Chapter 38 (b) Faith and pure insight

I．thoughts of faith The self-alienated spirit regards the civilized world as its specific existence; but because the whole spirit has completely alienated itself, what exists beyond the civilized world is the unreal world of pure consciousness or thinking.The content of the unreal world is the pure thought (Gedachte), whose absolute element is thought.But because the elements of this world are only thoughts first, consciousness only has these thoughts, but has not thought them, or in other words, does not know that they are thoughts; for consciousness, they all have the form of representation.Because, indeed, consciousness is passing from reality into pure consciousness, but it is basically still in the field and regulation of reality.Split consciousness is the self-identity of pure consciousness only in so far as it is [state] in itself, and it is we [those who study the phenomenology of spirit] who feel that it is so, not that it itself already knows that it is so. .Its ascent, therefore, is only a direct ascent not yet consummated in itself, and the antithetical principle by which it emerges is still contained in itself and has not become To be the master of opposing principles.For it, therefore, the essence of its thought is not an essence only in the form of an abstraction in itself, but rather an essence in the form of an ordinary real thing, which is the so-called ordinary real thing. It is a reality which has only risen to another element without losing in that element its determination as an unthought reality. —The essence of such a thought must be fundamentally different from the in-itself which constitutes the essence of Stoic consciousness; what is valid for Stoic consciousness is only the form of thought itself, and the The content is something taken at random from reality, which does not belong to thought; but for the above-mentioned consciousness, what is valid and accurate is not the form of thought;--similarly, [such an essence is also different. For] the in-itself that constitutes the essence of virtuous consciousness, for which essence is indeed related to reality, is indeed the essence of reality itself, but is only an unreal essence;—but For the kind of consciousness mentioned above, although the essence is on the other side of reality, it can be regarded as a realistic essence.Similarly, the natural justice and goodness [established] by reason that makes laws, and the universality [actions] done by consciousness that examines laws, have no real stipulations. —If, therefore, within the civilizing world itself, pure thought was an aspect of alienation, that is to say, the abstract criterion of good and evil in judgments, it has now, by passing through this whole movement, by having the moment of reality and Because of the reality, there are content links, which will be greatly enriched.But this reality of essence is at the same time only a reality of pure consciousness, not of actual consciousness; this reality has risen to the element of thought, but it is not yet a thought for actual consciousness, It is rather beyond the reality inherent in actual consciousness itself; for it escapes from this latter reality.

Religion—for that is obviously what we are talking about—appears here, but as faith in a civilized world, not yet in its own right. —Before we saw that religion already appeared in other determinations, for example, as the consciousness of distress, as a disembodied movement of consciousness itself. —In ethical entities, religion has also appeared as belief in the underworld (the underworld), but the consciousness of dead spirits is not strictly speaking belief, and is not placed in the element of pure consciousness on the other side of reality The essence of faith, rather, faith has its own immediate present there; its element is the family. — But here religion, in part, arises out of substance, and is the pure consciousness of that substance; rather than its own specific existence.Religion, therefore, is no longer the disembodied movement of consciousness,1 but still has an antithetical determinateness, which is opposed both to reality as this reality in general and to the reality of self-consciousness in particular; it is thus essentially It is just a belief [action].

①The main difference between the religious belief mentioned here and the above-mentioned distress consciousness (page 140 of the first volume of this book) is that the distress consciousness is insubstantial and purely subjective, while the faith mentioned here has substance, It is a substantive thought, objective, never an object of self-consciousness.In the section "Revelation Religion" at the end of this book, Hegel talked about the true concept of religion, saying that religion is the combination of the consciousness of distress and the belief that educates the world. - translator

This pure consciousness of the Absolute Essence is an alienated consciousness.We should take a closer look at the specificity of the consciousness as its counterpart, and we can only examine it in conjunction with this counterpart.At first it appears as though this pure consciousness had only the actual world opposed to itself; but since it is an escape from the actual world, and thus determinates the opposite, it has the actual world in itself; therefore, Pure consciousness is essentially self-alienated within itself, and belief constitutes only one aspect of it.However, another aspect has also been revealed to us at the same time.For pure consciousness is the reflection of the civilized world when the entities of the civilized world, and the various groups of which the civilized world is composed, appear as they are in themselves, Appears as spiritual essences, as determinations that move absolutely endlessly or directly sublate themselves in their own counterpart.Their essence, which is simple consciousness, is thus the simplicity of absolute difference, which in its immediacy is not difference.The essence of pure consciousness is therefore pure being-for-itself, not this individual self, but such a self universal in itself, which, as an endless The movement of things constantly attacks and permeates the static nature of (actual) things.In this ego, then, emerges this certainty:

