Chapter 57 Ⅱ.The Simple Content of Absolute Religion: The Reality of the Incarnation of God

Spirit has two aspects within it, as shown above as two opposing propositions: one says that the entity externalizes itself to become self-consciousness, and the other says that self-consciousness externalizes itself. It transforms itself into a thingy or universal self.In this way, two aspects meet each other, thereby producing their true union.The externalization of the entity, the becoming of the entity into self-consciousness, indicates its transition to its opposite, the unconscious transition of necessity or the potentiality of the entity to be self-conscious.On the contrary, the externalization of self-consciousness shows that it is potentially the universal essence, or—for the ego is a pure being for itself, it is still in itself in its other—it shows The reason why the entity is the self-consciousness is precisely because the entity is the spirit, which is what the self-consciousness says.So of the spirit, which has given up the form of substance and attained inhabitation in the form of self-consciousness, we may say--if we wish to quote terms appropriate to nature--that the spirit has a real mother, But there is a potential father.

Since actuality or self-consciousness and substance as potentiality are two moments of spirit, each becoming the other through mutual externalization of the two, spirit has its being as their unity. 1.the immediate presence of divine self-awareness As long as self-consciousness comprehends its own externalization only one-sidedly, although its object is thus for it both being and ego, and it knows that all existence is spiritual, the real spirit has not yet become it. The object of being self-conscious because being-in-general or entity itself does not similarly externalize itself from its side.For in that case everything is psychic only from the standpoint of consciousness, but not itself.According to this view, the spirit is only an imaginary presence.This kind of imagination is the ecstasy, which attaches to nature and history, to the mystical conceptions of the world and early religions, an inner meaning1 different from that which appears directly to consciousness in appearance, and especially in In religion, too, it is not the same as self-consciousness is known in religion, but religion is the religion of self-consciousness.But this meaning is borrowed, a cloak that does not conceal the naked phenomenon, and therefore does not command people's faith and respect, but remains nothing but the sombre night of consciousness and its peculiar wild visions.

① This is a brief commentary on the neo-Platonist mysticism that forgets the self and is one with God. - translator Therefore, this meaning of the objective, if it is not a mere imagination or fantasy, must have its own meaning in itself, that is to say, first of all it must arise for consciousness from the concept and in the form of necessity. And appeared.The self-knowing spirit thus arises for us through the knowledge of immediate consciousness, or of the consciousness of existing objects and their necessary motions.Secondly, this concept, being an immediate concept, also has the form of immediacy as the object of its consciousness, and it has the form of self-consciousness in itself, that is, according to the necessity of the concept, like being or immediacy (immediateness is contentless object of sensuous consciousness) externalizes itself and becomes to consciousness that of the ego. — But the immediate being-in-itself or the necessity of being as such differs from the thinking being-in-itself or the knowledge of necessity, — but at the same time this difference does not exist outside the concept; for the simple unity of the concept It is the immediate existence itself.As the concept is itself externalized or the transformation [into the subject] of an intuited necessity, it is likewise in necessity, that is, in itself, and knows and grasps this necessity. ——

The immediate being-in-itself of the self-conscious mind is nothing but the actual world-spirit which attains this knowledge of itself.Then this knowledge enters its consciousness again, and enters its consciousness as truth.The process of how this happens has been explained above. The fact that the Absolute Spirit takes the form of self-consciousness in itself and thus consciously—it now appears to be the belief of the world, where the Spirit exists as a self-consciousness, that is, as a real person, becomes The object of immediate conviction, the consciousness of faith sees, feels, and hears this sanctity.In this way, sanctity is no longer fantasy or imagination, it is actually in people's belief consciousness.Consciousness then no longer proceeds from its heart, from thought, and fuses the thought and being of God within itself, but starts from the immediately present being, and knows God in it. —The moment of immediate existence appears in the content of the concept in such a way that the religious spirit becomes a simple affirmative ego when all essentialities return to consciousness, just as the actual spirit itself in distressed consciousness as a simple self-aware negativity.The psychic ego of a given being thus has the form of complete immediacy.It is recognized neither as thought or represented nor as produced, as is the case with the immediate self seen partly in the religion of nature, partly in the religion of art.On the contrary, this god is directly perceived through sensibility as the self, as a real individual person; only in this way is the god self-conscious.

