Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

556 Phenomenology of Mind identity accepting the attitude and function of destructive negation — this is how behef looks upon it; belief finds it simply lying unreason and malicious intent, just as enlightenment in the same way regards belief as error and prejudice. As regards its content, it is in the first instance empty insight, whose content appears an external other to it.

It meets this content, consequently, in the shape of something not yet its own, as something that exists quite independent of it, and is found in belief. Enlightenment, then, conceives its object in the first instance and generally in such a way as to take it as pure insight, and failing to recognise itself there, interprets it as error.

In insight as such consciousness apprehends an object in such a manner that it becomes the inner being of conscious life, or becomes an object which consciousness permeates, in which consciousness maintains itself, keeps within itself, and is present to itself, and, by its thus being the process of that object, brings the object into being.

It is precisely this which enlightenment rightly declares belief to be, when enlightenment says that the Absolute Reality professed by belief is a being that comes from belief's own consciousness, is its own thought, something produced from and by consciousness.* Enlightenment, consequently, interprets and declares it to be error, to be a made-up invention about the very same thing as enhghtenment itself is.

Enlightenment that seeks to teach behef this new wisdom does not, in doing so, tell it anything new. * Cp. the view of God held by Fichte : also Feuerbach : — Wesen der Religion.

The Struggle of Enlightenment with Superstition 557 For the object of belief itself is just this too, viz. a pure essential reality of its own peculiar consciousness ; so that this consciousness does not put itself down for lost and negated in that object, but rather puts trust in it ; and this just means that it finds itself there as this par- ua j ticular consciousness, finds itself therein to be self-consciousness.

If I put my trust in any one, his certitude of himself is for me the certitude of myself; I know my self-existence in him, I know that he acknowledges it, and that it is for him both his purpose and his real nature. Trust, however, is belief, because its consciousness has a direct relation to its object, and thus sees at once that it is one with the object, and in the object.

Further, since what is object for me is something in which I know myself, I am at the same time in that object really in the form of another self-consciousness, i.e. one which has become in that object alienated from its own particular individuation, from its natural and contingent existence, but which partly continues therein to be self-consciousness, and partly is there an essential consciousness just like pure insight.

In the notion of insight there lies not merely this, that consciousness knows itself in the object it looks at, and finds itself directly there, without first quitting the thought element and then returning into itself ; the notion implies as well that consciousness is aware of itself as being also the mediating process, aware of itself as active, as the agency of production.

Through this it gets the thought of this unity of self as self and object. This very consciousness is also behef. Obedience and action make a necessary moment, through which the

558 Phenomenology of Mind certainty of existence in Absolute Keality comes about. This action of belief does not indeed make it appear as if Absolute ReaKty is itself produced thereby. But the Absolute Reality for belief is essentially not the abstract reaUty that lies beyond the believing consciousness ; it is the spirit of the religious communion, it is the unity of that abstract reahty and self-consciousness.

The action of the communion is an essential moment in bringing about that it is this spirit of the communion. That spirit is what it is by the productive activity of consciousness, or rather it does not exist without being produced by consciousness. For essential as this process of production is, it is as truly not the only basis of Absolute Reahty; it is merely a moment.

The Absolute Reality is at the same time self-complete and self-contained {an und für sich selbst). From the other side the notion of pure insight is seen to be something else than its own object ; for just this negative character constitutes the object.

Thus from the other side it also expresses the ultimate Reality of belief as something foreign to self-consciousness, something that is not bone of its bone, but is surreptitiously foisted on it like a changeling child.

But here enlightenment is entirely foolish ; belief discovers it to be a way of speaking which does not know what it is saying, and does not understand the facts of the case when it talks about priestly deception, and deluding the people.

It speaks about this as if by means of some hocus-pocus of conjuring priestcraft there were foisted on consciousness as true Reahty something that is absolutely foreign, and absolutely alien to it ; and yet says all the while that this is an essential reality for consciousness, that