Chapter 51 2. Art Religion①

① German is Kunstreligion, which refers to the religion of ancient Greece. - translator Spirit raises to the form of consciousness itself the form which it assumes in its own consciousness, and raises this form of consciousness before itself. Nature forms mixed with work.When this form of the mind wins the form of self-conscious activity, it becomes the worker of the mind. So if we ask what is the real spirit that is conscious of its own absolute essence in the religion of art, we get the answer that it is the ethical or true spirit.It is not only the universal substance of all individuals, but since this substance has the form of consciousness for that actual consciousness, it is tantamount to saying that this substance is individuated, and it is recognized by those individuals as their inherent essence. and your own achievements.Substance, therefore, is neither the God of Light for those individuals, in whose unity the self-conscious being-for-itself is contained only passively and only temporarily, and sees its actual dominion; Peoples who hate each other and are constantly consuming or destroying each other; nor is it the violence that oppresses peoples under hierarchies, which, while giving the illusion of a complete whole, lack the universality which is due to the individual. free.On the contrary, this spirit is a free people in whose life ethics constitutes the substance of all men, the realization and embodiment of which each and all know to be their own will and action.

But the religion of the ethical spirit is the raising of the ethical spirit beyond its own actuality, and the return from its truth to pure knowledge of itself. Since the ethical nation lives in immediate unity with its substance and does not yet possess the pure individual principle of self-consciousness, this national religion appears first of all in its completed form to be identical with its permanence. The separation of being. For on the one hand the reality of the ethical substance is based on its static immutability, as opposed to self-consciousness in absolute motion, and therefore on the fact that self-consciousness has not yet departed from its static customs and habits. It returns to itself in the fixed reliance of custom, on the other hand the ethical entity rests in its organizational form of a set of rights and duties, and of the division of the populace into classes and the specific activities of each class (which together form a Whole) and thus on the fact that the individual is content with the limitations of his particular being and has not yet comprehended the unlimited thought of his free self.But from that static and immediate trust in [ethical] entities leads back to certainty in itself, and to the set of rights and duties and the specific and limited activities which this trust and certainty imply. , is a dialectical movement of ethical substance, as in many things and their different determinations—a dialectical movement which obtains their repose and fixation only in the spiritual simplicity of its own conviction. sex. ——Therefore, the ethical life completes itself to achieve free self-awareness and the ultimate destiny of the ethical world is to return to its own individuality and the absolute relaxation of the ethical spirit.And the relaxation of the ethical spirit dissolves all the fixed distinctions of its stable existence and disintegrates the organic connection between the masses of the people, and fully believes in itself, achieving unlimited happiness and the most free self-enjoyment.

This simple certainty of the spirit itself has a double meaning: as static, stable existence and fixed truth, and as absolute restlessness and the disappearance of ethical life. But the simple certainty of the spirit translates into the latter [the relaxation or disappearance of the ethical life]; For the truth of the ethical spirit remains the essence and trust of this substantiality only if the ego does not know itself to be a free individuality, and therefore the essence and trust of this substantiality in this immanence and becoming of the ego In the case of freedom, it will collapse.Thus, as trust is broken, the [ethical] substance of the nation itself is shattered, so that the spirit, which was the middle term between the two extremes [that] sustains no enduring existence, becomes one extreme, and understands itself as Essential self-awareness.This self-consciousness is the spirit of self-assurance, which mourns the world which has lost it, and which now generates its essence from its pure self and raises itself beyond reality.

Absolute art emerges in such an era.In the early days art was expressed as instinctive labor, which had sunk into specific existence, stepped out of actual existence, and soaked into the depth of specific existence.Artistic labor does not take free ethical life as its entity, so the self engaged in artistic labor does not have free spiritual activities. Later, the spirit transcends art in order to attain its higher expression: that is, it is not only a substance growing out of the self, but is an object of this self in its manifestations; , but also to make its concept itself have an image, so that the concept and the created artwork can recognize each other as the same thing.

Since the ethical substance has retreated from its external embodiment to its pure self-consciousness, self-consciousness belongs to the side of the conceptual initiative by which spirit makes itself an object.The ethical substance then becomes pure form, since the individual, in his ethical obedience and service, has freed himself from the unconscious specific existence and fixed rigid determination of the ethical substance, just as the ethical substance itself has become something fluid and indeterminate .This [personal] form is the night in which the entity has been betrayed to make itself a subject.From this night of pure self-assurance the ethical spirit arises as a form freed from nature and from the immediate existence of spirit itself.

The actual existence of this pure concept into which the spirit has stepped out of its own bodily manifestation is an individual whom the spirit has chosen as the vehicle for the expression of its suffering.The spirit then functions as the commonality and power of the individual, and the individual is dominated by the power of the spirit, forming his mood of suffering, and by being dominated by this power, his self-consciousness loses its freedom.But that universal dominant force of authority is overcome by the individual's pure ego as a negative force.This pure activity, conscious of its own inalienable power, struggles with the essence which has not yet taken concrete form.In becoming the master of this essence, this negative activity has made the mood of the passion its subject and given itself content, and this unity manifests itself in the work, the individuated and The universal spirit that manifests itself.