①This refers to the emergence of Christianity, the revealed religion in which God is incarnate as man. - translator 2.The concept of the highest essence is accomplished by the individual self making abstraction and immediacy identical This incarnation of the divine essence, in other words, the immediate and essentially self-conscious form of the divine essence, is the simple content of absolute religion.In Absolute Religion the Divine Essence is recognized as Spirit, in other words Absolute Religion is the awareness of the Divine Essence of itself, as Spirit.For spirit is the knowledge of itself in its own externalization, and also the divine essence of motion which remains identical to itself in its otherness (Anderssein).But this essence is substance, because substance also returns to itself in its contingency, instead of treating contingency as something unessential and indifferent, and thus feeling itself in an alien state. In the thing, rather in the alien, is in itself, that is, because the substance is the subject or the ego. —Thus in this religion the divine essence is revealed.Its being revealed obviously means that its essence is known.But it is known precisely because of its essence as spirit, primarily as self-consciousness. —When the object is something other or alien to consciousness, and when consciousness does not recognize that object as itself, there is for consciousness a secret in its object s things.The secret ceases to be secret or mysterious when the Absolute Essence as spirit becomes the object of consciousness.For this object exists in its relation to consciousness as self; that is to say, consciousness directly knows itself in the object, or consciousness reveals itself in the object.Consciousness reveals itself only in its own certainty of itself.That object of consciousness is the self, but the self is not something alien but an inseparable unity with itself, but the immediate universal.The ego is pure concept, pure thought or being-for-itself.Being-for-itself is immediate being and thus being-for-other, and as such being-for-other it immediately returns to itself and exists in itself.The ego is therefore the real and only revealed being.The Merciful, the Just, the Holy, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, etc. are all predicates of a subject, and are universal links which take the subject as the center of their destination, and only when consciousness returns to thinking , they have their existence. —When they are only known, their ground, their essence, the subject itself has not yet been revealed, and likewise the determinations of the universal are not yet the universal itself.But the subject itself, and thus this pure universal, is revealed as the ego; for the ego is precisely this inner essence returning to itself, which is immediately there, and is the ego that knows it immediately there. inherent certainty.It is therefore revealed, according to its concept, the true form of the spirit; and this form, the concept, alone is the essence and substance of the spirit.Spirit is known as self-consciousness and is directly revealed to self-consciousness because it is self-consciousness itself.The nature of God and the nature of man are the same thing, and it is this unity that is now intuitively perceived.

Here, therefore, consciousness, or the way in which the essence becomes aware of itself, that is, the form in which the essence embodies, is in fact the same thing as the self-consciousness of the essence.This form itself is a self-consciousness, so it is also an existing object, and this existence also directly has the meaning of pure thought, absolute essence. —The absolute essence that exists there as an actual self-consciousness seems to descend from its eternal simplicity to a lower position, but in fact only then does it first attain its highest essence.For only when the concept of essence has attained its simple purity is it at once an absolute abstraction (which is pure thought and therefore the pure individuality of the self) and, because of its simplicity, the immediate or exist. —It is precisely this pure abstraction that is called sensuous consciousness; sensuous consciousness is a kind of thinking whose object is the existent, the immediate.Thus the lowest is at the same time the highest; and the revelation which appears entirely on the surface contains the deepest.To say that the highest essence can be seen, heard, etc. as an existing self-consciousness is in fact the completion of the concept of the highest essence; and through this completion the highest essence exists directly as the true highest essence There (istda)①.

①According to the translator of this book, the word Dasein is generally translated as "specific existence", abbreviated as "fixed in", which refers to the existence of certain quality and quantity in a specific space and time.Here, Hegel used the word Dasein as "istda" (existing there) many times, which shows that Hegel emphasized that Dasein means the existence of a specific place, that is, the meaning of perceptual existence.Some people often mistranslate Dasein (fixed existence or specific existence) into "objective existence" with inevitability and reality, while others translate Dasein into "concrete existence" with rich content and rational cognition, which is unity of opposites, unity of heterogeneity and many. , I don’t seem to understand Hegel’s usage and exact meaning of the word Dasein. - translator

3.Speculative knowledge is the appearance of the community of absolute religion This immediate being there or settled in is not merely direct consciousness, but at the same time religious consciousness.This immediacy has not only the inseparable sense of an existing self-consciousness, but also the sense of a purely thoughtful or absolute essence.What we [as philosophers] are aware of in our concepts, that being is the [highest] essence, is what the religious consciousness is aware of.This unity of Being and Essence and Thinking (which is immediately given being) is, of course, the thought or indirect knowledge of this religious consciousness, and it is also the direct knowledge of this religious consciousness.Because the unity of existence and thinking is self-consciousness, and it really exists there. In other words, the unity of thinking has the form of unity of existence at the same time.So God is revealed here as it exists; God exists there as it exists in itself.God exists there as spirit.God is attainable only in purely speculative knowledge, and God is only in speculative knowledge, only speculative knowledge itself, for God is Spirit; and this speculative knowledge is the knowledge of revealed religion.Speculative knowledge recognizes God as thought or pure essence, and that this thought is being, particular being, and that particular being is its own negation, and thus the self, the one (individual) and the universal self.It is this self that revealed religions know. ——