It is immediately convinced that it is truth, that pure thought is the absolute concept in its own negative force, which excludes all objective essence that can be opposed to consciousness and transforms this essence into a conscious being. of. — This pure consciousness is at the same time equally simple and undifferentiated, since its difference is likewise not a difference.But as the simple self-reflection of this form, it [pure consciousness] is the element of faith in which spirit has that affirmative universality, Existence of stipulations. —After being forced back into itself from the world without substance, which dissolves only in itself, spirit, in its truth, in unity without division, negates its own representation (or The absolute movement and negativity of phenomena) and the essence of this negative movement fulfilled in itself, and its positive rest.But these two moments, although generally belonging to the determination of alienation, are separated from each other like a double consciousness.The former stage is pure insight, that mental process centered in self-consciousness which takes for itself the consciousness of positive things, in the form of objectivity or representation, and compares itself to this other. confronted;

But the object inherent in pure perception itself is only the pure ego. —— Conversely, the simple consciousness of the affirmative or of the static self-equal has for its object the inner essence which is essence.Thus pure insight has no content in itself at first, since it is negative for-itself; faith, on the contrary, has content but no insight.If the former does not go beyond self-consciousness, the object of the latter is likewise in the element of pure self-consciousness, but in thinking and not in concepts, in pure consciousness and not in pure self-consciousness. within.Faith, then, is in fact a pure consciousness of essence, that is, of the simple immanence, and therefore thinking, which is the main and often overlooked aspect of the nature of belief. ① Essence exists directly in belief, and it is direct because the object of belief is essence, that is to say, pure thought (pure thought).However, once thinking enters consciousness, or pure consciousness enters self-consciousness, this immediacy acquires the meaning of an objective existence, which means an objective existence beyond the consciousness of the self.Since the original directness and simplicity of pure thinking have acquired this new meaning in consciousness, the essence of belief is reduced from thinking to appearance (idea), and it becomes truly self-conscious. The other party is such a super-sensual world. —On the contrary, in pure knowledge, the determination obtained by the transitional activity of pure thinking into consciousness is a determination opposite to the above. The change of objectivity means a purely negative, self-sublation, return to self content, that is to say, only the ego is really its own object, that is, the object has truth only in so far as it has the form of ego (or subject).

① Section 554 of "The Encyclopedia of Philosophy": "Faith is a kind of knowledge." - English translator J. B． Baillie's note. - translator Ⅱ.object of faith Just as faith and pure insight are both elements of pure consciousness, so both are the return of the [spirit] from the actual world of enlightenment.Both of them therefore manifest themselves in three respects: first, they stand apart from all relations, are in themselves and for themselves; thirdly, each of them is related to its other in pure consciousness. In the consciousness of belief, the aspect of Being in itself and for itself is the absolute object of belief; the content and determination of this absolute object have already appeared, because, according to the concept of belief, the absolute object of belief is nothing else. , is precisely the real world that has risen to the universality of pure consciousness.The structure of the latter [the real world] thus also constitutes the organization of the former [the object of belief], with the difference that in the world of belief the constituent parts do not alienate themselves when they become spiritualized, Rather, they are each essence existing in and for itself, and each is a spirit that has returned to itself and remains unchanged by itself. —Their transitional movement is therefore only for us [those who study this form] an alienation of determinateness, of the determinateness by which they are distinguished from one another, only for us , is an inevitable series;

But for belief, their difference is a static difference, their movement an accident. ① refers to the Trinity "person" (Person). - translator If we simply call them by the external determination of their form, and state power or wealth as the primary moment, as in the civilized world, then here the primary moment is the absolute essence, which is in itself and Spirit existing for itself, if it is a simple and eternal substance.But in the process of realizing the concept of substance as spirit, the substance transitions into being for him, and its self-identity becomes the real, self-sacrificing absolute essence; the essence becomes the self, but the self that becomes can be destroyed. A perishable self.The third moment is thus the return of this estranged ego and degraded [being human] entity to its original simplicity; only then is the entity represented as spirit. ③

① Refers to the transcendent God, the God as the entity, and the God as the Father. - translator ②The "essence" here refers to the entity; the so-called destructible self in the following refers to the incarnated God and Christ in Christian theology. - translator ③ refers to the absolute spirit, God as the Holy Spirit. - translator These differentiated essences, when they are withdrawn to themselves by thought from the changing flux of the real world, are abiding and unchanging eternal spirits; Think for their existence.But these essences, though pushed out of self-consciousness, still interfere with self-consciousness; for if the (absolute) essence remains unshakeable in its original form of simple substance, it should always be self-conscious. Alien.But the alienation of this substance, and its spirit after alienation, contain the real moment in themselves, and thus make themselves interfere with the self-consciousness of belief, or we can also say that the consciousness of belief belongs to the real world.

