Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

The Struggle of Enlightetiment with Superstition 565 Pure insight finds both purposeless as well as wrong. It is purposeless to renounce a pleasure and give away a possession, in order to show oneself independent of pleasure and possession; hence, in the opposite case, insight will be obliged to proclaim the man a fool, who, in order to eat, employs the expedient of actually eating.

Insight again thinks it wrong to deny oneself a meal, and give away butter and eggs not for money, nor money for butter and eggs, but just to give them away and get no return at all ; it understands a meal, or the possession of things of that sort, to be a self's proper object, an end of a self, and hence in fact understands itself to be a very impure intention which ascribes essential value to enjoyment and possessions of this kind.

As pure insight it further maintains the necessity of rising above the condition of nature, above covetousness and its ways ; it only finds it foohsh and wrong that this supremacy should have to be demonstrated by action.

In other words this pure intention is in reahty a deception, which pretends to and demands an inner elevation, but declares that it is superfluous, foohsh, and even wrong to be in earnest in the matter, to put this upHfting into concrete expression, into actual shape and form, and demonstrate its truth.

Pure insight thus denies itself both as pure insight, — for it abrogates directly purposive action, and as pure intention, — for it denies the intention of proving its independence of the ends of particular existence. Thus, then, enhghtenment makes behef learn what it means.

It takes on this appearance of being bad, because just by the fact of relation to an external other it gives itself a negative reahty, it presents itself as the opposite of itself. Pure insight and intention have to /^Dd

566 Phenomenology of Mind adopt this relational attitude, however, for that is their actualisation. This reahsation appeared, in the first instance, as a negative reality. Perhaps its positive reality is better constituted. Let us see how this stands. When all prejudice and superstition have been banished, the question arises what next ? What is the truth enlightenment has diffused in their stead ?

It has already given expression to this positive content in its process of exterminating error, for that alienation of itself is equally its positive reality. In dealing with what for behef is Absolute Spirit, it interprets whatever sort of determination it discovers there as being wood, stone, etc., as particular concrete things of sense.

Since in this way it conceives in general every characteristic, i.e. every content and filling, to be a finite fact, to be a human entity and a mental presentation, absolute Being on its view turns out to be a mere vacuum, to which can be attributed no characteristics, no predicates at all.

In fact to marry such a vacuity with universal predicates would be essentially reprehensible; and it is just through such a union that the monstrosities of superstition have been produced. Reason, pure insight, is doubtless not empty itself, since the negative of itself is present consciously to it, and is its content ; it is, on the contrary, rich in substance, but only in particularity and restrictions.

The enlightened function of reason, of pure insight, consists in allowing nothing of that sort to appertain to Absolute Reality, nor attributing anything of thatlkind to it : this function well knows how to put itself and the wealth of finitude in their place, and deal with the Absolute in a worthy manner.

The Struggle of Enlightenment with Superstition 567 In contrast with this colourless empty ReaHty there stands, as a second aspect of the positive truth of enlightenment, the particularity in general of conscious Hfe and of all that is : — a particularity excluded from an absolute Being, and standing by itself as something entirely self-contained.

Consciousness, which in its very earliest expression is sense-certainty and mere " opining,"' here comes back, after the whole course of its experience, to this same point, and is once again a knowledge of what is pure negative of itself, a knowledge of sense things, i.e. of existent entities which 4.,? 4, stand in indifference over against its own self-existence.

But here it is not an immediate naive consciousness ; it has become to itself immediate. While at first the prey to every sort of entanglement, into which it is plunged by its gradually unfolding, and now led back to its first form by pure insight, it has arrived at this first state as the result and outcome of the process.

This sensecertainty, resting as it does on an insight into the nothingness of all other forms of consciousness, and hence the nothingness of whatever is beyond senseexperience, — this sense-certainty is no longer a mere *' opining," it is rather absolute truth. This nothingness of everything that transcends sense is doubtless merely a negative proof of this truth.

But no other is admissible or possible, for the positive truth of sense-experience in itself is just the unmediated self-existence of the notion itself qua object and an object in the form of otherness — the positive truth is that it is absolutely certain to every consciousness that it is and that there are other real things outside it, and that in its naive existence it, as well as these things too, are in and for themselves or absolute.