this consciousness, for it means flight from the latter.

In the form in which Religion here appears — for it is religion obviously that we are speaking about — as the belief which belongs to the realm of culture, rehgion does not yet appear as it is truly and completely {an und für sich). It has already come before us in other phases, viz. as the unhappy consciousness, as a form of conscious process with no substantial content in it.

So, too, in the case of the ethical substance, it appeared as a belief in the nether-world. But a consciousness of departed spirits is, strictly speaking, not belief, not the inner essence subsisting in the element of pure consciousness away beyond the actual : there the belief has itself an ' immediate existence in the present ; its element, its substance is the family.

But at the stage we are now considering, religion is in part the outcome of the substance, and is the pure consciousness of that substance ; in part this pure consciousness is alienated from its concrete actual consciousness, the essence from its existence.

It is thus doubtless no longer the insubstantial process of consciousness ; but it has still the characteristic of opposition to reality qua the given reality in general, and of opposition to the reality of self-consciousness in particular. It is essentially therefore merely a belief.