Chapter 30 Chapter 6 Spirit

When the certainty of reason's conviction that it is all reality has risen to truth, when reason has realized that its self is its world, and its world its own, reason becomes spirit. ①. —The last stage of the movement which has been passed before shows the formation of the mind, because in that stage the objects of consciousness, that is, the pure categories, have risen to rational concepts.In reason engaged in observation, this pure unity of ego (Ich) and being, of being-for-itself and being-in-itself, has been determined as in-itself or being, and rational consciousness has discovered itself.However, rational observation is not so much a discovery as a sublation of the instinct of directly discovering its object, a sublation of the unconscious state of observing reason.The categories that have been intuited, the things that have been discovered, come into consciousness as the self-existence of "I". At this time, I already know that it is the self (subject) in the objective essence.However, the definition of category as being-for-itself opposed to being-in-itself is also one-sided, and it is a link sublating itself.The categories, therefore, are determined for consciousness in their universal and true sense as essences in themselves and existing for themselves.This determination, which is still abstract but constitutes the thing itself, is the essence of spirituality, and the consciousness of the spiritual essence is a formal knowledge of the spiritual essence, although this formal knowledge is also encountered everywhere. Various contents of spiritual nature.In fact, this consciousness, as an individual thing, is still distinct from the universal substance, and either makes arbitrary laws arbitrarily, or thinks that the laws are all in their own knowledge, as they are for themselves. and, moreover, it considers itself the arbitrator competent to judge these laws. ——Or, if we look at it again from the aspect of substance, then substance is the spiritual essence that is not yet aware of itself and exists for itself.As for the essence existing in itself and for itself, which at the same time presents itself before itself (conscious of itself) as consciousness which is a reality, is spirit. ②

①Hegel opposed the objective truth to the subjective certainty. In this sense, the spirit is the truth of reason, concrete reason, and the objective spiritual world, including the family from the lowest form to the highest form. tutor.What we usually call national spirit, cultural spirit, and zeitgeist is the spirit mentioned here.It is objectified by the further development of consciousness, self-awareness, and rationality discussed in the first volume of this book. - translator ②In the opening paragraph, Hegel reviewed in general the process of the formation of spirit by rational development.First, rationality develops the category (the unity of being and self) in the element of being-in-itself [see pages 161-232 of the first volume of this book]; Page]; finally, reason regards the category as the essence of the self-for-itself according to it (Vol. 260-290).But reason was only a substance at that time, and when this substance became a subject (self), it became a spirit. - translator

Its spiritual essence has previously been called the ethical substance; but the spirit itself is the ethical reality.Spirit is the ego of actual consciousness that is opposed to spirit, or rather, actual consciousness is opposed to itself, to itself as the objective real world, but in this way The objective real world has completely lost the meaning of being a foreign object different from the self to the self. Similarly, the self has completely lost its independence or non-independence from the world to the objective real world. meaning of existence for itself.Since the mind is a substance, and a universal, self-identical, eternal and immutable essence, it is the unshakable and ineradicable ground and point of departure of all individual actions—and the end and goal of all individuals, because It is the thing-in-itself thought by all self-consciousness. —This substance is again that universal deed or work which all individuals and each create by their actions as their identity and unity, for it is being-for-itself, it is the ego, it is action.As a substance, the spirit is a firm and just self-identity; but the substance is being-for-itself, which is the disintegrated, self-sacrificing good essence, from which everyone splits and shares His own share, thus fulfilling his own achievements.This disintegration and differentiation of essences is the moment which [forms] all individual actions and selves; this moment is the movement and soul of the substance, the realized universal essence.But precisely because this entity is a dissolved being in the ego, it is not a dead essence, but an actual and living essence.

Spirit is thus that absolutely real essence which supports itself.All previous ideologies were abstractions of the spirit, and the reason why they became that way was because the spirit analyzed itself, distinguished its own links, and stopped at these links.This isolation of these moments presupposes and is sustained by the spirit itself, in other words, they appear to exist in isolation only in the actually existing spirit.These isolated moments, if viewed outwardly, appear as if they were indeed isolated things; but their progress and return to their source and to their essence show that they are nothing but moments or passing things; And this origin and essence is precisely this movement and dissolution of these links.Now that the spirit, or the reflection of these moments, has established itself here, our reflection [of the phenomenologists] can briefly review them in this respect: they It was consciousness, self-awareness and reason.Therefore, when the mind stops in its self-analysis at the point where it considers itself to be an objective existing reality and ignores this reality as its own being-for-itself, the mind itself contains sense-determination. General awareness of sexuality, perception, and intellect.Conversely, when the mind stops at another stage of analysis and considers its object to be its being-for-itself, the mind is self-consciousness.But as immediate consciousness of being-in-itself and for-itself, as the unity of consciousness and self-consciousness, spirit is consciousness with reason: this consciousness has its object in the original sense of the word, and its object It has rational properties or categorical value in itself, but this object does not yet have categorical value for spiritual consciousness.The mind at this time is that consciousness [--reason] which we have just examined in the preceding chapter.When this reason which the spirit possesses is at last conceived by the spirit as a reason, when it is reason that exists, or when it is a reality in the spirit and the world of the spirit, the spirit reaches it. The truth of man: it is the spirit, it is the actual, ethical essence.

When it is in its immediate state of truth, the spirit is a people— This individual is a world—the ethical life.It must go on to become conscious of its immediate state, it must subsume the good ethical life and pass through a series of modalities in order to acquire knowledge of itself.But these forms are different from those experienced before, because they are real spirits, real realities, and they are not just forms of consciousness, but forms of a world. The living ethical world is spirit in its truth.Ethics sinks into the formal universality of the right as soon as the spirit recognizes its own [ethical] essence in the abstract.Spirit has since split itself into two (entzweite), and on the one hand it delineates one of its two worlds, the world of culture or the realm of enlightenment (Reichder Bildung), on its objective element, that is, solid reality, and on the other hand Its other, the world of belief, the realm of essence (ReichdesWesens), has been delineated on the element of thought,3 yet these two worlds, grasped conceptually by the spirit that has escaped the loss of its own division and re-entered itself, emerge as a result of the perception, which is distorted by enlightenment, which consists in spreading perception; and the world, split and expanded into this side and the other side, returns to self-consciousness.This self-consciousness now comprehends itself morally as essence, and essence as actual self: it no longer places the world and its principle (or ground) outside itself, but lets everything dissolve within itself, and, as conscience, it is the spirit convinced of itself.

①"In its truth", that is to say, in its objectivity; in this beautiful ethical world, the substance and the self penetrate each other without opposition, Hegel will regard it as the first link of spiritual development, immediacy links.In history, Hegel considered this link to be equivalent to the city-state society of ancient Greece. - translator ②This link is historically equivalent to the era of the Roman Empire; in the legal society of Rome, the immediacy of ethics broke down, forming the opposition between the self and its entity. - translator ③The two worlds of enlightenment and belief, in Hegel's mind, correspond to the historical period from the formation of the European nations to the French Revolution. - translator

The ethical world, the world split into here and beyond, and the moral world-view are thus individual forms of spirit which continue their return movement towards the single self-existing self of spirit, The goal and result they are to achieve will be the emergence of the actual self-consciousness of the Absolute Spirit.