Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

The Struggle of Enlightenment with Superstition 553 it betrays the fact that the infection has done its work. The struggle is too late ; and every means taken merely makes the disease worse ; for the disease has seized the very marrow of spiritual life, viz. con- .?3 sciousness in its ultimate principle (Begriff), or its pure inmost nature itself. There is therefore no power left in conscious hfe to surmount the disease.

Because it affects the very inmost being, whatever individual expressions remain, are repressed and allowed to subside and the superficial symptoms are smothered.

This is immensely to its advantage ; for it does not now squander its power in useless fashion, nor does it show itself unworthy of its true nature — which is the case when it breaks out into symptoms and particular eruptions antithetic to the content of belief and the connexion of its external reahty.

Rather, being now an invisible and unperceived spirit, it insinuates its way through and through the noble parts, and soon has got complete hold over all the vitals and members of the unconscious idol ; and then " some fine morning it gives its comrade a shove with the elbow, when, bash ! crash ! — and the idol is lying on the floor." * On some " fine morning," whose noon is not red with blood, if the infection has penetrated to every organ of spiritual life.

It is then the memory alone that still preserves the dead form of the spirit's previous state, as a vanished history, vanished men know not how. And the new serpent of wisdom, raised on high before bending worshippers, has in this manner painlessly stripped off merely a shrivelled skin.

But this silent steady working of the loom of spirit in the inner region of its substance, f its own action * Rameau's Neffe. t In the life of "feeling" and "emotion."

554 Phenomenology of Mind hidden from itself, is merely one side of the realising of pure insight. Its expansion does not only consist in like going along with like ; and its realisation is not merely an unresisted expansion.

The action of the principle of negation is at the same time essentially a developed process of self-distinction, which, being a conscious action, must set forth its moments in a definitely manifested expression, and must make its appearance in the form of sheer noise, and a violent struggle with an opposite as such.

We have, therefore, to see how pure insight and pure 2 J a, intention maintains its negative attitude towards that other which it finds standing opposed to it. Pure insight and intention, operating negatively, can only be, — since its very principle is all essentiality and there is nothing outside it — the negative of itself.

As insight, therefore, it passes into the negative of pure insight, it becomes untruth and unreason ; and as intention it passes into the negative of pure intention, becomes a lie and sordid impurity of purpose. It involves itself in this contradiction by the fact that it engages in a strife and thinks to do battle with some alien external other.

It merely imagines this, for its nature as absolute negativity lies in having that otherness within its own self. The absolute notion is the category ; it is the principle that knowledge and the object of knowledge are the same. In consequence, what pure insight expresses as its other, what it pronounces to be an error or a lie, can be nothing else than its own self ; it can only condemn what itself is.

What is not rational has no truth, or what is not comprehended through a notion, conceptually determined, is not. When reason thus speaks of some other than itself is, it

The Struggle of Enlightenment with Superstition 555 in fact speaks merely of itself ; it does not therein go beyond itself. This struggle with the opposite, therefore, combines in its meaning the significance of being its own actualisation. This consists just in the process of unfolding its moments and taking them back into itself.

One part of this process is the making of the distinction in which the insight of reason opposes itself as object to itself ; so long as it remains in this condition, it is at variance with itself. Qua pure insight it is without any content ; the process of its realisation consists in itself becoming content to itself ; for no other can be made its content, because it is the category become self-conscious.

But since this insight in the first instance thinks of the content as in its opposite, and knows the content merely as a content, and does not as yet think of it as its own self, pure insight misconceives itself in it. The complete attainment of insight, therefore, has the sense of a process of coming to know that content as its own, which was to begin with opposed to itself.

Its result, however, will be thereby neither the reestabhshment of the errors it has fought, nor merely its original notion, but an insight which knows the absolute negation of itself to be its own proper reality, to be its self, or an insight which is its self-understanding notion.

This feature of the struggle of enlightenment with errors, — that of fighting itself in them, and of condemning that in them which it asserts, — this is something for us who observe the process, or is what enlightenment and its struggle are in themselves impHcitly. The first aspect of this struggle, however, — the contamination and defilement of enlightenment through its pure self-