Chapter 35 2. Self-alienated spirit; enlightenment

The antitheses which the ethical substance retains were kept tightly within its simple consciousness, and this simple consciousness was an immediate unity with its own essence.Therefore, for the consciousness that directly points to the essence and regards the essence as its own ethics, this essence has the simple stipulation of existence; Consciousness neither sees itself as this exclusive self, nor does substance imply a certain existence excluded from it, that is, as if it were only through its own alienation that it could be related to it. The unity of two kinds of existence will produce that entity at the same time.But that spirit, that is, the spirit whose ego is something absolutely separate, finds its content to be an equally hard actual world opposed to it, and here the world has the The determination or characteristic of the being, the negation of self-consciousness.Yet this world is a spiritual thing, itself a fusion of existence and individuality.This specific existence of it is at once the work of self-consciousness, and at the same time an immediate ready-made, alien reality to self-consciousness, which has its own unique existence and in which self-consciousness Can't recognize myself.This world is the external essence and free content of legal right.But this external reality governed by the master of this legal world is not only an external primitive existence that happens to appear before the ego, but is also the work of the ego, not his affirmation but his negation. It's just labor.This external reality derives its existence from the self-consciousness of its own externalization and renunciation of its essence, a process of externalization which appears to be governed by various unrestrained factors in the legal world The state of disturbance and destruction in which external violence is imposed on self-consciousness.In fact, these unrestrained elements are, in themselves, nothing but pure disruption and their own dissolution.But this dissolution of them, this negation of their essence, is precisely the ego; the ego is their subject, their action, their becoming.But this act and process of becoming, by which substance becomes actual, is the alienation of the individual (personality); The plaything of those external stimuli.The substance of the ego is thus its own externalization, and externalization is substance, in other words, those psychic forces which form themselves into an ordered world and thus preserve themselves.

In this way, substance is spirit, the self-conscious unity of ego and essence; but both ego and essence also have the sense of being alienated from each other.Spirit is consciousness of an independent objective reality; but that unity of self and essence is opposed to this consciousness, that is, pure consciousness is opposed to actual consciousness.On the one hand real self-consciousness is transformed by its externalization into the real world, and the real world in turn into self-consciousness; sublated; they have become pure universals.Through this alienation they become pure consciousness or essence.Present reality is directly opposed to its other side, its thinking and its products, whereas thinking is opposed to this side, its own alienated reality.

Because of this, what this spirit forms is not just a single world, but a separate, opposite, double world. —The world of the ethical spirit is the present reality inherent in the spirit itself; each power of this world is thus in the unity of present reality, and although the two powers are separate from each other, each remains in balance with the whole.Nothing has the meaning of the negative of self-consciousness; even the dead spirit is presently present in the blood of the kin, in the ego (subject) of the family, and the universal power (Macht) of the government is the will, the national self.But here, what is present means only that objective reality with consciousness as its other side; each individual moment, as essence, derives its present existence and thus reality from another It is real, and its essence is another link different from its reality.Nothing has a spirit grounded in itself and within itself, on the contrary, everything is in something alien to itself;—the balance of the whole is not a unity that remains unchanged within itself, It is not the tranquility after this unity returns to itself. On the contrary, the balance of the whole is established on the alienation of opposites.Thus, like each individual moment, the whole is a reality alienated from itself; it splits into two kingdoms: the one where self-consciousness itself and its objects are real, and the other that of pure consciousness. The kingdom, on the other side of the former, is not in the current reality, but in belief.Thus, just as the ethical world starts from its division into the laws of God and the laws of man and their different forms, and the consciousness of this ethical world starts from the division of knowledge and ignorance, and returns to the destiny of consciousness, To the ego which is the negative force of these two opposites, these two kingdoms of the estranged spirit now also return to the ego; but if the former is the first directly valid ego, the individual individual, the latter , this second, this universal self returning to itself from its alienation, will be the consciousness grasping the concept, and the two spiritual worlds, that is, all their moments, insist on each being a fixed reality and the infinite These two spiritual worlds of spiritual existence will disintegrate in pure insight (Reine Einsicht).

This perception, grasping its own self as itself, achieves and completes enlightenment; it grasps nothing but the self, and it grasps everything as a self, that is to say, it treats everything The understanding of concepts removes all objective things and transforms all existence in itself into existence for itself.It is enlightenment when it is turned against faith, that is, against the alien, foreign, beyond realm of being.Enlightenment also completes alienation in this kingdom, because the alienated spirit flees to this kingdom as a peaceful consciousness in equilibrium with itself, and seeks refuge in safety; The things of this world are brought in, and the things of this world cannot be denied by the spirit as its own property, because the consciousness of the spirit also belongs to this world. —In this negative activity, pure perception simultaneously realizes itself and produces its own [proper] object (the unknowable absolute essence) and the useful.Since reality thus loses all substance, there is nothing in itself anymore, the kingdom of belief and the kingdom of reality collapses, and this revolution brings absolute freedom, which alienated With this freedom the spirit now returns completely to itself: it leaves this civilized country and passes into another, into the country of moral consciousness.