According to this second relationship, the consciousness of faith, on the one hand, takes the real civilized world as its own reality, and constitutes itself the spirit of the civilized world and its specific existence, which has already been examined; but on the other hand, it also Against this reality of its own, it regards this reality as illusory, and is itself a movement to sublate this illusory reality.This movement does not take place because the consciousness of faith has acquired a spiritual awareness of the inversion of the real world; for the consciousness of faith is a simple and austere consciousness for which spiritual things are illusory. things, because spiritual things still have the real world as their end.On the contrary [this movement takes place because] the reality opposite to the static realm of the thinking consciousness of faith is an inspiritual existence, and it is therefore necessary to overcome this inspiritivity by an external means. The presence.After perceptual knowledge and action are sublated, a psychology of obedience out of worship and praise arises, and this obedience produces a consciousness of unity with the essence that exists for itself, but this unity is not A unity of reality as seen directly, or rather, this worship is only a continuous and never-ending process of creation (unification), which pursues goals that cannot be fully achieved in the present reality.Of course, for the community [of worshiping God] this goal is achieved, since such a community is the universal self-consciousness; but for the individual self-consciousness the realm of pure thought must always be its actual A beyond, or, to put it further, since this beyond enters reality through the externalization of the eternal essence, is a sensuous reality not grasped; but a sensuous reality is always separate from another sensuous reality. They are irrelevant and external to each other, so that the other shore becomes the other shore, and it only acquires the determination of [infinite] distance in time and space②. – But the concept, that is, the reality which the spirit appears to itself, is always in the consciousness of faith an immanent which is everything and acts on everything without itself appearing.

①The original text of "worship" is Dienst, which has different meanings.In the previous enlightenment world, this word was translated as "serve" and served), which corresponds to "flattery", and here it is translated as worship (worship), which corresponds to praise and praise. - translator ②Refer to page 143 of the first volume of this book, distress consciousness. - translator Ⅲ.rationality of pure insight In pure insight, on the contrary, the concept is the only real thing; and this third aspect of belief, that of faith as the object of pure insight, is here a unique relation in which belief appears. —Pure insight itself, as in the case of faith, can be considered on the one hand in its own right and for itself, and on the other hand in relation to the real world, if the real world is still in a positive way, or as On the other hand, we can also examine the above-mentioned relationship between it and belief. We have already considered pure perception in and for itself; just as faith is a quiet, pure consciousness of spirit, that is, of essence, pure perception is a self-consciousness of this essence; it therefore does not know essence. That is, the essence (entity), but the essence is recognized as an absolute self (subject).It then engages in the sublation of everything that is independent and self-existing, different from self-consciousness, whether it is real or self-existing, and makes it a concept.It is not only the certainty of self-conscious reason that it is all truth; it knows that it is this certainty. But when the concept of pure insight first appears, the concept has no reality.Consciousness of this concept, therefore, appears only as an accidental, individual consciousness, and what is essential to this consciousness appears only as the end it seeks to realize.Its purpose is just to make pure perception universal, that is to say, to convert everything that actually exists into a concept, and into the same concept that exists in all self-consciousness.The intention is pure because it has pure perception as its content; and this perception is likewise pure because its content is only the absolute concept, which is neither opposed to an object nor limited within itself.The concept without limitation directly includes two aspects. One aspect is that all objective things only mean being-for-self and self-consciousness. The other aspect is that being-for-self and self-consciousness mean a universal What is sexual, that is, pure insight becomes the common property of all self-consciousness.This second aspect of intention is the result of culture, for in culture neither the distinctions of the objective mind, nor the parts and determinations by which it is judged, nor the originally definite natural objects All the differences that had been expressed were dissolved and disintegrated.Genius, talent, and in general special powers, are things of the real world, because the real world itself contains such an aspect that it also appears as the spiritual animal kingdom, and in this kingdom, for the sake of Capturing the essences of the real world, spirit animals are in the midst of violence and melee, fighting and deceiving each other. —There is no doubt that the above-mentioned differences, as some real "shape" (or variety), no longer exist in this world; individuality is neither satisfied with unreal things in themselves, nor has special content and on the contrary, it counts only as a universally valid thing, a cultivated thing; and the difference comes down to greater or lesser power, to a difference of magnitude, that is, Said, it boils down to non-essential distinctions.But this non-essential difference has disappeared in one sense, because in the state of complete disintegration of consciousness the distinction has been transformed into an absolutely qualitative distinction.What is there for the ego as the other or other is only the ego itself.In this infinite judgment all one-sidedness and singularity of the original being-for-itself is eliminated; the ego knows itself as pure ego to be its own object; is the element of pure insight. —Pure insight is therefore the simple essence without distinction in itself, and at the same time the universal achievement (or work Werk) and universal property (of all).In this simple spiritual entity, on the one hand, self-consciousness makes itself aware of this individuality or action of itself in all objects, and on the other hand, on the contrary, the individuality of self-consciousness is here related to itself. What is identical in itself is universal. —Therefore this pure insight is the spirit which appeals to all consciousness: Be rational for yourselves all that you are in yourselves. ①Readers may ask: Since Hegel believes that logical development is consistent with historical development, why didn’t he talk about the historical process of the Reformation here?In fact, the discussion of the Reformation already resides in his discussion of pure insight.The faith that educates the world is no longer the simple, subjective faith of the Middle Ages.Hegel said in his "Faith and Knowledge" that the belief of Christianity (Protestantism after the Reformation) has treated the finite and the infinite separately, so the actions of Protestantism can be compared to a kind of enlightenment action before the eighteenth century .So Hegel here immediately discusses the Enlightenment. - translator