The hopes and aspirations of the previous world are all urgently pointing to the progress of this revelation, the insight into what is the absolute essence, and the sustenance of these hopes and aspirations is found in the absolute essence.This joyful feeling of contemplating oneself in the Absolute Essence is realized in self-consciousness and stirs the whole world.For the Absolute Essence is spirit, which is the simple movement of those pure (abstract) moments which show that the Absolute Essence is only known as spirit when it is conceived as immediate self-consciousness. The notion of the psychic, which knows itself to be psychic, is itself still an immediate, undeveloped notion. The [absolute] essence is spirit, or rather, it is manifested, it is revealed.This first revelation itself is still immediate; but immediacy is likewise pure indirection [or intermediary] or thinking, and so immediacy must illuminate the moment of thinking in its own right. —On examining it more precisely, it is seen that the spirit, in the immediacy of self-consciousness, is only this individual self-consciousness, opposed to the universal; It exists there as an object, a sensuous otherness still in undissolved form for consciousness.This other does not yet know that spirit is its spirit, that is, that spirit, being the individual self, does not yet also exist there as a universal self, as all selves.In other words, the form taken by the spirit has not yet the form of the concept, that is to say, the form of the universal self; and this universal self in its immediate actuality is likewise the (dialectically) sublated self, It is thinking, universality, without losing its immediate reality in universality. ——

But the first and immediate form of this universality is not the form of thinking itself or of the concept as a concept, but the universality of actuality, the totality of the individual self, and the elevation of existence to representation; as In general, and in order to show a particular example, the "thing" of sublated sensibility, which is at first only perception, is not yet the universal of the understanding. This individual is therefore the revelation of the Absolute Essence, in whom, as an individual, the movement of sensuous being is accomplished.It is God who is immediately present; in this way his existence passes into already existing (Gewesensein).The awareness of God's present presence felt perceptually is no longer hearing God, seeing God.It has seen God and heard God; only because it has seen God and heard God does it itself become spiritual consciousness, in other words, just as God appeared before consciousness as a sensuous In the spirit. ——Because the consciousness that sees and hears God perceptually is only a direct consciousness, it does not sublate the non-identity with the object, does not return it to pure thinking, but only knows that this objective individual is spirit, but Not knowing that it is spirit itself.In the disappearance of the immediate being known as the absolute essence, immediate consciousness acquires its negated moment; spirit remains the immediate self of actuality, but is only the universal and this universal self-consciousness is the subject of its own substance, just as this substance is the universal subject in the universal self-consciousness.This universal self-consciousness is not the individual subject alone, but the individual subject is combined with the consciousness of the religious community, and in relation to this community it is the perfect whole of the individual subject.

①This refers to Jesus who is considered in Christianity as the revelation of God's incarnation and absolute essence. - translator ②This refers to the death of Jesus. - translator ③DasGemeinde We unanimously translated it as "community" or "religious community", which actually refers to the later institutionalized and authoritative church. - translator But past and distance are only imperfect forms by which the mode of immediacy is mediated or posited as universal; is preserved in it, and is recognized as not identical with the nature of thought itself.It is only raised [from sensation] to the realm of representation, since representation is the synthetic (external) union of the immediacy of sensibility and its universality or thought. This form of representation constitutes the determination through which the spirit becomes aware of itself in the religious community.This form of representation has not yet reached the spiritual self-consciousness of the concept as a concept, and the process of mediation has not yet been completed.Hence the defect in this union of being and thinking that the spiritual essence is still tainted with irreconcilable (Entzweiung) forms in this and the world beyond.The content is the content of the truth, but its various moments expressed within the scope of representation have a character that has not been conceptually understood, but only appears as completely independent aspects that are externally related to each other.As for the fact that the true content should also retain its true form for consciousness, it is necessary to give consciousness a higher education, to raise its intuition of absolute reality to the concept, and for itself to the level of consciousness. The level of self-awareness, as this process happens to us [philosophers] spontaneously. This content must be considered as it exists in its consciousness.The absolute spirit is the content, so the form that embodies this content should be the truth. But its truth is not only the entity of the religious community or the self-existence of the religious community, nor is it only the objectivity rising from this immanence to the appearance, but lies in becoming the real self, returning to itself, becoming a subject.Such is the movement which the spirit realizes in its religious societies, or rather, this is the life of the spirit.So what this self-revealing spirit is in and for itself does not seem to be by unraveling its rich life in the religious community and tracing it back to its original threads, somewhat like tracing them back to primitive injustice. The idea of ​​a well-established religious community, or even all the way back to what the real person said, can be grasped.This retrospective is based on an instinct for conceptual explanation; but it confuses the immediacy of origin as the first historical occurrence with conceptual simplicity.Thus impoverishing the life of the mind, throwing away both the idea of ​​the community and the action it takes on this idea, produces not concepts but mere externality and individuality, immediate phenomena. historical approach and lack of spiritual recollection of an individual imaginary image and its past. ① "Said words" refer to the words and sentences that Jesus preached. - translator