Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

II Enlightenment * The peculiar object on which pure insight directs the active force of the notion is behef, this being a form of pure consciousness Hke itself and yet opposed to it in that element. But at the same time pure insight has a relation to the actual world, for, like belief, it is a return from the actual world into pure consciousness.

We have first of all to see how its activity is constituted, as contrasted with the impure intentions and the perverted forms of insight found in the actual world, t We have touched already on the placid type of conscious life, which stands in contrast to this turmoil of alternate self-dissolution and self-evolution ; it constitutes the aspect of pure insight and intention.

This unperturbed consciousness, however, as we saw, has no special insight regarding the sphere of culture.

The latter has itself rather the most painful feehng, and the truest insight about itself — the feeling that everything made secure crumbles to pieces, that every element of its existence is shattered to atoms, and every bone broken : moreover, it consciously expresses this feeling in words, pronounces judgment and gives luminous utterance concerning all aspects of its condition.

Pure * Enlightenment (Aufklärung) is the universalisation of the principle of " pure insight/' and hence is logically the outcome of the preceding analysis. t Cf. pp. 5?5-33.

Enlightenment 547 insight, therefore, can have here no activity and content 3^i^ of its own, and thus can only take up the formal attitude of truly apprehending this ingenious insight proper to the world and the language it adopts.

Since this language is a scattered and broken utterance and the pronouncement a fickle mood of the moment, which is again quickly forgotten, and is only known to be a whole by a third consciousness, this latter can be distinguished as pure insight only if it gathers those several scattered traces into a universal picture, and then makes them the insight of all. By this simple means pure insight will resolve the confusion of this world.

For we have found that the fragments and determinate conceptions and individuahties are not the essential nature of this actuality, but that it finds its substance and support alone in the spirit which exists qua judging and discussing, and that the interest of having a content for this ratiocination and parleying to deal with alone preserves the whole and the fragments into which it falls.

In this language which insight adopts, its self-consciousness is still particular, a self existing for its own sake ; but the emptiness of its content is at the same time emptiness of the self knowing that content to be vain and empty.

Now, since the consciousness placidly apprehending all these sparkling utterances of vanity makes a collection of the most striking and penetrating phrases, the soul that still preserves the whole, the vanity of witty criticism, goes to ruin with the other form of vanity, the previous vanity of existence.

The collection shows most people a better wit, or at least shows every one a more varied wit than their own, and shows that better knowledge and judging in general are|some-

548 Phenomenology of Mind thing universal and are now universally familiar. Thereby the single and only interest which was still found is done away with ; and individual light is resolved into universal insight. Still, however, knowledge of essential reality stands secure above vain and empty knowledge; and pure insight, to begin with, appears in genuinely active form in so far as it enters into conflict with behef.

a The Struggle of Enlightenment with Superstition* The various negative forms which consciousness adopts, the attitude of scepticism, and that of theoretical and practical idealism, are inferior attitudes compared with that of pure insight and the expansion of pure insight — enlightenment ; for pure insight is born of the substance of spirit, it knows the pure self of consciousness to be absolute, and enters into conflict with the pure consciousness of the Absolute Being of all reality. Since belief and insight are the same pure consciousness, but in form are opposed, — the reality in the case of behef being a thought, not a notion, and hence something absolutely opposed to self-consciousness, while the reality in the case of pure insight is the self — they are such that inter se the one is the absolute negative of the other. As appearing the one against the other, all content falls to belief ; for in its unperturbed element of thought each moment obtains definite subsistence. Pure insight, however, is in the first instance without any content ; it involves rather the complete disappearance of content ; but by its negative attitude towards what it excludes it will make itself real and give itself a content. * "We live in an age of enlightenment " (Kant). Cp. Hegel ^V W 15 introduction to " French Philosophy." 549