Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

694 Phenomenology of Mind The distinction made between actual spirit and that same spirit which knows itself as spirit, or between itself qua consciousness and qua self-consciousness, is transcended and done away with in the case where spirit knows itself in its real truth. Its consciousness and its self-consciousness have come to terms. But, as rehgion is here to begin with and immediately, this distinction has not yet reverted to spirit.

It is merely the conception, the principle, of rehgion that is established at first. In this the essential element is self-consciousness, which is conscious of being all truth, and which contains all reality within that truth. This self-consciousness, being consciousness [and so aware of an object], has itself for its object.

Spirit, which knows itself in the first instance immediately, is thus to itself spirit in the form of immediacy ; and the specific character of the shape in which it appears to itself is that of pure simple being.

This being, this bare existence, has indeed a filhng drawn neither from sensation or manifold matter, nor from any other one-sided elements, purposes, and determinations ; its filling is solely spirit, and is known by itself to be all truth and reality. Such filling is in this first form not in agreement or identity with its own shape ; spirit qua ultimate Reality is not in accord with its consciousness.

It is actual only as Absolute Spirit, when it is also to itself in its truth as it is in its certainty of itself, or, when the extremes, into which spirit quu consciousness falls, exist for one another in spiritual shape. The embodiment adopted by spirit quxi object of its own consciousness, remains filled by the certainty of spirit, and this self-certainty constitutes its substance. Through this content, the degrading of the object to

Religion 695 bare objectivity, to the form of something that negates self-consciousness, disappears. The immediate unity of spirit with itself is the fundamental basis, or pure consciousness, inside which consciousness breaks up into its constituent elements [viz. an object with subject over against it].

In this way, shut up within its pure self-consciousness, spirit does not exist in religion as the creator of a nature in general; rather what it produces in the course of this process are its forms and shapes qita spirits, which together constitute all that it can reveal when it is completely manifested.

And this process itself is the development of its perfect and complete actuality through the individual aspects thereof, i.e. through its imperfect modes of realisation. The first reaHsation of spirit is just the principle and notion of rehgion itself — rehgion as immediate and thus Natural Rehgion. Here spirit knows itself as its object in a " natural '' or immediate shape.

The second reahsation, is, however, necessarily that of r^o» knowing itself in the shape of transcended and superseded natural existence, i.e. in the form of self. This is the Rehgion of Art or productive activity. For the shape it adopts is raised to the form of self through the productive activity of consciousness, by which this consciousness beholds in its object its own action, i.e. sees the self.

The third reahsation, finally, cancels the one-sidedness of the first two : the self is as much an immediate self as the immediacy is a self. If spirit in the first is in the form of consciousness, and in the second in that of self-consciousness, it is in the third in the form of the unity of both ; it has then the shape of what is completely self-contained {An-und Fürsichseyns) ; and since it is thus presented as it

696 Pheno?nenology of Mind is in and for itself, this is the sphere of Revealed Religion. Although spirit, however, here reaches its true shape, the very shape assumed and the conscious presentation are an aspect and phase still unsurmounted ; and from this spirit has to pass over into the hfe of the Notion, in order therein completely to resolve the form of objectivity, in the notion, which embraces within itself this its own opposite.

It is then that spirit has grasped its own principle, the notion of itself, as so far only we [who analyse spirit] have grasped it ; and its form, the element of its existence, since this form is the notion, is then spirit itself.