Chapter 56 I．Premises of the concept of revealed religion

The proposition that the self is the absolute essence obviously belongs to the non-religious, actual spirit; it must be recalled what form of mind is capable of uttering this proposition.This configuration will at the same time involve a movement which inverts that proposition, reduces the ego to a predicate, and raises the substance to a subject.This process must be understood in such a way that the inverted proposition does not in itself or for us [students of mental phenomena] transform substance into subject, or in other words restore substance in such a way that Spiritual consciousness returns to its beginnings, to the religion of nature, but to self-consciousness and through self-consciousness itself makes this inversion a reality.Since this self-consciousness is consciously renouncing itself, it will maintain itself in its externalization and remain the subject of substance, but just because it is externalized it also has consciousness of this entity.In other words, since self-consciousness, by sacrificing itself, produces the entity as subject, this subject remains its original self.Considering the two propositions, in the first the subject simply disappears in substantiality, while in the second the substance is only the predicate, so that both aspects appear in each of them with opposite and unequal values. ,—the result of this is a union and penetration of the two natures [subject and substance], in which both are equally important with equal value, but only Same as link.Spirit is thus both a consciousness that regards itself as its own objective entity, and equally a simple self-consciousness that remains within itself.

The religion of art belongs to the spirit of ethics, which, as we saw earlier, has fallen into the state of legal power, and can be summed up in the proposition that the self itself, the abstract individual, is the absolute essence.In the ethical life the self is immersed in the national spirit, the self is the universality full of content.But the simple individuality detached from this content, its indiscreet consciousness purifies this individuality into the individual, into the right of the abstract universal.In the abstract idea of ​​right the reality of the ethical spirit is lost, and the contentless genie of the national hero is assembled in a pantheon—not in a pantheon rich in images (Vorstel Blung), these The impotent form of the image, free to the imagination of each individual, gathers together in the pantheon of abstract universals, of pure thought which renders the spirits bloodless, and gives the spiritless self, the individual The individual exists in and for himself.

①The original text of individual is Person, and it is not appropriate to translate it into personality or personal body.The abstract individual, Hegel used to refer to the ideology that emphasized the abstract legal rights of the individual during the Roman Empire. — translator. But this ego, because it is empty, loses its content; this consciousness is essence only within itself.Its own specific presence, the legal recognition of the individual, is an abstraction without content.It therefore has rather only a thought of its own, or is unreal because it is there and knows itself as an object.It is therefore only the independence of the Stoic mind, which, by doubting the movement of consciousness, finds its truth in that form called troubled consciousness.

The tormented consciousness knows what the real value of the abstract (legal) individual is, and it also knows what the value of the abstract individual is in pure thought.It knows that to demand such a value would mean rather the complete loss of real value.Distressed consciousness itself is aware of this loss of itself, and relinquishes knowledge of itself. —We see that this consciousness of distress constitutes the very opposite and supplement of the comic consciousness of its own full pleasure.All divine essences are returned in the comic consciousness, in other words, the comic consciousness is the complete externalization of the entity.On the contrary, the consciousness of distress is the tragic fate of self-confirmation, which should exist in itself and for itself.In this conviction of its own, it loses all essentiality [all value and meaning], even its own consciousness of this self-knowledge of essentiality—in other words, it loses substance and self [ consciousness of the subject]; distressed consciousness is pain, which can be expressed in the grim statement that God is dead. ①

① "God is dead" is a famous saying in Hegel's book.Modern existentialists have seized on this statement to make a big fuss.Here Hegel is only expressing that the unique ideology of distressed consciousness has the idea that "God is dead", and does not mean that he himself advocates atheism. - translator Thus the ethical world and the religion of the ethical world disappear in the comic consciousness in a state of jurisprudence, and the consciousness of suffering is the whole of this lost knowledge.Distressed consciousness loses both its own value as an immediate personality (as an individual in a legal state) and its indirect (Stoic-like) personality value reflected in thought.Likewise reliance on the eternal laws of the gods is subdued, as the oracle, which instructs man how to do in particular matters, is silent.

The statues of the gods are now corpses, for they have no living soul, and the words of the hymns have no true faith.Spiritual food and drinks are no longer displayed on the godly table. From festivals and dances, people's consciousness can no longer return to the joyful mood of being one with the divine essence.The work of art lacks that spiritual force which at first gave birth to its own conviction from the tragedy of the destruction of gods and heroes.They are now as they appear to us,--beautiful fruit already plucked from the tree: A friendly fate delivers these works of art to us as a maiden presents those fruits.There is no real life of their concrete existence here, no fruit tree from which these fruits grow, no soil and elements of their substance, no climate which determines their character, still less the change of seasons which govern the course of their growth.In the same way, fate has given us those ancient works of art, but not the world around them, the spring and summer of the ethical life of the time in which they blossomed, but only a sense of them. A hazy memory of reality.So our act of admiring these works of art is not the worship of the gods, through which our consciousness can reach the complete and fully satisfied truth in it, but is only an external act, like rubbing the fruit from these fruits. To remove the raindrops, to sweep away the dust, and not to grasp the internal factors that surround, create and animate the reality of ethical life, but to build up the cumbersome framework of their external existence, language, history and other dead factors, is not I live in it for my own life, but just to display them in a superficial way.But just as the maiden who holds out to us the plucked fruit surpasses the natural world from which the fruit immediately grows: the conditions and factors of nature, the trees, the wind and rain, the sun, etc.; The vision of her and her gesture of presenting the fruit bring it all together; so the spirit of destiny that likewise supplies our works of art transcends the ethical life and reality of that people; The memory of the spirit that comes out is within us—it is the spirit of the tragic fate that gathers into a pantheon all those individual gods and attributes of substance, the spirit that realizes itself as spirit.

All the conditions for the emergence of the mind are present, and the totality of these conditions constitutes the growth of the mind, the emergence of the concept or being-in-itself. —The circle (or whole) formed by the various stages of artistic creation includes the forms in which the Absolute Substance externalizes itself.The Absolute Substance is embodied in the form of individuality as an object, as an existing object of sensuous consciousness, as pure language, or as a process of metamorphosis whose specific existence does not go beyond the ego. , but only as a purely evanescent object—as the immediate unity of the universal self-consciousness in the same enthusiasm, and as the unity mediated in the act of worship, as the beautiful body with its own image, and finally As actual existence raised to appearance, and a world expanded by this existence, this world is finally summarized into universality, which is also a pure conviction of itself. —These forms, and on the other hand, the world of personal and power, divorced from the plundering brutish consciousness of content, and the endless restlessness of the personal and skeptical consciousness of Stoic abstract thought, Forms a circular whole of forms.These forms seek, crowd, to draw new life into the surroundings of a spirit that is becoming self-conscious.And all the pains and longings of self-consciousness impregnated with torment are their central point, the common birth pangs out of which the spirit emerges—a simple, pure concept that has those forms as its moments.